When I first played No More Heroes, I was 15 years old, and I was immediately taken by the horror of it. As much as the trappings were felt to be a parody of gamer stereotypes of the era, there was an ethereal, purgatorial, mood to the city and it's inhabitants that stuck with me for a long time afterwards. One of the formative media experiences that would lead me to finding David Lynch, Alejandro Jodorowski, a lot of my favorite shit.
So when No More Heroes 2 came out three years later, I was extremely excited to play it, and remember being profoundly disappointed in it, and the "Suda Production" games that followed.
I was under the misconception that Suda had directed No More Heroes 2 for most of my adult life, but the latter revelation that he was not the head director has made a lot of things click. No More Heroes 2 is a pastiche imitation of the first game, only taking it's influence from the most surface level, Deadpool-esque fourth wall elements that are angling for nothing but a quick chuckle.
Even purely aesthetically, none of the boss encounters are anywhere close to the character design of the first game. Backstories for assassins seem to be ripped out entirely, multiple bosses spare only a few sentences or don't speak at all. There are tiny kernels of good ideas within No More Heroes 2's framework that are never handled , and the lack of Suda hurts even more imagining a game where these character-developing moments for Travis could have been successful in their impact.
The combat is better than the first game, but there is too much of it. The level design has you fighting wave after wave of identical enemies, and it grows tiresome very quickly without the in-between buildup between ranked fights that was present in the first game. The fights have no stakes to them, they are just a repetitive task to mash through for a plot that doesn't even seem invested in itself.
The music is fantastic, and I really like the handful of 8-bit games they designed for this thing, but when compared to the other masterpieces surrounding it in the Kill The Past legacy, No More Heroes 2 often has me desperately struggling to find the positives.
So when No More Heroes 2 came out three years later, I was extremely excited to play it, and remember being profoundly disappointed in it, and the "Suda Production" games that followed.
I was under the misconception that Suda had directed No More Heroes 2 for most of my adult life, but the latter revelation that he was not the head director has made a lot of things click. No More Heroes 2 is a pastiche imitation of the first game, only taking it's influence from the most surface level, Deadpool-esque fourth wall elements that are angling for nothing but a quick chuckle.
Even purely aesthetically, none of the boss encounters are anywhere close to the character design of the first game. Backstories for assassins seem to be ripped out entirely, multiple bosses spare only a few sentences or don't speak at all. There are tiny kernels of good ideas within No More Heroes 2's framework that are never handled , and the lack of Suda hurts even more imagining a game where these character-developing moments for Travis could have been successful in their impact.
The combat is better than the first game, but there is too much of it. The level design has you fighting wave after wave of identical enemies, and it grows tiresome very quickly without the in-between buildup between ranked fights that was present in the first game. The fights have no stakes to them, they are just a repetitive task to mash through for a plot that doesn't even seem invested in itself.
The music is fantastic, and I really like the handful of 8-bit games they designed for this thing, but when compared to the other masterpieces surrounding it in the Kill The Past legacy, No More Heroes 2 often has me desperately struggling to find the positives.