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

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


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


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

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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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


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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Can you do anything about it?

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

Is this really the end of history?

Is this really the end?

No more heroes.

The people who were around for the original punk movement and its derivatives are in their 60s, 70s, or even 80s now - isn't that crazy? My own dad, in his 60s himself, loves to remind me that he was actually there for Buzzcocks, The Clash, and Sex Pistols. His crown jewel "I was there" story is that he saw Diego Maradona score his first ever international goal at Hampden Park and then walked down the road to see Joy Division play their one and only gig in Glasgow later that day. Imagine living through that! When I go to a hometown gig and see a grey-haired dude or two hanging around the bar area, leaning on a walking stick or trying to sneak a breather, it's a surreal reminder that the ranks of "the older generation" are quickly being filled with people who raged against the machine before it was even a band. It's fun to imagine what these folks were like when they were young - what passions and dreams they held. How do I relate myself to them, and what do they have left to relate to me?

I'm not going so far as to say that Goichi Suda and his collaborators are synonymous with the occassional old men I see propping up the bar at their local PVSSYC#NT DIY show or Buzzcocks revival tour-stop, but the long-time staff at Grasshopper are, despite their pseudo-punk status, among the elder statesmen of game developers. Suda 51 has credits on 40 games that are spanned across three decades (will he retire at 51 games and release "The Suda 51 Games Collection"?!) and outside of secretive Nintendo legends like Miyamoto and Tezuka, I can't think of many individual game designers who are sitting on such broad production prestige and history. Travis Strikes Again, is, to my mind, the equivalent of one of those old greybeards finally sitting you down at a table in the beer-soaked venue and telling you all about their good old days stories - and how they're going to try and start a new band, too, of course.

It can feel somewhat ridiculous to attribute any video game to a single creator - as people often do with Suda - but Travis Strikes Again seems well aware of this, with frequent acknowledgements of the collaborative sacrifices that game developers make to create something that's either theirs or another's. It may feel unfair to the programmers and artists and guys who man the Twitter accounts, but I feel that it's imperative for games with "independent" spirit to continue transmitting truly single-personal perspectives in response to amorphous commitee-led industry dominators like Call of Duty and Assassin's Creed, and one of the only ways to tell a personal story is to focus it on one person - often the writer, or the director. Or the guy who is both. And the guy who is both in this case has an interesting life story (that's still in development, sorry) that I'd like to hear.

Despite speaking so highly of Suda (and Grasshopper) here, I'd say it's fair to say that it's rare that I outright love any of the many games they've made. There's always some glaring, punishing flaw or Duchampian aggression against the status quo that just reminds me too much that I'm wasting precious time. Time-wasting feels like a trait that's almost exclusively reserved for video games, and perhaps it's a unique aspect of the medium that Suda just loves to take advantage of time and time again to differentiate his work from that of a movie or painting or book. But I don't often appreciate it! And while it's nowhere near as brain-mummifiying as The 25th Ward or FSR, Travis Strikes Again still likes to hold up your clock. It feels to me like the game is hamstrung by a perceived need to offer value for money - despite its attempts to stand apart as a genuine art-piece of personal history, it's still constrained on some level by a desire to be a consumable product that people can "get their $40 from" and put 6/10 or 4/5 star ratings or whatever against in a games magazine or website or review blog. It fills its levels with stuff that simply doesn't need to be there, feeling like a guitar solo that goes on too long. But that's punk, right?

The greatest artwork-transgressor is likely the combat itself. While surprisingly strategic and satisfying at times (especially in the later levels), it eventually boils down to the same patterns/plays as always, and ultimately serves as an overbearing obstacle that stands in the way of getting more personal insights and pseudohistorical musings from the remembering minds at Grasshopper. Golden Dragon GP and Killer Marathon are probably the most enjoyable Death Balls in the collection due to the generous ways they interrupt the monotony of streets of raging/geometry warsing across Pac-Man mazes, and I kinda wish the game had been a minigame collection that homaged the different Grasshopper genres. It might have been even better if Travis had just peacefully walked round an Unreal Engine recreation of Suda's headspace and history in a manner not unlike Bubsy 3D: Bubsy Visits the James Turrell Retrospective; the game is at its best when it's just sharing its secrets and fun with you.

It's cute that the Serious Moonlight section bills itself as a Shadows of the Damned mini-sequel, but how fun would it have been if they're actually tried to emulate that game's feel, even superficially? C'mon! It's Unreal! The engine that everyone and everything uses for TPS action! (Given how much this game honours Unreal Engine/Tournament, it's a shame that Travis hasn't flossed his way into Fortnite yet) Perhaps too much to ask of our developers, but I honestly feel like there's a human limit to how much mindless swinging of a beam katana one can do while waiting for their clinch super move to charge back up. I went to the UK National Video Games Museum recently, and it proved to me that there's genuine value in getting people to experience gaming history by actually playing those games in quick, sequential succession. I think an Any% playthrough of Grasshopper's entire history is maybe what Vicarious/Grasshopper wanted for Travis Strikes Again, but probably didn't have time to do. Again, video games continue to take away our time in ways other artworks don't quite manage...

It's interesting to parallel this game with something like this year's Iwata Asks book - Iwata's auto/biography has some insightful stories and letters, but doesn't truly bear any of the guy's emotion or soul much beyond vague pleasantries like "I respect the developers at Nintendo" and "Shigeru Miyamoto was my friend". Suda, by contrast, seems more than willing to (sparsely) share his silver threads of thought, often in ways that can be uncomfortable for players - the infamous "the CEO of EA is a woman-beating piece of shit because he didn't let me make my high-concept AAA RPG game wacky enough" is an ugly piece of thinly-veiled thought from Suda, but it's preferable to the Nintendo CEO's polite corporate mannerisming. If video games really want to take that next artistic step, they do need the space to let out some of the ugly problematic thoughts inside our heads (the need to "burn sadness like life-giving fuel" as Travis surprisingly says), and I feel like Travis Strikes Again is moving things in the right direction. This is arguably an art-therapy session for these old boys.

At its core, I guess that's what Travis Strikes Again is. Something that's kinda ugly and protracted and painful, but undeniably worthwhile by virtue of its willingness to be earnestly personal and transgressive. A game that isn't so much about the act of playing the game itself, but more focused on the process of putting your brain against a gamepad to see inside someone else's brain on the other side of the cartridge. It's been a long road to this point, and there's still a long way to go, but they'll keep going. 10 hours of video games a day.

In the human world,
the time for games has ended.
Nothing binds us now.

this is exactly what would happen if you went back in time to 2007 with a copy of ultrakill, bulletstorm and fear and gave it to a bunch of source modders

the narrative kinda falls on its ass when it gets gigarushed 3 missions in, and the gunplay when youre not in bullet time feels like trying to pee with a boner when youre not using the spassy

i'd recommend this to anyone who has ever held a computer mouse, including my own mother