hmmmmmmmmm. no more heroes 3 is a good enough game that i found to be pretty dissapointing in several areas that ended up making the overall product feel a little less than. namely the story and the way they handled the levels.

but okay, let's not try to start off being a negative nancy too hard because there's stuff I liked a bunch in this game! for a start, the combat feels great! the removal of the stance system kinda bummed me a bit at first but after playing around with the new death glove abilities and some additional refinements they made to the overall combat i'm pretty happy with it! i never hated the combat in the old games but it's appreciable to have the katana killing in 3 just feel a lot faster and cooler. travis' animations and swings feel satisfying, the new glove abilities are fun and the change to the dark step mechanic gives it a bit more risk/reward. oh and the focus on keeping them at 60FPS is incredibly welcomed.

also MAN, that "KILL!" screen with the blood splatter in the background and the guiter soloing in the background rules. fuck ye

i also liked the boss fights in this! which like ye, shocker, no more heroes has good boss fights but they managed to keep a good amount of variety, gimmicks and surprise "no, I'M the real boss!" encounters in to keep me excited for each ranked rumble. there's probably at least two bosses from this game that i would take into my imaginary, non-published "Lewis' Favourite All Time NMH Boss Fights" canon. very happy me and suda were in the same "hey, that boss design looks boring can you kill them off and replace them with someone else" hivemind.

speaking of designs, the last thing i really wanted to praise was just the art and look of this game. i really liked the different clashing presentation styles of this game from old Mac PC looking menus, to PS4 livestream windows, to cutscenes like the intro to Velvet Chair Girl's fight and having your screen pop up with a strong arm of A buttons and every literal way to say Accept on the planet Earth. it was good. colourful, pop and obnoxious!

so whilst i feel like grasshopper got the combat, bosses and looks right they unfortunately dropped ball in some other areas for me. mainly the story, which ended up being my biggest sticking point after finishing the game. i don't know if this is just my fault for expecting too much from a modern day no more heroes game but the game doesn't really have anything surprising to it or anything to really say. like i mean, yes there are weird things happening around the edges of the main plot and fakeouts on boss fights etc. but when it comes to the actual story and where it goes it's kinda...it kinda just plays out how you expect. alien invasion happens, travis must kill top ten ranking dudes, he does, you get your big final boss fight with who you think plus additonal palpatine's behind it all and...yeah! Which I guess isn't nessisarily bad but the introduction of people like midori midorikara, kamui giving his big kill the past, kill the life speech, henry cooldown having a personality change and being a part of a secret organisation (and also sylvia??), the constant boss fakeouts i mentioned, even the fact that Travis Strikes Again even managed to say something or go somewhere more than it's initial premise with the deathballs granting you a wish thing just made me feel a bit meh on where the game went in the end. kinda came away without really feeling much about what happened or what it said. i guess at the end of the day i didn't really care that much about Damon and FU so having the game sideline everything to focus on them in the end was a bit of a bummer.

also i feel like the cast of this game is pretty underused. like, the no more heores series has such a strong line-up of characters and designs and a lot of old favourites and new hotness appear in it! bad girl is back! shinobu is back! dr. juvenile is here! midori midorikara appears from another universe and kamui is also her bf and has some fuckin kurumizawa shit going on in those hands! like it's a stacked cast but in the end none of them really end up doing anything or impacting the story until right at the end. shinobu gets her arms ripped off immediatly, bad girl gets Depression, dr juvenile just...wasn't asked to do stuff i guess and kamui just chills with bishop and travis for one scene and that's about it. even sylvia feels pretty underused in this game. do you see what i mean about stuff not really happening and characters not really mattering? it just seems like a bit of a waste, which is sad.

also yeah, the way they handled levels in this game is bad because they removed them completely and instead replaced them with arena fights where you get teleported around and they have no real style or location and because of that they feel way less unique and more like an extention of the overworld in a bad way and BOY let me tell you about the overworld it su-okay wait i just noticed the length of this review nevermind.

in the end, i enjoyed my time with no more heroes 3 and it definitely holds some value in the overall series. it just didn't leave me with much in the end. who knows, this might be one of those things where in a couple of years i'll look back on it and wonder why i was high strung on certain things and why i didn't enjoy it for what it was. but for now, alas.

actually one more thing henry cooldown is so fucking cool in this game i love him

I don't really know where to begin. It's hard to think of a bigger letdown for me in recent memory. Almost every aspect of this game feels underbaked, undeveloped, and unfinished. None of it congeals together. It's a trainwreck of the likes I haven't seen since - well, since the kind of games Grasshopper Manufacture were making in the early 2010s. The more things change.

So, let's tackle these in order.

RANK #10: DIABOLICAL PITCH

The combat's fine. It's alright. I know there are people who super dig it. It's probably the most fun combat that's ever been in a NMH game, but I find that it pales in comparison to a lot of the fantastic action games on the market today. Even compared to indie efforts like Assault Spy, Travis' limited moveset sticks out like a sore thumb, and means that despite there being some genuinely creative and cool enemy designs in the bunch, I still found myself tackling encounters almost the exact same way every single time.

RANK 9: DESPERATE STRUGGLE

Now, I said most fun combat in a NMH game. I didn't say best. Because for me, NMH1 still has that crown. Yes, it's grindy and repetitive. Yes, it feels like a chore. But in a game about stripping away the romanticisation of the life of a video game hero and revealing it to be labour-intensive contract work performed by someone's who's adolescent fantasies are exploited for profit, that works. It enhances the experience tremendously. What does the combat here do? What does it say? Nothing, really. It's just quite fun. But why should I turn this game on just for quite fun combat when I have DMC5 also on my shelf, a game who's combat I enjoy much more? The combat fails to be interesting or thematically resonant, and fails to compete as a surface-level thrillride. Just like the rest of the game!

RANK 8: HEROES' PARADISE

This affliction of total purposeless afflicts the open world as well. No More Heroes 1 caught a lot of flack for its buggy and barren open world, and while I won't defend the performance issues, I will defend its inclusion. In a game about labour and work, the commute is an important part of contextualising that. What does the open world of No More Heroes III serve? What point does it make? What does it say? Nothing really. There are suggestions, things you could read into what they might have said if the game was interested in actually exploring its world, but that's all it is, a veneer of purpose papered over an empty world that exists only because fans wanted it to exist.

RANK 7: SERIOUS MOONLIGHT

Every element of this game has the same feel: shallow, insubstantial, underused, underdeveloped. You can feel the shadow of "this was developed during COVID" looming over the entire world of this game, but even setting that aside, no idea, motif, or theme this game haphazardly throws out has any nuance whatsoever. GHM have finally made a game that truly feels true to the ancient criticism of them: they have made a game that genuinely feels like they threw a million things at a wall and none of them stick. Superheroes? Streaming? Retro gaming? Call of Duty? Fortnite? Mad Max? Rocky? All of it is thrown out there, and none of it amounts to anything. That's why when I say this game feels unfinished, I don't mean that's buggy or missing content or anything like that: I mean that every single element of this game feels like a first draft that goes nowhere (including combat, what other explanation can there be for the game making you use SCREW CRUSHER DEATH KICK exclusively for multiple hours only to unceremoniously throw you every single other death skill at you at once?), a digital version of a planning whiteboard full of everyone's vague ideas.

RANK 6: STRIKES AGAIN

There's a faint air of desperation about it all, leaping from scene to scene hoping that at least some of it will sink in and resonate. And, fair dos: I thought the Midori Midorikawa bit was cute and Death Chair Girl's section, involving murdering a sobbing alien mourning its friend while it quoted the end Rocky over and over while Travis says "I'm finally a hero!", was genuinely gnarly in an interesting way and was the only time I felt the spirit of NMH1 shine through. But as the game goes on it only gets more and more desperate to be liked, culminating in a last couple hours that are genuinely embarrassing and cringeworthy to behold, from simply recycling the ending of TSA with zero of the original impact, to begging Takashi Miike to make a No More Heroes movie after the entire game has been spent singing his praises (admittedly these scenes are fun in isolation but my god do they grate repeated ad nauseam) before the train finally meets its wreck as the game ends in what can only be described as a digital adolescent temper tantrum, as Grasshopper copes hard about not getting Travis in Smash Bros. while Suda once again makes a simulacrum of John Riccitello to make fun of and digitally take his revenge on for not getting to make Kurayami the way he wanted. I cannot describe how utterly embarrassing and pathetic this spectacle is: I think Riccitello is a shitbag too (for other reasons than Kurayami, admittedly) but all of you are way too old to be engaging in "oh yeah!!! i'll show u!!! i'll make you into my game and have you be a big ugly loser who gets killed by my OC while piloting an advertisement for another game!!!!" petulant childish nonsense.

RANK 5: LOLLIPOP CHAINSAW

This isn't the thing I found most upsetting about the game, though. That would be the way in which this game continues an upsetting trend from No More Heroes 2: that of extremely upsetting purposeless psychosexual hyperviolence against women for no good reason. Shinobu is brutally fridged at the start of the game and ends up doing basically fuck-all for the whole experience, whatever wrinkles TSA introduced to Bad Girl's character that made her return an intriguing prospect are completely dropped here, but most upsetting of all is the return of Kimmy from NMH2, already a pretty suspect idea in that game, which is turned up to eleven when she is murdered in a flagrantly pornographic way that is deeply uncomfortable, but not in any way that feels purposeful in any way shape or form. I'm not gonna describe the scene other than saying it's the most violently sexual thing I've seen in a game in some time and seems to be played largely for titillation because there's zero discussion on anything that occurs here. Whatever nuance that has to be entered into a scene to have it be more than a straightforwardly exploitative misogynistic scene is absent here.

RANK 4: REPORT FROM HELL

In this way, the shape of this scene is the shape of the game itself: there's no nuance anywhere, nothing substantive to justify any of this. In the early hours of my playthrough, I latched onto the one cohesive element of the game: the fact that every single element feels hollow, undeveloped, like a total facade, was surely deliberate, surely leading to something. But as time passed, as image after unremarked upon image is vaguely gestured at by the game only to be dropped with zero development or nuance, that reading became more and more strained. I could galaxy brain this, I could say that Santa Destroy is a wasteland full of no real people purposefully, I could say that every single fight taking place in the same warehouse with different set-dressing is deliberately drawing attention to the hollowness of it all, but at what point do I have to admit that the game isn't engaging with any of this in a meaningful way? At what point is this game not commenting on facile, undeveloped, perfunctory sequels, and is it just...one of those?

RANK 3: KILLER IS DEAD

I have no doubt that there are people for whom this resonates. I recognise that I'm coming in with quite a strong take: not for nothing is the game sitting pretty with a very high average score on this website. But I have to be honest with myself and say that any attempts to be generous with my reading of this game are based solely in the pedigree of those behind it, and that I have been harsher to better games in the past. I could be extremely generous, I suppose. But it would just be because I want to be, not because I think the game actually deserves it. At some point, I simply have to admit that this cloying, overly-referential, late-era punk band album desperately screaming about how much it wants to be liked...is just kinda sad.

RANK 1: LET IT DIE

No one can like a band forever. Sometimes you grow apart. And at this point, there are talented creators I would have a much better time exploring, rather than chasing the shadow of games that came out around 15 years ago.

I guess that's me killing my past.

"Too bad there won't be a sequel"- Sylvia No More heroes

Well here we are 3 sequels later and maybe finally the end of the No More Heroes series, and I gotta say its not that good. No More Heroes 1 was a raw, gorey satire which managed to be an exploration of video game stories, a surreal journey into depravity, and just a disgustingly good time. No More Heroes 2 was a failure of a sequel that simply missed the point of No More Heroes 1 along with having just hoards of enemies with overly long health bars. Travis Strikes Again was an incredible spin off that combined Travis with the dark and ominous writing of Suda's past works and a semi autobiographical tale of Grasshopper itself. Considering the change in tone from NMH2 to TSA I assumed the more traditional, action, jokey story of NMH2 was something done without much input from Suda, but it seems that was always the plan for a numbered No More Heroes game all along as 3 has a very similar tone. Its better written and more stylish then 2 but falls into the same trap of devolving into something simultaneously too funny yet also too melodramatic for its own good.

Rather then Travis simply fighting for his own jollies this time he's saving the world and also avenging his friends again (just like Bishop in NMH2). Despite Badman's death being what sets up the story its only brought up twice afterwards and Badman also gets no screen time before his death. Turning into the same shallow misery porn plot engine that NMH1 criticized to begin with. The majority of the boss cutscenes this time are used for meta jokes rather then actual characterization like the first and in general the story is just over whelmingly shallow. A good chunk of the gags are funny this time around, but also don't amount to much memorable. The one exception to this is the Henry cutscenes which are all very ominous and sneak in kill the past references without being overly obvious. The super hero satire NMH3 based it's marketing off of is simple barely present hear. Beyond Fu calling himself a super hero in the cutscene and a returning Destroyman boss there isn't much here that references western comics let alone critiques it any meaningful way. Other story elements are taken wholesale from Travis Strikes again like the retuning VN segments where most of the new characters are nameless dispensers of one punchline, or the returning 2D pixel art Travis segment which in Travis Strikes Again was full of depth but here is a simple one time gag calling back to another gag. There is even another Kamui appearance where he is a random wacky teenager for some reason.

Without a core interesting story to fall back on No More Heroes 3's systems have no ground to stand on the same way NMH 1's shallow gameplay had an excellent story to fall back on. The combat is certainly on the surface better then NMH 1's with the focus turned from pure crowd control to an enemy based system with a more diverse and dangerous enemy set. Yet, by the end game it simply devolves into doing stun lock 200 hit combos on the same enemies as Travis lacks any extra weapons and has only one unlockable combo and only 4 cooldown skills. The open world is back from one and is simply the same thing just with more locations and more busy work fetch quests to do. The one bustling city of santa destroy which houses real people like the job guy and naomi have been turned into lifeless husks with endless copy past aliens who provide almost every side job and Naomi is now a tree with 3 lines of dialog. The side job based grind of NMH1 is broken by the simple fact that mandatory missions and bosses give the player so much money grinding never really has to be done to pay for fights, and all upgrades are paid using a separate currency.

Graphics wise NMH3 has an excellent UI and sense of style hidden behind and ugly every thing else. Shading glitches, clipping, low draw distance, low rez textures that pop in, and a low open world frame rate just scream low budget in a way the blockbuster NMh1 never did on the Wii. NMH1 had simple but clean graphics and a lower frame rate on a large open world was acceptable on the Wii.

This review has been mostly negative, but there still is plenty to like here. The UI and ost are both incredible, and there are funny jokes and even a few good story beats. The combat is quite good for the first 6 ranks even, but for the big Suda written NMH numbered sequel I just can't help but be disappointed by the ugly graphics, shallow writing, and repetitive gameplay. There is a point where low budget tedious gaming punk rock simply travels into being tedious and ugly. Whatever budget Grasshopper actually had it wasn't enough to make the big crazy action game Suda wanted me invested in.

No More Heroes III is a game I initially thought incredibly highly of, mostly to deflect from my disappointment that a franchise that has played an instrumental part in my personal development didn't leave with a bang, but a whimper.

Had Suda51 not been so open in recent interviews about how Grasshopper's access to the IP is fleeting and that this will likely be the last time we see the cast for the better part of a decade, the egregious yet charmingly self aware sequel-bait ending might have been a little more palatable.

There's also the unfortunate case of No More Heroes III's fairly mediocre soundtrack. Rize drummer Nobuaki Kaneko is at the helm for most of the combat tracks in the game, though this mostly amounts to a loud wall of drums and little else of note. The game's best track, Start The Game, comes from Grasshopper and No More Heroes numbered-entry veteran Jun Fukuda and is heard literally once during one of the first by-the-books, mechanic-checklist tutorials. It's incredible.

That being said there's admittedly quite a lot to like here, most notably a massively overhauled combat system that makes good use of a few of it's 2019 predecessors more interesting mechanics: the Tension Gauge and Death Glove. Whilst not as expansive as Travis Strikes Again's offerings, these four abilities do a lot to make this the most fun a No More Heroes game has been to play since the franchises inception. That doesn't mean it's the best though, as I've always felt that the first game has thematically flawless gameplay; of course the otaku, trained on anime and pro-wrestling tapes, would live out his fantasised boss battles with all the weight of samurai duels of old.

That's about the extent of III's homages to Travis Strikes Again however, because Dr. Juvenile is reduced to a piece of plot armour who's shilling publisher Marvelous' DAEMON X MACHINA as the credits roll for the first of multiple times and newfound hardcore fan-favourite Badman is beaten to a bloody pulp shortly before the Rank #9 fight.

Poor writing isn't relegated to just Dr. Juvenile either, as not a single member of III's fairly sizeable female cast is given even a shred of depth. Though in all fairness most of the men, outside of Travis and FU, aren't treated much better either.

This might be due in part to how III is structured, just like the Netflix inspired pre-chapter credits would lead you to believe, No More Heroes III is explicitly episodic.
Normally this would be fine as all of the games prior were technically chapter-based, even if they weren't obvious about it, but this presentation makes each and every inevitable trademark Goichi Suda Narrative Fakeout that much more of a kick in the teeth when they miss their mark and rob the player of the one opportunity per ranking they had to be graced with even a nugget of story content.

Naïve as it may be to have expected it, No More Heroes III feels a lot less like an earnest follow-up to Travis Strikes Again and more akin to a No More Heroes 2.5.