When first starting No More Heroes, one finds himself in a fairly typical hack n slash romp, with the game wasting no time putting you in front of a bunch of thugs to slice your way through a straighfoward path to the first boss who faces you in a fast paced 1v1 sword battle. The game starts "in media res", without any context as to why you are facing these enemies or what your motivations as the main character are, a trope we are used to seeing in storytelling and that we presume will be expanded upon the further we go into the narrative. If this is your first impression of No More Heroes, then you have already fallen into it's trap.
It's not until you get further into the 2nd or 3rd mission that things start to feel a bit....off. You find yourself inside plain looking corridors and empty warehouse that repeat themselves ad naseum and beating seemingly random and out of place thugs like baseball players or military troops, and between missions you will be doing extremely mundane and grounded chores and part time gigs until you have earned enough cash to be able to start a new mission. This sense of purposeless progression during gameplay and detachment from the extreme and cartoony violence that happens during combat and the cutscenes is further instigated until the game flat out starts to take away catharsis from you and mock you for it.
All of this would have been meaningless, if Suda didn't intertwine the player with the main character, Travis Touchdown, so closely together. Travis Touchdown fancies himself an over the top anime superhero, climbing his way to the top of the ranks with a Star Wars lightsaber, but in the most downbeat moments of the game one quickly discovers that Travis is just a 20 year old something addicted to videogames and anime, without a steady fullfilling job and with some romantic hang ups to boot. Suda brilliantly makes Travis' frustration and boredom our own through the act of interactivity, and as you find yourself shaking the controller in a jerk off motion to fill your sword's battery to kill the next enemy and putting the wiimote in your ear to hear Sylvia'se sexy voice speaking directly to you, the metaphor is firmly established and unavoidable.
As you reach the final hours of NMH, and the game has completely shattered the 4th wall and destroyed any possibility of a conclusive and satisfying narrative, you will know you have played something special. In an era where videogames are now so preoccupied with artistic recognition, Suda shows that much can be accomplished with so little, and that you never have to sacrifice the medium's strength, the gameplay, to explore deep thoughts and questions about why we play videogames, what we expect to take from them, and why we surrender so much of our lifetime to it.
It's not until you get further into the 2nd or 3rd mission that things start to feel a bit....off. You find yourself inside plain looking corridors and empty warehouse that repeat themselves ad naseum and beating seemingly random and out of place thugs like baseball players or military troops, and between missions you will be doing extremely mundane and grounded chores and part time gigs until you have earned enough cash to be able to start a new mission. This sense of purposeless progression during gameplay and detachment from the extreme and cartoony violence that happens during combat and the cutscenes is further instigated until the game flat out starts to take away catharsis from you and mock you for it.
All of this would have been meaningless, if Suda didn't intertwine the player with the main character, Travis Touchdown, so closely together. Travis Touchdown fancies himself an over the top anime superhero, climbing his way to the top of the ranks with a Star Wars lightsaber, but in the most downbeat moments of the game one quickly discovers that Travis is just a 20 year old something addicted to videogames and anime, without a steady fullfilling job and with some romantic hang ups to boot. Suda brilliantly makes Travis' frustration and boredom our own through the act of interactivity, and as you find yourself shaking the controller in a jerk off motion to fill your sword's battery to kill the next enemy and putting the wiimote in your ear to hear Sylvia'se sexy voice speaking directly to you, the metaphor is firmly established and unavoidable.
As you reach the final hours of NMH, and the game has completely shattered the 4th wall and destroyed any possibility of a conclusive and satisfying narrative, you will know you have played something special. In an era where videogames are now so preoccupied with artistic recognition, Suda shows that much can be accomplished with so little, and that you never have to sacrifice the medium's strength, the gameplay, to explore deep thoughts and questions about why we play videogames, what we expect to take from them, and why we surrender so much of our lifetime to it.