No More Heroes

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No more heroes has been lauded as the edgy, creative, adult game the Wii needs to hold the attention of non-casual-gamers and keep us from leaving our Wiis to gather dust while we play our 360s. Well it could have done that, if not for the problems.

Don’t get me wrong, No More Heroes is like if Quentin Taratino and Shinichirō Watanabe got together and made an anime. But as I was playing I began to question why they didn’t just make No More Heroes an anime in the first place. The game is in love with its characters and cutscenes but there are strong signs of neglect in other areas.

In the game you play Travis Touchdown, a brazen youth with an electric katana and a deep passion for moe loli anime characters (I wish I was kidding), somehow coming out as a hip, killer otaku of sorts. Further solidifying this image Travis charges his beam katana by making wanking motions with it. So Travis runs out of money to buy video games and does the obvious thing of taking a hitman job to earn some dough. Turns out the guy he kills was 11th rank in some secret assassin organization and he’s tricked into moving up to 10th rank with an offer from a beautiful, accented girl and then has no choice but to keep going because lower ranking assassins will be after his ass anyway.

The game breaks the fourth wall often and has some hilarious old-school elements to it, like pixelated HUD elements as well as some SNES/arcade-like sound effects. The controls are interesting, using a combination of button pressing and wiimote motion but they can be a bit hard to get used to. You pretty much mash A to hit a guy, depending on how you hold the wiimote Travis will be in a high or low stance, then the game goes into slow motion and you quickly have to swing the controller in the direction an arrow points you to do the finishing move. After that’s just an explosion of fakey blood and coins. Travis can also do quick dodges and a targeting system allows him to block and as if that isn’t enough there’s also a sort of slot machine thing that gets set off during fights that allows you to do special moves but so far I’ve found some of these a bit confusing and since it’s random many kick in only after you’ve cleaved everyone in the room in half. Pressing B gives you some disarming kicks and if you manage to grab a guy you can preform wrestling move that involves waving the nunchuck and wiimote in the direction you’re told. Another interesting thing of random note, before each assassin fight Travis gets a call on his cell from aforementioned pretty accented girl, but her voice comes out of the wiimote speaker and the game cleverly tricked me into holding it up to my ear like a phone to hear what the hell she was saying.

The graphics, as you might have noticed, are incredibly stylistic. I appreciate the bold effort in rendering the characters that way but it’s not exactly my cup of tea (well artistically it is, but not as a video game render), but it could easily be someone else’s. However the free-roaming city looks like complete ass. I hope you like driving a bitchin’ motorcycle around a really really low-res version of any given GTA locale. I don’t know how something like this could look worse on the Wii than on the PS2 but it does.

You spend most of your time in this city looking for jobs, because you need to put up money in order to have a fight between you and the next assassin arranged. The first job was, I kid you not, collecting coconuts for a coconut vendor. After that I actually got to get some sort of assassin-y jobs. The first said I would just go around killing dudes til my life ran out and I’d get 2,000 LBs (No More Heroes’ form of currency) per dude. So I was like, sweet! So I got to the location which was just a parking garage and got to work, but the job was a lie because it ended when I just killed all the dudes, still in quite good health. So I went and took the next job, which was to assassinate a corrupt business man. I found myself at the SAME parking garage fighting the SAME damn dudes only this time one was labeled as the target. Come on. If you’re going to force the player to do side missions at least make them decent.

I fear this was some ill-conceived attempt to pad the game and make it longer. Sure alot of modern games have free-roaming, but I honestly didn’t expect much else out of No More Heroes aside going from fight to fight in a semi-coherent manner. Okay so the city allows you to get better weapons, training, new clothes etc. but there are so many other ways that could be implemented that don’t involve a dime store knock off of GTA’s thriving microcosms. Driving around the city serves little purpose aside from getting from point A to point B and it’s not enjoyable because you can’t even run people over. It’s not a game-killer, no, but it’s still annoying.

Don’t get me wrong, the battles with the other assassins, and fighting your way through waves of faceless cronies to get to those battles is a hell of alot of fun. But I fail to see why I should have to cut grass to earn money in between the fun. I suppose the game would just be incredibly short if I didn’t, but there could have been other ways to lengthen it that don’t curb one’s excitement. Or just make it short, who cares? I got my ass handed to me twice by a schoolgirl with a big white afro, I still think just going from assassin to assassin would take a plentiful amount of time. Still, the game’s merits are in its quirky design and dialog and rather interesting, jam-packed fighting system. I didn’t quite get completely used to it myself, but that doesn’t make it bad.