No More Heroes
Where to begin, where to begin. No More Heroes is at once familiar and new; both traditional and wildly unique. You've never played a game quite like it, but if you play games, you'll feel right at home. More than that - No More Heroes is, in so many words, a game about people who play games. It makes Contact's treatment of the fourth wall look like child's play. It's also a damn awesome game. Unless you have a particular aversion to rough language, sexual themes, and hyperbolic violence, there's no excuse for not playing it. And if you like those? You may as well buy the game right now.
No More Heroes has two core gameplay components. One of them starts out awesome and becomes just plain outlandish. The other starts out disorienting, and becomes awesome. But I'm getting ahead of myself.
You control Travis Touchdown, a modern anime nerd who recenly won a Beam Katana (lightsaber) on eBay. Now he's broke and needs to pay the bills. So what's a guy with a laser sword to do? Become a professional assassin, of course. At the behest of a hot chick named Sylvia, Travis goes a little crazy, and decides to take on the Top 10 ranked list of assassins, one at a time. (You don't actually play this introductory part - it's all in the game's opening cinematic.)
The first core component is action. You start the game in the foyer of an opulent mansion, and some guys in suits with cheap iron sticks come at you. Guess you've got to kill them. A thorough tutorial walks you through the mechanics of combat: the nunchuk stick moves, and the Z button targets enemies. Press A to strike, holding the Wii remote high or low to perform high or low attacks. String them together for combos! Strike at the same time as your enemy to perform a blocking counter! Use the D-pad to evade attacks! Wii remote gestures are used for counters and to finish off an enemy. A proper finish activates a roulette wheel that has a chance to activate a special Dark Side power, which is timed on the UI by a tiger walking toward a goal. Charge up your sword's batteries by shaking the remote!
It gets a little weird, but the basic idea is that you can tear shit up by properly deciding when to attack and when to block and evade. The roulette stuff is a little underused, but supercool when it goes off. Anyway, in the end what you've got in the battle system is a great way to send buckets of blood flying every which way at a moment's notice. It's way fun, and in boss fights, can get pretty challenging. There are ten bosses, as you climb the ladder of the assassin ranks; each assassin has a unique personality (from a washed up English rock star to a philosophical army girl with a Planet Terror gun-leg), a unique setting, and unique abilities, making for a completely ... unique fight, each time.
The stages surrounding them are different each time, too. The mansion in the beginning belongs to the rock star; another boss, Destroyman, is holed up in a movie studio protected by a bunch of flunkies wearing paper sacks over their heads. Each stage has an interesting setup, and while the early ones tend toward Killer7-esque level design, the later ones have sweet gimmicks all their own, including a bus ride and a baseball stadium massacre.
So, how do you get to the stages? That's where the second core component comes in: the overworld. The town of Santa Destroy, which appears to be, supposedly, between the California beach and the Mexican border, is a city of the walking dead, people who've elected to lead lives of apathy, where human life holds no value except to take it. In theory, anyway. The actual overworld, which can be navigated on foot or using Travis's "Schpeltiger" rocket-powered motorcycle, is fairly dull, especially in the early game.
Its primary landmark is the No More Heroes motel, where Travis lives (he's apparently got a good long-term deal on his room). Inside, you can heal up, check out items you've collected, take a look at a town map, play with the cat, and save your game. The game is saved by using the toilet. Inbetween ranked assassin matches, Travis will crash in his room, take a call from the UAA (United Association of Assassins?), deposit a requisite entrance fee into a secret account via ATM, and then head to the match site. But how do you make the money to cover that fee? That's where it gets interesting.
Everything starts with an odd job, from the local employment center. These tasks cover everything from mowing lawns to picking up litter, to finding stray cats. They use quirky gameplay gimmicks and some remote-waggling to make the game feel lighter. After doing one of these and earning a bit of scratch, you open up assassination missions, which are timed, paid jobs to flat-out kill people (which is where your real money comes from).
Scattered around town are also Free Mode missions, where you fight until you kill everyone or you suffer a hit, whichever comes first. These are super-hard until you get used to them, at which point they're only mostly hard (especially when they have guns!). Santa Destroy also features a gym where Travis can up his stats by training, a lab where a friend of his works on new and more powerful Beam Katanas, a fashionable but useless clothing store, and a Japanese bar with a drunken Russian martial arts master, among other attractions.
As more things open up in the town, it becomes more fun to run around in; but in the early game, it's about as exciting as untoasted bread. You do get to ride around in the Schpeltiger, but until you get the hang of taking rocket-powered sharp turns, this isn't very fun either. Run-over pedestrians don't do anything except make a cool noise, you absolutely can't run into cars - you bounce off - and the physics in general are pretty sketchy. There are hidden items scattered around town too, but you can't even start getting those until after a couple ranked matches.
I mentioned the music before, but it bears mentioning again. The music is awesome. The sound effects? Awesome. Voice overs? Awesome. Graphical style? Awesome. Graphical quality? Mostly alright... the town, especially when you're speeding through in the rocket bike, can look pretty awful at times. But that's why you speed through it on a rocket bike. The faux-pixelated interface elements and icons that mark important locations (again, think Contact) are super cool. And it comes to a head in a minigame that you can play during the Rank 4 match, a vertical-scrolling space shooter complete with 3D models and chiptune-esque music.
The narrative is reminiscent of Killer7's, in that it's mostly quiet until the final moments of the game, but in a very different way.
All in all, from presentation to theme to gameplay, No More Heroes is a remarkable package. There are some rough spots in the overworld mechanics, and less intrepid gamers may be inclined to leave the game early. But rest assured - if you've been waiting for a game to really knock you off your feet, this is it.
Progress: Rank 1 (Mild), will return for more stuff later