No More Heroes 1+2 Review (Switch)

Note: this review has a video version that can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OEj0wVzxvlY

No More Heroes is a very quirky game. No More Heroes is a straight-up power fantasy, but at the same time a subversion of it. It has many twists and turns and does not end how players would expect it to. Our main character is Travis Touchdown, an otaku serial killer murdering people with a lightsaber that he bought off eBay, and he’s very special.

You spend most of the game not killing, but raising money through odd jobs in order to even get to your assassination missions. You are a loser, and that’s the point. It doesn’t follow a typical level-to-level structure; you have to drive around looking for part-time work in order to pay the bills, train, and buy new gear. You fully inhabit this down on his luck, low class, impoverished loser, and it works. Travis Touchdown is a character who is so eccentric and ridiculous that he becomes fun to watch because you have no idea what he’s going to do next. Travis is thoroughly pathetic and unlikeable, and, by extension, you playing this game are that too. It’s a giant deconstruction of the typical action game hero. Instead of being this cool, larger than life personality, you are a loser. And that’s the point.

The gameplay is fairly simple, but satisfying. Unless you have a disability that prevents you from doing so, I recommend playing the game with motion controls as it makes for a more… immersive experience.

The core game loop is dishing out combos so you can move into killing moves which can decimate surrounding enemies. It’s not all that basic though, you have a high and low stance with your melee weapon, and you need to pay attention to how your enemy is moving in order to gauge which attack you should use to pass their guard. You can also block and string in some wrestling moves to deal some real punishment. It’s a simple, but satisfyingly crunchy combat system.

One cool thing about the combat is the slot machine mechanic, where slots roll after every kill, and if you get three in a row, you enter a momentary state called the Dark Side. And these sequences are super silly and really set this game apart from your average button masher. They can range from being able to attack super fast, to walking around the room in black and white and pressing buttons to do execution moves on enemies. My favorite is Strawberry on the Shortcake, where Travis’s hair turns blonde, you can one hit kill everything, and the killing blow indicator just goes crazy so you’re throwing your controller around like a madman. These moments help even up the pace and give a shot of adrenaline when you’re in a tough situation. They also just look really stylish and cool.

One thing the game never tells you is how to do one of the uh, core mechanics of the game that you need to, uh, beat it? That’s Circling Around. You press left or right the moment you block an attack, which enters you into slow motion, giving you ample opportunity to deal a ton of damage to your enemy. The game never tells you how to do this, and you kinda need to know about this, because it’s basically necessary for boss encounters, especially later in the game. The only blurb about this mechanic was in the original Wii version’s manual, so it’s always been really poorly explained. For anyone who doesn’t have the manual, which is everyone playing the new Switch version, there you go. There’s how to do one of the core mechanics of the game.

On the note of the boss fights- they’re a real treat. Each fight is a one-on-one duel with an extremely memorable and interesting character, and is often accompanied with some great battle music. You have to read your enemies and gauge carefully what your next action should be to avoid getting destroyed. It’s like fighting a regular enemy but on steroids. It’s super tense and overcoming the next tough battle is one of the most satisfying feelings in the game.

In order to conquer those bosses, you’ll need to regularly upgrade your weapon and yourself between assassination missions, otherwise you’ll find that you’re not doing quite enough damage. No More Heroes adds a lot of busywork between each of its missions that you have to do, because killing isn’t rewarding, and it shouldn’t be. So it becomes this kind of slapstick, comical adventure, where in one moment you’ve decapitated someone, and then you’re shaking trees to field coconuts; you cut someone’s arm off, and then you’re mowing a lawn; you go on a reckless one man killing spree, and then you’re off finding lost cats. The game contrasts its violence perfectly with this surreal, parodic, over the top world, and it is an incredible thing.

The Switch version is probably the new ideal way to play the game. Not only is it the original Wii version of the game in high definition, but performance issues have been smoothed out and controls have been adapted to accommodate the new system. The original game had an uncapped framerate, and it would fluctuate wildly between 60 and 30 FPS, especially in the game’s open world. Now it runs at a solid 60, and the increased average framerate makes it much easier to react to enemies and drive in the open world. No More Heroes has never felt better to play. It’s a very good port. The only problems are that the audio crackles a bit, which is really bad and needs to be fixed immediately, and there’s one misplaced piece of music- the K-Entertainment theme. In the original it was this mellow track that really fit the atmosphere, but for some reason it’s one of the part time job themes now. I can only assume this was a mistake. Hopefully they fix that as well.

In the end, No More Heroes is still a video game, and despite it all, it’s a fun one. Even the banal busywork is fun and amusing. It’s unlike anything else; the sheer disconnect and contrast between the horrible violence and the mundane everyday activities, as well as the subversive main character, makes it a surreal experience that has to be seen to be believed. It’s one of my all time favorites, and it comes highly recommended from me.

No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle is a much harder sell. Not being helmed by series creator and Grasshopper Manufacturer founder, Goichi Suda, who also wrote and directed the first game. As a result, No More Heroes 2 is a distinct departure.

The first No More Heroes made a name for itself as a wacky incredibly violent game, something there was not a lot of on the Wii. So for the sequel, they doubled down on all that, while dropping the more mundane aspects of the original, stuff that was heavily criticized by people who just didn’t quite get it. They also dropped any sense that Travis Touchdown is a loser. They made Travis into a cool action hero in this game and I don’t like that. He spouts the most predictable one-liners and that sense of unease and wonderment from not knowing what he’ll do next is completely gone.

Just like Travis’s characterization, the narrative is also not a deconstruction of the average action game anymore, but rather a by-the-numbers revenge plot, though it does still subvert expectations in its finale, but, that finale isn’t very good so I guess we can’t all be winners. The writing overall is a lot more melodramatic than before and lacks the first game’s surrealness and darker tone, instead being intensely over-the-top and juvenile to the point where it doesn’t even feel like it’s in the same universe as the first game.

Even the laid-back jobs from the original game have been converted into fun, retro minigames that are not really the departure from the usual style that they were in the original. Don’t get me wrong, most of them are really fun and I like them, but they’re just more wacky silliness that doesn’t feel like it belongs. Except, uh, Suda, either out of spite or because he was having a laugh, put the job that everyone hated from the first game in here, except even worse, because of course he did.

And those minigames are all optional, hence why they’re called side jobs now. You only need to do them to get money for upgrades, which you do definitely need, but still, it’s very different from having to do those banal jobs in the first game because you needed the money to do the levels. It’s a choice now if you want to do a certain job or not.

Similarly, the core gameplay is also significantly worse. While the presentation is overall improved and the game looks a lot flashier, attacks lack the same punch they had in the original due to a difference in animation and feedback. Even the standard Beam Katana doesn’t control like it did in the first game. While the presentation for the combat has gone up, the presentation for the slot machine mechanic has gone down. Most Dark Side modes look identical now, lacking the visual flair they had in the original, making it fairly bland and not really the kind of stand-out feature that they were in the first game.

Combat in general just feels less considered than before. There’s no indicator for whether you’re in high or low stance anymore, so it becomes tricky to tell which you’re in because the slightest tilt of the controller can change your stance. The combo meter is gone. Later levels are packed to the brim with meat sponge enemies who take forever to kill, which really wears your simplistic moveset thin, and because the combo meter is gone, button mashing is far less engaging and stringing together combos is far less rewarding. Also in the late stages of the game, there are enemies who can shoot you with machine guns from across the map, instantly stunlocking you. The problems with those two enemy types collide and make many of the later levels just unsatisfying to play. It’s not a very refined experience, far less so than its predecessor despite the obvious increase in budget.

The game just feels more slapped together. There are also two awful missions in a row where you play as another character who controls even worse than Travis, feels even worse to play as, and has awkward stiff platforming. The boss fights on average are also a bit of a disappointment. Opting more for spectacle than an enjoyable and satisfying gameplay experience, a lot of them devolve into just hitting the boss until it’s dead, with barely a need to really read your opponent’s every move. Some of the bosses border on being unfun, and some of them are just bad, like the Ryuji boss fight. The assassins you fight are also not nearly as memorable or interesting as the first game’s bosses, which is extremely disappointing because you can tell they definitely put a considerable amount of effort into the cinematics, but they aren’t even as strongly written or directed as the ones from the original.

Perhaps the most disappointing thing about No More Heroes 2 is that it abandons some of the core premise of the first game to simply retcon it so a sequel can happen with the same structure as the original. The story these retcons are made in service for, well, is just trying to say the thing that the first game made apparent through theming and gameplay and deliberate design decisions- the fact that killing is bad and not rewarding- through uh just straight up having Travis say it out loud several times in cutscenes. He goes through the exact same character development he already went through in the original, again, but worse and more blatant this time. It’s very apparent that this game was written by different people.

The drop in quality in writing and gameplay is probably because Suda wasn’t around all the time to keep those aspects in check. There’s also a gratuitous amount of fanservice this time; female designs are on the average far more revealing and overt where they didn’t need to be, and you can barely go a single stage without getting interrupted by cleavage. It’s kinda uncomfortable. The whole game is a lot more risque than its predecessor— which is saying quite a lot because it’s not like the first game shied away from having some more raunchy material either.

I want to reiterate something here, the first game was incredibly juvenile and gross at points, but there it was more at the expense of Travis, making fun of him and doubling down that he’s a big loser. Now, in 2, it’s much more in service of him. He’s still this creepy weirdo, but now he’s a creepy weirdo that the game goes out of its way to show is this legendary heroic figure and has fangirls and just treats him like a cool dude anyway. It leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

I feel like I’m being overly harsh to this game, and I do like it, so I’ll talk about some things that I like about it. Melee combat is much improved by having actual combos and wrestling moves that would be fatal always kill your enemy now, instead of having to deal an additional blow to your enemy after you suplex them to the ground. You can switch weapons in the middle of levels now which adds some variety to combat by giving you more options. The little training minigames you can do with Jeane are really funny, and are the only minigames in here that really evoke the same feeling as the ones from the first game. The big thing that I like though, the soundtrack, it’s incredible. There’s such an array of different genres and music in No More Heroes 2, that it kind of makes it worth going through some of the muddier parts of the game. For example, the first of the aforementioned awful levels where you play as another character, it contains my favorite song in the whole game.

This Switch port is also pretty good. Again, it’s probably the ideal way to play the game. I wish they fixed some of the problems I previously discussed, like the lack of a stance indicator. The port also introduces some new problems, like there’s this new weird issue where a loud noise plays at the end of the FMVs, the game crashed more than once on me, and the audio crackling present in the first game’s port is also here, most notably in the game’s final boss. Those complaints are small, however, and the whole package is sweetened by the fact that this is the first time the game is in 60 FPS. It feels a whole lot better than it did back when it was locked to 30, and it kind of makes up for the worse feeling combat in a way because it’s just so smooth.

So if you liked No More Heroes because of the silliness and the violence, well, you might still like 2. You might even like it more than the first game. This review is my opinion, I think that should go without saying. It’s not a bad game, but I don’t think it’s great either. It does contain retcons and things that might be necessary to understand games after it, but it’s not all that important, and the next game in the series, Travis Strikes Again, kind of goes over some of those already in some expository text. If I had to give a recommendation, if you’re interested in these games, or you want to play them to understand No More Heroes III, I would definitely play No More Heroes and Travis Strikes Again. Don’t skip either of those. Yes, the game that you probably think is a spinoff is more important than the game with 2 in the title. Because Suda 51.

If you’re still on board after those games, maybe give 2 a shot. It’s worth playing for the soundtrack alone.

No More Heroes is a transcendental experience, one unlike any other, and it is definitely worth your time. No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, is a game that has a 2 and a subtitle.