another romhack W kinda unfortunately. playing this i had an epiphany about competitive pokemon but before that lemme say that doin this three innates + one selectable ability on every mon shit is crazyyyy cool and smthn that i'd like to see carried forward for romhacks, kinda like how day/night cycles are the complimentary bread you get with a romhack meal. three innates keep the core identity of most mons in tact and the selectable ability lets you splash between some gimmick, offensive, or defensive niches, meaning that you can pop out with the offensive v-create trick room solrock one gym then have him on some shiesty sand support rocker type beat the next gym. never been one to really hankerdown on one set of mons but with how quickly you can switch EVs and abilities, and thus team niches for each mon, it makes homie loyalty an actual incentive...rather a nostalgia prison of how watching venusaur clicking giga drain for 23 hours of the 40 hour experience was secretly fun because it distracted you from that overdue LabCorp bill you got last time you got burned and had to go to the clinic. similarly the minimal grinding shit this does along with level caps feels essential for the similar smogon simulator breed of romhacks that have been cropping up tryna ride radical red's high. this fares sooooo much better than radical red just on account of how quickly it is to drop and build teams back up, you can run a full new set of six after every gym if you wanted and that kinda easy team variety is something i think this genre has been missing for a long ass time now.

course as you can imagine here the power scaling is pushing prosperous amounts of P when niggas have four abilities--the recent 1.5v build has brought things back into the realm of sanity (weather teams were gettin the goob nut off on everything) but still keeps cool balance changes like feraligtr being a superbeast or dewong being an unkillable support god who comes up and sets up six turns of aurora veil for free for the whole gang. i think this has finally fulfilled the true promise of every mon is viable here that every romhack hitherto has claimed but never really succeeded. like, no lil baby, but if ur rlly 4PF you can build a team to have beautifly 6-0 super sweep about half of the elite four without requiring much more than some hazard support to be honest. not every change is perfect,,, (i beat this on 1.0 where weather abilities weren't as nerfed, and lets just say sharpedo with strong jaw + swift swim is first ballot hoenn HOF--conversely; parasect my friend....welcome to the guangdong tigers) but there's more than enough boosts here to justify a toe tip for even the most experienced romhackers. some personal favorites:

-- steelix getting shore up + some shiest defensive abilites lets him be an actual top tier wall, capitalizing on how good steel/ground is as a defensive typing whilst also minimizing how quickly he falls over to special attackers (still weak to them and other breakers but not in a crippling way as in before).
-- LOVE dhelmise here, some innates give you triple types and dhelmise is a grass/steel/ghost combo. AND has an ability that makes him only neutral fire and deal neutral damage back to fire types with grass STABs, AND has fucking water absorb for some reason. which means blud is like a super ferrothorn that can maintain excellent hazard control with spin but still put on that presh with a poltergeist + STAB anchor shot combo.
-- hitmonchan gets priority on all punching moves, letting him pop out with priority boltbeam coverage and a priority CC for funsies.
-- Typholsion having a priority eruption is fucking hilarious + he can splash on sand teams cause he's a ground type for some reason
-- greninja is so insanely cracked they give him wicked blow and skill link for water shuriken, like why.
-- Slaking can opt for truant or an ability that lets him act every turn but just move last, which is still p great
-- Lots of mons like sirfetch'd have this ability called Rampage which lets them avoid recharge if they get a KO, meaning you can run goofy shit like scarf giga impact tauros as a cleaner or even something more unserious like aerilate rampage giga impact dragonite as a cleaner. fun for the whole family.
-- giving tangrowth a neutrality to fire + an ability that gives him free lefties is so nice, genuinely kinda heartwarming that after decades of stall ballcrushing a romhacker is willing to toss the more patient amongst us a bone. stall players are truly feasting on the low tho between sheninja buffs + blissy regenerator + new intimidate for special attackers + more access to recovery and roost and auto-healing abilites across the board. if ur struggling early-mid game just get a quag and wall everybody, trust

now onto the epiphany: could be burn out since competitive singles dominates about 30% of my life in between youtube recommendations, me & my friends' draft league, spare showdown sessions, and occasional romhack runs like this but i think the appeal of mons to me will never be fully unlocked. about the 7th gym here i kinda got bored of all the shocking new changes and really just kinda wanted to be done with the whole endeavor lmao. as cool as the new changes are the game never feels like it can catchup to player ingenuity in a way that another player would, resulting in either some self-imposed limitations to even the scales or AI just using legendaries out the gate to even the odds. its cool that drake has a mega rayquaza, i guess? but if u got to pull out that shit just to make the game difficult i feel like there's some other considerations in terms of AI and trainer team building to be had here. likewise i look forward to when this gets some kinda movepool or ability expansion, not to undercut the sails of the aforementioned changes because they all are genuinely fun but like the shit boils down to the same archetypes for mons we've had since like gen 3: hits hard but slow, hits hard but fast, walls physical, walls special, gets up hazards, removes hazards, etc etc etc. the fact that any given mon can fulfill at least one of these roles viably is great, but without any change to the way these niches interact with each other or the kind of core teambuilding considerations to competitive pokemon as a whole its very whatever. maybe playing the whole game in doubles woulda fixed that (doubt it) but about 30 hours in it felt like i was swapping variables for the same formula rather than experiencing some transmutive. and look i get it, romhack, can only expect so much, and the scope achieved here is already crazy impressive, BUT i would be lying to u reader if i didnt walk away wanting more & more....for once i see gamefreak's vision in how they've tried to shake up battling for a decade now with z-moves, dynamax, terra, etc. z-moves were the best out of those IMO but like we need a gamefreak version of drive gauge or some shit--this is in many ways a lot of pokefiends' dream romhack, but the dream has made it clearer than ever that we've been smokin mids.

bitch youuuuuuu are a stranger. this broader aesthetic sense of making art thats like an overtly long talk therapy session with some two faced white woman is becoming maddening to me. i dont think its appropriate to belabor this because the "quiz" here is such a harmless & secondary example of it, and maybe is more self-aware than im pinning it, but also i had a pretty stark realization in here that i've heard this exact voice, story, talk, expression, diction, & conclusion more times than i ever thought possible. u kno both folks here probably said "power differential" 1 too many times in the relationship. forgive me but i gotta talk my shit for a minute: yall's own self-admitted lack of agency & disproptional reactivity dont bother yall?????? self-pitying shit is as much of a power play as anything else u woulda known that if you were up on ur nietzsche by now. might as well let ur fucking nuts hang & make art and say shit about what you would do if you had things your way instead of what would you woulda done were you the perfect lil tweebell them PhDs is tryna get you to be. like the final conclusion here is an overtly self-conscious epigraph about how being too self-conscious is bad. you bitches need an intervention!!! i may be a broke ass bitch ass nigga but trust that rapping along with pap when he goes "hunnid on me...these bitch ass broke ass niggas better not say nothing to me" prepares me to tackle life's problems more than anything coming from this lane. maybe im a sociopath and got a impaired sense of empathy & dont get it but also ian seen nary a post or analysis or even a interpretative lens that would reward deeper investigation of smthn that got this "autoethnography" or whatever stench on it. another big whiff from itch.io 4 me.

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”The most detestable habit in modern cinema is the homage. I don’t want to see another goddamn homage in anybody’s movie.” - Orson Welles, speaking at the Cinémathèque Française in 1982

Meaningless referencing is a hallmark of Grasshopper Manufacture video games. In The Silver Case, Tetsugoro Kusabi says a moment in time reminds him of the Rocky movies; Stephan Charbonie name-drops the 1994 FIFA World Cup in Flower, Sun, and Rain; one of my favourite vignettes in The 25th Ward essentially boils down to two detectives being jacked to the tits about going to Starbucks for a caramel macchiato. 


I didn’t bother fact-checking the references above for correctness - is that what those references were again? Is that what they actually referred to? I don’t remember. It was something like that, but I’m not sure - I doubt you knew if my references to these references were right, either. You just know that Suda 51 and his staff love to acknowledge things that they like inside things that they’ve created, right? That jarring feeling of hearing a sci-fi psycho killer monologue about the dollar menu at McDonalds, or watching the lyrics from your favourite moody new-wave hit crawl across the LEVEL COMPLETE screen. There’s something special about seeing and hearing a virtual world acknowledge another (real or fictional) world in material terms that we can recognise and appreciate.


References are, of course, an oft-maligned artistic technique - Orson Welles infamously condemned any artist who leaned on referential crutches. Ironically and hypocritically, the Welles filmography is stuffed with creations that he used as vessels of reference to other works of art. F for Fake - one of his best - is not much more than a series of homages to performances and works of art - both real and imagined - that Welles admired. Transformers: The Movie, his final performance, is nothing more than one big reference to a line of plastic Hasbro toys. Despite his trademark bullish blustering, even one of the all-time greats couldn’t avoid contradicting himself on the matter of referencing. Reference is an inevitable part of self-expression that even some of the best directors of adverts for frozen peas simply cannot avoid.

Cantankerous contradictions aside, I imagine most of us feel similarly to Welles about references. As the always-rolling stone of pop culture gathers more and more digital detritus, films, television shows and video games gain an ever-increasing pool of other people’s popular history to lean on - we’ve all no doubt rolled our eyes at a shameless Star Wars parody or Skyrim knee joke a few hundred times in our lives. Captain America’s infamous “I got that reference” line from Avengers has itself become a reference. 2020s culture has essentially become a referential ouroboros, with creators cyclically patting each other on the back with cameos, shoutouts and in-game tshirts.


Filling your own work with someone else’s work is often just a tedious exercise that outwardly effuses appreciation for another artist, but really just serves as a way for you to self-congratulate and show people what you and they already know. Despite the fact that all these shoutouts are essentially made unto a cultural void, there are still some references being made today that can become special to you or me. After all, we still hold some level of care for the pieces that make up each other's identities. 


Since playing Travis Strikes Again earlier this year, I’ve not been able to shake the memory of a moment that held an eerie serendipity for me. It happened during one of the game’s visual novel detours - in pursuit of a Death Ball, Travis is sent to a festival in Split, Croatia. Whoa! In 2019, the year TSA launched, I went to a festival in Split, Croatia! And then, not long after that, Travis talks about how his handler/girlfriend/wife is really into SUP (stand up paddleboard) yoga right now - my handler/girlfriend/wife is really into SUP (stand up paddleboard) yoga right now! What are the chances, eh?! Travis is just like me! Are we on the same journey? If we read Travis as an extension of Suda 51, is Mr. Goichi Suda himself on that journey with me, too?


Such is the power of a meaningless reference. Two throwaway lines with no broader meaning or significance can suddenly bring a viewer/consumer deeper into an artist/character’s world by giving them something in common - but only for the people who rolled the same numbers on the die of life and culture that the creator did. A true artist, Orson would likely argue, could create meaning through depiction of a universal human experience - one that doesn’t rely on creator and observer both owning the same DVDs or liking the same sports team.


I don’t think I’m alone in seeing superficial-referential similarities between myself and Travis Touchdown. In the wake of No More Heroes 3’s launch, I read a tweet about the game that was making the rounds on KamuiNet - not only did it praise the game for allowing Travis, Shinobu and Bad Girl to age in line with the real-life release dates of the No More Heroes video games, it also suggested that it was refreshing to see a creation where older characters can let their geek-freak flags fly. It’s cool that a 40 year old man can like Chr’s Cunterttack; it’s cool to drink beers on your couch and watch moe anime; it’s cool to be a fully grown adult and still swing a toy lightsaber around; uhhh… and more of that sort of thing (I wager the tweeter would love Kevin Smith’s Clerks 2). I’d reference the tweet, but I don’t know where it is now - hopefully this allusion is enough to keep you in the loop, even if I have likely muddied the specifics once again.


So - was that tweet made with tongue planted firmly in cheek? It’s hard to say. You’d assume a fan of No More Heroes would think twice before praising a game for permitting revelry in stunted consumerism, but hey - I know of people who own replicas of Travis Touchdown’s jacket. Suda himself retweeted a dude who has the beam katana tattooed all the way down his calf. Some people love these games without thinking too hard about all of it. And that’s fine! Whether the tweet was intentionally ironic or not, though, I still think it’s a worthy observation that drives its Akira motorcycle (omg it does The Slide!! sick reference!!!) quite close to what No More Heroes 3 is hopefully trying to truthfully achieve in its own scrappy texture-popping, frame-hitching, wall-clipping little way. 


I won’t waste too much time recapping how we got to No More Heroes 3 (you’re on Backloggd, after all, and can read excellent Top Reviews for each game in the series) but it’s worth considering what each NMH game was really about. The original game in particular, as it’s NMH3’s closest relative - No More Heroes 3 is to No More Heroes 1 as The Force Awakens was to A New Hope, to make another meaningless reference. A reboot and retread of well-worn ground that revels in all the superficial signifiers we’ve come to expect from each series. Revived from the dead with an injection of Disney/Marvelous cash and creatively controlled for a whole new generation. With each re-awakening, the main characters are now older and not necessarily any wiser, reliving glory days by referencing all that Good Shit you loved so much countless decades ago. Hey… They even both have blue lightsabers! What a reference! 


Surface-level symbology and parallels aside, probably the most important thing to keep in mind about No More Heroes 1 while playing No More Heroes 3 is its pop-punk meditation on consumer identity and how it was essentially used to trap Travis in someone else’s violent cycle of gig economics (again: read those Top Reviews!). It doesn’t even matter if he’s aware of the grind he’s trapped in and why it sucks - you and Travis still have to participate in your literal or figurative lawn-mowing in order to afford your new video game t-shirts. And this was before the inescapable collective consciousness of the 2.0 and 3.0 Internets forced us all to look at and buy the same things all the time. Ultimately, the only way Travis could escape his perpetual consumer torment was to go live in the woods and play someone else’s video game (fuck!!! a reference!!) all day instead. And even then, the past he wasn’t able to kill (in the form of a reference to a prior NMH game) still found him and brought him back to the modern metropolis.


When looked at through a lens crafted in the present day, the original No More Heroes couldn't have dropped at a better time. It released the same year as the first iPhone and the '07 Global Financial Crash, and just a few months later, Iron Man hit cinemas. Can you think of three bigger social and cultural touchstones for the 2010/20s era? NMH was the final checkpoint before the end of nerd culture's Bronze Age and the beginning of its Iron (Man) Age. Not a smartphone in sight. Just NEETs living in the moe-ment.

It may just be me attributing my own meaning to a personal period of time, of course - I played the first game as an unemployed 18 year old dweeb hiding out in his parents' back room, and I'm now a 31 year old dweeb with a mortgage and a (furry) child - but it does feel like there's been a momentous paradigm shift in The Culture since 2007. When I went to university, my peers at the pub would turn up their noses when I talked about comics, video games and anime - they were fringe, outsider topics that swam in channels separate from the mainstream. Nowadays, everyone I know knows their Monkey Balls from their Dragon Balls. My own grandmother congratulated me for putting out a Doom wad, for fuck's sake! Make a Super Mario reference in 2021, and the chances are high that your own mother would probably know what you're talking about. Whether they like it or not, everyone is at least partially immersed in this grand nouveau-nerd culture that capital has kindly crafted for us to consume. It's no coincidence that Damon Riccitiello, landlord maximus and CEO of Not-EA Games, is Earth's ambassador for an extraterrestrial apocalypse.

And that is the main thrust of what I think No More Heroes 3 is trying to drive itself toward. Despite the introspective events of Travis Strikes Again, Travis Touchdown returns to his mainline series in a relatively unscathed blaze of geeky glory. Like that tweeter I referenced earlier said, the 40 year old Travis is now definitively a child walking in the realm of adults. He even has 2.5 children and a wife - the all-time classic societal markers of adulthood - but still somehow lives alone with his punk IPAs and wrestling figures, decorating his motel room with anime witch girl posters and collecting trading cards for an 80s video game that he watches obsessively on YouTube. Not exactly society's Dad of the Year material. Is that his fault, though? And is that necessarily a bad thing? I feel like NMH3 is trying to explore these questions without being particularly confrontational or condemnational about them. Grasshopper are holding up a mirror in your peripheral vision while you play their latest game; they're showing you their painting of that guy at your job who wears his Joker t-shirt three times a week and takes his kids to Disneyland so that he and his wife can go see the Millennium Falcon. Is Travis that guy?

Travis is probably the most frequently and meticulously discussed video game character on Backloggd. If ever there was a meme to sum up the whole site, it would likely be that "OMG! THATS ME!" guy, looking at a picture of Travis Touchdown (alongside his close friends Tokio and Sumio). The type of person who likes Suda 51 games and posts on Backloggd is unlikely to clap when Captain America references Fortnite in a Marvel movie, though. They’re probably not going to laugh when Elon Musk acknowledges Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in an episode of Rick and Morty. A Neon Genesis Evangelion reference in YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG is not gonna delight them. But they’ll still play these games, watch these movies, see these shows, and then seek out a social blogging website where they can share their disdain for said references and assign an appropriate star rating - as if that absolves them of their participation in said culture. What video game t-shirt did you wear in Travis Strikes Again, by the way? And how thick is that line of the web that separates you from that guy in the Joker t-shirt? How deep does your appreciation of the culture you appreciate really go? Could you pronounce "itadakimasu" (love the lyrics on that song!) any better than Travis does, despite playing all those Japanese video games of yours?

I say we're all "participating" in this international smorgasbord of culture-lite, but I think none of us are really all that free to choose how we interact with these things or allow ourselves to be molded by them, short of renting a trailer in the forest. Our friends chat about it, our mutuals snark about it, our coworkers use it for small talk. I didn't watch Loki, but it came up a lot in my daily team meetings. I know what happened in the show, even though I didn't want to think about it. I've played Call of Duty: Warzone with my buds, despite the fact I regularly condemn the Activision war machine. You gotta do what you gotta do. I saw Spider-Man: Far From Home because it's what my friends wanted to do one day. It wasn't a big deal. It's all a common ground we can embrace each other upon. In No More Heroes 3, one of the only ways Travis can relate to a bereaved Bad Girl is by barging into her bedroom and telling her to watch F-te/St-y N-ght or whatever that was. Meaningless references emit powerful psychoframes that connect us.

Meaningless referencing is a hallmark of Grasshopper Manufacture video games, and No More Heroes 3 is the platinum-stamped standard-bearer of that hallmark. You could even argue the gameplay itself (which I didn't even talk about here, lol) is just a series of references - you boot up your beam katana to the classic NMH beat, pull off various suplexes from the annals of NJPW and WWE history, drive the Akira bike down the highway, fly around in a knock-off Full Armor Unicorn Gundam, and mow lawns because you mowed lawns in the original No More Heroes. There's very little here that's of original invention, and Orson Welles, were he alive today and gaming his big ass off, would fucking hate that. It's all goddamn homage, all the goddamn time, you goddamn fuckhead. But in some weird way, there's an artistic bravery in building a game that's entirely about other people's work and how that makes you feel. If you can have a podcast about Takashi Miike, why can't you have a video game about Takashi Miike?

No More Heroes asked the player two questions - “Is this you?” and “Does it feel good?”

No More Heroes 3 tells the player two things - “This is you!” and “Man, does it feel good!” 

Those two new statements might not end with question marks, but I think they're intended to provoke you. Whether you like it or not, this is the way that it is.

Can you do anything about it?

Can Travis (that's me!) really change the future?

Is this really the end of history?

Is this really the end?

No more heroes.