No More Heroes Review
A lot of action games try very hard to convince players to take them seriously. Resident Evil 4, Heavenly Sword, and God of War are prime examples of this. Luckily, Ubisoft and SUDA-51's No More Heroes is one of those games that doesn't care in the least if it's taken seriously, as it will show you time and time again. Off-beat and irreverent humor abound, curses and excessive violence galore, No More Heroes is one of the most over-the-top action titles ever conceived.
The story centers around Travis Touchdown, a young man who's something of a loser to most. His interests include anime, professional wrestling, kittens, and killing everything in sight with an energy katana he purchased in an online auction. Off to a rollicking start already, aren't we? Mr. Touchdown meets a girl in a bar and offers to buy her a drink; this leads him into a bloody battle with the eleven top-ranked assassins in the world in a struggle to come out on top, and if you think it's got a weird story now, just wait until you've actually started playing. At first, Travis is reluctant, but upon the hint that he'll be compensated with sex should he become #1, he decides that he has nothing else to do anyway and sets out to kill his superiors. Travis's adventures will take him across the city of Santa Destroy to meet with a wild cast of antagonists, but of course, not everything is what it seems to be in the Assassins Association, and Travis comes to some startling realizations about who he's working for and why.
The bulk of the gameplay amounts to a fairly simple formula: Make money, take some side missions to burn time and gain cash, pay an entry fee and start killing hordes of enemies and eventually the mission boss. Upon completing a ranked battle, you receive an increase to health or another varied bonus on occasion, as well as an increase in rank. From there, you need to gain more money in steadily increasing amounts to pay the entry fee to the next highest rank battle. To do this, you'll be given various ordinary tasks like mowing lawns, finding lost kittens, and sweeping mines. These tasks are all deceptively simple, and they make ample use of the Wii's unique control scheme, making for a number of zany and hilarious outings in otherwise mundane tasks. You'll also have various optional assassination missions scattered across the city, as well as sub-assassination missions you can take to earn fairly large sums of money in exchange for offing a few thugs around town.
Insofar as combat goes, No More Heroes has a surprising amount to offer. First off, there are two difficulties: an easy mode, and a hard mode, the latter of which makes guarding more complicated and also elevates enemy strength and aggression. Obviously, you'll want to keep an eye on your Health and Battery meters, considering it's Game Over if the former runs out, and your attacks and guards will become utterly useless if the latter is depleted. For the most part, motion controls are put on the backburner, in favor of a simpler kind of system. Gestures are still present and are used to execute powerful finishing sword and wrestling moves, but the bulk of the combat is controlled simply through the A button and B trigger. A controls Travis's sword attacks, and B dictates brawling moves that are used to stun enemies-both of these occasionally also appear as button prompts to execute bloody finishing moves and gesture-executed suplexes. You can also tilt the Wii Remote up and down to execute high and low attacks, both of which will prove useful in getting through an enemy's guard.
On occasion, when you and an opponent launch an attack at the same time, the two of you will enter a power struggle, in which you'll be required to spin the Remote rapidly and force them back. Should you succeed, a prompt will come up indicating for you to flick the remote in a specific direction to execute a violent finishing move. Another fairly uncommon occurrence is a random-chance sort of transformation that is "rolled" after you kill any enemy; when these happen, you'll enter a brief sort of 'god mode', in which attacks may immediately trigger finishers that require no specific gestures, or you may gain the ability to instantly kill any enemy at the press of a button prompt. A nice touch, but perhaps the downfall of this is that it is completely random, and you'll often find yourself hitting the transformation with few to no enemies remaining alive.
The boss fights are interesting and varied, and often terrain as well as the bosses' unique attacks will come into play. One area, for instance, is littered with hidden holes you might fall into and will have to make use of motion control gestures to clamber out of before being blown up. Another boss arena requires you to coax the enemy into attacking certain flashing lights to cause him to be struck and knocked to the ground. The fights themselves are pretty intense, and will require you to use both high and low attacks, wrestling and sword moves, guarding, and so on. Some bosses' attacks will also keep you guarding or essentially force you to dodge, or take a heavy amount of damage with a strong knockback force. Some attacks will paralyze you, and others will, frustratingly enough, instantly kill you. Fortunately, the attacks that instantly kill tend to be the easiest to avoid, and it should only take you one time meeting with one to realize they're better to avoid.
No More Heroes is a fairly open kind of game, with a city that's large enough that traversing it on foot is generally impractical, which encourages you to use your motorcycle, the Schpeltiger, a bit more frequently. Still, once you've been from one end of the city to the other so many times, it does begin to feel somewhat constrained, though the amount of things you can do in Santa Destroy and the length of many assassination missions available help to ease this and make the game seem much larger. Also helping to increase the overall content is a healthy amount of sidequests and optional items, like new wrestling techniques you can learn from a man named Lovikov in exchange for seven of forty-nine Lovikov Balls per move, and there are also videos you can pick up from a store up the street from your room, Beef Head Video, that will teach you new moves. Thunder Ryu's dojo and gym allows you to use motion control exercises to increase stats like strength and vitality, and even increase your beam katana's combo amount. Area 51 offers a wide variety of clothing at varying prices to alter Travis's appearance to players' tastes, and in the way of weapons, Naomi's Lab occasionally offers new weapons and weapon upgrades to increase your ability to dole out the harshness to thugs around town. But, for those not interested in any of that kind of thing, you can also just kick back in your apartment and mix-and-match outfits, or play with your kitten-No More Heroes really does have something for everyone.
Graphically, No More Heroes can be rather uneven. It has a great sense of style, and the cel-shading is brilliantly done, kind of giving players the feeling that they're actually playing an action anime at times. Still, sometimes the characters feet or appendages may appear a bit blocky, and when you bump into someone on the streets, instead of them reacting in some way, they're sort of shoved aside as if they're surrounded by some impermeable barrier. Aside from the minor graphical blemishes, No More Heroes is a good-looking game, largely due to its unique sense of style, and the glorious fountains of blood and gore you'll be seeing in no short supply-literally every time you kill an enemy an explosion of blood comes gushing forth and spills across the ground before dissipating. Particle attacks used by enemies, and lighting effects are nicely done. The environments are typically very nice-looking, but there is a fairly good amount of graphical pop-in on distant trees and buildings, and occasionally objects will look rough and jagged as you go by. Still, animations are clean and smooth, if wildly exaggerated, and the textures are almost all fantastically done. All in all, the art direction and over-the-top style make up for any graphical discrepancies you might find.
The sound is just as wild as the dialog and the art direction of No More Heroes, all the insane tracks fitting perfectly the ludicrous action in the battles. There's an interesting mix of hard rock and electronic dance music used as the background for the game, and there's even some weird bluegrass-type music thrown in on occasion. It's different, to be sure, but the crazy mix actually works very well. The Wii Remote sound are also nicely done, from the lightsaber-esque whining and groaning noises it emits when you attack to Sylvia's nutty phone calls-the latter of which sound so real that you may even feel tempted to hold up the Remote as though it were a real phone. The voice acting ranges from decent to fantastic, with familiar voice talents like Steve Blum and Quinton Flynn providing voices for a couple of the game's crazy cast. Travis's immature tough guy taunts and asides, Sylvia's dry humor, and even characters like Destroyman's insane ramblings and laughter are all top-notch, if a little exaggerated at times-but really, the melodrama seems more intended, because it contributes more to the dialog than hurts it in this case.
No More Heroes isn't a particularly long game, but the first time through will take you about 12-15 hours of gameplay. Even though there isn't much else to do after the first time through the game, other than trashing all the early missions and bosses with a fully upgraded weapon and a whole host of new wrestling moves, but even that will bring many players back, if the other difficulty setting doesn't. SUDA-51's latest creation is an off-beat roller coaster ride, and while it isn't packed with a ton of heart, it's got a lot of guts to go along with its in-your-face style. This is one title gamers looking for something different should definitely pick up.
