No More Heroes Review

lwelyk wrote this on Tuesday, May 26, 2009 in Nintendo Wii, Reviews

No More Heroes is second only to Mad World in ridiculous, over-the-top violence. Every kill involves gushers of blood spewing forth from the enemy, and every boss battle ends in your opponent’s body being a bunch of bloody stumps. The game isn’t all bloody decapitations though, it’s also ridiculous satire of action movies and games starring a caricature of a violent American who is obsessed with Japan; exactly the kind of stuff you would expect from Suda51.

You can feel Suda’s crazy influence from the beginning as the 4th wall breaking intro cutscene introduces you to Travis Touchdown, our loser otaku protagonist. Basically Travis needed money and assassin was the only job available at the time, so using a battery-powered beam katana he bought on an online auction, he begins his quest to be the number one assassin. Helping him is Silvia Christel, who sets up the matches with the progressively stronger assassins for him.

One of the tamer scenes in the game.

This isn’t free though, which leads to one of the games first problems. You need to make money to unlock the next level, and to do this you must do several things. First, do a rather mundane mini-game such as mowing lawns, which is amusing and short so that isn’t so bad. Second, do small assassin missions where you actually do some fighting. Combat consists of basic sword swings, throws, combos, and a couple charged shots. Thankfully, you press the A button to attack rather than swing the Wii Remote; keeping the game from being too frustrating. The combat is quite fun and keeps things interesting with different types of enemies. That’s not the problem, the problem is getting to these missions.

You navigate No More Heroes through the hub world of Santa Destroy, your city. Unfortunately, aside from a few collectibles, there’s nothing to do in Santa Destroy save get annoyed or lost. You drive halfway across the city to do your mission, only to lose, making you drive back to the mission giver and then back to the mission spot again. It gets very tedious, very fast.The game tries to be open world without anything to do, which just doesn’t work. Objects exist in the overworld, like people, cars, buildings, but your only interaction with them is to crash into them and fall off your motorcycle, forcing you to get back on and traverse the empty world again. It’s like they wanted to make an open world game and a linear action game, and forgot to put any content into the former part.

Travis is pretty awesome for a loser otaku.

Once you get enough money to do the next ranked fight though, things get really fun again. The levels are very simple and linear, but that’s more to the game’s strength. Once you get to the end you are treated to a silly cutscene where the boss and Travis shoot the breeze a bit before killing each other. No More Heroes features some of the greatest boss battles in video games, and you never get the feeling that they hobbled them together from the same mold, they’re all unique.

You have your basic “guy with a big weapon”, but then you have a boss that has filled the battlefield with holes and shoots rockets from her artificial leg at you. There is no strategy that just works on all of them, you need to be prepared to do something completely different for each boss. There is a bit of a difficulty spike in the bosses later in the game though. It’s not an easy game to begin with, but the last few bosses are incredibly difficult and require very good timing and knowledge of the games mechanics.

BEST MINIGAME EVER!

The boring overworld shouldn’t be a deterrent though, once you’re playing the real game, No More Heroes is creative, funny, and ridiculously gory. A game all Wii owners should have if for nothing else but to startle some casual Wii gamers when you cut off so many people’s heads that the blood effects cause the system to lag for a minute.

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