This review contains spoilers
“Punk’s not dead,” a phrase that is scribed on the opening logo of Grasshopper Manufacture, the developers of No More Heroes. This is obviously a reference to the phrase, “punk is dead,” popular sentiment in punk culture popularized in 1978 by the band Crass. This phrase is often used as a means of a self-destruct switch when punk music or punk culture strays too far from its underground, DIY roots. The rebellious and subversive nature of punk rock must not be compromised, or else it loses all of its identity and purpose. Claiming that “punk is dead” is a means of starting anew. Why is this inscribed on the logo of a video game developer? Because Suda 51, the head honcho of Grasshopper Studios, prides himself as a “punk rock video game developer.” One could argue that he’s out of his element here because claiming “punk is not dead” fails to understand the ironic reverence of the common phrase, and therefore, he is merely a poser. Perhaps he is an optimist, claiming that the era of radical ideas across any medium is still prevalent, or at least they should be. He can certainly bolster his auteur credentials, considering the studio's output. Killer7 is one of the most divisive games because of how bizarre it is. However, the phrase “punk is not dead” is not attached to the brand of Grasshopper Studios for Killer7. This is written on the logo of Grasshopper Studios for No More Heroes, Suda 51’s follow-up to Killer7. The reception to No More Heroes wasn’t as mixed as Suda 51’s previous title as it was generally well-received by most outlets. Let’s just humor Suda 51 for a moment and give him credibility as a “punk rock video game developer.” If Killer7 was made to be divisive because Suda 51 refused to sacrifice his uncompromising artistic vision, isn’t toning it down for your next project against the laurels of punk rock? Arguably yes, but there are plenty of elements in No More Heroes that still hold Suda 51’s merits as a subversive, punk rock video game developer.
No More Heroes takes place in a fictional American town called Santa Destroy, a town located in California given the Spanish name and beach shore with palm trees. The game immediately plunges into action as a tall, young man named Travis raids a luxurious mansion and lays waste to the hundreds of suited guards scattered around the place. In the pool area of this estate, an eccentric-looking older man named “Death Metal” muses with Travis about the subjective concept of paradise before he brandishes his giant cleaver and dukes it out with him. Death Metal loses, and Travis hacks him to bits ritualistically. A young Eastern European woman named Sylvia explains that Death Metal was ranked number 10 in a league of assassins, and Travis is killing all of them one by one to become the number one ranked assassin.
I need to make something clear; No More Heroes is not a game with a punk rock soundtrack, nor does it reference any punk rock artists (except for the title, which might be a reference to the song by ‘70s punk band The Stranglers). I am specifically comparing the artistic foundation of No More Heroes to see if it matches a punk rock feel and mindset. Punk rock isn’t just a genre of music or a fashion statement; it’s also an ethos. There is more to punk rock than just playing four chords erratically while bleeding on stage and piercing your genitals with safety pins. This ethos gives credence to the chaotic nature of punk rock. The purpose of it all is to fling a monkey wrench to the status quo, the conventional tactics and sensibilities of society, and the popular art that reflects it. Once punk starts to veer more into popular conventions at the point of Flanderization, “punk is dead” is a claim to start anew like a phoenix rising from the ashes. This mostly pertains to the genre of music, but this ethos can stretch to other facets of art and culture. The artistry of hip hop has always reminded me of punk rock. It comes from an urban environment, and it illustrates the decay of society and culture through subversive music. The punk group that made me consider this punk rock ethos was Suicide, an iconic ‘70s synth-punk group that was so subversive with their instrumentation and delivery that the punks hated them. What’s more punk rock than that? They showed me that punk rock meant more than just what the music was supposed to sound like.
The point of this review isn’t to claim that video games can have subversive qualities. Like any artistic medium, many video games can be categorized as going against the grain. The question is whether Suda 51 can claim “punk’s not dead” with this game. The presentation of No More Heroes is a stylish mesh of pop culture, borrowing from sources ranging from professional wrestling, gritty Frank Miller comics, anime, kung-fu movies, superheroes, etc. These elements mix well into the fabric of this game without being obtrusively referential, giving the game a lot of character. Mixing all of these pop culture elements seamlessly with the violent, degenerative background is reminiscent of work from Quentin Tarantino. Suda 51 is often compared to the famous director, and there are definitely similarities between the two. The blood-soaked lawlessness of Santa Destroy could remind someone of Pulp Fiction and the hoards of uniformed enemies being slaughtered by a sword-like Kill Bill. The characters also have philosophical musings with each other through a vein of pop culture modernity. I don’t think Tarantino is a direct influence of Suda 51, but both men have a similar habit of putting all of their passions in a blender and serving up their special concoction to us. Their eccentric influences tend to overlap. The pastiche nature of both creators reminds me of the make-up of post-punk, a punk rock subgenre that combined a cluster of different influences with a punk ethos. The prefix “post” might connote that it came after punk, but it was a contemporary form of punk at around the same time. The “post” in post-punk is more appropriately postmodernism, a complicated idea/movement in art and literature marked by a sense of subversiveness. It sort of connotes that all progression in art has been accomplished and has lost its relevance, so flippantly using a smattering of them creates something radically new. This is definitely the attitude conveyed in the presentation of No More Heroes. They even add other postmodern staples like breaking the fourth wall. Whether or not Quentin Tarantino is a punk rock director is a debate for another time.
Another subversive choice for this game was the decision for this game to be an exclusive for the Nintendo Wii. Just when the family-friendly console was starting to convince the older generation that video games weren’t machines used to turn children into violent hoodlums, No More Heroes came along to set things back a bit. Putting No More Heroes on the Wii wasn’t just a novel idea to give gamers a more mature alternative for the family-friendly system. The combat in this game fits the Wii’s controls like a glove which comes naturally when your character is brandishing a sword-like weapon. Fortunately, the developers restrained the motion controls for this game. Travis wields his beam katana with the A button, and the motion controls only come into play as an execution move that coincides with a directional swipe. Travis can also execute wrestling moves on stunned enemies as a finishing move. Each directional move for the katana swipes or the wrestling moves is unpredictable and easy to pull off. The developers had a fine grasp on the Wii’s controls and made it one of the smoothest controlling games on the console. In comparison to the shoddy port version for the PS3, the game faltered on a system that was more user-friendly in terms of more mature video games, so the Wii, strangely enough, turned out to be a perfect fit.
Besides being a likely reference to The Stranglers song of the same name, the title also might allude to a certain principle in punk rock. A part of the dogma of punk rock was that the musicians were only an equal playing field as the audience, a “no rock stars” rule. It was supposed to be a refreshing change of humility and authenticity from the popular stadium-filling, larger-than-life rock bands of the 1970s. Once the punk musicians became rock stars, the “punk is dead '' self-destruct switch was pulled, and something else was erected in its place. In No More Heroes, everyone is a degenerate scumbag. Travis himself is absolutely no hero by any stretch of the means. For one, he’s an assassin who makes a living murdering people, batting off any morally questionable incentives for what he does with a cocky swagger. His motivation to become the top-ranked assassin isn’t even for the glory of it, but to have sex with Sylvia. Travis is also a loser who lives in a hotel with his collection of anime figurines and doesn’t have any friends or tangible romantic prospects. He’d be an anti-hero if the hero part of that phrase didn’t give him too much credit.
Travis is just a product of the world he lives in because everyone around him is also a loser. The other assassins highlight this quite well as none of them are exemplary people, nor are they better off than Travis. The bosses in No More Heroes are by far the best aspect of this game as each of them is unique in character and in how they are fought. Destroyman is a caped superhero who moonlights as a mailman. Holly Summers is a bikini-clad woman with many explosives on her side to literally bury you in the sand. Speed Buster is a portly elderly woman who doesn’t technically fight you but blasts her laser cannon at you that is so gigantic that it gives the Death Star laser a run for its money. My favorite fight in this game is Bad Girl, the second to last boss who is Harley Quinn, if Warner Bros stripped off all kid-friendly connections to the Batman franchise. Everything from her conveyor belt that constantly eviscerates guys in gimp masks to her psychotic determination to defeat Travis is utterly deranged and leaves a lasting impression on you. She is also the hardest boss in the game by far.
Similarly to Travis, they are boats with a lot of character, but their roles in the grand scheme of life are ultimately rudderless. They are people who still lack the fundamentals of a prosperous life. Dr. Strange is singing his heart out in a baseball stadium, but the arena is vacant. His greatest longing is also to see his estranged daughter again. Harvey Volodarskii is a talented magician who puts on impressive, albeit morbid magic shows to an audience of only Travis and Sylvia. These bosses remind me of the individualism expressed in the music scene of punk rock. All of these creative, capable people who have the potential to become something larger than life are still undermined, leaning towards the underground subculture of punk rock to express themselves while still being pariahs in the grand scheme of things.
The unfortunate matter is that to unlock all of these spectacular bosses, one has to play through the other portion of this game. Progress in No More Heroes is made by earning money through odd jobs and smaller assassin missions assigned at two different places in the overworld. This portion of the game is incredibly grind intensive and is the majority of it as well. To get to these jobs, Travis has to travel back and forth to the job center and then drive somewhere else where the job is located. Each job, like picking up coconuts, pumping gas, erasing graffiti off of walls, etc., has unique mechanics. Still, their novelty wears off quickly because Travis will have to do these jobs around three to four times to earn enough money for the next boss. The assassination missions aren’t any better as they are brief and come in the same type of variation. I usually chose the mission where Travis fights 100 guys in five minutes because it nets you the most money, but even decapitating guys with a fluorescent bulb wore on me after a while. It doesn’t help that the overworld of Santa Destroy is incredibly drab and lifeless. Every building practically looks the same, and most of them are a standard brown. It’s not a joy to traverse in the slightest. Everything from getting to the sites in Travis’s tricked-out car that doesn’t fit the lay of the land to repeating the same tasks is the pinnacle of the grinding-intensive gameplay that I despise. I don’t even want to buy clothes or training moves for Travis because I know I’ll have to regain that money by doing the odd jobs again. Recalling the punk rock ethos, this might illustrate the DIY ethic that punk musicians grind to support themselves in underground bands. Everything is much harder when you’re sticking it to the man, but experiencing it in a video game is an unnecessary slog.
Once Travis unlocks the #1 ranked assassin, he gets a call from Sylvia’s mother telling him he’s been duped. Sylvia is a con artist who fabricated the league of assassins. To learn why she did this, Travis travels to a far-off land and faces the #1 ranked assassin Darkstar. Darkstar is then split in half by the real #1 assassin, who is none other than his sister Jeane. Apparently, Jeane has just murdered Travis’s parents, and Sylvia hatched the league of assassins as a convoluted revenge plan. Jeane is the final boss of the story and an underwhelming one as well, considering it comes after Bad Girl. Travis executes Jeane after her defeat and doesn’t score with Sylvia. Everything in this game up to this point was all for nothing, giving the player an empty feeling but with good intent. The darker side of the punk rock ethos tends to verge into nihilism, the fact that nothing matters in the grand scheme of things, and the punks illustrate this with their “fuck it” attitude towards the purpose of society. In the career of an assassin, it illustrates that killing is an art form that is soulless and ungratifying. Being ranked #1 at the end of the day didn’t propel Travis’s status in the slightest and didn’t make him invincible. He’s still the same loser he always was, and he’s easily ambushed by another assassin in a vulnerable position at the end of the game. If you collect every beam katana, there is a secret ending with the real final boss, Sir Henry, who robbed you of killing the ranked five assassins earlier in the game. He’s a great boss that capitalizes on your skill with the beam katana. The fight also makes up for fighting Jeane at the end, but it adds a bunch of information to the characters that don’t make any sense. Narratively, the original ending is much better at conveying a message.
If Suda 51 feels his auteur weirdness is ushering in a new wave of punk rock sensibilities in gaming, I think there’s enough evidence in No More Heroes to give him enough credence. Claiming “punk’s not dead” still seems like he’s missing the point, but he doesn’t miss the point with this game. No More Heroes is the ethos of punk rock coming to life in a video game. It accomplishes the nihilistic outlook of punk with the emphasis on individualism and subversiveness that comes with it. As a video game, it was a special gem on the Wii that utilized the console’s motion controls exquisitely and the bosses are consistently some of the best I’ve ever fought in any game. However, the absolute tedium of the open-world odd jobs cannot be forgiven, marring what could’ve been a great game instead of a good one with a unique narrative and characters.
------
Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com
No More Heroes takes place in a fictional American town called Santa Destroy, a town located in California given the Spanish name and beach shore with palm trees. The game immediately plunges into action as a tall, young man named Travis raids a luxurious mansion and lays waste to the hundreds of suited guards scattered around the place. In the pool area of this estate, an eccentric-looking older man named “Death Metal” muses with Travis about the subjective concept of paradise before he brandishes his giant cleaver and dukes it out with him. Death Metal loses, and Travis hacks him to bits ritualistically. A young Eastern European woman named Sylvia explains that Death Metal was ranked number 10 in a league of assassins, and Travis is killing all of them one by one to become the number one ranked assassin.
I need to make something clear; No More Heroes is not a game with a punk rock soundtrack, nor does it reference any punk rock artists (except for the title, which might be a reference to the song by ‘70s punk band The Stranglers). I am specifically comparing the artistic foundation of No More Heroes to see if it matches a punk rock feel and mindset. Punk rock isn’t just a genre of music or a fashion statement; it’s also an ethos. There is more to punk rock than just playing four chords erratically while bleeding on stage and piercing your genitals with safety pins. This ethos gives credence to the chaotic nature of punk rock. The purpose of it all is to fling a monkey wrench to the status quo, the conventional tactics and sensibilities of society, and the popular art that reflects it. Once punk starts to veer more into popular conventions at the point of Flanderization, “punk is dead” is a claim to start anew like a phoenix rising from the ashes. This mostly pertains to the genre of music, but this ethos can stretch to other facets of art and culture. The artistry of hip hop has always reminded me of punk rock. It comes from an urban environment, and it illustrates the decay of society and culture through subversive music. The punk group that made me consider this punk rock ethos was Suicide, an iconic ‘70s synth-punk group that was so subversive with their instrumentation and delivery that the punks hated them. What’s more punk rock than that? They showed me that punk rock meant more than just what the music was supposed to sound like.
The point of this review isn’t to claim that video games can have subversive qualities. Like any artistic medium, many video games can be categorized as going against the grain. The question is whether Suda 51 can claim “punk’s not dead” with this game. The presentation of No More Heroes is a stylish mesh of pop culture, borrowing from sources ranging from professional wrestling, gritty Frank Miller comics, anime, kung-fu movies, superheroes, etc. These elements mix well into the fabric of this game without being obtrusively referential, giving the game a lot of character. Mixing all of these pop culture elements seamlessly with the violent, degenerative background is reminiscent of work from Quentin Tarantino. Suda 51 is often compared to the famous director, and there are definitely similarities between the two. The blood-soaked lawlessness of Santa Destroy could remind someone of Pulp Fiction and the hoards of uniformed enemies being slaughtered by a sword-like Kill Bill. The characters also have philosophical musings with each other through a vein of pop culture modernity. I don’t think Tarantino is a direct influence of Suda 51, but both men have a similar habit of putting all of their passions in a blender and serving up their special concoction to us. Their eccentric influences tend to overlap. The pastiche nature of both creators reminds me of the make-up of post-punk, a punk rock subgenre that combined a cluster of different influences with a punk ethos. The prefix “post” might connote that it came after punk, but it was a contemporary form of punk at around the same time. The “post” in post-punk is more appropriately postmodernism, a complicated idea/movement in art and literature marked by a sense of subversiveness. It sort of connotes that all progression in art has been accomplished and has lost its relevance, so flippantly using a smattering of them creates something radically new. This is definitely the attitude conveyed in the presentation of No More Heroes. They even add other postmodern staples like breaking the fourth wall. Whether or not Quentin Tarantino is a punk rock director is a debate for another time.
Another subversive choice for this game was the decision for this game to be an exclusive for the Nintendo Wii. Just when the family-friendly console was starting to convince the older generation that video games weren’t machines used to turn children into violent hoodlums, No More Heroes came along to set things back a bit. Putting No More Heroes on the Wii wasn’t just a novel idea to give gamers a more mature alternative for the family-friendly system. The combat in this game fits the Wii’s controls like a glove which comes naturally when your character is brandishing a sword-like weapon. Fortunately, the developers restrained the motion controls for this game. Travis wields his beam katana with the A button, and the motion controls only come into play as an execution move that coincides with a directional swipe. Travis can also execute wrestling moves on stunned enemies as a finishing move. Each directional move for the katana swipes or the wrestling moves is unpredictable and easy to pull off. The developers had a fine grasp on the Wii’s controls and made it one of the smoothest controlling games on the console. In comparison to the shoddy port version for the PS3, the game faltered on a system that was more user-friendly in terms of more mature video games, so the Wii, strangely enough, turned out to be a perfect fit.
Besides being a likely reference to The Stranglers song of the same name, the title also might allude to a certain principle in punk rock. A part of the dogma of punk rock was that the musicians were only an equal playing field as the audience, a “no rock stars” rule. It was supposed to be a refreshing change of humility and authenticity from the popular stadium-filling, larger-than-life rock bands of the 1970s. Once the punk musicians became rock stars, the “punk is dead '' self-destruct switch was pulled, and something else was erected in its place. In No More Heroes, everyone is a degenerate scumbag. Travis himself is absolutely no hero by any stretch of the means. For one, he’s an assassin who makes a living murdering people, batting off any morally questionable incentives for what he does with a cocky swagger. His motivation to become the top-ranked assassin isn’t even for the glory of it, but to have sex with Sylvia. Travis is also a loser who lives in a hotel with his collection of anime figurines and doesn’t have any friends or tangible romantic prospects. He’d be an anti-hero if the hero part of that phrase didn’t give him too much credit.
Travis is just a product of the world he lives in because everyone around him is also a loser. The other assassins highlight this quite well as none of them are exemplary people, nor are they better off than Travis. The bosses in No More Heroes are by far the best aspect of this game as each of them is unique in character and in how they are fought. Destroyman is a caped superhero who moonlights as a mailman. Holly Summers is a bikini-clad woman with many explosives on her side to literally bury you in the sand. Speed Buster is a portly elderly woman who doesn’t technically fight you but blasts her laser cannon at you that is so gigantic that it gives the Death Star laser a run for its money. My favorite fight in this game is Bad Girl, the second to last boss who is Harley Quinn, if Warner Bros stripped off all kid-friendly connections to the Batman franchise. Everything from her conveyor belt that constantly eviscerates guys in gimp masks to her psychotic determination to defeat Travis is utterly deranged and leaves a lasting impression on you. She is also the hardest boss in the game by far.
Similarly to Travis, they are boats with a lot of character, but their roles in the grand scheme of life are ultimately rudderless. They are people who still lack the fundamentals of a prosperous life. Dr. Strange is singing his heart out in a baseball stadium, but the arena is vacant. His greatest longing is also to see his estranged daughter again. Harvey Volodarskii is a talented magician who puts on impressive, albeit morbid magic shows to an audience of only Travis and Sylvia. These bosses remind me of the individualism expressed in the music scene of punk rock. All of these creative, capable people who have the potential to become something larger than life are still undermined, leaning towards the underground subculture of punk rock to express themselves while still being pariahs in the grand scheme of things.
The unfortunate matter is that to unlock all of these spectacular bosses, one has to play through the other portion of this game. Progress in No More Heroes is made by earning money through odd jobs and smaller assassin missions assigned at two different places in the overworld. This portion of the game is incredibly grind intensive and is the majority of it as well. To get to these jobs, Travis has to travel back and forth to the job center and then drive somewhere else where the job is located. Each job, like picking up coconuts, pumping gas, erasing graffiti off of walls, etc., has unique mechanics. Still, their novelty wears off quickly because Travis will have to do these jobs around three to four times to earn enough money for the next boss. The assassination missions aren’t any better as they are brief and come in the same type of variation. I usually chose the mission where Travis fights 100 guys in five minutes because it nets you the most money, but even decapitating guys with a fluorescent bulb wore on me after a while. It doesn’t help that the overworld of Santa Destroy is incredibly drab and lifeless. Every building practically looks the same, and most of them are a standard brown. It’s not a joy to traverse in the slightest. Everything from getting to the sites in Travis’s tricked-out car that doesn’t fit the lay of the land to repeating the same tasks is the pinnacle of the grinding-intensive gameplay that I despise. I don’t even want to buy clothes or training moves for Travis because I know I’ll have to regain that money by doing the odd jobs again. Recalling the punk rock ethos, this might illustrate the DIY ethic that punk musicians grind to support themselves in underground bands. Everything is much harder when you’re sticking it to the man, but experiencing it in a video game is an unnecessary slog.
Once Travis unlocks the #1 ranked assassin, he gets a call from Sylvia’s mother telling him he’s been duped. Sylvia is a con artist who fabricated the league of assassins. To learn why she did this, Travis travels to a far-off land and faces the #1 ranked assassin Darkstar. Darkstar is then split in half by the real #1 assassin, who is none other than his sister Jeane. Apparently, Jeane has just murdered Travis’s parents, and Sylvia hatched the league of assassins as a convoluted revenge plan. Jeane is the final boss of the story and an underwhelming one as well, considering it comes after Bad Girl. Travis executes Jeane after her defeat and doesn’t score with Sylvia. Everything in this game up to this point was all for nothing, giving the player an empty feeling but with good intent. The darker side of the punk rock ethos tends to verge into nihilism, the fact that nothing matters in the grand scheme of things, and the punks illustrate this with their “fuck it” attitude towards the purpose of society. In the career of an assassin, it illustrates that killing is an art form that is soulless and ungratifying. Being ranked #1 at the end of the day didn’t propel Travis’s status in the slightest and didn’t make him invincible. He’s still the same loser he always was, and he’s easily ambushed by another assassin in a vulnerable position at the end of the game. If you collect every beam katana, there is a secret ending with the real final boss, Sir Henry, who robbed you of killing the ranked five assassins earlier in the game. He’s a great boss that capitalizes on your skill with the beam katana. The fight also makes up for fighting Jeane at the end, but it adds a bunch of information to the characters that don’t make any sense. Narratively, the original ending is much better at conveying a message.
If Suda 51 feels his auteur weirdness is ushering in a new wave of punk rock sensibilities in gaming, I think there’s enough evidence in No More Heroes to give him enough credence. Claiming “punk’s not dead” still seems like he’s missing the point, but he doesn’t miss the point with this game. No More Heroes is the ethos of punk rock coming to life in a video game. It accomplishes the nihilistic outlook of punk with the emphasis on individualism and subversiveness that comes with it. As a video game, it was a special gem on the Wii that utilized the console’s motion controls exquisitely and the bosses are consistently some of the best I’ve ever fought in any game. However, the absolute tedium of the open-world odd jobs cannot be forgiven, marring what could’ve been a great game instead of a good one with a unique narrative and characters.
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Attribution: https://erockreviews.blogspot.com