Travis Touchdown Returns
The first No More Heroes was one of the most celebrated 3rd party titles on the Wii when it arrived in 2008, so naturally there were high hopes for the sequel. Desperate Struggle is indeed a sequel, you play as the crazed assassin Travis Touchdown once again climbing the rankings to become the number one assassin in Santa Destroy, and once again his quest is pretty much fueled by the most stereotypical male motives, blown out to the extreme. The same blonde haired lady wearing as little clothes as she can get away with is pulling the strings, and everything works out pretty much like you'd expect.
The differences are apparent however, and many of the changes have to do with making the game play better than the first. This is a good sentiment, and generally they were successful at making the controls a little less frustrating, but it is still No More Heroes, and that means clunky controls. The game's pacing is where I saw a larger difference. In the first NMH, you would spend a good amount of time gathering money to buy upgrades, weapons, and entrance to the next ranking match. Once you entered the ranking match you would spend a good bit of time running through an area slaughtering numerous henchmen and generally causing havoc before you reached the boss, most of which took a long time to beat, and many of whom were challenging to the point where I died a few times trying. Desperate Struggle cuts out a lot of that, making money not required to enter ranking matches, as well as having less upgrades and weapons to buy, and also buy cutting down significantly on the length of areas leading up to bosses, as well as reducing the length and difficulty of the boss fights themselves. They do offer more boss fights than the original, but not a whole lot more, and unfortunately almost all of them aren't half as interesting as most bosses from the first game.
Where Desperate Struggle really shines is probably the strangest thing about the game - the minigames. This game is riddled with multitudes of small, simple minigames that range from the various activities you do to excercise your overweight cat to Travis' creepy anime video game to the many 8-bit "job" minigames that actually earn you money. These are generally hilarious and fun to play, almost more so than the actual game you're playing them within.
Gameplay aside, what made the original No More Heroes such a standout game was its over the top action and dialogue that meshed with the most ridiculous characters and an extremely warped sort of mix of japanese and american culture. Unfortunately, while the sequel tries to carry that feeling on, it really only has the same feel to it for the first few fights, and quickly drops off into a fairly boring area in which it remains for the rest of the game. I don't think the game gets any help in this area by taking the action out of Travis' perspective for a couple of missions towards the end, putting you instead in control of Shinobu and Henry. I enjoyed the slight change in gameplay for those missions, but really felt like these games should be all about Travis, because he is the pure embodiment of all the ridiculousness that makes No More Heroes great.
Overall this is a sequel that is both better and worse than the game before it. In my opinion, the things we lost are vastly more important to the franchise than what we gained, because I don't think anybody cared about the wonky gameplay of No More Heroes, but they still loved it. Maybe if they could strike that gold mine of oozing over the topness again this series can come back stronger than ever, but I don't think Desperate Struggle really took it anywhere it needed to go.
