Hey hey folks, and welcome to my critique of Sleeping Dogs. Just a friendly reminder that if you haven’t completed the game, there will be spoilers in this video. If you wish to avoid them, please pause, and go play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue.
At multiple times during Sleeping Dogs, Wei Shen will be called in to have a meeting with his handler Raymond. Raymond is sympathetic to Wei’s double life, having to be part of the Sun On Yee Triad as well as respect the law as an undercover police officer. Wei does not return any sympathy or respect in these scenes. They are annoyances, interrupting his work, that is ultimately more important than someone in the police force making sure he’s ok. I understand the purpose of these scenes. We as the player are meant to sympathise with Wei. We want to get back to the enjoyment of playing the game. Beating up rival triad members, driving around town, engaging in shootouts and becoming further embroiled in triad drama. Despite this, I always felt that the heightened drama and tension of these exchanges felt unearned, especially because it felt that Wei was always in the right, and there were never any consequences for telling Raymond to go pound sand. After all, the cops are the good guys. Raymond may be an annoyance, but he would never do anything to put Wei in any more danger, and his threats to shut down the undercover operation hold little weight because despite being pulled further into the triad lifestyle, Wei is getting results.
A couple years ago I played Driver: San Francisco for an impressions video, and I remarked how enjoyable it was playing an open world game as a police officer. Not just because the missions were about helping people rather than causing violence, but it gave a reason to try and limit the carnage I might otherwise engage in seeing these games give players the tools to do so. Not that you can’t go on rampages in Sleeping Dogs, but being a cop puts a check on the damage I might otherwise be causing. In GTA IV for instance, I remember finding it amusing to walk up to random pedestrians and start punching them. I wanted to provoke a fight and see how it would escalate. In Sleeping Dogs there are lockboxes scattered throughout the world, and most of them are guarded by groups of triad members or other street gangs. This is a game sanctioned way to blow off some steam and engage in the melee combat system. Even near the end of the game, I would be driving or walking around when the glint of a lockbox would catch my eye, or I would notice the red goon markers on my minimap. I would take time out from heading towards the next mission to attack a few enemies and acquire some more cash that I had no use for. Beating people up in public is not following the letter of the law. That’s called assault. Seeing as the people I was beating up were bad people themselves, and I was undercover, the game gave me justification to wail away to my heart’s content. That’s the spirit.
And maybe that’s why the world of Sleeping Dogs feels so alive to me. I think I had more fun driving around Hong Kong than any other open world space. It might be the small things, like how following the GPS will take Wei through side alleys. This is his home, he knows the shortcuts. It might be the vendors who buff your stats whenever you buy food from them, or the people always having conversations outside your apartment. There’s a sense of ownership of the space by beating up the thugs. I’m making the city a better place. Visiting the shrines and looting the lockboxes is just a reward for my due diligence as a citizen. This is outside the mission structure. During the missions, all bets are off. I’ve hit pedestrians, crashed countless times, and generally behaved like the triad maniac Wei is posing himself as. While these actions will lower the cop experience and increase triad experience, what’s interesting is that the missions have no bearing whatsoever on face experience. The time between missions when I’m engaged in races or just helping random strangers, that increases notoriety and causes people around town to recognize Wei, as well as leading to greater rewards from the clothing and vehicle vendors. Just like we’re stuck between being a cop and rising through the triad, there are two Hong Kongs. One inside the missions, and one outside, and never the two shall meet.
There are also two Weis. Does Wei ever reconcile the two versions of himself? At the end of the game, speaking to Officer Teng, she questions which Hong Kong feels like home to Wei, the side of law and order or the side of chaos and violence. To me this suggests that Wei’s heart was never really on the side of the police. The police are just a way for Wei to get his revenge on the Sun on Yee. It makes the drama with Raymond make sense. Wei excuses his own methods and behavior because it’s all in service of the greater good, taking down the triad. The problem is he feels most at home in the triad. The player certainly does. It’s much more enjoyable to race cars, beat up thugs, and get into shootouts rather than follow the law. Especially when the player doesn’t have to. Sure there’s a penalty during missions for such reckless behaviour, but the cop missions then reward similar mayhem. Since it’s an open world game, there is no long standing consequence for going on a rampage or changing Wei’s behavior. That after the credits, the game loads Wei back in his swanky apartment with a golden gun and gives you free reign to do whatever you like in this virtual space tells me that Officer Teng’s concerns are justified. It would be one thing to say that the chaotic side of Wei is all the fault of the player. We’re the influence pulling this character in the direction of the dark side, but we have no control over Wei’s attitude in the cutscenes. Wei relishes his freedom in the triad, and resents the police when they try and correct his behaviour. Even though Wei is a police officer, in the end, he might not be that different from any of the Grand Theft Auto protagonists. He just has a better excuse.
Thanks for watching. What are your thoughts on Wei’s internal conflict. Do you think that there was actually a war going on inside him for his loyalty to the police or to the triad, or do you think he was firmly on one side or the other the whole time? Let me know in the comments. If you’d like to help the channel and show me some love, please like the video, share it on your favourite social media sites, and subscribe if you haven’t already. Until next time, I hope you’re all having, a wonderful day.
Hey hey folks, and welcome to my critique of Killer7. Just a friendly reminder that if you haven’t completed the game, there will be spoilers in this video. If you wish to avoid them, please pause, and go play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue.
I thought that playing Killer7 on the PC with a mouse and keyboard would make the Heaven Smile less terrifying. That the fear they instilled in me the first time I played through the game was because of how fiddly I found aiming in first person with a controller. I was wrong. The Heaven smile are scary because of what they represent. The slow inescapable approach of death. Their laughter is inhuman, and entering a new room and hearing that low chuckle always unnerved me. The cackle they emit when you kill them does not represent a moment of triumph, but is the Smile having the last laugh. You have not escaped death, only delayed it. It doesn’t matter how many you kill, because if you exit the area and return, they will be back. They always keep respawning.
In the first mission, Angel, we are informed that there are only 14 Heaven Smile in the building. Then the duplicator is introduced. They’re breeding. I have a theory that the Heaven Smile might be a contagion, a virus that humans can catch, but we only encounter 3 types of Heaven Smile. Those created by Kun Lan, the new varieties created by the US government, and the weaker offspring of the duplicator smiles. My theory was based on Andrei Ulmeyda turning into a Heaven Smile, but that suggests the government experimenting on citizens to create a weaponized version of the Smiles under their control, and not a contagion. I honestly don’t know what’s worse. I also have a theory that the Smiles may be increasing in number as a countermeasure to stop the player from uncovering the past of Emir Parkreiner, but we’ll return to this theory a little later.
Then there’s Iwazaru. We chase him through the basement of Garcian’s trailer, after transporting there from Battleship Island. Unmasked, we see that our trusted servant and guide throughout the game has been none other than Kun Lan. Matsuoka tells us before entering that final room that this is the original and final Heaven Smile. Kun has been keeping tabs on the Smith Syndicate this whole time. Perhaps that’s another reason the smiles appear in greater numbers as the game progresses. Not only is Emir remembering who he is, but he’s under the control of Harman Smith, Kun Lan’s rival. We’ll discuss the chess game between Harman and Kun throughout the video, but what if all this time we thought that Emir was one of Harman’s pieces, when he was actually one of Kun’s?
In the second mission, Sunset, missiles have been fired at Japan from an unknown source, and the US government is deciding whether or not it wants to intervene and save the island nation. There are factions within the US government that think Japan has outlived its usefulness as an ally. They feel the Japanese government is too corrupt and not worth the effort of the US to save. What makes this ironic is that we find out later that the Japanese have been controlling the US government for some time through the US elementary school system, and thus the election process. The Japanese have decided the result of the US presidency for decades.
It is suggested that the party responsible for the attack on Japan is the UN Party (not to be confused with the United Nations). They are responsible for the creation of the Yakumo, a policy that is at the core of Killer7’s political conflict. In Sunset when Christopher Mills relays the orders for Garcian and the Killer7 to kill Fukushima (a restaurant owner that is in possession of the Yakumo), they run into an assassin trying to retrieve the document for the Liberal Party (another Japanese political faction), as well as a third assassin working for the International Ethics Committee. The Killer7 dispatch of both assassins and the Yakumo falls back into the hands of the UN Party under its new leadership of Kenjiro Matsuoka, who is backed by Kun Lan.
The Yakumo is the UN Party’s foreign policy for a world under Japanese leadership. As politics can be defined as any idea successful in gaining and maintaining governmental power, the desire for all these factions to gain the Yakumo conveys the absolute power of an idea itself. While it is unclear whether or not the Yakumo has any supernatural significance, it does bestow power on those who possess it. Andrei Ulmeyda got his hands on a piece of the Yakumo, and was able to grow from a post office clerk into the owner of a mega corporation. True the corporation is a fraud, a wooden placard that topples when the Killer7 make their way inside it, but perhaps all political ideas are the same. They contain the ability to gain and maintain large amounts of money and power, but are built on a precarious foundation. They only continue to exist and flourish because people believe in them.
If the UN party are behind the missile attack launched at Japan, the question then is why? Was it all a ruse to have the US government move on Fukushima through the Killer7 so they can retrieve the Yakumo? It’s suggested that similar to how the Yakumo was born out of the ashes of World War II, by destroying Japan with an even greater attack, a new era, and the fulfillment of the Yakumo policy can rise like a phoenix from the ashes of the devastated country. Perhaps this is also a modern form of the Bushido Code, the idea of death before dishonour. This idea holds weight thanks to the Heaven Smile. If the UN Party were not being controlled by Kun Lan, they are after Matsuoka takes his leadership position during Sunset. Kun Lan is responsible for the creation of the Heaven Smile, and their main method of attack is that of blowing themselves up by coming into contact with their enemy. Suicide bombing, reminiscent of the Kamikaze attacks from the Japanese during World War II, another embodiment of Bushido.
The second half of Sunset takes place in the KAKU Building, where over a game of Mahjong, representatives of Japan and the US are discussing whether or not Japan will be saved. The talk breaks down when one of the representatives is accused of cheating. The KAKU Building is flush with the motifs of gambling. There are puzzles with dice, poker hands, and horseracing. The 4-way Mexican standoff and the resulting executions have an inevitability to them that they too were part of the game being played, and this game could not have played out any other way. A strong theme running through Killer7 is that of politics as a game. Of countries and key figures as pieces on a chess board. This turns literal when Garcian finally enters the forbidden room of his trailer and sees that Harman Smith and Kun Lan are engaged in a game of chess. One that has been played before, and whose stakes are much larger than the pieces on the board. Garcian and the Killer7 are pieces in that game. This is the core experience of playing Killer7. Killer7 is an action game on rails. The player can only move these characters on predetermined paths, and only certain members of the group can access certain areas. The pieces cannot move freely.
One of the reasons Killer7 blew my mind when I first played it is that Harman Smith and Kun Lan are representational characters. They’re more than just a single person in a single place at a single time. A young Harman Smith killing his older counterpart with a tommy gun is an example of this. The chess game alongside the showdown in the Heaven Smile headquarters, and the epilogue in Shanghai show that Harman and Kun are rivals, but it is a friendly rivalry. It’s not as simple as good vs evil. They couldn’t be friends if that were the case. It’s more Yin and Yang. Two sides of the same coin. I thought perhaps they represented order and chaos but it would be screwed up if Harman represented order as the leader of the Killer7, a group of assassins.
There’s an east vs west dichotomy to their rivalry as well. If the Yakumo is supernatural in origin, then it is likely that Kun Lan had a hand in creating it. He created the Heaven Smile which I think are a weapon for the Japanese in the same way the Yakumo is. Perhaps the Yakumo is a wildcard and the pieces that Harman and Kun are playing with are as simple as the Killer7 vs the Heaven Smile. The epilogue in Shanghai shows that no matter the state of the world, this idea of competing ideologies between nations has to play out. It’s simply a different landscape. Their meeting in Shanghai is 100 years after the only narrative choice the player gets to make, whether or not to kill Matsuoka. This decision results in either the US or Japan winning the current game of politics. A decision that ultimately doesn’t seem to matter 100 years later.
If the game between Harman and Kun is as simple as the Killer7 vs the Heaven Smile, what about the mission titled Alter Ego? The Killer7 have a showdown against the Handsome Men, a sentai task force created by the US government for the purposes of combating the Heaven Smile threat, which at this point has become global. The showdown between the Handsome Men and the Killer7 ends with credits for a 16-bit video game before we see Kun Lan. Were the Handsome Men yet another of Kun’s chess pieces? An obstacle put in the way of the Killer7 to thwart Harman winning their game? As long as we’re talking about obstacles that are not Heaven Smiles, are Andrei Ulmeyda and Curtis Blackburn similar pieces?
Garcian Smith’s real name is Emir Parkreiner. A trained assassin who as a teenager murdered the Killer7 in a hotel, murdered his school principal Harman Smith, and stuffed him in a safe. The school that Emir was trained at is controlled by the Japanese UN Party, and the missions the Killer7 have been undertaking are for the US government. Emir carries the weapons of the Killer7 in his giant briefcase, meaning that changing into members of the Killer7, Harman Smith being the leader of the Killer7, and Garcian’s subservience to Harman are all in Emir’s head. We discover this in the final moments of the Smile mission.
Opening the safe at Coburn Elementary creates a cut on Emir’s forehead, revealing his third eye. He’s starting to see again. These memories have been repressed. As we make our way back to the Union Hotel, Emir recalls the assassination of each member of the Killer7 before he meets a young Harman Smith who assassinates the Harman and Kun playing the game of chess. The Forbidden Room might have only been accessible through Emir. Finally on the top of the building, Emir confronts what he’s done. He shoots his younger self in the third eye. He’s come to terms with that part of himself. In the final mission, Lion, Emir is Garcian no longer, and one of the consequences of that is that he can no longer see the Heaven Smile.
Let’s discuss my theory about whether or not the game is taking place inside Emir’s head. The Smith syndicate is the only group that can see and take down the Heaven Smile. This is thanks to Emir’s powers, and it’s not until the US government develops The Handsome Men that they have any alternative to relying on the Smith Syndicate. The Syndicate who might ultimately be under control by the Japanese because of Emir’s repressed education. The world of Killer7 has a theme of death and rebirth, or at least death not being the end. Most of the characters the Smith Syndicate kill appear in later levels as remnant psyches. Dan Smith had already been killed by Curtis Blackburn when Emir took his life in the Union Hotel, and it is suggested that Emir has lived more than once. He certainly looks well for a man born in 1942.
Returning to the game of chess, and a question I asked earlier, whose piece in the game is Emir? It might sound obvious to say Emir is Harman’s piece as Harman is the leader of the Killer7, but this is only because Emir wills it. When Emir interrupts their game, Harman is terrified of him while Kun is maniacally laughing. This is a different Harman from the one leading the Killer7. A Harman that remembers Emir murdering him. So is Emir Kun Lan’s piece? Emir was trained by the Japanese, but he has also been warring with the Heaven Smile as he is the only person capable of seeing them. I think that Kun wants to stop Emir from realising who he is, and that is why more Heaven Smile appear the closer we get to the end of the game. The Union Hotel is infested with them. Of course by this point, the Heaven Smile created by Kun have gotten away from him. The US government’s creations and the offspring of the Duplicators are the majority of what is fought. Was this part of Kun’s gameplan? In the end, Emir (as the player) makes the choice which nation wins the game, and by this point, Harman and Kun are no longer alive to witness its conclusion. Not that it matters. As Kun says in Shanghai, “The world doesn’t change, all it does is turn”.
Thanks for watching. In the end Killer7 presents a nihilistic view of human nature and the conflict between nations. How those that kill desire death themselves, or at least the death of their past in order for them to move on with their lives. In the Union Hotel, the soul shells, the collectibles needed to pass through the Vinculum Gate, are located where Emir executed the Killer7. This leads me to believe that the soul shells in the other missions represent previous assassinations of Emir (as himself, or through the Smith Syndicate). That he has to revisit the past and come to terms with his actions before being allowed to move forward. What do you think? So much of the game is open to interpretation, and that’s why I think it’s such a worthwhile work of art. I’d love to hear your interpretations in the comments, or your queries as to how certain characters or elements fit into the grand scheme of things. As always, if you’d like to help the channel and show me some love, please like the video, share it on your favourite social media sites, and subscribe to the channel if you haven’t already. Until next time, in the name of Harman, I hope you’re all having, a wonderful day.
