this is a really stupid game, and i love it so much. it gets surprisingly deep after a while with themes about how culture and media has desensitized us to violence and murder and how you can never truly escape the cycle of violence. once you're in, you can't get out. Travis is such a pathetic loser who is willing to kill hundreds of people just to score with some french chick, so you're rarely laughing with him but rather laughing at him. this is kinda a guilty pleasure of mine, because this game is really stupid most of the time, but it's campiness is more charming than obnoxious.

I feel like Suda games are hard to review because so often their good qualities are tied intrinsically to their bad ones. The gameplay is so clunky in places but in a way that feels intentional and not in a cop-out kind of way. There is a depth to the way mechanics and storytelling interact to keep reinforcing that you and Travis are both weird losers doing busywork just because you're told to do so, but it's also so superficial about this theming that you can't help but feel like Suda is just fucking with you for his own amusement. Laser swords are cool though.

Smells like Suda spirit.

This game is loud, crude, in your face, and maybe even a little obnoxious at times but I love it. It almost constantly maintains this super goofy over the top tone, and it never takes itself too seriously, opting to go all in on it’s satire of what I believe to be the entire video game medium.

The gameplay is an often disliked part of this game, but I feel it works incredibly well. In that classic Suda fashion, it chooses to purposefully stray away from something “fun” in favor of using the gameplay thematically. The game follows this super tedious, super linear format of grinding money, paying the United Assassins Association all your hard earned cash in order to set up the next rank fight, play a level to get to the boss, kill the boss, wash rinse and repeat. It isn’t very fun, especially the money gathering.

It seems pretty amateurish to have such a system, but under the lense that the game is a satire, it becomes a bit more meaningful. Think of a solid 80% or more of the games you’ve played and think about their gameplay loops. How much you do this gameplay loop under the runtime of the game. I don’t know about you, but for me I quickly realized that for a lot of these games I’m basically doing the same thing over and over. I just never notice it since these games strive to be fun and that masks the monotony.

By removing the “fun”, No More Heroes gameplay highlights how extremely repetitive so many games are. It laughs and makes fun of them.

Even the combat is like this; both the bosses and you only have a handful of moves and the bosses have A LOT of HP (especially the final boss) so you’re going to be going in cycles of dodging attacks, blocking attacks, counterattacking, and so forth over and over until eventually you or the boss dies. When I fought the final boss for the first time, my hands actually started hurting from how long I had to fight them.

And of course, it’s really impossible to talk about this game without talking about it’s protagonist Travis Touchdown, who is honestly one of my favorite video game protagonists ever. If I met him in real life I’d probably hate the guy, but as a character I love him. Travis perfectly encapsulates both the satiricalness of No More Heroes as well as it’s commentary beautifully.

If the gameplay and its format is satire of video games, then Travis, the one who’s actually rising up the ranks and doing the fighting, would be a satire of us, the players.

When we first see Travis just outside of the intro, he’s easily decapitating some guys and doing cool poses and the like. He seems like the most badass guy ever. Then we see his daily life and find out he lives alone in a motel, has no stable employment, has shelves of anime girl figurines, and his walls are plastered with Mexican wrestling masks (classic Suda).

Frankly, he lives a pretty pathetic life. He’s a very not subtle satiricalization of many video game players and anime fans, some guy who surrounds himself with fiction rather than attempting to improve his life. So when he’s a super cool badass it’s really an illusion masking this patheticness, and it’s really an illusion we would all want to be in reality. We would all want to be the cool guy destroying enemies and saving the princess and all that, and so in order to live out this fantasy we play video games and surround ourselves with fiction, just like Travis.

The game indulges in our fantasy with the rank matches, but after the level is done and the boss is slayed, we are forced to return back to the motel and our real lives. From there the only thing we can do is work and then blow off all our money towards more fantastical fiction…it’s kind of a depressing loop, and one I could easily imagine many people becoming entangled in. Hell, I could end up in that situation to be honest.

But despite some of its more saddening comments on modern consumerism, it still maintains a silly tone throughout. Messing around with Jeane the kitten in the motel, hearing about the ridiculous DVDs Travis rents, driving around town in an uber custom motorbike, it’s such a goofy and lovable title. In order to save the game you have to take a dump in a toilet for Christ's sake.

I haven’t played any other No More Heroes game just yet, but in the near future I’d love to play No More Heroes 2. From what I’ve read online it’s a somewhat less fondly loved game, but if it maintains at least some of the spirit this game has I know I’ll enjoy it, to some extent anyways.

This game is quite a strange one, It feels like a Wii game but at the same time I feel like I would hate to play it on the Wii. The early game sucks like the bosses are really tanky and most of the time I feel like they weren't really engaging. It then picks it self up around the half way mark (I'd say after Destroy man). if this game were in a Mission based structure where you select the next stage or shop through a menu I feel like it would help with it's pacing but it's just not like that. For example, in the game, once you beat a boss you then have to complete very boring jobs to get enough money to move onto the next stage and I just don't like how it's done (maybe in the sequels it get better). The game does make up for it though with some great memorable characters who really help with the style it's trying to go for. That's not to mention the last like 2 bosses in the game with the dumbest twists ever but since this game doesn't take itself too seriously and I love them.