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This game fuckin rocks so hard I don't even have some wistful metaphor to open this article with.

I started playing this game on the wii with the motion controls but ended up switching to the switch port/ remaster / whatever for convenience sake. The motion controls on this are actually very satisfying to use, although I kept them off most of the time just because I was playing in handheld mode and being lazy. The analog stick movement does however provide a nice sort of visceral alternative to the motion controls. The gameplay itself is not reinventing the wheel with it's combat system but I think it also is done very well. The mob combat leading up to the bosses is fairly standard although hitting the finishing move input and then decapitating enemies always feels good as hell. I think the boss combat is where this game really shines though. I found much more enjoyment in facing one opponent for an extended period of time and wearing them down rather than fighting massive mobs of enemies, but perhaps that's just down to personal preference.

Before I get into it about the plot and the vibe of this game which I think is what will stick with me more than the actual game mechanics, I think the only complaint I actually have to bitch about is the open world. The streets of Santa Destroy are pretty devoid of anything to actually do and could probably just be boiled down to a couple of menus. Now maybe part my detest for open worlds in general is because a large portion of my peak gaming career was during the seventh generation where every single game thought it needed to have an open world, so maybe i'm just burn out on the concept in general. I'm also no longer 15 years old and now have and require full time employment to satiate my addiction to food and shelter, which no longer leaves whole days for me to kill exploring virtual worlds. I barley have time to explore the world I actually live in. Just give me some fucking tight well designed levels. I do not need a bunch of extraneous bullshit in the games I play for entertainment.

That said though, the extraneous bullshit in the form of odd jobs and other assassin missions you have to do to raise money between ranked assassins missions, I actually love. I don't love doing them because they obviously suck, but I find them incredibly thematically interesting in the characterization of Travis Touchdown. I love that this game alternates between (trying) to make Travis look cool during the ranked missions, and making him look like a complete dork any other time outside of them. The biggest evidence I have of this decision is that you save the game by taking a shit. I cannot think of another video game that has ever shown ANY character on the toilet, let alone the main character. Then of course you have Travis's, living out of a motel, the living room decorated with anime figures and a single recliner, clearly not made to ever accommodate more than one single person, the fact that the video rental spot keeps calling him to tell him his videos that are all titled shit like "how to please a woman 101 part 3" and "coffee and milf", recharging the beam katana by jerking off with the wiimote, and the fact this entire game is spurred on by Travis trying to fuck Sylvia. As the great poet Fred Durst once so fatefully penned, Travis truly did do it all for the nookie.

Or at least that's how it appears until you hit the ranked match to become assassin number 1. We are now in spoiler territory but this game is almost 20 years old and if you were playing along in the media club in the VoidDweller discord server (which you should!) , No More Heroes was for the month of April & May and there's only about a week and a half of May left. With that fair warning given, as Travis squares up with the #1 assassin Dark Star, he suddenly remembers that his parents were murdered and sees the face and identity of the killer, who initially to me appears to bear a striking resemblance to Sylvia, but her identity is eventually revealed when she punches clear through Dark Star's chest (or his dick? idk) in a single punch, now becoming the number #1 assassin herself. Jeane, whom curiously Travis's cat is also named, is revealed to be Travis's half sister along with the rest of her legitimately tragic and sympathetic backstory which, this is long enough already & you can look that up for yourself if you want to read all that, causing Travis to suddenly remember that he actually became an assassin to kill jean and avenge his parents.

Call me stupid but this is the most opaque and ambiguous part of the game to me. Ambiguous in as to how it's supposed to make me feel anyway. Maybe it's bitter sweet because Jeane's story is so miserable and she's finally at rest, no longer haunted by her past or being hunted down by the other top ranked assassins. I'm unsure if it's supposed to make Travis's quest appear in a more noble light or more emotionally heavy, or make him look more like a hero and less like a dork, but to me the revelation doesn't change much in his characterization. Maybe the late in the game revelation of this is actually supposed to undermine it's emotional weight, making you not care about it. They do literally fast forward through Jeane's tragic backstory. I've also yet to play through the other sequels to this game , although I am planning on it, and perhaps those entries will provide further context and allow me to formulate an actual opinion as opposed to my current one of "I dunno".

I think what was more interesting to me with this game were the parallels I saw to being a musician. Travis doing a ranked assassin mission and climbing up in the ranks and then afterwards immediately being thrust back into "real life" and having to do shitty odd jobs to come up with money to pay bills seemed very analogous to me to ripping a sick gig where you fire on all cylinders, people are super into it and you actually sell some fucking t shirts, and then the next day having to go back to work at your shitty job. The whiplash to the ego can be intense. It's probably a much needed humbling for rockstar cosplayers, but it's always hard for me to swing from the thing I'd say I'm the best at doing and feel a real sense of purpose and meaning from, back to low paying retail/food service shit that almost anybody could do that often feels like a Sisyphean waste of time. I actually wondered while playing through NMH how long the game would be if you just went from one boss straight to the next one. Given the game is only about 11ish hours long according to howlongtobeat.com , I'd bet if you took the side content out it'd shorten the game by a large margin. Somebody should make a little mod of that and call it No More Heroes: Trust Fund Paradise. There's an interesting point the youtube channel GhenryPerez makes in their video essay Deadly Individualism: No More Heroes about the line bad girl says about "It's just a job, you know the daily grind." and how her appearance takes cues from adult film stars, but I also see the same metaphor in the burnt out musician or even a pop star, no longer enjoying the hobby or passion they have monitized the joy out of, but I will spare us further speculation for brevities sake.

I'm clearly projecting here with the musician metaphor but it's MY blog and I can project onto fictional characters if I want to. There's not a lot else I've got to wrap this up, other than I did really enjoy my time with this game. Even with the very sparse open world stuff I thought was unnecessary, I'd still say it's worth the time to play though, especially given it's length. Damn I miss playing games that don't take entire weeks to get through. I find the dork / coolguy dichotomy of Travis Touchdown very interesting, and I'd be remiss if I didn't mention somewhere in here that the beam katana is sooooo sick. I also thought the wrestling moves were really fun to pull off even if I very seldom actually used them. I hear they get rid of the open world stuff in the sequel which I'm very looking forward to. The official verdict is that No More Heros fucks.