You can keep your heroes, thanks.
Warning: No More Heroes may contain content that is innapropriate for everyone.
Blood will flow. Strange sexual references will be made. Human limbs will littler the ground. It's pure, outrageous genious.
The story of No More Heroes is a very simple one. Travis Touchdown, the antihero of the game, goes out for a drink one night and ends up killing the eleventh best assassin in his hometown of Santa Destroy. Now officially a ranked assassin in the UAA (or something like that...) Travis must kill off the ten assassins ranked higher than him and take his place as the top ranked assassin in Santa Destroy. Led along by a seductive French woman from the UAA, Travis carves a bloody path through his rivals in hopes of (and here's what really ties the plot together) getting laid. Yes, Travis kills all of these people mostly in pursuit of getting a little tail. Of course, once you've finished beating down your sixth or seventh victim, you can't help but get the suspicion that maybe everything is going too smoothly...
Combat in NMH is simple but fun. Like in Zelda, the Z button locks on to enemies. From here, pressing the A button will attack with Travis' beam katana and pressing B will execute physical attacks like wrestling moves. Motion control is smartly implemented only in Travis' finishing moves, which send heads flying more often than not. All in all, combat is easy to learn and fun to master thanks to a two button control scheme similar to a Super Smash game. Everything outside of combat kind of suffers, though. Movement control is a bit stiff, but easy to get used to. Worse than the movement control is the open world wandering that occurs between missions. Travis drives a motorcycle from mission to mission in an open world format, but the motorcycle controls very stiffly and collision detection with other vehicles is abysmal. It's still preferable to navigating a bunch of menus, but it's far from polished. Side missions such as mowing lawns and lower-ranked assassination missions are available, and while none are bad, none really stand out either.
A wickedly unique graphical style can't save NMH's graphics score from mediocrity. In fact, at times the graphical style actually makes the graphics look worse. Objects can look blurry or undefined, and pop in is frequent in the open world segments. Cutscenes still look decent. Character design is often fantastic and sometimes bizzare.
"F***heads!" This is one of the first words you will hear Travis say as he beheads two grunts. If that doesn't really strike your fancy, you may want to mute some of the dialouge in NMH. Honestly, though, despite the somewhat meatheaded introduction, NMH has simply brilliant dialouge. Brilliant in a crazy way. This game manages to be hilarious, wacky, and maybe a bit gross all at once thanks to a great script delivered by good voice actors. Simply put, the sound matches up with the game very well. There is rarely any music in NMH save for a few guitar licks every once in a while.
To put it simply, No More Heroes is a game with its own unique sensibilities, and quite frankly it doesn't give a crap if you like it or not. The weird, 100% entertaining cutscenes are really what make No More Heroes one of the best Wii games yet.
Brushed your teeth lately? Need to shave? Then what are you waiting for? Buy No More Heroes, and head towards the Garden of Madness!
Blood will flow. Strange sexual references will be made. Human limbs will littler the ground. It's pure, outrageous genious.
The story of No More Heroes is a very simple one. Travis Touchdown, the antihero of the game, goes out for a drink one night and ends up killing the eleventh best assassin in his hometown of Santa Destroy. Now officially a ranked assassin in the UAA (or something like that...) Travis must kill off the ten assassins ranked higher than him and take his place as the top ranked assassin in Santa Destroy. Led along by a seductive French woman from the UAA, Travis carves a bloody path through his rivals in hopes of (and here's what really ties the plot together) getting laid. Yes, Travis kills all of these people mostly in pursuit of getting a little tail. Of course, once you've finished beating down your sixth or seventh victim, you can't help but get the suspicion that maybe everything is going too smoothly...
Combat in NMH is simple but fun. Like in Zelda, the Z button locks on to enemies. From here, pressing the A button will attack with Travis' beam katana and pressing B will execute physical attacks like wrestling moves. Motion control is smartly implemented only in Travis' finishing moves, which send heads flying more often than not. All in all, combat is easy to learn and fun to master thanks to a two button control scheme similar to a Super Smash game. Everything outside of combat kind of suffers, though. Movement control is a bit stiff, but easy to get used to. Worse than the movement control is the open world wandering that occurs between missions. Travis drives a motorcycle from mission to mission in an open world format, but the motorcycle controls very stiffly and collision detection with other vehicles is abysmal. It's still preferable to navigating a bunch of menus, but it's far from polished. Side missions such as mowing lawns and lower-ranked assassination missions are available, and while none are bad, none really stand out either.
A wickedly unique graphical style can't save NMH's graphics score from mediocrity. In fact, at times the graphical style actually makes the graphics look worse. Objects can look blurry or undefined, and pop in is frequent in the open world segments. Cutscenes still look decent. Character design is often fantastic and sometimes bizzare.
"F***heads!" This is one of the first words you will hear Travis say as he beheads two grunts. If that doesn't really strike your fancy, you may want to mute some of the dialouge in NMH. Honestly, though, despite the somewhat meatheaded introduction, NMH has simply brilliant dialouge. Brilliant in a crazy way. This game manages to be hilarious, wacky, and maybe a bit gross all at once thanks to a great script delivered by good voice actors. Simply put, the sound matches up with the game very well. There is rarely any music in NMH save for a few guitar licks every once in a while.
To put it simply, No More Heroes is a game with its own unique sensibilities, and quite frankly it doesn't give a crap if you like it or not. The weird, 100% entertaining cutscenes are really what make No More Heroes one of the best Wii games yet.
Brushed your teeth lately? Need to shave? Then what are you waiting for? Buy No More Heroes, and head towards the Garden of Madness!
