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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.