No More Heroes

An intentionally boring open world punctuated with wild, intense action, No More Heroes and its main character Travis is a good representation of the gamer and gamer's mindset. The world feels so lifeless and mundane to them and so they are desperate not only for some form of escape, but also to satisfy a thirst for violence. The fact that gamers complain so much about the open world only makes it funnier and reinforces the point the game is trying to make. It also makes you realize how the open world of the Grand Theft Auto games are more like a playground than an actual world. So No More Heroes ends up not only being more over-the-top and ridiculous than any Grand Theft Auto, it is also far more realistic at the same time. Such polarization and contradiction is the result of extraordinarily high artistic ambition, and such full realization of that ambition is an achievement rarely seen in the video game medium. It is what makes No More Heroes a special and unique game, even if it is not always the most enjoyable game to play. By being both the epitome of gaming and the antithesis of gaming at the same time, No More Heroes is much more than a satire of Grand Theft Auto, it is a satire of the entire video game medium and industry as a whole.

“Punk’s not dead”, a phrase that is scribed on the opening logo of Grasshopper Manufacture, the developers of No More Heroes. This is obviously a reference to the phrase, “punk is dead”, popular sentiment in punk culture popularized in 1978 by the band Crass. This phrase is often used as a means of a self-destruct switch when punk music or punk culture strays too far from its underground, DIY roots. The rebellious and subversive nature of punk rock must not be compromised or else it loses all of its identity and purpose. Claiming that “punk is dead” is a means of starting anew. Why is this inscribed on the logo of a video game developer? Because Suda 51, the head honcho of Grasshopper Studios, prides himself as a “punk rock video game developer.” One could argue that he’s out of his element here because claiming “punk is not dead” fails to understand the ironic reverence of the common phrase and therefore he is merely a poser. Perhaps he is an optimist, claiming that the era of radical ideas across any medium is still prevalent, or at least they should be. He can certainly bolster his auteur credentials considering the output of the studio. Killer7 is one of the most divisive games of all time because of how bizarre it is. However, the phrase “punk is not dead” is not attached to the brand of Grasshopper Studios for Killer7. This is written on the logo of Grasshopper Studios for No More Heroes, Suda 51’s follow-up to Killer7. The reception to No More Heroes wasn’t as mixed as Suda 51’s previous title as it was generally well-received by most outlets. Let’s just humor Suda 51 for a moment and give him some credibility as a “punk rock video game developer”: if Killer7 was made to be divisive because Suda 51 refused to sacrifice his uncompromising artistic vision, isn’t toning it down for your next project against the laurels of punk rock? Arguably yes, but there are plenty of elements in No More Heroes that still hold Suda 51’s merits as a subversive, punk rock video game developer all the same.

No More Heroes takes place in a fictional American town called Santa Destroy, a town located somewhere in California given the Spanish name and beach shore with palm trees. The game immediately plunges into action as a tall, young man named Travis is raiding a luxurious mansion and laying waste to the hundreds of suited guards scattered around the place. In the pool area of this estate, an eccentric-looking older man named “Death Metal” muses with Travis about the subjective concept of paradise before he brandishes his giant cleaver and dukes it out with him. Death Metal loses and Travis hacks him to bits in a ritualistic fashion. A young Eastern European woman named Sylvia gives some context that Death Metal was ranked number 10 in a league of assassins and Travis is killing all of them one by one to become the number one ranked assassin.

I need to make something clear; No More Heroes is not a game with a punk rock soundtrack, nor does it make any reference to any punk rock artists (except for the title which might be a reference to the song by ‘70s punk band The Stranglers). I am specifically comparing the artistic foundation of No More Heroes, seeing if it matches a punk rock feel and mindset. Punk rock isn’t just a genre of music or a fashion statement, it’s also an ethos. There is more to punk rock than just playing four chords erratically while bleeding on stage and piercing your genitals with safety pins. This ethos gives credence to the chaotic nature of punk rock. The purpose of it all is to fling a monkey wrench to the status quo, the conventional tactics, and sensibilities of society, and the popular art that reflects it. Once punk starts to veer more into popular conventions at the point of Flanderization, “punk is dead” is a claim to start anew like a phoenix rising from the ashes. This mostly pertains to the genre of music, but this ethos can stretch to other facets of art and culture. The artistry of hip hop has always reminded me of punk rock. It comes from an urban environment and it illustrates the decay of society and culture through subversive music. The punk group that made me consider this punk rock ethos was Suicide, an iconic ‘70s synth-punk group that was so subversive with their instrumentation and their delivery that the punks hated them. What’s more punk rock than that? They showed me that punk rock meant more than just what the music was supposed to sound like.

The point of this review isn’t to claim that video games can have subversive qualities. Just like any artistic medium, plenty of video games can be categorized as going against the grain. The question is rather if Suda 51 can claim “punk’s not dead” with this game. The presentation of No More Heroes is a stylish mesh of pop culture, borrowing from several sources ranging from professional wrestling, gritty Frank Miller comics, anime, kung-fu movies, superheroes, etc. These elements mix well into the fabric of this game without being obtrusively referential, giving the game a lot of character. Mixing all of these pop culture elements seamlessly with the violent, degenerative background is reminiscent of work from Quentin Tarantino. Suda 51 is often compared to the famous director and there are definitely similarities between the two. The blood-soaked lawlessness of Santa Destroy could remind someone of Pulp Fiction, and the hoards of uniformed enemies being slaughtered by a sword-like Kill Bill. The characters also have philosophical musings with each other through a vein of pop culture modernity. I don’t think Tarantino is a direct influence of Suda 51, but both men have a similar habit of putting all of their passions in a blender and serving up their special concoction to us. Their eccentric influences tend to overlap. The pastiche nature of both creators reminds me of the make-up of post-punk, a punk rock subgenre that combined a cluster of different influences with a punk ethos. The prefix “post” might connote that it came after punk, but it was a contemporary form of punk at around the same time. The “post” in post-punk is more appropriately postmodernism, a complicated idea/movement in art and literature marked by a sense of subversiveness. It sort of connotes that all progression in art has been accomplished and has lost its relevance, so flippantly using a smattering of them creates something radically new. This is definitely the attitude conveyed in the presentation of No More Heroes. They even add other postmodern staples like breaking the fourth wall for good measure. Whether or not Quentin Tarantino is a punk rock director is a debate for another time.

Another subversive choice for this game was the decision for this game to be an exclusive for the Nintendo Wii. Just when the family-friendly console was starting to convince the older generation that video games weren’t machines used to turn children into violent hoodlums, No More Heroes came along to set things back a bit. Putting No More Heroes on the Wii wasn’t just a novel idea to give gamers a more mature alternative for the family-friendly system. The combat in this game fits the Wii’s controls like a glove which comes naturally when your character is brandishing a sword-like weapon. Fortunately, the developers restrained the motion controls for this game. Travis wields his beam katana with the A button and the motion controls only come into play as an execution move that coincides with a directional swipe. Travis can also execute wrestling moves on stunned enemies as a finishing move. Each directional move for either the katana swipes or the wrestling moves is always unpredictable and easy to pull off. The developers had a fine grasp on the Wii’s controls here and made it one of the smoothest controlling games on the Wii. In comparison to the shoddy port version for the PS3, the game faltered on a system that was more user-friendly in terms of more mature video games, so the Wii, strangely enough, turned out to be a perfect fit.

Besides being a likely reference to The Stranglers song of the same name, the title also might allude to a certain principle in punk rock. A part of the dogma of punk rock was that the musicians were only an equal playing field as the audience, a “no rock stars” rule. It was supposed to be a refreshing change of humility and authenticity from the popular stadium-filling, larger-than-life rock bands of the 1970s. Once the punk musicians became rock stars, the “punk is dead '' self-destruct switch was pulled and something else was erected in its place. In No More Heroes, everyone is a degenerate scumbag. Travis himself is absolutely no hero by any stretch of the means. For one, he’s an assassin who makes a living murdering people, batting off any morally questionable incentives for what he does with a cocky swagger. His motivation to become the top-ranked assassin isn’t even for the glory of it, but to have sex with Sylvia. Travis is also a loser who lives in a hotel with his collection of anime figurines and doesn’t have any friends or any tangible romantic prospects. He’d be an anti-hero if the hero part of that phrase didn’t give him too much credit.

Travis is however a product of the world he lives in because everyone around him is also a loser. The other assassins highlight this quite well as none of them are exemplary people either, nor are they better off than Travis. The bosses in No More Heroes are by far the best aspect of this game as each of them is unique in character and in how they are fought. Destroyman is a caped superhero who moonlights as a mailman. Holly Summers is a bikini-clad woman with a multitude of explosives on her side to literally bury you in the sand. Speed Buster is a portly elderly woman who doesn’t technically fight you but blasts her laser cannon at you that is so gigantic that it gives the Death Star laser a run for its money. My favorite fight in this game is Bad Girl, the second to last boss who is Harley Quinn if Warner Bros stripped off all kid-friendly connections to the Batman franchise. Everything from her conveyor belt that constantly eviscerates guys in gimp masks to her psychotic determination to defeat Travis is utterly deranged and leaves a lasting impression on you. She is also the hardest boss in the game by far. Similarly to Travis, they are boats with a lot of character, but their roles in the grand scheme of life are ultimately rudderless. They are people who still lack the fundamentals of a prosperous life. Dr. Strange is singing his heart out in a baseball stadium, but the arena is vacant. His greatest longing is also to see his estranged daughter again. Harvey Volodarskii is a talented magician who puts on impressive, albeit morbid magic shows to an audience of only Travis and Sylvia. These bosses remind me of the individualism expressed in the music scene of punk rock. All of these creative, capable people who have the potential to become something larger than life are still undermined, leaning towards the underground subculture of punk rock to express themselves while still being pariahs in the grand scheme of things.

The unfortunate matter is that to unlock all of these spectacular bosses, one has to play through the other portion of this game. Progress in No More Heroes is made by earning money through odd jobs and smaller assassin missions which are assigned at two different places in the overworld. This portion of the game is incredibly grind intensive and is the majority of it as well. To get to these jobs, Travis has to travel back and forth to the job center and then drive somewhere else where the job is located. Each of the jobs like picking up coconuts, pumping gas, erasing graffiti off of walls, etc. have its own unique mechanics, but the novelty of them wears off quickly because Travis will have to do these jobs around three to four times to earn enough money for the next boss. The assassination missions aren’t any better as they are brief and come in the same type of variation. I usually chose the mission where Travis fights 100 guys in five minutes because it nets you the most money, but even decapitating guys with a fluorescent bulb wore on me after a while. It doesn’t help that the overworld of Santa Destroy is incredibly drab and lifeless. Every building practically looks the same and most of them are a standard brown. It’s not a joy to traverse in the slightest. Everything from getting to the sites in Travis’s tricked-out car that doesn’t fit the lay of the land to repeating the same tasks is the pinnacle of the grinding intensive gameplay that I despise. I don’t even want to buy clothes or training moves for Travis because I know that I’ll have to regain that money by doing the odd jobs again. Recalling back to the punk rock ethos, this might illustrate the DIY ethic that punk musicians grind to support themselves in underground bands. Everything is a lot harder when you’re sticking it to the man, but experiencing it in a video game is an unnecessary slog.

Once Travis unlocks the #1 ranked assassin, he gets a call from Sylvia’s mother telling him he’s been duped. Sylvia is a con artist who fabricated the league of assassins. To learn why she did this, Travis travels to a far-off land and faces the #1 ranked assassin Darkstar. Darkstar is then split in half by the real #1 assassin who is none other than his sister Jeane. Apparently, Jeane has just murdered Travis’s parents and Sylvia hatched the league of assassins as a convoluted revenge plan. Jeane is the final boss of the story and an underwhelming one as well considering it comes after Bad Girl. Travis executes Jeane after her defeat and doesn’t score with Sylvia. Everything in this game up to this point was all for nothing, giving the player an empty feeling, but with good intent. The darker side of the punk rock ethos tends to verge into nihilism, the fact that nothing matters in the grand scheme of things and the punks illustrating this with their “fuck it” attitude towards the purpose of society. In the career of an assassin, it illustrates that killing is an art form that is soulless and ungratifying. Being ranked #1 at the end of the day didn’t propel Travis’s status in the slightest and didn’t make him invincible. He’s still the same loser he always was and he’s easily ambushed by another assassin in a vulnerable position at the end of the game. If you collect every beam katana, there is a secret ending with the real final boss, Sir Henry who robbed you of killing the ranked five assassins earlier in the game. He’s a great boss that capitalizes on your skill with the beam katana. The fight also makes up for fighting Jeane at the end, but it adds a bunch of information to the characters that don’t make any sense. Narratively, the original ending is much better at conveying a message.

If Suda 51 feels as if his auteur weirdness is ushering in a new wave of punk rock sensibilities in gaming, I think there’s enough evidence in No More Heroes to give him enough credence. Claiming “punk’s not dead” still seems like he’s missing the point, but he doesn’t miss the point with this game. No More Heroes is the ethos of punk rock coming to life in a video game. It accomplishes the nihilistic outlook of punk with the emphasis on individualism and subversiveness that comes with it. As a video game, it was a special gem on the Wii that utilized the console’s motion controls exquisitely and the bosses are consistently some of the best I’ve ever fought in any game. However, the absolute tedium of the open-world odd jobs cannot be forgiven, marring what could’ve been one a great game instead of a good one with a unique narrative and characters.

Did I die a lot? Yes!
Did I miss fundamental gameplay mechanics that probably could've helped me in harder bosses like Destroy Man and Bad Girl? Yes!
Did I ragequit like at least 4 times? Yes!
Did I almost spill a water bottle on my keyboard while furiously shaking my PS3 controller up and down to recharge my laser sword? Yes!
But, did I also have a blast playing this magnificent game, which is full of fantastic music by Masafumi Takada and masterful writing by Suda51? Absolutely!

I played this with my friends on PS3 after one of them brought up how much he enjoyed the Wii version, and this is a game I heard of a while back when it first came to Wii and was a pretty big name when Wii was lacking quality exclusives. To be honest, the game plays like garbage, the controls on PS3 are pretty bad, the game consists of mostly repetitive grinding mini games, and a good chunk of the boss fights are just running up and spamming the attack, and the game is pretty damn short. But at the same time, the boss fights are pretty fun and memorable, the game does have a decent sense of humor as silly as it is, and it does have a odd and unique style that I sort of appreciate. Yeah the game isn't anything great, but if you were to just take the boss fights and cutscenes this game would have been a little better since half the reason I dislike this is due to the grinding side jobs between the main missions and traveling around like a dumbass looking for things to do. Oh and did I mention the way you save in this game is going to the toilet.

Goichi Suda ("Suda51") has always exploited "quirkiness" as his signature style in the many video games he's directed, and No More Heroes, with a player-protagonist like Travis Touchdown (an ex-professional wrestler who chooses a life of professional killing for the prime objective to get laid) is naturally no exception.
The game's story sets Travis with an aggressive ambition to be the very best of all the world's professional assassins: requiring him to plow through a repetitive multitude of fights, each ending with gruesome mutilations of all those in his path with his beam-katana (as well as the unnecessary and perhaps excessive aid of some chance-based power-ups fueled by a slot machine and the passionate shouting of dessert flavors).
And yet despite this quirky madness, this plow through all of Travis's enemies finds a way to get tedious, for in order to progress to the next "ranking battle" ( boss fight) the player is most often tasked to fight huge crowds of bad guys using the same sword moves over and over again, with the exception of the different wrestling moves you can acquire as you defeat more bosses and move higher up the world's top 10 killers list. (Although there is a handful of moves you can unlock by amassing hidden collectibles scattered around the open-world map of the game).
But other than these missions solely composed of reusing moves on different hoards of enemies, you can also progress to the next ranking battle by completing "job" minigames that task you with a refreshing variety of actions to play through for your success. (IE Gas refueling, picking up litter, cleaning off graffiti, picking up cats, picking up scorpions...etc)
Then there is the open-world aspect of the game where you move Travis around either on foot or on his ridiculous motorbike, and I can safely say that this open-world portion is the worst part of No More Heroes mainly because of these three reasons: traveling on your motorbike results in many frustrating clipping errors or accidental collisions with cars (that did not need to be implemented; I wouldn't have minded if the motorbike's absurdly huge tires crushed any opposing cars like a tank to keep the vehicle-movement's flow steady); insultingly dull and moribund designs for the city scenery; and a pitiful mistake in controls concerning how the same button to dig for buried cash is what you press to get back on your motorbike -- so don't park on grass for the life of you! (Although this mistake can be in a sense "fixed" by moving a little away from your bike and calling some nobody character to bring your motorbike closer to you... but this process is irritating and time-consuming).
And the writing can be alienating, as it has its own audience. (That is, the audience who don't give a shit about writing and just want the fun and "quirkiness" from Suda51.) There are scenes of some forced and uncomfortable drama (the burial of a killer on the beach), and many "quirky" jokes simply aren't funny; but it should still be understood that there is a particular breed of players who will love absolutely every exaggerated and ridiculous thing the script of No More Heroes has to offer.
But for me... "Quirkiness" is fun and all, but once its moment of glory is done, I tend to forget about all the cheesy nonsense and foolery that's supposed to keep me laughing even after I put down the game.
At least each of the big killers you fight are so colorful and intimidating that it came to the point where I was always excited to enter the next ranking mission just to see them.
No More Heroes is, in a nutshell, a fun waste of time interrupted by open-world filler and occasionally tedious combat; and yet I'd recommend some hypothetical hacked version that beheld exclusively the boss fights.