this game has never clicked with me, and, for a long time, i used to think of it as more of a personal failing than anything qualitatively wrong with this game. i recall very few things about my first playthrough of this game. i don't remember exactly when in my life that i played it (just that i was a teenager). i don't recall how i felt about playing the game while actually playing it. all i really remember is that, ironically, i forgot most of it. i remembered the grocery store, the final level and boss, and i vaguely recalled the fights that led up to it. but i didn't remember them in the way i remembered NMH1. there wasn't any shinobu, a boss that demanded i learn not only competency with the game's systems, but also with punishing when bosses left themselves open. i'm not saying there aren't bosses like that in the game, just that i don't remember even doing that learning process. i remember "it's kill or be killed", a few jokes, and that's it. for all intents and purposes, this game was completely disposable to me for a long time. no more heroes 1 is one of my favorite games of all time; you can see how i would want to equate this more to me being a distracted and immature teenager rather than this game being just that exceptionally devoid of impact.

and now, having replayed it, i get it. i get why i didn't remember this game. it's because it's not memorable.

okay, i know that was a lot of build-up to a relatively tame insult, but work with me. regardless of how you felt about no more heroes 1 as a video game, there was essentially one thing you couldn't deny about the game: it had flavor. it was doing something unique. the execution is for all to argue and debate, but you couldn't point to many contemporary games on the wii that were doing something like NMH1. of all the things you could possibly fuck up in a NMH1 sequel, removing the memorability from it has to be the singular worst mistake you could make. it also begs the question of how could you do that? how is it even possible to syphon the personality out of a NMH game and make it feel forgettable?

you can't explore santa destroy anymore, a change i suspect was largely motivated by the bevvy of critiques against the game for having an empty open world. it was ironic and satirizing the trend of open worlds with nothing actually happening in them, but i get it, you got a lot of dings against you for that one. the problem is that in removing this world, you have to replace it with. . . something. and NMH2 doesn't. so you don't have to pay for fights anymore, meaning money serves less of a purpose, not to mention naomi has a grand total of Two (2) things to sell you in the entire game. all you really need money for are the upgrades ryan'll give you. so, you're far more likely to barely spend any time in between missions dicking around. NMH1 had pacing inherent to the game with making the player get money. it made the combat sections that much more memorable because they were separated by mundanity. some people hated it and said it made the game boring, but they missed the point in that the mundane elevated the profane. when you don't have that time to ponder and anticipate, you lose payoff. it doesn't help that the mini-games in this game are far more hit-or-miss, and while they have slightly more retro-game charm to them, that doesn't excuse how awfully some of them play (i.e. the coconut and space mini-games). you're going to more than likely just go from assassination mission to assassination mission and it will likely blur together like it did for me.

and when it does come to the assassination missions, they leave much to be desired. the game starts out pretty strong with its first few levels, but then slowly it starts to decline. eventually you get to levels that have no music playing during them, or are just empty "drive along this road for 3 minutes and reach the boss" moments. some assassination missions don't even have levels. i eventually had to look up what the dev period for this game was. it had about 2 years, which is not terrible by any means. i get that not every single part of the game can be a home-run, but there's such a gigantic lack of content relative to the first game. let me repeat: there's no open world, less worthwhile mini-games, no collectibles, less levels, no sylvia phonecalls, and less to buy. again, i don't subscribe to the theory that sequels need to be bigger and grander than their predecessor, but NMH2 cuts out so much content and replaces it with nothing. i can't help but feel like this is just a hollowed out game as a result.

the assassins in this game suffer the most in regards to lack of personality. i think this problem is more systemic than "they really struck out on bosses this frequently", because most bosses have next to no lines of dialogue, little build-up, and are disposed of with little impact to travis. they try to have a holly summers moment with ryuji, but considering that ryuji literally does not speak once and has no introduction beyond "im on a motorcycle and japanese 😤", why should i care? i mean, holly didn't have that many lines, but you still got a very strong idea for who she is and the fact that she chose her own death and the way she did it made her memorable. ryuji dies because. . . he lost to travis and sylvia wanted to troll. okay. complete flop of a moment, and they linger on travis' reaction to try and imply that this is some turning point for him. it just doesn't work.

the real kiss of death here is that i actually detest a large portion of the boss fights in regards to gameplay. let's just come right out and say it: this game is mostly bad boss fights with very few good ones. in the spirit of 13 sentinels, i will now go over every fight individually and delineate things about it that stand out to me.

helter skelter: awful fight once you get past the tutorialized section of it. i firmly believe most people tend not to notice how bad this fight is because by the time you actually start it, he has half health. he suffers from a common problem in this game, which is "has a no wind-up or tell move that comes out extremely quickly that can break your guard and often leads to a follow-up attack that will do a lot of damage". you can dodge the follow-up attack typically, but there is no way you're capable of reacting in time for the lead-up. almost every boss in the entire game has it, so this is more a universal complaint than unique, so i won't mention it in the following summaries. but still, fuck man. outside of that, he's just a boss where you have to wait for him to use the one combo that leaves him vulnerable, and if you exercise any level of proactive aggression, he punishes it immediately. it's a very boring and poor fight to start with.

nathan copeland: i mean, at least he's better than the guys he's sandwiched between. he's appropriately easy as far as early bosses go, only real difficulty comes from when his environmental hazards start stunlocking you. i barely remember anything he actually does because he's so easy to just whale on without him retaliating much.

charlie macdonald: literally not even a fight. the gimmick wears thin almost immediately and is brainless to overcome. why even include this in the game.

kimmy howell: definitely one of the few fights i like in the game. has a fun and quirky introduction that makes her honestly the most memorable character introduced in this game. only complaints i have for her is that her moveset is fairly simple, and her projectile is such a nonfactor. it definitely feels like she could've stood to have maybe a little more complexity, she's very easy to solve and her AI lacks aggression. but, again, this is a fight i like, if only because i remember it pretty vividly.

matt helms: hey look, one of the worse fights in the game! his molotov attack is buttfucking stupid in regards to him not being interruptible while using it + it breaks guards + it lingers on the ground. all you need to do is subtract one of those things and the attack becomes balanced and fine. in general i just dislike his whole adult baby vibe and the fight itself is one of the rare cases of "spamming attacks and being mindlessly aggressive is in your best interest" for the duology. his lore is completely lame too, you couldn't come up with something more interesting than "he's a spooky ghost who killed his parents!!!"?

cloe walsh: nothingburger of a boss both in aesthetic and fight. she has such low HP that you can cream through her fairly quickly, meanwhile her attacks are so telegraphed that you have to be not paying attention to be in any real danger. you'd think her being both in a high security prison and also having magical poison abilities would give her at least a little room to talk about who she is or what her deal is, but the game seems to want to get rid of her as quickly as possible.

dr. letz shake: fun idea to have him come back, but then you run into the obvious problem of "how are you going to make fighting a giant machine work in this type of game?", and, ultimately, they don't. he has only 3 attacks, one of which is just a basic "get off me" move. the joke outstays its welcome because it wasn't even particularly funny in the first place.

million gunman: cool fight theme, literally nothing else remarkable about him outside of him being possible to infinite (low attack into 2-3 high attacks will make him take some damage, then start dodging, and then he'll try to retaliate with a move you can punish before it launches, repeating the cycle).

new destroyman: hey look! another god awful fight! having one of the destroyman halves spam projectile moves is infuriating to deal with, difficulty be damned. i know the cheese strat of hiding in the upper right corner so that you can isolate the red eye and blue eye just does nothing, but that doesn't fix the fight. even when you do it that way, you're still going to have to play grabass with the blue eye half for at least 5-10 minutes, if not longer. all of this is exacerbated by the fact that shinobu's combos have such terrible finishing lag that your only safe option is to just spam sonic sword. either way, it's an objectively horribly designed fight.

ryuji: on this replay, i distinctly remember thinking "this is the first actual boss fight that feels like it could belong in NMH1"; that only really applies in terms of his fight's design, though. ryuji, as mentioned, is another nothingburger. i would probably like his fight if his shiteating dragon wasn't such a liferuiner. i've had the damn thing pinball me back and forth between hit boxes while guarding until my battery ran out and i died. trying to do anything to ryuji while the dragon's summoned is futile because you might as well be playing smash bros. with items on at that point. you can lock him down in a combo and the dragon will zoom into you without warning. you're better off just waiting until it disappears, so add that to the list of bosses where waiting is the most reliable strategy. ryuji himself has a decent moveset and learning how to answer his attacks genuinely feels good, it's just that shitty dragon that's the problem. . . what's that? motorcycle fight? no, we're not even going to talk about that.

mimmy: is it bad that i like this fight. i feel like it's bad because it's the easiest fight in the entire game. just spam charge attacks and use the invincibility frames to avoid damage. at least it has a good fight theme.

marge: i've never understood the hype behind marge. the location is gorgeous from an aesthetics point of view, but her fight is so stupidly easy it feels like a genuine error to place it this late. it slots in better between like, kimmy and matt helms. she genuinely does such little damage and the attacks she has are very obviously telegraphed. combine that with the abundance of health drops that spawn (excluding bitter mode obviously) and i can't imagine many people died to her. she's one of the endgame bosses and she feels like babymode. i mean, i do still like her fight, but it always feels like i'm bullying someone with a handicap.

captain vladimir: completely worthless fight. why is an astronaut an assassin. why is he floating. whatever. he has probably the "least likely to ever hit you" instakill, can shoot very easily dodged lasers, and can throw rocks at you. that's about it. it's also comedic at the game's expense when they try to have an emotional moment when he dies. who is this fucking random soviet astronaut and why is he #3.

alice twilight: going to say nothing revolutionary when i say that she's far and away the best boss in the game on every front. great cutscene introducing her that gives us the idea that she has an interior life that we'll never get to know + a fight that's designed very well + a unique fighting style + an extremely great fight theme. the only bad thing i can say about this fight is less at the fight's expense and more the game's: why play this game for this fight when heroes' paradise already has it? lol

jasper batt: everything wrong with this game can be traced back to this character. both in design and also in lore. and also yuri lowenthal. genuinely one of the worst final boss fights in a game that i've played in recent memory, potentially in the top 5. i would literally prefer if the game just ended on a fake-out with no fight than this shitshow. teleporting punch moves that have no telegraph and will break your guard? Fuck you.

these fights suffer from being either too gimmicky or too unbalanced (both for and against the player). i think you can also argue that personality-wise so many of these fights fall short because we're given nothing to work with on any level. who is cloe walsh? why should i care? who is million gunman? why should i care? who is captain vladimir? why should i care? hell, matt helms and ryuji share the exact same boss theme despite being complete polar opposites both in setting and design. i'm not going to say that every single boss in NMH1 was a winner (even though i unironically think they were), but at least i could describe them with more than like, two adjectives. i truly could not say the same thing about most of NMH2's bosses. what this ultimately means is that when there's so few boss fights i actually like, i have next to nothing to look forward to in the game. it's just "oh i have to THAT fight now, great" over and over again. ironically, despite having 15 bosses, the game feels so much shorter and less developed compared to the first game's 10. you can argue quality > quantity, and surely that's part of it, but i think another part of it is just that NMH2 lives in the shadow of the first game.

NMH2 has this huge issue of being up its own ass. it takes itself far too seriously when the first game was going in nearly the opposite direction. sure, 1 had plot twists and serious moments, but they were always underlined by how absurd the setting is. the characters play everything straight, it's the fact that they exist in this world that not only allows deathmatches, but makes it this mundane bureaucratic exercise. hell, one fight in the game gets prevented just because travis wasn't following protocol. contrast this with NMH2, where travis is suddenly viewed as a god by everyone and even gets his face painted as a mural che guevara style. the assassins you fight will literally talk about how they've been waiting to be killed by him in this cultish way, and it all doesn't work when the first game's ending reveals that the UAA was all a scam set up by sylvia to milk travis for money, not to mention that travis was a gigantic loser for falling for it. in NMH1, travis is a tragic yet pathetic character. in NMH2, travis is the opposite, an epic force meant to change the world for the better. it's so out of place and unfitting for the setting of santa destroy. you exchanged nihilism and apathy for optimism and redemption without any of the work to earn it.

it's one thing for a game to have a bad sequel, but i think going from where NMH1 left off, you were doomed no matter what. you literally sequelize the game that said "too bad, no sequel for you", where do you go from there? it's equally baffling because suda was involved in both projects, so we can't sit here and say it was a case of losing the visionary of the series. what happened? not only does this game take itself too seriously, it's about as funny as a fucking funeral. i just want so badly to find anything about this game to like, but it feels ironically a victim of its own malaise. NMH1 made fun of itself so much that it's impossible for me to take this setting as seriously as 2 wants me to. NMH1 wanted me to take this wacky setting for what it is and see what happens when people play it straight. NMH2 wanted to franchise it.