"I know, too bad there won't be a sequel."

No More Heroes was probably the first "art" game I ever played, though I didn't think of it as such at the time. Over the years, I've come to really appreciate what it set out to accomplish, and finally revisiting it for the first time since 2012 has only made me fall back in love with it.

There are lots of different possible interpretations regarding what this game is really about, all of them valid. Personally, while there's much more to the writing than just this, I like to think of it as Suda51 taking the piss out of the direction he saw popular video games going in at the time. So you've got this big, sterile open world filled with pointless collectibles, and you have to do literal in-game work before being allowed to progress to the next "good part." Repetitive busywork is all you do between main levels, meanwhile much of the city's space goes basically unused because the majority of your activities all take place in the same general vicinity. This is more or less exactly what would become of many AAA titles released since NMH's debut, and the original Wii version being published by Ubisoft in the US adds some beautiful irony if this was indeed the intent.

But also it's just a hilarious, fun brawler with novel motion controls, fueled by incredible music and visuals, and it can be appreciated for that alone if you disagree about its design choices being deliberate. Besides, nowadays the tedium demanded by No More Heroes feels quaint, as modern open world games require twice as much lawn-mowing and gas-pumping as this one's entire runtime.

Reviewed on Aug 16, 2021


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