Essentially, No More Heroes is a 3D hack and slash game where you play as Travis Touchdown, and cut a lot of people into bloody fountains with your beam katana, an everyday lightsaber with a different name to prevent lawsuit. The plot of the game is rather simple: Beat the other 10 ranked assassins in order to become the best assassin there is. As an added bonus, the leader of the assassin association, Sylvia Christel, also promises to have sex with you if you manage to get to the top rank. Now that's what I call motivation! It's a simple plot, the kind of plot I can really get behind, not to mention all the cutscenes are filled with really cheesy bad 80's action film styled dialogue. Sometimes the voice acting and writing does go into actually bad territory, a bit more often than I'd like. At the end of the day, the plot is basically an excuse to go around and cut some dudes heads off. Fun!
I personally love both the design of the beam katana, rather than just being a laser that magically ends at a certain length and breaking all logic breaking the universe, it instead has a thingy that goes down the side and up to the top. It brings some realism to a game where can plow down numerous palm trees with a motorbike without damaging said motorbike.
I personally really want to make a replica of the beam katana in the middle, or possibly the one left since it's the most iconic of the group and the one you get at the start of the game. Or both! I just really love how the sword has a tiny bit of realism, it sure is nice to have such a detail-
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| The Strongest and final Beam Katana in the game |
Oh, nevermind. Well, it was nice while it lasted. Speaking of really cool things I like about this game, let's talk about Travis. His he's basically a giant weeaboo who likes to collect wrestling and anime merchandise. There's something I really like about this character, just the fact that he's a filthy otaku with no life, I relate to that pretty well which probably isn't a good thing. Heck man, just look at his room!
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| The room of a true assassin |
Uhh, but yeah, gameplay! The gameplay is as basic as it can be, you take your sword, and you swing it to cut people. Wee! I can't stress how much fun the gameplay is. Sure, you're just pressing A a lot, but my god, it's so much fun slicing people in half and watching their remains spray out fountains of blood and money. The game structure is what you'd expect, you go from one rank fight to the next, where you do a stage, then have a long fight with the next ranked member. Each stage usually has a unique enough gimmick to make going from stage to stage more fun, such as fighting dudes in busses, or on a train, or maybe you fall asleep and have to do a touhou styled minigame. That was a fun part.
The bosses are definitely some of the best parts of the game, they're basically long duels of skill. Some of my favorites are DestroyMan, who fires giant dick lasers at you, and the large fat woman with a shopping kart laser thingy who hates men and also killed your trainer. It sure was satisfying to decapitate her! However, some bosses really, really grind my gears. Specifically, Shinobu and Bad Girl. I honestly spent 2 hours on both of these fights. I don't mind hard bosses, nor do I mind restarting fights. However, when the boss fights are around 10 minutes each, dying and then restarting the fight gets annoying after a while since it takes so long. I ended up being there for exactly 2 hours and 45 minutes on Bad Girl.
Cutting dudes in half is good and all, however, there is another part of the game I have to mention. While the ranking fights are the main part of the game, inbetween those, you have to gather money! How do you gather money?
By going around in the overworld of Santa Destroy and doing missions over and over, of course! The overworld was cool for about 15 minutes, but once you spend 2 hours in between all of the ranked fights grinding for money to do the next ranked fights and get new katanas, it starts to get a little annoying. An example of some of the missions you have to do is kill the CEO of a chain of restaurants named "Pizza Butt" or gather coconuts and bring them to your employer. Fun for one short mission, not fun when you need to do them countless time to get enough money to go to the next fight. As much as I love the city of Santa Destroy, I think I spent about half of the game in the overworld mindlessly grinding, when I should have been slicing dudes in half.
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| Sir Henry, Secret Boss Dude |
One final thing I need to mention is what happened to me at the end of the game. At the end of the game, there are two endings: A fake out one where you get killed while you're taking a shit on the toilet, and an ending that you get if you've bought all the swords, where you fight your twin brother Henry (He's Irish!) in the parking lot of your motel. It's an intense final fight, and he even did the whole crossguard lightsaber before episode 7, except with two extra lasers for the guard! Of course, before I went to that, I wanted to see the joke ending. After the ending, it took me to the save screen and told me to clear my game. Being an idiot, I thought it just meant adding a little "cleared!" thing next to my profile. I was wrong. Instead, it deleted my save file. I wouldn't be able to fight Henry without replaying the entire game all over again. So basically, my reaction was:
How could they do this to me? That fight looked so fun, now I'll never be able to do it without replaying the whole game, nor will I be able to reload my save and get the rest of the items in the game, or anything of the sort. It pissed me off SO much that I immediately started playing the sequel. I'm not sure why that was my first response, but hey, now you can look forward to a post about the sequel sometime soon.
In short, No More Heroes is a good game, but a flawed game. The voice acting and writing is kind of weird, the gameplay can get boring, especially with some of the overworld stuff, but at the same time, it's so stupidly fun that I can ignore most of the flaws and just have a good, mindless time slicing dudes into nothing but a bloody mess. For now, I'll end the post with the best way to save your game in any game I've ever seen: Taking a shit on a toilet.
Stay classy, No More Heroes.
