No More Heroes

Travis Touchdown has it all... a slick little motel room on permanent rental, a gigantic motorcycle that makes cops look the other way, a video rental shop with all the best Mexican Lucha Libre masked wrestling movies, endless t-shirt choices and an anime statuette collection that any self-respecting Otaku would pay a lifetime supply of Pocky to obtain. Plus, Travis has a cat. Despite all of this apparent opulence, our battery-power light saber-wielding protagonist just won’t be satisfied until he is also the absolute Number One at something. So why not take down the top ten assassins of Santa Destroy and claim that title for himself? This is the plot of No More Heroes... make sure you’ve brushed your teeth and mentally prepared yourself to “enter the garden… of madness!!”

Plotting Points by Tan(x)
Video Game Reviews by a Very Busy Math Teacher

Game: No More Heroes
Platform: Wii
Played For: 21 hours


Our hero Travis, who is somehow defining of the term “dork”, is going to have to work hard to achieve his new-found aims. In order to be declared the Numero Uno assassin in the world, he has to compete in ranked matches against that ragged assortment of misfits and monsters that constitute the current top ten. And the right to a ranked match has to be purchased from the United Assassins Association (represented by the mischievous Sylvia Christel), each successive competition requiring ever vaster sums of the local currency, LB$. Our hero Travis is pretty good at chopping limbs and severing arteries, but he’ll have to work his way up the chain of strangely high-paying service jobs around town, not the least of which include garbage pick-up, coconut collection and atomic scorpion wrangling. Yes, the Southwest does seem to have its unique share of urban dilemmas.

The integral strength of No More Heroes is the consistent adherence to a unique stylistic vision and underlying dark humor. Santa Destroy is a town where t-shirts can be found in every dumpster, traffic languidly rolls around oblivious to our hero’s slightly unlawful motorcycling habits, and all the inhabitants speak in strange and characteristic ways. There is a lingo to the game, and a unique sound that combines the best of Toynbee old school video game bleeps with the tinny synthetics of the Wii remote. “THAT!” declares your martial arts sensei “Thunder Ryu”, many times, often without reference to what he’s talking about. Everything here is a little off of the norm, making the top ten assassins, impossible misanthropic caricatures that they are, feel like they fit right in. No More Heroes presents a world that can offer schoolgirl ninja assassins, giant robots, and baseball thugs, and make it fit all together as a consistent presentation of anime homage, without being a bad B-movie anime itself. Kudos to the creative team behind this whopper of a world, panoply of geekdom and memorable amusements that it is.

While I really enjoyed the insane story and the quite acceptable audio components of No More Heroes (and the game does have an interesting graphical style), there were times that I wondered if the game couldn’t have looked better than it did. A lot of scenes were dark and smudgy... it felt like the resolution was set lower than the average Wii game (which are already not the equal of the competing HD systems.) Could the artistic vision of this game have translated into crisper lines, sharper colors and greater depth of detail? Or, like certain Quentin Tarantino films, was the retro-grainy look a pre-meditated, artistically motivated decision? I suppose that’s for the art critics to sort out, as this game most certainly qualifies as some kind of triumph of pop art.

A second possible complaint is the lack of interaction outside of special event locations in Santa Destroy. Here you have a nice big city a la Grand Theft Auto, but the people ignore your presence, the cops and other drivers are oblivious no matter what side of the road you choose, and other than a clothing store taken from the Hot Topic line of fashion and the local gym, there’s just nothing going on in this town. Driving to the next event was mercifully brief, but it still began to feel like a chore, as there was simply nothing to it... no dramatic tension, if you will. No More Heroes could have benefited from some random encounters on the street, or some kind of consequences for being caught driving badly, or something. Collecting t-shirts out of dumpsters is fun, but more could have been added in this direction. This is a game that is pretending to be an open world sandbox when it really isn’t.

What did work very well for me was the fighting system. Swinging the Wii-mote around to get Travis worked up with his Beam Katana made for a grand old time. Each time you slice up a faceless minion you are treated to a comical explosion of blood and coins, underscored by a satisfyingly synthetic sound effect. Having to stop every few moments to charge up your weapon with frantic shakes of the Wii-mote could have been annoying in a lesser game, but here it made for frequent frenetic fun. The slot machine super abilities (all named deliciously, such as “Blueberry Cheese Brownie”) and wrestling throws supplied enough variation to Travis’s abilities to generate robust, satisfying boss battles with each of the big name assassins (who somehow made me think of the many mutant freaks you square off against in the Metal Gear Solid games. Each one has his or her shtick, a couple of signature moves, some great dialogue and even a hired horde of theme-based underlings!) Beam Katana upgrades were also great, leading to a lot of very pleasing carnage.

No More Heroes is an adult game with many adult themes, a rarity on the Wii system. Raunchy and ultra-violent, the game still managed to always make its over-the-top sensibilities feel necessary to its, well, rather unique artistic vision. My wife, generally not a fan of explosions of blood, severed limbs or sexploitation, was still readily eager to give this one an enthusiastic two thumbs up. Travis is one insane dude, but he is a fun nutcase in an irrational, cartoon world that’s perfectly designed for a good whopping. If anything, this game is extremely memorable, and that in itself is worth the price of admission.

Will I play it more: I’m just dork enough to play THAT again, sometime. Yes, THAT.