This review contains spoilers
Going into No More Heroes 3 I wasn't expecting it to be the final game in the series. With Travis Strikes again existing as a way to bring people back into the series and them seemingly going all out for 3, I figured the franchise was going to go into an upswing of sorts. So When I saw the tweet from The official No More Heroes twitter where Suda 51, the director and creator of the franchise, said that the game is Travis's final battle it caught my by surprise. That being said, after actually playing No More Heroes 3 it makes a lot of sense. I will be saving that part of this review for last though as I would like to talk about every other aspect of the game that I found notable first, but the sense of finality that exists in regards to Travis and his journey was a major part of the game that I found extremely engaging. Fair warning this is gonna be filled with a lot of spoilers for the game.
To kick things off I wanted to talk about how incredible the combat feels this time around. I played the switch ports of 1 and 2 originally and while I liked their combat design well enough the gameplay did feel very of its time in terms of not having some now standard mechanics of the genre such as dodging being easy to pull off. NMH3 meanwhile has some of the best action combat I’ve seen in awhile. Giving Light attack and heavy attack their own buttons instead of having two different ways to do them from one input feels really nice and makes it feel a lot more fluid than the prior games. Adding in dodging and jumping also helps the overall feel of the combat to feel a lot smoother and bring it up to modern action game standards. These more modern controls mixed with all of the new enemy types you have to face as well as just the general weight and feel of attacks makes for some incredibly solid combat that I wanted to do as much as possible throughout the game. However, I’d argue the biggest addition to the gameplay this time around are the death skills.
Death skills are an addition from Travis Strikes Again that I am really glad made it into 3. They essentially function as special moves that can help you dish out massive damage in some capacity before needing to recharge before the next use. These skills felt like they slotted in really well with the rest of Travis’s combat abilities personally. The four skills you receive are Death kick, a strong drop kick that sends enemies flying, death force, a force push type attack that sends enemies flying as well, death rain which has small projectiles rain from above over a set area, and death slow which slows everyone in a certain area. All of the abilities will work well in a pinch and can make battles a breeze if you use them well, but my personal favorites were slow and rain. Being able to damage enemies and keep them off of me while I fought one enemy, or if I was getting overwhelmed being able to slow down everything near me and give myself a second to breath helped to control the flow of combat and make me feel like I'm in charge of the battle and I love that feeling. The combat is easily the best part of the game and it runs incredibly, which I unfortunately can't say about most of the rest of the game.
The game runs at about 60fps in combat, and that's pretty much the only time outside of cutscenes where it does. I'm not very good at noticing framerates so it usually doesn't bug me when a game has framerate problems, but going from the extremely fluid fights to the open world which I think hovers around 30 fps (or possibly lower during certain parts of the game such as using the boost on the motorcycle) it is very apparent and shows that this game probably could have been optimized a bit more. Even with how it's running the open world isn't much to write home about. It's very barren and while it does have points of interest they're few and far between compared to most modern open world games. That being said, I'm okay with this for one reason.
That reason being that while the open world doesn't run the best and is pretty empty, it adds to the charm of the game in my opinion. Santa Destroy is a shitty, rundown place that even after years of change and having a big tech mogul like Damon, one of the game's main antagonists, move into the area and bring money isn't enough to make Santa Destroy any better of a place. It's still just some backwater, rundown town. The lower quality framerate and resolution in these areas help add to that for me in a bizarre way that I feel like I shouldn't like as much as I do. In the same vein, I would ultimately rather have these aspects of the game than not.
The overworld and everything that comes with it, such as the money earning for rank up fights and the minigames in order to earn that money, are a returning feature from No More Heroes 1 that all were not in No More Heroes 2. NMH2 cut a lot of these features in order to streamline the game and get people to the fights quicker, and while I get that approach from a certain perspective personally I find that it made NMH2 lose some of the charm that NMH1 had. There was something special about watching Travis have to run or drive around town to various odd jobs like picking up trash or mowing lawns, it was wacky and silly between all the high octane fights that each level brought and it made them memorable. It also made Santa Destroy memorable in it's own right because you got to see the town as you went looking for jobs to do after being sent out from the job agency. It wasn't exactly the most fun thing possible but it added its own quirky touch to the game. No More Heroes 2 however cut all this. You don't have to get money for rank up fights, you can't explore the map at all, and while you can go do side activities they generally were for leveling up and weren't as memorable to me as the No More Heroes 1 minigames.
No More Heroes 3 having these elements from NMH1 return made the game feel charming in a way NMH2 couldn't really manage. So even if the overworld parts of the game didn't run the best compared to how well the combat runs I can look past it because it makes the game feel more unique and just adds a layer of charm to it. Sure it's janky and feels off compared to the cutscenes and combat, but that's okay. Santa Destroy is an off putting place and seeing it explored in a less than ideal way adds to that feeling for me.
The story for NMH3 is one that I really enjoyed personally. It's unconventional, weird, over the top, but most of all it just has fun with itself. The game starts with an alien invasion lead by Prince Fu, an intergalactic criminal who has come back to Earth after being stranded there years before in order to take it over with his buddies from space prison. Travis gets involved when they blow up a huge chunk of Santa Destroy and wake Travis up from where he's passed out in front of the TV. From there Travis kills the weakest one of the aliens, getting himself put onto their galactic leaderboards, which then leads to Fu attacking Travis's friends and bringing him fully into taking out all of the invading alien superheroes. From there it's a fun romp through multiple boss fights, some against the aliens from the rankings and some against other characters from previous games who killed the boss before you could in classic NMH fashion.
This type of story feels fitting for the final game in the series in my opinion. Travis has peaked as the strongest on Earth so the only people who can keep giving him reasonable challenges are his friends and his brother or aliens who aren't bound by the restraints of being human. The grandiose scale of the story feels fitting for both the series and the supposed final game of it. Overall I loved the story for this crazy game; but at the same time I think the part that I found the most impactful and important about the story was how it functions as a character study of Travis Touchdown after doing this for the past 12 years.
I mentioned earlier that the game has a sense of finality to it, and that is best reflected in Travis himself. It's been 12 years since the first game and the years have taken their toll on him. He still loves the thrill of the fight and will fight to protect his home town of Santa Destroy, but it's no longer his choice in a way. In No More Heroes 1 he actively sought out the fight. Throwing himself into the assassin ranking fights for money, a chance at sex, and the general thrill for battle. But as of TSA and No More Heroes 3, the fight is actively chasing after him. Travis just wants a quiet life now, sitting at home watching Miike movies, anime, and wrestling with his friends. Sure he'll fight and kill other assassins when needed, but it's no longer what he's after. The fight continually is coming to him and he's trapped in this cycle of the battle never truly ending because of his actions in the first two games. This is effectively Travis's final battle, not against Fu or Damon, but against the life he's built for himself.
I think this is exemplified by the after credits scene of the game where Travis and everyone are getting ready to go home after the events of the game and yet another new threat appears. That threat is then dealt with by outside forces, namely Travis's kids from the future, who have come to find Travis so he can help them fight another threat. This is Travis's life now, and despite being annoyed Travis does accept going with them in the end to continue the fight. Travis is still fighting on and on because that's all his life has been for the past 12 years, just continous death and bloodshed with moments of peace with those that he cares about in between. His final battle is effectively deciding whether he wants to put up with the never ending battle for the moments of peace; and the game answers that question in a scene earlier on in the story where Travis dies.
Travis's death towards the end of the game is effectively the deciding point in this psychological last battle. After being killed by his brother Henry, Travis’s soul is then sent to what is essentially a 80’s arcade game. In this game Travis has a conversation with the main character that while brief is ultimately what helps him come to a decision. He chooses to go back and keep fighting instead of finally being able to rest. Travis decides the outcome of his final battle here by accepting that if he wants the parts of his life that he enjoys he also has to accept that the fighting won’t ever truly end for him. There’ll always be another ranking leaderboard, there’ll always be another huge threat to his loved ones, and there'll always be another battle to fight. But that’s okay because Travis is determined to keep fighting as long as he gets the peaceful moments with the people he loves.
No More Heroes 3 is a bizarre but beautiful game. It has the perfect mix of fluid and janky when it comes to the different aspects of gameplay, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Meanwhile when it comes to story it revels in being juvenile while having some really serious stuff going on under the hood, and honestly I think this dichotomy that it creates with this elevates the story and makes it extremely memorable and impactful. NMH3 is a special kind of game that doesn't come around very often and I'm glad I got to experience it.
So thank you Suda and Grasshopper Manufacture, for one final trip to the garden of madness.
10/10
To kick things off I wanted to talk about how incredible the combat feels this time around. I played the switch ports of 1 and 2 originally and while I liked their combat design well enough the gameplay did feel very of its time in terms of not having some now standard mechanics of the genre such as dodging being easy to pull off. NMH3 meanwhile has some of the best action combat I’ve seen in awhile. Giving Light attack and heavy attack their own buttons instead of having two different ways to do them from one input feels really nice and makes it feel a lot more fluid than the prior games. Adding in dodging and jumping also helps the overall feel of the combat to feel a lot smoother and bring it up to modern action game standards. These more modern controls mixed with all of the new enemy types you have to face as well as just the general weight and feel of attacks makes for some incredibly solid combat that I wanted to do as much as possible throughout the game. However, I’d argue the biggest addition to the gameplay this time around are the death skills.
Death skills are an addition from Travis Strikes Again that I am really glad made it into 3. They essentially function as special moves that can help you dish out massive damage in some capacity before needing to recharge before the next use. These skills felt like they slotted in really well with the rest of Travis’s combat abilities personally. The four skills you receive are Death kick, a strong drop kick that sends enemies flying, death force, a force push type attack that sends enemies flying as well, death rain which has small projectiles rain from above over a set area, and death slow which slows everyone in a certain area. All of the abilities will work well in a pinch and can make battles a breeze if you use them well, but my personal favorites were slow and rain. Being able to damage enemies and keep them off of me while I fought one enemy, or if I was getting overwhelmed being able to slow down everything near me and give myself a second to breath helped to control the flow of combat and make me feel like I'm in charge of the battle and I love that feeling. The combat is easily the best part of the game and it runs incredibly, which I unfortunately can't say about most of the rest of the game.
The game runs at about 60fps in combat, and that's pretty much the only time outside of cutscenes where it does. I'm not very good at noticing framerates so it usually doesn't bug me when a game has framerate problems, but going from the extremely fluid fights to the open world which I think hovers around 30 fps (or possibly lower during certain parts of the game such as using the boost on the motorcycle) it is very apparent and shows that this game probably could have been optimized a bit more. Even with how it's running the open world isn't much to write home about. It's very barren and while it does have points of interest they're few and far between compared to most modern open world games. That being said, I'm okay with this for one reason.
That reason being that while the open world doesn't run the best and is pretty empty, it adds to the charm of the game in my opinion. Santa Destroy is a shitty, rundown place that even after years of change and having a big tech mogul like Damon, one of the game's main antagonists, move into the area and bring money isn't enough to make Santa Destroy any better of a place. It's still just some backwater, rundown town. The lower quality framerate and resolution in these areas help add to that for me in a bizarre way that I feel like I shouldn't like as much as I do. In the same vein, I would ultimately rather have these aspects of the game than not.
The overworld and everything that comes with it, such as the money earning for rank up fights and the minigames in order to earn that money, are a returning feature from No More Heroes 1 that all were not in No More Heroes 2. NMH2 cut a lot of these features in order to streamline the game and get people to the fights quicker, and while I get that approach from a certain perspective personally I find that it made NMH2 lose some of the charm that NMH1 had. There was something special about watching Travis have to run or drive around town to various odd jobs like picking up trash or mowing lawns, it was wacky and silly between all the high octane fights that each level brought and it made them memorable. It also made Santa Destroy memorable in it's own right because you got to see the town as you went looking for jobs to do after being sent out from the job agency. It wasn't exactly the most fun thing possible but it added its own quirky touch to the game. No More Heroes 2 however cut all this. You don't have to get money for rank up fights, you can't explore the map at all, and while you can go do side activities they generally were for leveling up and weren't as memorable to me as the No More Heroes 1 minigames.
No More Heroes 3 having these elements from NMH1 return made the game feel charming in a way NMH2 couldn't really manage. So even if the overworld parts of the game didn't run the best compared to how well the combat runs I can look past it because it makes the game feel more unique and just adds a layer of charm to it. Sure it's janky and feels off compared to the cutscenes and combat, but that's okay. Santa Destroy is an off putting place and seeing it explored in a less than ideal way adds to that feeling for me.
The story for NMH3 is one that I really enjoyed personally. It's unconventional, weird, over the top, but most of all it just has fun with itself. The game starts with an alien invasion lead by Prince Fu, an intergalactic criminal who has come back to Earth after being stranded there years before in order to take it over with his buddies from space prison. Travis gets involved when they blow up a huge chunk of Santa Destroy and wake Travis up from where he's passed out in front of the TV. From there Travis kills the weakest one of the aliens, getting himself put onto their galactic leaderboards, which then leads to Fu attacking Travis's friends and bringing him fully into taking out all of the invading alien superheroes. From there it's a fun romp through multiple boss fights, some against the aliens from the rankings and some against other characters from previous games who killed the boss before you could in classic NMH fashion.
This type of story feels fitting for the final game in the series in my opinion. Travis has peaked as the strongest on Earth so the only people who can keep giving him reasonable challenges are his friends and his brother or aliens who aren't bound by the restraints of being human. The grandiose scale of the story feels fitting for both the series and the supposed final game of it. Overall I loved the story for this crazy game; but at the same time I think the part that I found the most impactful and important about the story was how it functions as a character study of Travis Touchdown after doing this for the past 12 years.
I mentioned earlier that the game has a sense of finality to it, and that is best reflected in Travis himself. It's been 12 years since the first game and the years have taken their toll on him. He still loves the thrill of the fight and will fight to protect his home town of Santa Destroy, but it's no longer his choice in a way. In No More Heroes 1 he actively sought out the fight. Throwing himself into the assassin ranking fights for money, a chance at sex, and the general thrill for battle. But as of TSA and No More Heroes 3, the fight is actively chasing after him. Travis just wants a quiet life now, sitting at home watching Miike movies, anime, and wrestling with his friends. Sure he'll fight and kill other assassins when needed, but it's no longer what he's after. The fight continually is coming to him and he's trapped in this cycle of the battle never truly ending because of his actions in the first two games. This is effectively Travis's final battle, not against Fu or Damon, but against the life he's built for himself.
I think this is exemplified by the after credits scene of the game where Travis and everyone are getting ready to go home after the events of the game and yet another new threat appears. That threat is then dealt with by outside forces, namely Travis's kids from the future, who have come to find Travis so he can help them fight another threat. This is Travis's life now, and despite being annoyed Travis does accept going with them in the end to continue the fight. Travis is still fighting on and on because that's all his life has been for the past 12 years, just continous death and bloodshed with moments of peace with those that he cares about in between. His final battle is effectively deciding whether he wants to put up with the never ending battle for the moments of peace; and the game answers that question in a scene earlier on in the story where Travis dies.
Travis's death towards the end of the game is effectively the deciding point in this psychological last battle. After being killed by his brother Henry, Travis’s soul is then sent to what is essentially a 80’s arcade game. In this game Travis has a conversation with the main character that while brief is ultimately what helps him come to a decision. He chooses to go back and keep fighting instead of finally being able to rest. Travis decides the outcome of his final battle here by accepting that if he wants the parts of his life that he enjoys he also has to accept that the fighting won’t ever truly end for him. There’ll always be another ranking leaderboard, there’ll always be another huge threat to his loved ones, and there'll always be another battle to fight. But that’s okay because Travis is determined to keep fighting as long as he gets the peaceful moments with the people he loves.
No More Heroes 3 is a bizarre but beautiful game. It has the perfect mix of fluid and janky when it comes to the different aspects of gameplay, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Meanwhile when it comes to story it revels in being juvenile while having some really serious stuff going on under the hood, and honestly I think this dichotomy that it creates with this elevates the story and makes it extremely memorable and impactful. NMH3 is a special kind of game that doesn't come around very often and I'm glad I got to experience it.
So thank you Suda and Grasshopper Manufacture, for one final trip to the garden of madness.
10/10