Game Spotlight: No More Heroes + No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle

Twilight Lynk has reached its second anniversary, so I thought I would write an entry about the very game and its unexpected sequel that represents the spirit of video games and gamers everywhere… though only a certain niche group would probably agree with that assessment.

I’ve been trying to decide how I should be going about the Game Spotlight for these two games. They’ve been created by a developer that has released an odd array of games, led by a man who is brilliant yet ignored by most, released on a console many gamers don’t really take seriously.

My first encounter with Goichi Suda (aka Suda51) was on the GameCube through a game called “killer7″… without going into too much detail (we can save that for another Game Spotlight), there are those who have studied the game in intricate detail, even writing entire essays relating to what the game was really about. No, seriously, you can have a look for yourself if you look around hard enough… basically, the game was a socio-political look at the relationship between the east and west… it’s riveting stuff.

No More Heroes, on the other hand, does not deal with such SERIOUS BUSINESS subject matter. In fact, what it does deal with is very close to our hearts… video games. What the folks over at Grasshopper Manufacture have created with No More Heroes is an observation of video games, the state of video games in the world today, and the types of people who play these games. Just as there have been walls of text written up for killer7, the same has been done for No More Heroes and its sequel… and it’s just a whole lot of outrageously silly fun at the expense… of everything.

Both games also drip with pop culture references, everything from sci-fi to anime, video games, wrestling, music, movies and so on. Some are more subtle than others and I’m sure there are a lot that are just fly right over peoples heads.

No More Heroes

Before anyone even knew of the games existence, the project titled “Heroes” was originally planned for an exclusive release on the Xbox 360. However, early into its development the project jumped ship and became a Wii game. A few days after E3 2006, the first trailer for Heroes was released… and man was it quite the interesting trailer, complete with an interesting art style akin to killer7, what appeared to be a lightsaber, characters with outrageous names and horrendously bad voice acting. Fans of killer7 looked at this trailer and started to interpret it as a statement between the flashy HD consoles (360 and PS3) vs Wii. In the trailer, Travis Touchdown famously utters the line “Your shining armour and fine words won’t get you anywhere!“… awesomely lame.

Who is Travis Touchdown? Well, he’s you, me, and just about every other geek out there in our world. On the surface the story of No More Heroes is a simple one. Geek buys a “beam katana” off of eBay; geek becomes an assassin. After making his first kill he strikes a deal to become the number 1 assassin so he can bone a hawt blonde French chick as his prize… of course, it’s not really that simple.

A common thread that binds a lot of games developed by Grasshopper Manufacture is that they all seem to have a streak of brilliance through what is otherwise an awkward set of gameplay mechanics. Most would look at these games and see them as half baked; missing the mark of what makes a game playable. These complaints are valid in a way, but I find that a lot of what seems restrictive about these games is in themselves a message to the player about what this game really is about.

For example, in No More Heroes, the most engaging and thrilling parts are always the boss battles and the combat itself. This is where No More Heroes shines and it’s the time when players truly feel the joy of gaming. On the other hand, the overworld of Santa Destroy is dull, lifeless and a pain in the ass to make your way through. To get through the streets of Santa Destroy, you use the Schpeltiger, Travis’ “super large scooter” that resembles an X-Wing and is as big as a Y-Wing, is an awesome machine but difficult to control and not the most practical way of getting around Santa Destroy. There are many elements like this that make up the game, but they don’t appear to be lacking because of laziness, but rather on purpose.

As I’ve mentioned before, a lot of people have their own theories and have written up walls of text about their theories all around the interweb. I’ll link you to a few of them that I’ve found at the end of the entry since they’re all pretty interesting reads… if you’ve played the game, of course.

So, you either hate it and don’t get what anyone sees in it, or you like it because it has some fun moments scattered through it, or you love it because you feel there’s something else there that’s more than the sum of its parts.

No More Heroes: Heroes’ Paradise

Recently in Japan, a version of the game called “No More Heroes: Heroes’ Paradise” has been ported over to the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 with HD visuals and a mode called “Very Sweet” where all of the female characters wear much skimpier outfits than they usually do in the standard game. I don’t really know how I feel about the making of this port mostly because Suda51 and Grasshopper Manufacture had no involvement in its creation. True, the original concept for the game was planned as a 360 release, however it evolved since then and became something entirely different.

The motion controls in No More Heroes is what gives the game its fun factor. Performing wrestling moves and finishers through the commands that appear on screen by any other means seems pointless. In fact, No More Heroes 2 has the option of letting players use the Wii Classic Controller instead of the usual Wii Remote + Nunchuk setup as an alternative… it’s nowhere near as good. When you’re in the heat of a great boss battle, the motion controls give it that extra push that makes you feel great when you knock the boss back and perform a critical hit or a wrestling move on them… but speaking of No More Heroes 2…

No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle

I honestly didn’t expect it when the first trailer for the game was revealed. I mean, I wanted MORE No More Heroes, but felt that it wasn’t a possibility since, at the time, Suda51 had not made a sequel for any of his games. So, I’m very thankful for the existence of No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle. I wanted more and was given exactly what I wanted.

The funny thing about it is that Suda51 himself stated that the first No More Heroes was intended to be a stand alone game and that he had no plans for a sequel at all. Even funnier is the fact that at the end of the first game, in its “true” ending sequence it shows “To be continued” written much like the way it was written at the end of Back to the Future… For those of you who don’t actually know why that’s funny, it’s because the first Back to the Future movie was intended to be a stand alone movie with no plans for any sequels. It wasn’t till the movie was released and became an instant hit that the plans for a sequel were ever thought of… the “To be continued” text at the end of the first movie was just a tease for the audience to make them think something more was coming when, at the time, it wasn’t true… I love it.

In NMH2, the story continues from the first… but what exactly is the story of No More Heroes? While it is fun to have these characters die in absurd ways as their blood splatters everywhere, there’s more to it than that. Is the quest to become number 1 really what this is about in the first? Is the quest for revenge the true plot in the second? I don’t think so, and many others don’t either. If you hadn’t realised that there was more going on than what was literally being shown on screen in the first game, you certainly will in the second.

I enjoyed the combat gameplay in the first game quite a lot and somehow they managed to improve it immensely in the second game. I haven’t really gone back to the first game to compare just exactly how things were changed to see whether these changes were big changes or subtle ones, but whatever they did made the whole experience a hell of a lot more fun. Of course, the biggest addition to the game that added the most to the experience were the 8-bit mini-games.

I’m sure a lot of people are getting sick of mini-game collections in games these days, and in a way, NMH2 is making a statement about just that… but at the same time, the mini-games that are a part of this game are mind-blowingly good. I would go on and on just about these games, however I’ve decided that to try to cut this entry down a little since it’s become so long, I’ll post up a separate entry talking exclusively about the 8-bit games that appear in NMH2.

The only unfortunate part about this game is the fact that it’s much too short. The first game was a little longer since you had to do a little more to earn money so you could progress to the next ranked battle, but in the second game you can just continue on whenever you wanted. I did take my time and earned enough money to buy all of the beam katana’s as well as complete all of the revenge missions, but still… I just breezed through the game in a day and that was that. I absolutely love the game, but I think I may have loved it a little too quickly…

Much like the end of the first game, there doesn’t appear to be anything to suggest that there will be a sequel in the future. Suda51 has suggested that their may be a sequel if enough people want it and that it would appear on Nintendo next home console. If there is a No More Heroes 3, will it be centered on Travis Touchdown or is this really the end of his story?

Whatever happens, these two games have been one hell of a ride.

Some interesting reads…

As mentioned above many times… there are quite a lot of people who like to write walls of text (including me looking at the size of this entry) about No More Heroes. Here are some of those articles that I could find for this entry, but I’m sure there are more out there.

No More Heroes related articles

No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle related articles

Damn, long entry is long. I really didn’t intend things to get this long… plus this entry has taken me a few days to write, destroy, rewrite, rinse and repeat… the Game Spotlight entries are more about shedding light on games some people may have missed for whatever reason. Sure, I do end up talking about some games that everyone and their dog have bought at times, but the Game Spotlight is really meant for games such as this… ones that shouldn’t be ignored, but are… unfortunately.