Romeo Is A Dead Man Post-Launch And New IP

One month removed from Romeo is a Dead Man’s launch, I had the chance to sit down one more time with the game’s creator and writer Goichi Suda, better known as Suda51. The divisive title is the latest in a long legacy for the games auteur who has been creating experiences with unique gameplay ideas and clever writing for over three decades with the help of his studio, Grasshopper Manufacture.

This divisive style meant that in its reviews, Romeo saw a lot of hate and love in equal measure, as is usually the case with Grasshopper’s titles. However, Suda says he “predicted” the results and “doesn’t care about Metacritic’s score”.

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“The thing that we care about as a studio, and the thing that I care about personally, is how the gamers feel about the game,” Suda explains. “Are the players having fun? Do they enjoy it? I care what the gamers think.

“Metacritic scores, until somewhat recently, tended to have an effect on how well a game would sell, especially for a smaller game. Now, I feel like the player scores seem to be carrying more weight than they used to. I think it’s a good thing that Metacritic’s score doesn’t get too much damage in sales.”

Romeo Might Be Dead, But He’s Full Of Surprises

On the surface, Romeo is a Dead Man is an action game where you defeat enemies who look like zombies using different melee and projectile weapons. It’s a functional and bloody beat ‘em up with a good foundation, but its most interesting bits come from the myriad mechanics, mini-games, and other special details that you’ll find along the way.

For example, Romeo is an FBI agent who can interact with his crew amidst a pixel-art hub world. One of them is the nurse WorstPink, and she hides an amusing dating-simulator sequence that you can only experience completely if you answer 99 questions in a row. If you fail at question 57, you need to start again from scratch.

“[Game designer] Yosuke Akiyama is the one who came up with the idea,” Suda explains. “He said, ‘It’s like a dating simulator that comes out of nowhere in the middle of this game’. At first, I was like, ‘What? I don’t know, man.’

“To be honest, we were pretty worried about it. Akiyama himself was super worried; he had second thoughts. Before the game was properly released, he actually came to me to apologize directly. He was like, ‘I shouldn’t have done that.’ In the end, I feel it turned out well, and I’m glad we included it in the game.”

As you might expect for a creator so personally invested in his work, Suda points to a lot of fond memories during development. He remembers doing a lot of rework for the last few months, fixing everything as much as possible while working within a limited budget and time constraints. He’s particularly happy with the Bastards system, a gameplay mechanic where Romeo harvests zombies in a special garden room with his sister and then summons them in battle.

However, he lists the game’s title screen as one of his proudest achievements. “When the title screen popped up, it was like, ‘This game is going to work.’ It was like a confirmation.”

We also speak about the magical music video segment that appears before the last level, in which the Japanese hip-hop group Scha Dara Parr plays a song over some oniric and psychedelic visuals, like nothing I have seen in a recent video game. Suda tells me he’s a big fan of the group, and points out that Scha Dara Parr has a long history with video games – they did the promotional song for the first Legend of Zelda in Japan.

Writing About Death And Life

Romeo is a Dead Man is about the FBI agent Romeo Stargazer looking for his lost love, Juliet. The problem is that Juliet is a time-space criminal who has gathered a group of super villains from different timelines. Plus, she also seems to be evil in every timeline you find her.

Suda has built an entire career on writing universes and characters from bizarre and eccentric ideas, but to say that’s all his stories are is to miss the point. Here, there are themes of the threat of giving your data to companies, political corruption, and the need to ‘kill your past’ in order to enjoy life and live in the present, among other topics.

Romeo is a Dead Man was going to have a scenario writing team for its story, but this didn’t work out, so Suda ended up writing the whole thing. His hand made it a personal tale with concepts and characters from previous works, as he usually does.

Romeo’s story goes deep into being unable to escape your past and fighting an unavoidable future, but it also explores love, law, morality, and, more interestingly, religion. There are clear nods to Buddhism in symbols and how Romeo is transformed through the game, and Ukokira Kodebin wrote on X about how the game feeds from Zoroastrianism.

“Being Japanese, Buddhism is something that’s sort of ingrained into us,” explains Suda. “We’re not necessarily all Buddhists, but a lot of our culture is based on Buddhism. It’s just sort of part of everyday life for us.

“There’s a game called Moonlight Syndrome [Human Entertainment, 1997], and the characters that appear in that game are actually gods in Zoroastrianism. I studied Zoroastrianism at that time, so that may be one of the elements [in Romeo]. The Buddha stuff was definitely on purpose, and was definitely a conscious decision, but the Zoroastrian stuff was more of a subconscious thing, or partly at least.”

Interestingly, while the game’s main plot is obviously inspired by Shakespeare’s classic play, Suda actually selected quotes from Oscar Wilde to introduce each chapter. He tells me he wanted to do something in the vein of Criminal Minds, which opens each episode with a quote that represents the story that’s about to take place, and that Wilde is simply one of his favorite authors.

Grasshopper Is Not Dead

On March 7, Bloomberg reported that Gang of Dragon, the upcoming new game from Yakuza creator Toshihiro Nagoshi, will lose its NetEase funding in May, and will be forced to find additional income if it is to be completed. This came as a shock and a concern for other studios under NetEase’s umbrella, like Grasshopper Manufacture. While Romeo is a Dead Man was self-published, NetEase still owns the studio, and there are rumours that the studio isn’t in a good financial state.

Unfortunately, Suda couldn’t make a direct comment on this, instead pointing to Romeo’s ‘sales targets’. “Our original goal for Romeo is a Dead Man was for it to sell ten million copies,” he explains. “And we haven’t hit the ten million mark yet, so we’re still shooting for that. We still need everyone’s help, so please support us. I hope we can sell ten million copies.”

On the other hand, he also says Grasshopper isn’t done with releasing patches and fixes for the game. In fact, it will receive “a certain amount of extra content,” though he wasn’t sure about calling it “a proper DLC”.

There is still no news about the physical version of Romeo is a Dead Man, but at least Suda could confirm that the new game Grasshopper is working on and releasing this year is a brand-new IP.

“We’re still in the middle of figuring out exactly how to go about releasing it and when,” he explains. “If possible, what we’d like to do is maybe go to some smaller-scale indie event and have people actually be able to play it there. But nothing has been decided yet, exactly as far as when and how it will be released.”

And what about a remake of Flower, Sun, and Rain, a cult-classic title that fans have been asking for ages? “As soon as we get ten million copies, we’ll be able to make it happen. We’re really looking forward to it.”

Released

February 11, 2026

ESRB

Mature 17+ / Intense Violence, Blood and Gore, Suggestive Themes, Use of Drugs, Strong Language

Developer(s)

Grasshopper Manufacture

Publisher(s)

Grasshopper Manufacture

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