The Epitome of Style
Style is something that not many games have these days. Most popular games feature a space-marine with a covered face and less personality than a wad of paper running around and, what else! Shooting aliens. None of them can really boast anything "stylish". All they can boast is... well... Brown and grey. From the sea of samey, blood-soaked shooters emerges No More Heroes. Sure, while it is arguably the most blood-soaked game of 2008, it strays from everything we believe a game to be. It laughs in the face of Master Chief and Marcus Fenix, and comes out one of the most uniquely stylish games anyone has seen in years.
No More Heroes follows the story of Travis Touchdown in the fictional city of Santa Destroy. Travis is a fanatic otaku who is into collecting, wrestling and killing. Yes that's right, he really likes to kill people. In an amazingly blatant ode to Star Wars (a property you will notice is borrowed from even more throughout the game), Travis owns a "Beam Katana" (Light Saber) which he won on Ebay, for the purpose of killing people. With this Beam Katana, Travis is working his way up the ranks to become the world's number one assassin, having been suckered into this "game" of working up the ranks by the beautiful and mysterious, Sylvia Christel.
No More Heroes has a distict rhythm to its gameplay progression and pacing. You rack up money performing odd-jobs and odd-killing missions, earn the allotted amount of money to put in the ATM, opening up the stage for the next of the 10 assassins ranked above you, go through the stage, fight and kill the assassin, then repeat. It may sound repetitive, but the game seems to end at a perfect time to prevent this flaw from becoming overbearing. Besides that, I have never played a game where the cutscenes drive me so much to keep playing. It's been a few console generations since the cutscenes alone have earned a game so many points. They are so incredibly entertaining and hilarious, that you'll want to keep going just to see the next one.
The cutscenes owe all of their entertainment value to the colorful and memorable cast of characters. The main character, Travis Touchdown, is undoubtedly my favorite new character of 2008. He's a crude, foul-mouthed pervert who's only actual motivation to keep killing the assassin's above him, is sleeping with the aforementioned Sylvia Christel. And yet, you would still totally hang out with this loser, despite his being a killer. He's just such a likeable guy, and he's just one of us (minus the killing part). He's into gaming, music, anime and the like.
It may seem like it would be impossible to achieve such high-quality cutscenes with such low-quality visuals, however. I meant it when I said that the cutscenes owe all of their entertainment value to the characters and anime inspired style, because besides the voice acting (which is excellent), the production values do not impress. Boss and main characters are well designed, and look fine, but most normal enemies repeat, and are plagued by low polygon count, and an overall uninspired look. But, the characters do have a subtle cel-shaded look, which gives the game a bit of individuality. Environments fare somewhat worse, with indoor boss stages looking decent, if a little bland, but the open city of Santa Destroy being downright ugly. Draw distances are awful, with cars and trees popping into view mere seconds before running into them on your motorcycle, and the detail on buildings appearing far too late. Santa Destroy also has an eerily empty feel, with very few people walking around the sidewalks, and the few cars repeating often.
The open world does just enough to detract from the overall experience of No More Heroes a bit, but not much. It is a rather small part of the game, and you'll only really be in the open of Santa Destroy to get from destination to destination, essentially making it an enormous hub, as there isn't really much "sandbox" to be had in Santa Destroy. There isn't much to do, other than finding what are called "Lovikov Balls", and doing challenge missions. The real meat of the game comes from its simply, but fun and extreme combat, which takes advantage of the Wii's motion sensitive capabilities without overdoing it in the least.
Combat is primarily handled with the A button for a regular swing of the beam katana, while the B trigger can be used for an attack with your fist. That's right, you won't be swinging your Wii Remote around like a maniac to eviscerate your foes, but you'll either be tilting it up while pressing A, for weaker, quick swings of the Katana, or tilting it down for stronger, sweeping swings of the Katana. If an enemy is stunned, you can perform a wrestling move on them using on-screen motion prompts, and to finish them off, an arrow will appear on-screen facing any direction, telling you to swing the Wii Remote in that prompted direction. It's an amazingly smart compromise to what could have otherwise been an utter disaster in terms of combat control.
Enemy deaths are extravagant, to say the least. Heads and torsos explode from their persons with blood coming down like rain, unfortunately causing the framerate to drop considerably at times. Enemies will often exclaim "my spleen!" when they should really be mourning the loss of just about everything else. Bosses go down hilarious, and even sometimes heartfelt cutscenes that you'll want to watch again and again.
No More Heroes is a game that oozes style, from its characters to its combat. It has its problems, mostly on the technical side, but just about everything else makes up for it, and it is a strong contender for game of the year. SUDA has a sleeper masterpiece on his hands, and I can't wait to see what he has in store for the sequel. The Wii lacks 3rd party support of this caliber, and if every 3rd party developer put this much creative care into their games, the Wii could actually be on top.
