It depicts characters in various walks of life who refuse or are either unable to let go of their past in ways that catch up to them without fail. Kill the Past is a series of games with similar thematic tones or directly connected to a shared universe. But today the fandom is closer than ever to understand the essence of Suda’s work, by retracing his career in video games, but also by retracing his life. For most of Suda’s career, all that western fans had were breadcrumbs, fragments of a broader story we could only speculate about. Grasshopper Manufacture had localized Flower, Sun, and Rain on the DS in 2009, which turned out to be a direct sequel to The Silver Case released in 1999 that was never localized until 2016! Replaying Flower, Sun, and Rain with his new knowledge was akin to receiving a shock of how much is suddenly unveiling in front of you. To get there was already a struggle in itself. A place that has been called “ Kill the Past”. The release of The Silver Case and The 25th Ward was akin to give us the key to crack the code, to understand that many of Suda’s games are coming from the same place. It revealed that what most fans thought was a disparate and eclectic body of work is actually connected, thematically linked and both deeply layered and personal. Few things have been as fascinating this decade as the release of several of Suda51’s older works.
