The one thing you can always expect from a Grasshopper Manufacture story, in a semantic-imploding way, is unpredictability. Romeo is a Dead Man is no different. The concept here is – and make sure you have your seatbelt on for this wild ride – Romeo Stargazer, seconds away from death when space-time is shattered, is saved via a piece of tech rammed into one of his eye sockets. He's then recruited by the FBI's Space-Time Police (yup) in order to hunt down criminals across multiple universes. On top of that, Romeo is also trying to find his girlfriend (who is, of course, named Juliet) who's suddenly gone missing. Got all that? Good. We're only just getting started.
Romeo is a Dead Man, like the rest of Grasshopper's library, is a visually striking adventure. "Each game’s design direction and visual style sort of comes together gradually as the staff and I discuss various ideas," Suda51 tells us, "and a lot of it is basically kind of ad-libbed on the fly, so game development for us is almost like playing a jam session at a live concert. For us, that feeling of a 'live jam session' and sense of electric energy is what drives us to make our games, and I feel we put more importance on keeping that feeling going more so than thinking about how we can just make a game look cool."
Dead good
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Fans of Grasshopper's previous work can look forward to a game that not only looks familiar, but feels familiar, while forging a strong identity of its own. "The team we have working on the Romeo is a Dead Man project also worked on Travis Strikes Again and No More Heroes 3, so it’s the third title they’ve worked on together," Suda51 explains.
"I wanted to think of a project that could help further improve the team’s abilities and bring them even closer together, and as I came up with the idea for the Romeo project I felt it would be perfect for that. Particularly since we’re actually developing the game with at least twice as many team members as we had for No More Heroes 3, I thought this would be a good opportunity to not only buff up the team’s skills, but to do so on the sort of game that we tend to do best – a 'fast-moving slash-action' game – so I kept that in mind as I gradually came up with ideas for the project".
We're being teed up for one heck of a "fast-moving slash-action game". Space-time exploding is great news for us, as it means a wide variety of environments packed with weird and wonderful enemies for us to plough through, including some huge and truly wild-looking bosses. We'll be shooting as well as slashing, though; a mixture of guns and swords means we'll be encouraged to flip between weapon types from moment to moment, as well as absorbing enemy blood to charge Romeo's special "Bloody Summer" attack, for maximum bad-guy-splatting effectiveness. Suda51 explains that some members of the team are melee mains (such as himself) or gun mains, while others regularly use both.
The idea to include both guns and melee weapons came from Grasshopper's "action ace", a programmer named Hironaka. "Guns can be really powerful weapons," says Suda51, "but we made sure to make the game so that melee weapons such as swords would also come in handy and possibly even be more effective in some parts, and I really hope that players get what I mean when they try the game out. You can make the choice to take out enemies somewhat more easily with guns, or you can choose to wipe out a bunch of enemies all at once with close-range melee attacks; there are lots of different possible variations as far as combat style goes."
Variation comes through player choice. "On top of all the different skills that are available to use, there’s also one of the most important combat-related elements: the 'Bastards'. This is basically the 'crafting'-type aspect of Romeo Is A Dead Man, where you basically do 'zombie crafting', and we’ve put a whole bunch of different Bastards into the game," says Suda51. "You can carry up to four Bastards with you at once [...] Personally, I’ve got a specific set of four Bastards that I usually use, but I’ve seen people do some really cool shit with certain combinations that I wouldn’t have thought of myself, and it’s always fun discussing these various combinations and mash-ups."
From the moment the anime-style reveal trailer ignited our excitement ("We’ll send [animation studio Kamikaze Douga] a request for something, and they’ll go and ramp our ideas up two or three levels higher", says Suda51), Romeo is a Dead Man has promised to be something special. With stylish bloodsoaked combat in a world where creativity runs wild, we can't wait to dive in and get our digital hands dirty. Yet one question remains. We're thinking it, you're thinking it, and we made Suda51 think it when we asked: How many squats can Romeo Stargazer do in one go?
"Romeo was originally a sheriff’s deputy, and so he’s gotten a lot of exercise and worked out a lot. He’s also in a band – he plays bass in a band, and there are even parts in the game where you can see his bass guitar. Squats are really important for a bass player, especially since he’s in a shoegazer band so he’s constantly looking down and sort of bending his knees, you know? So he gets a lot of knee exercise done as well. Considering all that, I’d say Romeo could probably do up to three whole squats at once." Three may not be a huge number, but we bet they'd be the three most impressive squats you've ever seen in your life.
