I think exposing a modern AAA game dev to a single Suda51 video game would instantly kill them like a Victorian era child eating a bag of hot cheetos

Real ass videogames are still being made and it's a beautiful thing. The latest 7/10 masterpiece from Grasshopper is bursting at the seams with creativity and love for the medium, serving as an antidote to gaming's "nine out of ten" spiritual malaise.

Suda to me is one of the most misunderstood creative minds. I consider Killer7 to be one of the greatest games ever made (Silver Case games are great too). No More Heroes, while I appreciated the themes Suda was getting at, I considered to be "meh" and its success served as a tragic catalyst for businessmen to go "oh, Suda is Mr. Wacky-Style-Man!" completely misunderstanding the underlying substance of his work as they stepped in to take control. This led to a long, painful history of Suda having his name plastered onto mediocre games at best and steaming piles of garbage at worst ever since 2007, which undermined and often directly contradicted the originating ideas from the Sudaverse/Kill The Past series (I consider Lollipop and Shadows of the Damned to be trash for your reference). Brilliant postmodern explorations got replaced with short-sighted jingling keys. Provocative, mature themes and ♥♥♥♥♥♥ imagery got replaced with shallow edge and hypersexualized ♥♥♥♥♥ nonsense. Everything suddenly an immature mirror to what was there before... Fast-forward to 2019, and it felt to me like Suda was saying in Travis Strikes Again "Look, I'm finishing up No More Heroes and then I'm going to try to come back since I'm hopefully no longer getting slapped around by this industry". Fast-forward again to 2026, and most everyone you see thinks of him as "Mr. Wacky-Style-Man!" likely knowing him for some assortment of post-2007 games, and then Romeo is a Dead Man releases.

Given all that background, the question for someone like me is "is this a return to form for Suda?". I can happily answer - after 100%ing this game and getting all achievements - "yes".

-STORY-
Initial trailers had me worried it would continue the No More Heroes humor, but thankfully most of it is tastefully implemented in a more subtle way that's hybridized with humor that would be more at home in Killer7 where there are layers of irony to chew through or Suda is just outright being a ♥♥♥♥ on purpose ("we're in a tight spot!" comes to mind). Without getting into spoilers, I'd say the main arc of events feels like a commendable effort to clean the Sudaverse up while also finding a way to keep it all canon and I'm curious/hopeful for where things go next. That said, Romeo's story does feel loose in places in order to make this work, but I see it as a necessary evil in order to try patching things up. The main stand-out of the story for me is actually something less obvious that can't really be said without spoiling, but I'll just say there's a very brilliant execution of some understated aspects of the story I can see a lot of people not pay enough attention to. One unfortunate aspect of all this is that it does require you to have slogged through the entire series to understand the details.

-ART-
It's Grasshopper dude. They're a group of really talented devs on the artistic front. There's not much to say here, just dope stuff all around - although I'd say I didn't find all the boss themes to be equally compelling

-GAMEPLAY-
This is the most polished and engaging combat system Grasshopper has made. While this sounds like nothing but a compliment, there's actually a paradoxical consequence to this as well. Friction has always played a role for Grasshopper, and when they're at their best they find a way to work alongside it. With Romeo being this smooth, it does highlight annoyances that otherwise may be somewhat masked by universal friction. An annoying input-storage issue that can very easily cause you to somehow reload twice in a row or have an additional dodge trigger long after your last button press (maybe this will get patched but as of writing this it was a thing), an enemy's AI pathing being strange and sporadic, or enemies that are very simplistic and simply a nuisance (those birds man...) feel much more disruptive and out of place when the game is otherwise so smooth. Bosses feel uneven difficulty and engagement-wise with there being some moves that are harder to read leading to frustration, some bosses having some form of tedium, or a boss or 2 that are just super easy. This game also carries the Grasshopper tradition that plagues nearly all their games where they milk the gameplay too hard as the game progresses with enemy spamming and certain enemies and/or a mini-boss getting overused towards the end, That said, there's more freedom than ever before and you can come up with some builds that trivialize most things even on Hard. With that said, I would say not to play on Hard if you're not interested in some grinding and playing around with builds. Heck feel free to just play on Easy if you don't feel like dealing with annoyances in the long-term and would like to coast with minimal fatigue to the credits.

-PERFORMANCE NOTE-
With a 5070 ti at 1440p I played at max settings aside from setting the scaler to "Low" which still looked great but gave me good frames aside from some occasional areas that dipped to high 60s or low 70s for some reason. Other times I was in the 100s, it was a bit all over. There was also a hitching/stuttering issue of sorts in some areas you could see while moving the camera around, but I could deal with it fine. All in all I had an okay technical experience, but I recognize that if I didn't have a powerful computer I could be singing a whole different tune right now.

-FINAL NOTES-
This is a flawed but compelling game from a misunderstood creative mind trying to reclaim his series, and I'm all for it. If you're in it for artistic creativity there's a lot to love here, though it's most profoundly enhanced by having a good understanding of the total Sudaverse/Kill the Past. I've seen some call this a return of "old Suda", but given the historical context I'd say this is a return of "true Suda" and I'll continue to root for him as I know the great things he and his team are capable of.