: Before we go into Lifecut, there’s something I need to talk about briefly, that being a manga by the name of Kurayami Dance.
: In Lifecut, we’ll find two issues of it - they’re directly related to the Comic Beam issues we found in Decoyman. Comic Beam was the magazine that ran Kurayami Dance in 2015.
: So what is Kurayami Dance, and why is it important? To understand that, we need to go back to a game called Shadows of the Damned, which released in 2011. There’s no LP of it on the archive, but supergreatfriend did one on Youtube.
: Near the end of the early 2000s, Suda pitched an idea for a game called Kurayami, which would have been an action game that was also a direct sequel to The Silver Case.
: The main draw was that it had three big names working on it - Shinji Mikami in the director’s seat, Suda as the lead writer, and Akira Yamaoka doing the soundtrack.
: As I understand it, what happened was that they decided they needed money to make the game they wanted to make, and as a result sought out a publisher. The good news is they got one. The bad news is that the publisher they got was Electronic Arts.
: Naturally, EA wanted to turn Kurayami into an overly focus-grouped pile of shit because they thought it’d sell more. They got their way, and we got Shadows of the Damned.
: Suda has never gotten over this, to the point where he named the main villain of Travis Strikes Again after John Riccitello, EA’s CEO at the time.
: Just before the re-release of The Silver Case, Suda decided that he’d instead turn his original idea for Kurayami into a manga - that being Kurayami Dance.
: Kurayami Dance is a deconstruction of the idea of “Kill the Past”, in that it’s about a guy who nearly kills himself going 300 kilometers per hour on his motorcycle.
: He wakes up after three years of being in a coma to find out that all the rich people have moved into a private enclave run by a guy who is VERY reminiscent of the mayor in The Silver Case.
: By the way, Tokio shows up at the start of it.
: Anyway, the plot is that the main character works at a funeral home, and is given a mission to bring a big, expensive coffin to a funeral inside Kurogane City, the enclave of the rich people.
: When he gets there, he finds out that the entire city is having a massive suicide epidemic due to people being “too happy” with their lives.
: Anyway, the main character’s catchphrase is “I’m in a hurry to live”, compared to Kamui’s “Kill the Life” that he adopts after this game.
: I can see why EA didn’t like it, though. Kurayami Dance is very anti-capitalist and at the same time, very political. It’s not the kind of safe money-earner that EA likes to shit out.
: From what I understand, Suda is looking to potentially make Kurayami a thing now that Grasshopper has money, so hopefully we’ll get to see it someday.
: Next up is Lifecut, complete with a bunch of pictures by Salty Vanilla.