Travis Touchdown is a stone-cold murderer -- the geekiest one that you could possibly imagine. Johnny Bravo meets Han Solo meets Jeffrey Dahmer: they all get drunk and spawn an abomination. He loves lucha libre, gratuitous swearing, cutting people straight in half and trying to nail his blond haired assassination-lifestyle facilitator. Right off the bat, you're thrown into his persona full-force and to be perfectly honest, it doesn't feel so bad.
Let's be up front about this -- No More Heroes is charming. It's perfect for the gamer crowd, at once appealing to a variety of different subcultures: wrestling, anime and kung-fu, among others. Those exact gamers will quickly realize (unless they're card carrying lucha libre mass murderers themselves) there's not much more to this game than it's initial novelty (not to be confused with actual character.) Suda 51, Grasshopper Manufacture CEO and the man responsible for NMH (as well as Killer 7) set out to make a statement and in some respects, delivers on that promise. He clearly states his desire to create fringe/strange games with repetitive gameplay yet (at least initially) hilarious cutscenes.
This game is through and through a hack'n'slash, allowing nearly-falling-off-the-hinges loose controls as to lower the barrier of entry for Wii gamers -- and thusly gimping the game's controls for anyone able to grasp the mash-mash-slash combat system.
The main story is the big standout in the game and we'd feel a hell of a lot better about NMH if it would have allowed us direct access to that. The mindless minigames and brutally incomplete open-world you're challenged with navigating feel woefully cobbled together and exacerbating the situation, the one vehicle you own handles worse than it looks.
(This is how shitty it looks)
Surprising as it may be, the biggest problem with NMH is that it's all 'vision' (our favorite buzzword, what's yours?) Mr. 51 has some great gameplay ideas, his problem is that he's poor at implementing those ideas without hurting other pieces of the pie, so to speak. For every Cowboy Bebop-esqe showdown with a boss where our man Travis Touchdown talks smack throughout the whole fight, there's an infantile coconut collecting minigame (and you can interchange 'coconut collecting' with a small variety of other silly titles if you're so inclined through actual gameplay.)
All in all, while NMH and Mr. 51 have proven that weird, (sort of) indie games can be great at times, big undertakings like this may profit from either better editing or larger development teams/more experienced developers. We are still looking forward to your masterpiece, sir. Don't let us down.
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