Was drawn in by the hook of this being a postal worker simulator, only to be trojan-horsed into another Netflix-brained drama. A Life Is Strange-like that has you driving around a poorly-disguised and thoroughly-sterilised simulacrum of Twin Peaks (this was made by a Dutch dev team - why not show us NL's country life instead of leaning on a well-worn setting?).

You're relatively un-fussed by any of the day-to-day concerns that would no doubt come with delivering the post in a secure and timely manner, and there are so many missed opportunities for fun little gameplay pieces - the truck doesn't take damage, you can't break the speed limit, the parcels don't arrive late, you don't have to dodge dogs - any of these little things could have injected a small sprinkling of spice into it, but the game is only really interested in telling its story. I think I wanted it to be Shin Paperboy.

I get that it's nice, sure, and there are people who really do want a depressurised and bloodless GTA driving/walking game; but without anything really driving (lol) the experience, this is basically just a series of Walking Dead-style dialogue encounters split up with a cuddly coddling truck-driver experience. Nothing ever matters, which seems to kinda contradict the game's nascent notions of changing your life. Dialogue options only seem to be there to move the chatter along most of the time, and characters often react in the ways the developers wanted them to react, rather than the ways you hoped or expected they would. The different ending options are a perfect example of this, but as the game only really has its story going for it, I won't spoil the bizarre surprises here.

The romance options are exactly what we've all come to expect from indie games at this point - utterly toothless and sexless stuff that makes the 40-something main characters behave like preschoolers holding hands on a trip to the park. You can't have a single city gal discover her first kiss is now a huge sexy lumberjack and have it only lead to a nice hug. Come on now! It's about time one of these games played out with all the debauchery of a greasy pulp paperback like A Stranger In Her Bed or whatever.

My postman sometimes come up the stairs of our building mid-joint roll, banging crap metal out of his phone speakers and huffily hurling anything marked FRAGILE onto a rough approximation of our doorstep. Now that's the delivery guy game I wanna be playing. Lemme dropkick an Amazon parcel and shag some lonely lady after I break her windows with a Hello Fresh box.

I was ready to moan about the open world still being barren, and the massive step down in character customisation from 1&2, and every wee side thing being redundant because it gave nothing to the story and the rewards were always just a t-shirt, but I honestly had a great time in spite of all that, which might as well be a NMH staple at this point.

I'm not an intelligent man who can break down games, and say things like "When viewed through a lens of X, No More Heroes is very much still an allegory for Y". It is simply beyond my ability. Some things just get me hype as fuck, hootin' and hollerin'. Caveman Mode, if you will.

Combat is tight, and the combo of old stuff with the TSA Death Moves keep it fun, especially playing on Spicy where you need to be on yer toes constantly. It's the only part of the game that runs buttery smooth, and ye can just feel it being written at the top of a whiteboard labelled "PRIORITY".

I've said it many times, but I'm a Suda mark. It's fine, I admit it. The dude makes games for me. The whole last fight and end sequence was just laser-focused My Shit. Made me laugh out loud twice because they were just having fun with it. Firing jokes in because they know what this series is, whether it's truly the end or not.

No More Heroes Forever!

The thing about NMH1 is that it's only a "game about games" insofar as it's a game about labor (specifically wage labor) and the relationship between labor and gaming both materially and representationally. It's effectively a work of games crit aimed at the then-contemporary conventions of "open-world" game design as codified by Grand Theft Auto as a means of examining how thoroughly the medium of video games and the imaginations of the people who play them have been colonized by wage labor and "the grind" to the extent that even our supposed forms of play have taken on the form of work - the minigames are kind of odious and stupid because wage labor is odious and stupid, and gig work especially so. That so little has changed in the intervening 15 years and NMH1 still has just as much bite to it now as then is depressing to contemplate lol.

In addition, Travis Touchdown himself functioned there as a critique of a very particular kind of person/audience - specifically the "nerd" or "otaku" as a consumer, first and foremost, and chauvinist secondly. By extension, it's also a game with a more sharply defined notion of class than I usually see discussed - with the notable exception of Holly Summers, all of the game's characters are split into the very clearly delineated camps of "depraved wealthy freaks" and "working class/poor", with Travis, Shinobu, Speed Buster, Bad Girl (debatably), and Jeane being the only people in the latter camp (Letz Shake is a joke not-boss whose sole purpose is to establish Henry and thus isn't counted). Travis is a neet living in a shitty motel, drifting from gig to gig and paycheck to paycheck, with no family (that he knows of) and the closest thing to a friend being the guy who runs the video store down the street, and deals with this first by embedding himself in otaku consumerism and secondly by purchasing his beam katana online and attempting to get in on "the grind" via the assassin rankings. NMH1 has a keen awareness of the otaku/nerd as a consumer identity and byproduct of capitalism, while simultaneously not losing sight of how people like Travis nevertheless benefit from the spoils of empire and capitalist exploitation - the public beach of Santa Destroy having been overrun by the U.S. mitary invokes the U.S. occupation of both Iraq and Okinawa, for instance.

I could expand on this further but this is ostensibly a NMH3 review so I'll just make one further point regarding the roles Jeane and Henry play in NMH1 in opposition to Travis. Henry serves as a parallel to Travis, rather than his opposite number - where Travis is an isolated subculture-obsessed drop out, Henry is the ostensible dream end product of "the grind": wealthy, cultured, married with a kid and a white picket fence, and gainfully employed full-time. He's the symbol of capitalist assimilation whom Travis both loathes and envies in equal measure, whom he wishes both to destroy and replace. It's fitting the game ends with their battle undecided, for their conflict is not dialectic - they both pursue the same ultimate goal of success but merely start from different points; they are parallel lines that can never truly cross.

Jeane, on the other hand, is different - she represents an existential threat to everything Travis pursues and benefits from without realizing it. Her story and Travis' are practically identical - like him, she "sold her body" for the funding required to train herself into a weapon, only she did so through sex work where Travis does so through gig work, though Travis of course cannot recognize how those two things are fundamentally the same. She murders her rapist, their father, and both destroys and rejects the nuclear family as a system, shattering Travis' hazily idealized memories of his own "happy family." Finally, she fights Travis one-on-one with no tricks and no gimmicks (save for a slowly shrinking boss arena) and, canonically, wins, and would have succeeded in killing Travis were it not for Shinobu interceding and sealing all of their fates. All potential for the shattering of systemic patriarchal violence and the destruction of the family, the possibility for change, is snuffed out with her; the past lives, still.

This is a very scattered and un-thoroughly cataloged collection of Thoughts that I've had percolating while playing NMH3 after having replayed NMH1 and 2 earlier this past year, and having just finished it today I feel reasonably confident in saying it fails to carry through any of what makes NMH1 interesting in ways equally as frustrating as NMH2 and TSA. Combat at least has been refined to a nice sheen and it stands out compared to the rest of the series on that front - the area of effect on QTE killing blows has been radically reduced to the point that it will only take maybe a couple pips off the health of surrounding enemies, but this is compensated for by your Death Glove abilities acting as invaluable crowd control and ranged tools. The Dark Step has been blessedly revised from an unintuitive stick waggle to a dedicated dodge button, and strikes a nice balance between not being quite as overpowered as in NMH1 nor nerfed into irrelevance as in NMH2. Enemy variety has also been greatly expanded with the new alien combatants and their unique gimmicks, and the various combinations each match up introduces keeps things reasonably engaging.

All that aside though, this is the most afterthought of an open world setting in maybe any game I've ever played, to no end that I can discern. The replacement of assassination missions and their varying levels of difficulty and rulesets with "defense missions" where you fight generic waves of different enemy types kinda sucks, as they're just way less fun and interesting. Likewise the removal of pre-boss combat levels where you make your way through an area to their stage, which guts a lot of the personality of the new alien antagonists (at least half of whom get killed by new or returning characters before you can fight or learn much about them anyhow), though Midori Midorikawa and Velvet Chair Girl are imho absolutely series highlights, even if not quite as challenging as I'd like.

Speaking of the aliens, the much-hyped superhero angle goes absolutely nowhere and isn't explored in the slightest, nor do any other potentially interesting thematic threads from the rest of the series. Henry gets a godawful redesign and shows up mostly out of obligation, while Jeane is reduced once again to her namesake being a pet and the biological child of Travis and Sylvia, a depressing legacy. The game likewise makes a big show of bringing back Shinobu and Bad Girl only to have them sidelined for pretty much the entire game for no reason? Idk man I really don't know why I still get expectations for games Goichi Suda is directly involved in (especially the ones he writes himself) given I'm always disappointed to varying extents, but this one in particular really does feel like a hugely wasted opportunity. Granted Suda reportedly sold 80% of his share in NMH to Marvelous!, who thus now exercise far greater discretion over what goes into them, but still! All told I enjoyed Suda's (genuinely cogent and entertaining) digressions on Takashi Miike more than I did pretty much any other element of this game. Unless you're like me and have an abiding affinity for this series, wait til this one is on sale and go watch Andromedia instead; actually just got watch Andromedia regardless it's a masterpiece.

I was a Miike fan long before I was a Suda fan.

I feel like Grasshopper Manufacture understands me, y'know? In No More Heroes 3, they capture the essence of what formulated my taste in media. Right off the bat, before anything else happens, we have Travis reminiscing about a janky, ugly video game no one but him seems to remember; when he revisits it, hoping to finally see the incredible ending he was promised as a child, he discovers that it was all a lie. But you get to play the game too, and it's clear that a lot of effort was put into making it as accurate to the "good" old days as possible. The execution of this whole Deathman saga feels like an earnest love-letter to the kind of garbage I grew up thinking was gold, and that's exactly what NMH3 is to its very core: earnest. This is Suda51's most sincere work to date, a genuine attempt at making the kind of open-world game GHM was lampooning in the original No More Heroes, with their most polished and mechanically satisfying combat so far. When it isn't getting bogged down by frequent load screens and occasional dips into typical open-world checklist design, it's a true joy to play. The fact that they could get action this smooth out of Unreal Engine 4 on the Switch is a testament to the oft-overlooked skill of the development team.

NMH3's sense of humor is tonally very different from the previous games, simultaneously showing more restraint while also being even more over the top. What I mean is, everything about it feels natural despite being more audacious than ever. The script is some of Suda's best work, as what it lacks in the depth and thematic resonance of previous Kill The Past titles, it makes up for with strong character writing and dialogue. This is definitely one of the funniest, most charming games ever made, balancing just the right amounts of absurdism and self-indulgence to create some absolutely wonderful surreal comedy. The highlight for me was always seeing Travis and Bishop discuss the quality of Takashi Miike's filmography and directorial techniques, which felt like an exaggerated take on the way I love to ramble on about my favorite films and games with friends. Seeing these characters sing the praises of the most major works that got me into Japanese cinema - Gozu, Audition, and Ichi The Killer - makes me feel so warm and cozy inside. And while this aspect of the story is certainly among the most self-indulgent things ever penned for a video game, it doesn't feel forced or like Suda is trying to make a cheap comparison with his own work; it's just a guy writing earnestly about how much he loves his favorite director. We need more stuff like this.

The opening and closing hours of No More Heroes 3 are some of the wildest in any video game, delivering a sensory overload that can only be described as "fucking raw." The soundtrack might be the best in the series, if not Grasshopper's entire oeuvre. The whole production bleeds style to the point where it may actually become substance. There is so, so much I adore about this game that I'm already starting to forget how the swirl of constant load screens and general open-world nonsense threatened to ruin my good time at every turn. These issues created a particularly frustrating amount of tedium, necessitating shorter play sessions than I'd hoped, and for once I don't think it was intentional. That said, everything else about NMH3 resonated with me on an almost instinctual level, and I hope you'll be able to find something just as special in it as I did.

you hear the one about avid players of tetris? their minds basically get rewritten because of exposure to the damn thing. thing is, this is true of any earthly activity that brings together body, mind, and soul. its psychosomatic, kinaesthetic. any activity that informs consciousness will bleed into the subconscious. my dreams aren't really like the ones LSD presents, but my fear is that they will be.

a product of its time in all the ways that matter and bolstered as a result. psx architecture struggling under the weight of hell and failing to load in the density of its worlds in time leaves the mind incapable of guarding itself for whats going to happen next - legitimately unsettling, unpredictable, uncanny, uncaring. youre sieved through textures and atmospheres at a rapid clip. no barriers exist here, everything is simply a permeable membrane. every scene, vignette, happenstance, and interaction a stitched-together quilt one night and a tesseract the next. like any work of its kind it requires a certain level of maturity and commitment - particularly these days when the only thing you can reliably bet on about an audience is their urge to demystify - but you ought to take the leap. this is really affecting work here that i cant possibly be cynical about and a great alternative to melatonin

Mascot character platformers are one of the most exciting genres in gaming to me. They have the potential to be an intriguing concoction of every visual, aural and story element that normally goes into games, but benefit strongly from their bend towards the main controllable character being the mechanical focus. Characters like Rayman, Ratchet & Clank, Hat Kid, their games are informed by their personalities and rulesets in a way that contextualises the player’s involvement in their worlds. Conceptualised well enough, the degree of exploration and interaction afforded to the characters can elevate these titles to surprising degrees, and give them a unique voice with a sense that they really have something to say.

This is pretty much where Psychonauts comes in. The first game came about in the full swing of the mascot platformer craze of the 00’s - and with the help of Double Fine’s history in sharp character writing and adventure exploration, concocted a game where the themes are both broad and accessible: Psychics exist and can explore people’s mental planes to empathise with visualisations of their own unique psychological issues.

Part of my adoration for the first Psychonauts comes from its strong visual direction, with off-beat and illustrative takes on individual character’s mindscapes. Psychonauts goes above and beyond with its core concepts by allowing its cast to express themselves through clever writing and impressionistic environmental caricature. Likely inspired by Rankin Bass stop motion movies and the artwork of Tim Burton, who’s styling has roots in ideas of eccentrism, depression and nonconformity - as well as have a level of cheeky humour that complements its attempts to depict darker themes. It sets the perfect stage for what Psychonauts is setting out to do; to let its cast express themselves in unique and personal ways of which the player is tasked with physically navigating, a visual metaphor for the therapist and the client. All these abstractions never go too far into sheer chaos because they’re balanced wonderfully and grounded with stereotypical visual metaphors that help keep things grounded, like “censors”, “emotional baggage”.


Psychonauts 2 is great, I’m amazed that it not only delivered on its promise of being a follow-up to the original title, it also exceeded it in almost every aspect. My main complaints are that I simply didn’t find it anywhere near as laugh-out-loud funny, and that the climax is a little contrived to the point it simply wasn’t satisfying. One of the strengths of the original was the level of interaction you had with the world in the form of use-items and environmental objects, and character count… something Psychonauts 2 seems to have made an effort on trimming down. I think a lot of my disappointment in the humour of this game stems from how little there is to reveal, by comparison? Still, it’s a fun story to see unfold - I’m hugely fond of how there is a throughline across the levels in the form of a kind of shared trauma within the cast.

This is simply one of the best looking games I’ve ever seen from a technical standpoint. Uses, and masters every trick in the Unreal Engine book while also inventing new ones. Unbelievable work with gravity tricks, false scale, shaders and portals. Every area is simply stunning. I can’t believe how good it looks. Oh my god. Platforming feels wonderful and mercifully there’s an easy mode for the less-than-stellar combat.

This review feels bad to me so I'll just end it here.

Surface familiarity failing to capture the lightning in the bottle that was NMH1. Words I never expected to utter about a NMH game once again helmed by Suda, but this is the unfortunate reality. Retreaded old familiar ground and innumerous hollow callbacks fail to disguise the lack of purpose and intention in NMH3, giving us instead a sequel closer in tone to NMH2 than NMH1.

Grasshopper fails to effectively manage its visibly low budget, hurting the expressiveness and animation found in previous entries, hastily sidelining the promise of TSA’s cast, and glaringly omitting the presence of traditional pre-boss stages. This last point in particular being the biggest misstep of NMH3, especially when taking into consideration NMH1’s understanding of how illusive the videogame structure is, and how brilliantly it destroys it. Without it, NMH3 has no foundation on which to stand itself on and not even its admittedly entertaining combat can make the uncontextualized arenas feel like anything other than a very impressive tech demo.

Having sat with it for a while now, my conflicting thoughts have a very hard time reconciling with NMH3 and the reasons for its existence. At first glance, NMH3 seems intent on setting aside much of the unorthodox and incisive writing that characterizes NMH1 and TSA in favor of creating a no frills over the top action game built on its own terms and without the constraints and expectations of normal videogame production, that funnels its creativity and passion into much of the aesthetic and presentation that goes above and beyond anything ever seen in a videogame. Watching Travis and Bishop rave on about Takashi Miike, as any two ordinary college roommates would on any given Friday night about their favorite movie, it almost become easy to forgive NMH3’s more immediate failures and appreciate the personality and labor of love behind the development of such a disjointed mess of a game.

On the other hand, while I don’t entirely subscribe to the cynical interpretations of NMH3’s MCU framing of the plot and the social media and streaming services allusions, there is an underlying sense that permeates much of the experience of disinterest, bitterness and alienation in bringing Travis into a world that has long abandoned him. NMH3 is drenched in nostalgic infatuation with the old and the past in a way the previous entries weren’t, almost defiantly so, while also allowing itself to conform to this new reality of media consumption in a shrugging and indifferent manner. This contradiction is best exemplified with Travis trying to reconnect with an old retro game of his childhood, remastered for the modern age, in search of answers that are ultimately never given to him and soon reject his now unfamiliar presence. Travis’ senseless bloodlust is ultimately the same as it ever was, just upgraded and updated accordingly.

In a way, NMH3 represents a sort of alternate finale to the Kill the Past saga, frequently referencing characters and concepts from previous Suda works only to immediately discard them at the expense of the players in the know and closing the door with a plethora of unanswered questions, trapping Travis forever inside No More Heroes, now destined to relive in perpetuity the same bloody uncathartic plot, once a tragedy, now a farse, foolishly hanging on to a static past. It’s hard not to think of MGS4 when playing NMH3, but while it’s understandable why Kojima injected it with so much hostility and resentment towards the player, I fail to decipher why Suda would follow up on TSA’s optimistic catharsis with such a retread for Travis and the series in general. In contrast to MGS4’s tying of all the needless knots, NMH3 instead destroys the series by way of implosion, eating itself from inside out and leaving the remains for whoever is next.

And yet, in its finest hour, I’m left amazed and grinning at how NMH3 manages to bring all its messiness together at the end beautifully in a final showdown that simultaneously acts as a defying FU indictment against the industry that brought it into existence and as a sincere gratitude to the fans who allowed it to happen, one of the most uplifting punk statements worthy of the Grasshopper brand. Regardless of my thoughts here, I ultimately do not think Suda had the intention of pervading NMH3 with such negative emotions, and I do believe he genuinely wanted to make NMH3. The final product however leaves much to be desired, and its meta textual narrative does not make up for the lack of engagement I felt during the story and combat of NMH3. It’s a baffling and contradictory epilogue to TSA, and a weird janky victory lap for the series that has an endearing quaintness to it that makes it hard to hate on.

One thing I can say for certain tho, and that is this is the hardest in the mf paint a NMH soundtrack has ever gone, and you gonna be looking real silly arguing otherwise in the NMH3 discourse to come.

i keep thinking about strangereal. strangereal is a terrific name for the world of ace combat. it aptly denotes the franchise’s mechanics, functions as a wry descriptor for the series’ daredevil aesthetic, and evokes a fantastical image. when it’s working effectively, the realism of strangereal is achieved by means of a kind of unconscious shorthand.

speaking anecdotally, a surprisingly significant number of people look at an ace combat title – the box art, the community, brief snippets of gameplay – and uncharitably make the assumption that it’s plane call of duty. given project aces’ reverence for realistic fighter jets, high altitudes contrails, and dogfighting dusk to dawn, this isn’t necessarily an unfair assumption to make. it’s sometimes uncommon for media to be so attentive to verisimilitude in the little details while simultaneously dabbling in the kind of magical realism that ace combat does. ace combat has top gun romanticism in its veins; it has more in common with afterburner than it does with microsoft flight sim. its primordial essence might as well have been scooped from galaga. but make no mistake, ace combat will imbue its systems with all the affectations of reality. you’ll learn a wealth of complex maneuvers to navigate three dimensional space, all the while stalling accidentally, evading the onslaught of enemy missiles from your periphery, and avoiding crashing into complex architectural spaces. the open air becomes your arena, cities and their edifices your escape shafts, ravines your trenches. it’s tempting – and very funny – to say this is a series about locking on to green squares and waiting for them to ding red, but the core gameplay loop finds its sense of pure excitement in all the minutiae, the calculations (yaw, roll, pitch, speed, missile trajectory) you have to make in order to synchronize with your jet and down a target. the moment you start becoming more comfortable using your regular outfitted machinegun in aerial engagements is the moment you ascend. it all comes down to your nerves. immelman turns, chandelles, cuban eights – cramped tunnel runs. you might call the experience holistically ‘strangereal’. but the most important thing is, of course, that this is a very highly attuned, enthralling natural drama that occurs in all the games – that of plane maneuverability.

ace combat’s strangereal setting is designed as simulacra over facsimile – where realities contend with abstraction. our history and theirs sometimes align, but only to invite comparison and perspective. the bleakness of electrosphere’s setting of strangereal seems callously exaggerated in its lack of regard for bodily autonomy, free will, and self-actualization, but its developers were only drawing upon influences readily understood unconsciously, enlisting production ig’s aid in setting the tone by way of formal shorthand. electrosphere, in depicting a world impoverished and emancipated by the whims of megacorporate warfare, grapples with the tenets of a large body of cyberpunk work depicting profound trepidation over technological revolution, with the venality and frank hostility of nations beset by late-stage capitalism, and draws upon a wealth of easily comprehensible mixed media – the advertising wars waged by microsoft and apple come to mind as a heady influence. this is deliberately reflected in electrospheres plane design. one dominant corporation, neucom, is sleek, futurist, impossibly glossy and curved; general resources, reflecting a down-to-brass-tacks utilitarian brand, serves as their stylistic inverse. this, too, is shorthand. it furthers the realism of strangereal while also exploring new ideas.

or take the strangereal of shattered skies for a comparatively more grounded approach. with terrain pockmark ridden at best (and irreversibly altered for the worst in many other instances) by a deluge of asteroid fragments following a global crisis, shattered skies immediately establishes political instability and humanity in crisis as the norm, which informs its setting and its depiction of warfare. this is a world picking up the straggling pieces after a semi-successful defense against a cataclysm of untold proportion, with these actions still inevitably leading to widespread devastation and the collapse of infrastructure. this is first introduced with the first lines spoken in ace combat 04:
“I was just a child when the stars fell from the skies. But I remember how they built a cannon to destroy them. And in turn how that cannon brought war upon us.”
the war in question is shattered skies’ continental war, which was triggered by loss of infrastructure, tensions with displaced refugees, and trade quotas. in brief summation, it involves the invasion of a nation with a railgun capable of destroying the ulysses asteroid, and repurposing it as an anti-aircraft weapon, and the fight to take it back. ace combat takes the struggles of reality – climate and extinction anxiety, humanitarian crises, warfare itself – and alters them through the lens of strangereal to convey its action. that, alongside the gameplay, is also a big appeal of the franchise.

all of these elements, depictions, and sensibilities coalesce to create a series that is continually compelling even at its messiest. shattered skies is the predecessor to the unsung war, and the franchise’s debut on the PS2. with that uncertain introduction, especially following the commercially unsuccessful yet wildly ambitious electrosphere, came a very solid, if unambitious title with a wide range of problems. the flow of its military campaigns made sense, its world was compelling and understated, its narrative quiet and melancholic yet taut, but it was sorely lacking in visual identity and mission variety. it returned to the traditional ace combat 2 military campaign structure of working towards an explicit goal through various missions, each sensibly placed one after the other. and the narrative emerging opposite this is one following the enemy aces who have no choice but to engage with you by the end, thus lending the proceeding battles weight through dramatic irony. it’s an unsettling moment when you kill one of yellow squadrons pilots for the first time and radio silence fills the airwaves, and it’s part of ace combat continuing in the footsteps of electrosphere: the necessary interrogation, however minor or subtle, of an arcade flight sim that feels great but derives influence from realism. this is something shattered skies nails (although electrosphere does it better) and to me it’s the crux of the series identity – it’s strangereal. it’s the feeling that this world could have been our own, but everything is affected by a layer of digital remove.

ace combat 5 finds this characteristic off-kilter reality in abeyance. the unsung war tips tips the formerly tightly wound balance (strange/real) far more towards the tonally ‘strange’, the magical realism. this isn’t the biggest problem ace combat 5 has, but it is absolutely the lynchpin of all my criticism because the approach undertaken by project aces in this game informs all the issues i have with it.

these changes, in my opinion, were seemingly made to ameliorate the problems people had with shattered skies. ace combat 04 is a dry but very candid and forthright title with a simple, but well-executed narrative. ace combat 5 has more personality from the get go and packs a bit more production value. the environments don’t look quite as dreary, the planes move a bit more responsively, and the cutscenes are 3D CG this time. on top of that there’s an actual cast of characters this time around and missions are usually set up with intrigue, so there’s a sense that something is happening to you rather than you being a lone agent in an ongoing overarching struggle. one mission starts from first person perspective as you remain in the cockpit, watching the bombs drop in your vicinity, before rushing to takeoff and defend the skies.

but this increased narrative focus carries with it several unique problems. i want to start with the first moment this became clear to me, because ace combat 5 opens decently enough that you might not notice the cracks in its seams, and with a charitable focus on the game one might not be so inclined to interrogate any potential mishaps or wrongdoings. seven missions into the game you’re pulled into a situation where you and your squad must lead a counter-assault against a submarine carrier; you had previously survived your last encounter with the submarine by the skin of your teeth. the submarines anti-aircraft weaponry consists of burst missiles which annihilate anything under an altitude of 5000 feet when it fires. you know this, your wingmen know this, the mission briefing specifies this – it won’t catch you off guard like it did the last time. on top of this you have now retrofitted a satellite with an orbital laser so that you have further means of dispatching the burst missiles.

the dilemma is this: lacking personnel with which to conduct the sortie, your commanding officers send your squadron and many cadets-in-training, affectionately named ‘nuggets’. despite their lack of dogfighting experience, they know enough that they’ll be able to hold their own against enemy ordinance, especially with full knowledge of what will be attacking them, no surprises.

wrong. all of the ‘nuggets’ died in the sortie because after three successful strikes, the orbital laser malfunctions. everyone realizes this and makes a big fuss over it, but rather than elevate aircrafts to an altitude of above 5000 feet within 30 seconds after the first warning from nagase (which, by the way, only takes three to four seconds to accomplish from a base altitude, if that) every single nugget perishes in burst missile range. this is because ace combat 5 is a game that for all intents and purposes begins favoring drama and wayward polemic at the expense of realism. it wasn’t a demanding altitude, a demanding time limit, or a demanding number of enemies and every cadet died to further the casualties suffered under war and to add to the cast’s understanding that War Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up To Be, We’re All Cogs™. while i haven’t tested it yet, it would not surprise me in the least if the AI for the nuggets climbed to an altitude just below 5000 feet, and then right before the safe zone, they stalled so as to perish in battle.

but the troubles don’t really end there. the increased focus on the narrative proceedings and on wingman banter has direct ramifications for gameplay as well. several of ace combat 5s missions are unnecessarily padded so your squadmates can speak, ordained by the script, before progressing to the next stage of the mission. i played on hard difficulty and even then i was stunned to see that because i had dispatched all enemies well before the mission dictates that i should have, the mission simply continues to respawn enemies on the ground and in the air so that you have something to do to fill out the dead time. not only is this obscenely artificial once you come to grips with what’s going on, but it also throws a significant wrench into preparing for a sortie. i accept the premise that a mission briefing could be wrong so as to further the stakes and to amplify the tension of the gameplay, but this is a case where all your mission briefings might be lying to you and you have no way of foreseeing it. a mission with 30 ground targets and 15 aerial targets could easily become a mission with twofold that amount, with one particularly egregious mission respawning enemy bunkers repeatedly after you had already dealt with them. complicating this is both the lack of resupply lines from ace combat 4 and targets with greater health pools than prior iterations of ace combat, meaning you waste more ammunition to deal with enemies that were not specified to be there and you have to micromanage your ammunition to counter this fact in what is supposed to be a replayable, score-based arcade title. missions are stuffed to the brim with this kind of dead time and overindulgence in enemy count. one mission has you follow a truck for five minutes with zero friction – you cant even target structures so as to stop the trucks path. at least the mission where you flew slowly at low altitude for ten minutes possessed a semblance of mild danger. your wingmen barely make a dent in any of this despite any of the tactical orders you might try to give them. if you don’t believe me, kindly look at my squadmates numbers by the end of the campaign.

https://imgur.com/a/BfwCqNN

this is also the longest campaign in an ace combat title, topping out at 27 missions plus a victory lap. with the litany of scripted missions and gimmick missions that this title has, ace combat has never felt so much like an exhausting marathon. there are moments that it all works as a nice composite, but these moments are so few and far in between that the game is actively drowning in mud for most of it. it’s quite amusing to me that this entry in the franchise has the opposite problem of something like nier or drakengard – both of which are recipients of ace combat’s conceptual dna. in nier, the problem is the casts dialogue during battles, which are both narratively important and entertaining, but can easily be cut off by player input; in ace combat 5, the script, oftentimes for worse, obstructs player input in service of narrative. despite this, this can easily be interpreted in niers favour, which i won’t do for the sake of avoiding spoilers. ace combat 5 gets no such reprieve.

some of this might be excused if the unsung war had a good narrative, but it rather unfortunately registers to me as hisitronics. it’s bereft of the kind of nuance, humanity, or expressiveness of previous entries in the series in favour of aerial schmaltz. these characters are paper thin apex predators fighting against the machinations of war by doing hardly anything different from any other title in the series – indiscriminate slaughter. and far be it from me to reject something that has the potential to be subversive or satirical in intent, but nothing about the unsung war is even vaguely suggestive of this to me. it’s markedly less thoughtful than both electrosphere and shattered skies before it, without the comparative mechanical strengths of the relatively narrativeless ace combat 2. it sacrifices what works for an anti-war fairy tale that culminates in a squadron’s shared anti-war anthem, right before eviscerating the enemys offence entirely in a show of brute military strength. the whiplash is unreal to me. particularly so when the conspiratorial bent of the narrative seems like it will dismantle the kind of jingoist nationalism that fuels combative sentiment, but stops before even attempting to.

it takes a lot to pull me out of this kind of high octane schlock, but ace combat 5 represents the worst of both worlds. its lack of meaningful hooks renders its explosive highs destitute by the time you get there, and all the strengths it possesses as a mechanical ace combat title are negligible once you remember that they’re reflected better in the games before it. i much prefer the cowboy bebop-esque fatalism of something like shattered skies over the sluggish and preachy, constantly disconnected nature of ace combat 5. my argument here doesn’t intend to suggest that ace combat can’t be corny, but this tone should operate in tandem with the systems rather than disrupting them. and likewise, the mechanics should leverage the storytelling. because ultimately, project aces are right – in spite of the destruction they represent, planes are cool. they’re kinetic. they dance and joust in the skies. but so much of this game is repellant instead – it misses what makes ace combat work mechanically, and it misses what makes it work narratively. it aspires to the self-interrogation of games past, but instead opts for having your squadmate say ‘dogfights suck’ in the first mission of the game. its attempts to evoke reality are both underwritten and lacking in subtlety (yuktobania in this game is absolutely just russia; the antagonists in this game are cartoonishly committed to being evil). it ain’t strangereal, it’s just strange. and i can get similar, but more considered joys, somewhere else.

So this is EASILY the best NMH game. Its aesthetic alone immediately made me fall in love with it, the presentation just screams passion and soul in every single facet of the game. It genuinely feels like a once in a lifetime experience with how many talented creators collaborated to make this happen, there are SO many assets by such a diverse range of people, from the art, the huge fucking ost, and even the menus. The gameplay is phenomenal, it feels so good combo skill chips together with your different attack methods and the game rewards you by playing cleverly, especially during bosses where you can use skillchips to abuse their moves against themselves. The bosses in general are just so tightly designed, for the most part, and the cutscenes/dialogue that come with them are as always fun as hell. The reason I say for the most part is because the quality of the bosses starts going on a decline after Rank 5, with Rank 2 being NMH2 tier awful in the way that it lets you just kill it in one combo without retaliating once (on Hard).

The story is... okay! The characters are all entertaining, but not much happens that you wouldn't expect, and probably most of the cutscene dialogue is there for flavor rather than to establish anything substantial. There are a few chekhov's guns and some interesting stuff gets swept under the rug entirely. I don't think this is too big of a flaw since its carried so hard by how charming the characters are, but it is a step down from the thematic complexity of TSA and probably NMH1 as well in ways. They especially really missed the ball with the ADV format content, which appears a few times in the main story (which totals to probably 5 minutes), and in 3 sidequests which tell well written but short stories unrelated to the plot. There's just so much room there they could have used for expanding alien backstories, adding light hearted interactions between Travis and his friends, and spicing up the town with more sidequests, but sadly its very minimal.

Regardless of my issues the game was fucking awesome and towers above the rest of the series, I soyed out like 20 seperate times and I still have so much content to do in postgame and NG+, including the entire crafting system that i barely touched. its good play it.
also stan midori and kamui

EDIT: 2 days after beating it, I've been thinking about and discussing the game a lot and I think a lot of my issues with the plot are probably intentional and the game might be a lot more thematically dense than I thought at first. Gonna replay it with a new outlook after I let it sit a while longer and make another review probably

this game is very complicated and my opinion of it only grows more nuanced the more i think about it, so its hard to pinpoint how exactly i feel about it. i can try though.

the following was my initial impressions.

"far from a bad game, but so afraid to truly confront its more mature themes that it relies too heavily on the wacky suda that only appeals to those unwilling to take him seriously as a writer. just as soon as they were done making wacky rainbow silly “oh, japan” funtime games, we come right back to it in fear of making another financial flounder. combat is satisfying, but lacks depth with cooldown-based attacks and purpose without standard levels. the open world returns, but is segmented and barren, feeling like even more of a waste than the first game’s. the bosses seem cool at first, but are often too easy and lacking any significant purpose in the story. this game leans heavily on its themes of “kill the past,” but frequently undermines itself for the lulz or takashi miike. this game is suda at his most insecure, and im disappointed by his inability to give any of these characters a meaningful sendoff. i give it an awesomesauce out of thanos"

but now, i think ive come to appreciate it a little more. i think the blatancy in its absurdity and lack of introspection from TSA is completely intentional. after all, what is left to introspect on after TSA? travis, alongside Suda and ourselves, has become who he is. he's run from his past long enough and now he is - literally - living with it, comfortably and happily. Santa Destroy is entirely different, almost unrecognizable, but its still his home. that is, until FU arrives.

a petulant and spoiled child, seeking to cause havoc purely for the sake of recognition and prestige; killing for cool points. FU serves as a perfect foil to travis because he is what travis used to be, a child with a desensitized view of killing. unlike the travis we have now, FU has not been forced to introspect on himself and persists to try and kill travis out of anger and revenge, a fool's game that travis is equally familiar with. just as FU represents travis's past that he must kill if i may be so bold as to say, travis represents FU's future, one that he is deathly afraid of no matter how much he tries to pretend he isnt.

i could talk for ages about the dichotomy between travis and fu, but its complicated. everything about this game is. ive grown on its story more but that does NOT make it without flaws. its issues with structure and bosses are still there, the lack of levels is still disappointing and all the bosses still lack very good characterization. the bosses may be intentional, the levels most certainly are not.

i dunno man. this game is complicated. but i think it might be really special.

Grasshopper and Suda's trademark creative personality unleashed on a scale not seen since the original. not as quiet and contemplative as Travis Strikes Again, 3 returns to the bold bullshit of the first without any of the overexerting quirk of the games that followed it. a return to form and, finally, the first No More Heroes game with combat that feels good and fun. honestly my biggest complaint is that i just wanted more - more weapons, more dialogue, more story (was pulling for another Killer7 appearance) and maybe a bit more variety. you can definitely tell this was a victim of both covid and a low budget, but it does the most it can. it had me grinning at the edge of my seat like very few games ever can. this is more of a 3 1/2 but it gets 5 stars for the Travis rap bit.

I'm not going to include any spoilers because if you're interested in the game the surprises are definitely the best part of the game.

I think the biggest problem with this game is how streamlined it has become. Considering it brought back NMH1's formula of money grinding for bosses I thought that we were going to get interesting and challenging boss dungeons, with many interesting mechanics and things to come!
I was somewhat right, there was definitely a lot of interesting stuff going on, but the boss dungeons are completely gone. You do a few encounters on the map, and if you want you can do all of them and have enough money for the next boss fights. You don't even need to do the job minigames for money. And after those encounters you pay up, go to the boss, beat the (really easy on bitter so maybe try spicy) boss, rinse and repeat about 10 times.
The story was also poorly handled and does not try to close anything up in this game, mostly because it's setting up for some future titles that aren't No More Heroes, but something else. In this game though it does continue up a lot of the points brought up in Travis Strikes Again and that was honestly pretty nice, but maybe it could've seen some more development that does feel like a missed out opportunity. Apart from that the plot is fine, it's nothing stellar or mind blowing but it will keep you entertained.

The one MAJOR complaint that I have is that half the map is completely unexplorable, whether this will be DLC or nothing at all it's definitely weird, not that it matters though: the map is quite empty and devoid of interactions except for a few collectibles.
Overall though it's still a funny and fun game, maybe slightly repetitive, but it definitely does its own thing.