No More Heroes

Genre: Spectacle Fighter

Players: 1

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Review:

No More Heroes is a Spectacle Fighter originally released for the Wii in 2008 before being ported to other platforms, with the game releasing on the Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game features a story that sees its hero, Travis Touchdown, coming into possession of a lightsaber-esque beam sword (apparently bought in an online auction), and of course decides that the natural thing to do is to kill the world’s top 10 assassins so he can be number one. Does that seem silly to you? Yeah, it’s just that sorta’ game – this series is the brainchild of Goichi “Suda51” Suda, best known for having some bizarre stuff in his games, and this one is no exception.

As previously mentioned, this is a game that was originally made in the Wii era, and it looks it. While the resolution has been improved and the framerate is mostly pretty smooth (though it bogs down when things get busy), the game’s character models, environments, and textures definitely look their age, and the game’s video sequences still have their ugly low resolutions from the original release. There’s also a fair amount of ugly aliasing here, to boot. When it originally released, No More Heroes was a pretty good-looking game, but that was 12 years ago and by today’s standard the visuals look pretty quaint, although certainly still playable.

However, all of that is on a technical level, and where No More Heroes always really shined was in its bizarre presentation, highlighting adolescent manchild Travis Touchdown’s expressive personality through presentation elements like on-screen videogamey prompts, slot machine bonuses, the constant spewing of taunts during combat, and eccentricities like Travis going to the bathroom and dropping trou while the screen gets covered with toilet paper whenever the player wants to save.

Make no mistake, whether you love this game or hate it will depend largely on whether you find Travis to be a hilariously silly satire of childish action heroes… or if you just find him to be an immature, despicable, disgusting boor. This guy is “toxic masculinity” personified before that term even became a thing, and the entire game celebrates his extreme tendency towards violence (leading to tons of decapitations and gushing blood), objectifying women (who dress and act as if they’re perfectly happy to be objectified), and just overall being an ass. And to be clear, this is not me complaining, because I recognize that this is largely the point of this character, but even so I know he’s going to rub people the wrong way.

However, while the presentation here is a “love it or hate it” sorta’ thing, the gameplay itself is fantastic. This game was originally designed to make use of the Wii’s motion controls to make for some fairly unique combat mechanics, and those controls transition better than expected to the Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Cons. Players hold the right Joy-Con at different angles to change Travis’s fighting stance, and are prompted to finish off enemies by swinging the controller in a given direction. It mostly works well, although the Joy-Cons don’t always detect motion perfectly – you will likely miss a prompt or two because the damn thing doesn’t detect your motion properly, and even more often the game will just give you a finishing move when you move the controller the wrong way and the game just decides to give it to you anyway.

This was a teensie bit frustrating, but given that the Wii remote uses different motion-sensing capabilities than the Joy-Cons have, I feel like the slight imperfection here is acceptable. Players who want to do without the game’s motion controls do have that option, and can swap to a more traditional control scheme in the game’s menus, though I actually feel like the motion controls feel better-suited to the game and are just more fun. However, I really appreciate that they give players the option to choose here.

This game isn’t without its flaws though, even beyond what quibbles there are with the presentation, and that’s the game’s structure. See, No More Heroes isn’t a simple boss rush with ten assassins to fight, nor is it even just a series of ten levels to fight through. After taking on the first assassin and his legion of mooks, Travis needs to earn enough money to pay a registration fee for each new assassin he targets, and to do this he must take on a series of assassination missions himself, as well as various odd jobs. This is all well and good, but the problem is that these missions are all laid out on an open-world-style map that’s time-consuming to criss-cross back and forth, without much to do in between. In short, this is a game that presents players with an open world that serves absolutely no purpose other than to waste their time, and not in a fun way. Also, some of these odd jobs are plain garbage – such as the coconut-collecting mission that serves as your first job and has nothing to do with the great combat that’s central to the game. Oh, and the camera is a bit of a pain at times too.

If it sounds like I’m doing a lot of complaining here, let me just say that if No More Heroes works for you, it will really work for you. The combat is great, and if you don’t despise the main character and the game’s quirky presentation, you’re likely to love it. And while there are certainly some missteps here, and some elements of the game have aged better than others, overall if you’re a fan of Action games you’ll likely to find this to be a fun, silly, unique title that’s well worth your time.

tl;dr – No More Heroes takes the original game’s Wii motion-control combat and does a pretty good job porting it over to the Nintendo Switch’s Joy-Cons, and while the graphics have aged somewhat, the game’s expressive personality (thanks largely to its outlandish protagonist) is still as bizarre and compelling (or repulsive) as ever. This game definitely has its flaws and rough edges, but overall it’s still a solid and unique Action game.

Grade: B+

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