Several years ago, for reasons I can’t really explain, my family decided to get pizza from a place out of town. I can’t exactly pinpoint why we came to the decision, or why we chose that particular place. Maybe it was something we had read in an article, or a place we passed on the way to a new job, or a place we had been to once long ago and the memory had been dislodged through happenstance. I couldn’t tell you the name of the parlor or if the pizza was any good, though it clearly didn’t leave an impression. What I can tell you is the distinct memory that I was out of time in that place. It wasn’t necessarily an unknown place, even now I hear its name thrown around casually in stores where employees give rough directions to patrons before they get to me, but it was a place that felt left behind. The signage, the material, the people, it all felt as if it had been left in stasis, a time capsule you could walk through and breath in. Dotted across the country are these little towns that never move forward.
I’m a significant way through Romeo Is A Dead Man when the memory returns to me. Romeo is a story of incredible scale; our hero, intrepid sheriff turned Junior Cadet, is recruited into the FBI’s Space Time Division to help set history right after it shatters sometime in 2019. It’s a premise that feels like it’s setting up a massive globe trotting adventure à la the classic platformers of the early 3D systems. Instead, it mostly involves trotting around our protagonist’s hometown, never escaping. Never moving forward.
Keeping it simple
Romeo Is A Dead Man is the newest title from Grasshopper Manufacturer, the eclectic studio home to Suda51, one of the most unique directors in the industry. The team made big waves among enthusiasts on the GameCube with the release of Killer7, a unique blend of rail shooter and adventure game that gave a bizarre twisting narrative about elections and assassins. This was followed up by a spattering of more traditional action titles, all of which had a unique irreverent tone to them, none more so than the No More Heroes series that has defined the company’s success. Romeo, like these titles, is a fairly standard action game in its moment to moment gameplay. For a modest fee players can unlock sets of melee weapons and complimentary ranged ones that they can then switch on the fly during combat, though it’s an awkward process.
Romeo’s combat may best be described as rudimentary. You have a light combo, a heavy combo, and a special move you use by building up a fighting game-esque super meter. In theory, players should mix up ranged shots and sword swipes to fill this meter as efficiently as possible, but going from melee to range combat is enough of a hassle on its own, with the transition from firing, to reloading, to swinging your sword always feeling a split second too slow to feel rewarding. Reload is where the momentum is most deliberately lost, as enemies will almost always attack before the reload can be completed and dodging needs to negate the act entirely.
In practice, I found myself ignoring the guns entirely, focusing all my effort on mastering melee combat which proved to have its own pitfalls. The bulk of Grasshopper Manufacturer’s action titles reward defensive play by having a perfect dodge system, one that gives you a special combo for dodging strikes at the perfect moment. Romeo has no such system. In fact, Romeo has no defensive options at all. Players cannot block or parry enemy attacks, and dodging has a lower priority than attacking so if you’re mid combo you’ll find yourself locked in until the strike is over. Beyond this, the game’s sheer amount of visual noise can make reading enemy attacks difficult, especially as they lack any obvious highlights. While enemies will almost always reel back before an attack, a more distinct visual cue like a flash or an aura would help readability. As is, Romeo expects very cautious play, especially from players who opt for the game’s hard mode for their first run like I did.
On paper these all seem to build a poor combat system and yet, I like playing Romeo. I like its one combo combat and its messy enemy placement. I like it more than last year’s ultra slick Ninja Gaiden 4 or Ghost of Yotei. I admire its purity. I love how much of it feels stripped wholesale out of No More Heroes 2, Grasshopper Manufacturer’s most underrated title. I like how it cultivates restraint in me as a player even as its go-to obstacle is a Dynasty Warriors level of zombies to tear through. I like the weight of the Star Destroyer, the pop of the Juggernaut, and the slow down that happens when you burst enemies like overripe watermelons. With a few upgrades, I grew to love the awkward process of unloading a machine gun on an enemy waddling down a corridor before smacking it around with a chainsaw sword. I liked it enough to turn off its more unique mechanics for a minor damage boost and still felt satisfied.
Still that mechanic is worth some spotlight. During the wholesale slaughter of the ‘rotters’ that occupy the levels, players will acquire seeds they can use to cultivate ‘Bastards.’ Bastards can be assigned and used in combat, each having their own cooldown after use. Cultivating bastards involves sending them to battle with each other, and then planting the resultant seed to get a buffed version of one. It’s a simple system, but one that allows players to fill the gaps in their strategy. One of the first drops players get is a sentry gun, giving cover fire as you wade through the crowd of the undead, but I preferred ones that offered bursts to stagger bosses. It’s a system that feels like a solid evolution of the abilities from the studio’s previous release, No More Heroes 3, and one that helps smooth out its lack of combos. Much like its predecessor, artfully doling out Bastards against bosses can feel downright filthy, stunlocking them in loops where they’re helpless to stop you. It’s a satisfying, but not static result, since I found about half the bosses were resistant to my particular build.
Awkward and bizarre, but it’s got heart
Much as I love playing Romeo, any game with Suda51 attached is sold more as an experience than a pure gameplay system, and having had some time to gestate the story I feel strongly that Romeo may be the best story Grasshopper Manufacturer has put out since the original No More Heroes. Co-written by Ren Yamazaki, director of the previously mentioned Killer Is Dead, the duo tell a surprisingly melancholy tale about the frustrations of growing up in a small town and becoming a justicar for the wrong reasons. Tempestous and ornery, the titular Romeo doesn’t cut the silhouette of a good samaritan so much as a bored kid looking for a cheap thrill. A chance encounter with the ever mysterious Juliet seems to give him the opportunity to live a more robust life, but on the night their journey should begin, Romeo has a chance encounter with a monster. On the verge of death, Romeo’s genius grandfather injects him with the Dead Gear, transforming him into the masked hero Dead Man and setting him on the path to join the FBI and stop space time fugitives.
Yet, even as a federal agent Romeo is relegated to the unchanging town of Deadford, encountering Juliets from other worlds that come to finish the job, this plays out as an elongated absurdity, one where the most extreme and bizarre circumstances give way to mundane conflicts in simple locations, a staple of suda51’s works. But beyond that, Romeo builds into an allegory about fantasy and the mundane grind we go through day to day. It’s a game whose pieces come together in bizarre somber ways, ones that only became clear when it’s all done. It’s a puzzle I look forward to tinkering with in the months to come, and feels like a strong sign of where the company can go creativively. More than anything, as Romeo has seemed to replace No More Heroes lead Travis Touchdown as the company mascot, I’m happy to find the team is willing to give Romeo some villainous traits as well, something that Travis felt like he lost after his first foray.
Much as I walked away from it enjoying the story I feel that its execution of that story left something to be desired. Much of the title cutscenes are done in a floating comic style that leaves a lot to be desired. While the art is usually up to snuff and shifts styles often, I can’t help but feel the game took a half baked approach to the sequences. Despite the format players cannot advanced panel by panel like in an actual comic, nor does the game take the pains to try and make the art feel encompassing. In other titles with comic style cutscenes they’ll try to use the full frame of the screen, shifting the graphics as the scene changes. Romeo’s cutscenes just feel too rigid in presentation. Occasionally, the game will use a vintage visual novel style that seems like an altogether better option as its less-is-more approach lets players fill in the blanks and focuses on dialog, suda’s strong suit. This is of course, in lieu of full 3D cutscenes, the few of which we get here are up to the company’s high standards. This decision is almost certainly a consequence of funding, since Grasshopper’s parent company NetEase pulled funding from all foreign projects some time last year.
Romeo’s biggest hurdles are, as they seem to be for every release, performance based. Despite a fresh Nvidia 5070Ti in my rig, and a game that never seems to have much to stress even last gen consoles, I encountered slowdown at some key points. Full disclosure, though the GPU itself is new and there’s nothing in my rig that dips below recommended specs, it has been on the bad side of some voltage abuse which may be responsible for performance flaws. Still, as the title has been out in the aether for some time and these problems have been reported by others, it does seem to be a result of poor optimization. Part of this seems to be the mislabeling of certain features. The graphics setting in the options may be a resolution scale where the native resolution is set to medium and the ‘high’ setting upscaling to an absurd degree.
Summary
Romeo Is A Dead Man feels like it’s out of sync with the rest of the industry. It’s a time capsule, a character action game with labyrinthian level design, a big weird story, and an expectation you play it by its rules and not the other way around. And I love it. I love it with all my heart. It seems extremely easy to sit here and look at the lopsided execution of its story and wonder about what it could have been, but I can’t help and admire how the team threaded the needle and put everything they had into keeping the vision as close as they could. It’s awkward and bizarre, and needs some tuning up, but it’s got a human heart that beats too loud to ignore.
Romeo Is A Dead Man is out now on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.
