I'm gonna say it... I like this more than No More Heroes 1.
Fine, I played the PS3 "Heroes Paradise" version of the game, and it can be a bit of a divisive version, but hear me out.
No More Heroes III is the fourth (fifth?) game in the trilogy that extends plotlines and themes that stretched across the entire series, while applying fresh perspective and contexts. Following the latest journey of Travis Touchdown, the twice #1 ranking assassin in the UAA and resident anime geek that shacks up in the run down No More Heroes Motel, he lives the life of a recluse neet, spending his day watching anime and playing video games (the story even opens up with Travis talking about an 80s video game called DEATHMAN). That is, until space invaders show up, nuke a large portion of Santa Destroy, and send out a challenge to all would-be/wanna-be heroes. Coerced, he butts heads against Prince Jess-Baptiste the Sixth (also known as FU), the intergalactic "Superhero" ringleader of the invasion that decided to make Earth his latest conquest, starting it off with said nuking.
After the first match against a few tutorial alien bozos, Travis is thrust forth into the Rank 10 boss of the game with... surprisingly little before that, aside from some backstory relevant cutscenes. After defeating Rank 10 and not getting any answers aside from that one San Andreas meme, FU decides to pay a visit to No More Heroes Motel to make the challenge a bit more personal by horribly mangling a long time friend of Travis' and murdering a recent one.
The table is set, and revenge is back on the menu, served hot and spicy at the end of Travis' beam katana.
No More Heroes III is a feast of color and psychedelic visuals when taking on the hostile crew of FU's, thick with 50s to 80s retro designs that don't skimp on the technicolor or the geometric shapes. It honestly enough to start making me think Travis himself might have been a mantis-shrimp in a previous life with his vicious war on impossible colors.
Helping balance the visual madness is the mundane locations of Santa Destroy and the surrounding locations (each with a different theme, design, and reference to yesteryear pop culture and pulp media), with said mundane locations being MUCH easier to traverse around due to the improved movement of Travis' superbike. Gone is the Job Center and K-Entertainment from NMH1, with their function now scattered about the maps, separated into Volunteer Work (the side jobs) and Defense Missions (the combat trials/assassin work), with some of the jobs of the first game making a return with some reworks. Defense Missions are simple wave by wave arena fights with an assortment of enemies, and end up being the bulk of regular enemy encounters in the game (with a few exceptions). All of this is to gather Uc (the primary currency of the game and needed for Ranked Battles), WESN (the secondary currency and typically used for upgrades), and Junk (materials for chip creation). Personal favorite jobs include Lawn mowing, WESN mining, Garbage collection, and hunting down Death Scorpions (the latter was in NMH1 as a variant of garbage collection, changed in NMH3 as a game wide scavenger hunt). There are also text based adventures, but they're more for fleshing out the game world rather than anything gameplay related, but are no less interesting. Though, if you want something challenging outside of the regular stuff, there is a "Time Machine" underneath the Motel where you can re-challenge every boss you've faced up to now, but with the added perk of trying higher difficulties, provided you give up a small entry fee per harder fighter that isn't on the current main story level.
The combat, while not AS expressively diverse in the original game (which had multiple Beam Katanas with differing speeds and powers) still is fast and frenetic even with only one weapon for the entire game, but is now combined with the four death skills (Kick, Force, Rain, Slow) to help turn your foes into multi-colored puddles of goo and give Travis much more range and crowd control than ever before. Perfect Dodge makes a return, and so does his infamous wrestling moves, which slow time for a short period and refill the Beam Katana's power respectively, Power Up Slots come back to either turn you into a speed demon, grant you invincibility, allow you to throw opponents at any time, give you money, or give you the ability to transform into your mecha armor to lay waste to foes... or give you nothing. After all, it's a slot machine. Gotta match three to make anything happen.
If there is anything that I personally didn't like, it's that the game did away with linear stages before the Ranked Match. While said stages in prior entries could sometimes be tedious or last a bit too long, it still gave me as a player a lot of room to experiment with the combat a bit more and explore locations in and out of Santa Destroy. It was a nice injection of gameplay variety that wasn't just a miningame (side job), Defense Mission (wave based arena combat) or Designated Match (single round fight). The only exception to that is Rank 5 which... actually, I won't spoil you in this review. You wanna know, go play it yourself. I thought it was a brilliant move.
The game runs at a buttery smooth 60 FPS and looks terrific, even on an old ass CRT TV like mine, and I had only had the displeasure of running into a SINGLE glitch in all my time playing the game (it was bad enough to soft-lock me, but I doubt I could replicate it). It sounds great with music feeling both new and familiar, retro yet modern, and sound effects having the right punch and weight to them no matter what was going on. Voice acting is just as good as it was in the first game and Travis himself sounds perfectly strange, psychotic, and nerdy as hell.
The story is... a lot of things. It's about a sad man looking for real purpose in his life, and life providing just that for good or ill. It's about responsibility, for putting aside what you want in favor of what needs to be done. It's about letting go of pride to strive for better. It's about friendship and what it really means to want and keep friends. It's about the past coming back to haunt you, bless you, or both. It is also about a goofy loser otaku weeb that has taken up hacking aliens to bits instead of people (most of the time) because a dickhead prince decided playing by the rules was bullshit. It takes itself as seriously as you allow it to, with genuine funny moments, sombre moments, and introspective moments sprinkled all about with careful consideration of context and tone (whether it's preserved or smashed). No matter how you look at it, the story is at least as entertaining as the gameplay is, and is filled with enough manga, anime, film, gaming, and pop culture nods and homages that the fourth wall lies shattered at the players feet from the beginning. At least, that's my takeaway.
Though, if I liked it so much, why does it only get a half a star more than the first game in the series? Perhaps it was the lack of proper stages? Perhaps it was the lack of weapon customization? Perhaps it was the lack of meaningful exploration available despite there being FOUR more overworld maps outside of Santa Destroy? Perhaps it's that certain Rank battles are interrupted by other Assassins, and the subsequent Alien superhero opponent ends up biting the dust before the fight... Maybe it's multiple of, if not all these, reasons, and that I'm still a little salty for being soft-locked in a largely glitchless game.
That all said, I recommend this game that some critics claim is as deranged and psychedelic as a Alejandro Jodorowsky film, even though Travis and his friends would likely want the game to be seen as more of a hard-core work from Takashi Miike.
Fine, I played the PS3 "Heroes Paradise" version of the game, and it can be a bit of a divisive version, but hear me out.
No More Heroes III is the fourth (fifth?) game in the trilogy that extends plotlines and themes that stretched across the entire series, while applying fresh perspective and contexts. Following the latest journey of Travis Touchdown, the twice #1 ranking assassin in the UAA and resident anime geek that shacks up in the run down No More Heroes Motel, he lives the life of a recluse neet, spending his day watching anime and playing video games (the story even opens up with Travis talking about an 80s video game called DEATHMAN). That is, until space invaders show up, nuke a large portion of Santa Destroy, and send out a challenge to all would-be/wanna-be heroes. Coerced, he butts heads against Prince Jess-Baptiste the Sixth (also known as FU), the intergalactic "Superhero" ringleader of the invasion that decided to make Earth his latest conquest, starting it off with said nuking.
After the first match against a few tutorial alien bozos, Travis is thrust forth into the Rank 10 boss of the game with... surprisingly little before that, aside from some backstory relevant cutscenes. After defeating Rank 10 and not getting any answers aside from that one San Andreas meme, FU decides to pay a visit to No More Heroes Motel to make the challenge a bit more personal by horribly mangling a long time friend of Travis' and murdering a recent one.
The table is set, and revenge is back on the menu, served hot and spicy at the end of Travis' beam katana.
No More Heroes III is a feast of color and psychedelic visuals when taking on the hostile crew of FU's, thick with 50s to 80s retro designs that don't skimp on the technicolor or the geometric shapes. It honestly enough to start making me think Travis himself might have been a mantis-shrimp in a previous life with his vicious war on impossible colors.
Helping balance the visual madness is the mundane locations of Santa Destroy and the surrounding locations (each with a different theme, design, and reference to yesteryear pop culture and pulp media), with said mundane locations being MUCH easier to traverse around due to the improved movement of Travis' superbike. Gone is the Job Center and K-Entertainment from NMH1, with their function now scattered about the maps, separated into Volunteer Work (the side jobs) and Defense Missions (the combat trials/assassin work), with some of the jobs of the first game making a return with some reworks. Defense Missions are simple wave by wave arena fights with an assortment of enemies, and end up being the bulk of regular enemy encounters in the game (with a few exceptions). All of this is to gather Uc (the primary currency of the game and needed for Ranked Battles), WESN (the secondary currency and typically used for upgrades), and Junk (materials for chip creation). Personal favorite jobs include Lawn mowing, WESN mining, Garbage collection, and hunting down Death Scorpions (the latter was in NMH1 as a variant of garbage collection, changed in NMH3 as a game wide scavenger hunt). There are also text based adventures, but they're more for fleshing out the game world rather than anything gameplay related, but are no less interesting. Though, if you want something challenging outside of the regular stuff, there is a "Time Machine" underneath the Motel where you can re-challenge every boss you've faced up to now, but with the added perk of trying higher difficulties, provided you give up a small entry fee per harder fighter that isn't on the current main story level.
The combat, while not AS expressively diverse in the original game (which had multiple Beam Katanas with differing speeds and powers) still is fast and frenetic even with only one weapon for the entire game, but is now combined with the four death skills (Kick, Force, Rain, Slow) to help turn your foes into multi-colored puddles of goo and give Travis much more range and crowd control than ever before. Perfect Dodge makes a return, and so does his infamous wrestling moves, which slow time for a short period and refill the Beam Katana's power respectively, Power Up Slots come back to either turn you into a speed demon, grant you invincibility, allow you to throw opponents at any time, give you money, or give you the ability to transform into your mecha armor to lay waste to foes... or give you nothing. After all, it's a slot machine. Gotta match three to make anything happen.
If there is anything that I personally didn't like, it's that the game did away with linear stages before the Ranked Match. While said stages in prior entries could sometimes be tedious or last a bit too long, it still gave me as a player a lot of room to experiment with the combat a bit more and explore locations in and out of Santa Destroy. It was a nice injection of gameplay variety that wasn't just a miningame (side job), Defense Mission (wave based arena combat) or Designated Match (single round fight). The only exception to that is Rank 5 which... actually, I won't spoil you in this review. You wanna know, go play it yourself. I thought it was a brilliant move.
The game runs at a buttery smooth 60 FPS and looks terrific, even on an old ass CRT TV like mine, and I had only had the displeasure of running into a SINGLE glitch in all my time playing the game (it was bad enough to soft-lock me, but I doubt I could replicate it). It sounds great with music feeling both new and familiar, retro yet modern, and sound effects having the right punch and weight to them no matter what was going on. Voice acting is just as good as it was in the first game and Travis himself sounds perfectly strange, psychotic, and nerdy as hell.
The story is... a lot of things. It's about a sad man looking for real purpose in his life, and life providing just that for good or ill. It's about responsibility, for putting aside what you want in favor of what needs to be done. It's about letting go of pride to strive for better. It's about friendship and what it really means to want and keep friends. It's about the past coming back to haunt you, bless you, or both. It is also about a goofy loser otaku weeb that has taken up hacking aliens to bits instead of people (most of the time) because a dickhead prince decided playing by the rules was bullshit. It takes itself as seriously as you allow it to, with genuine funny moments, sombre moments, and introspective moments sprinkled all about with careful consideration of context and tone (whether it's preserved or smashed). No matter how you look at it, the story is at least as entertaining as the gameplay is, and is filled with enough manga, anime, film, gaming, and pop culture nods and homages that the fourth wall lies shattered at the players feet from the beginning. At least, that's my takeaway.
Though, if I liked it so much, why does it only get a half a star more than the first game in the series? Perhaps it was the lack of proper stages? Perhaps it was the lack of weapon customization? Perhaps it was the lack of meaningful exploration available despite there being FOUR more overworld maps outside of Santa Destroy? Perhaps it's that certain Rank battles are interrupted by other Assassins, and the subsequent Alien superhero opponent ends up biting the dust before the fight... Maybe it's multiple of, if not all these, reasons, and that I'm still a little salty for being soft-locked in a largely glitchless game.
That all said, I recommend this game that some critics claim is as deranged and psychedelic as a Alejandro Jodorowsky film, even though Travis and his friends would likely want the game to be seen as more of a hard-core work from Takashi Miike.