Where were you when Tango Gameworks reminded everyone else how it was done?

Hi-Fi Rush is a masterpiece, and it's a shining beacon to let the world know that the dying genre it occupies still has some juice. Character action games were always niche, but they've been on life support for the better part of a decade now. Devil May Cry burst onto the scene all the way back in 2001, and its copycats were few; PlatinumGames ended up taking the mantle for themselves for a solid streak, but began fumbling hard around the time of The Legend of Korra, and were never again able to reach the heights of their earlier work. 2019's Devil May Cry 5 helped to remind the people what was up, but an entire genre of games only being able to claim one or two titles to their name every few years is a genre that's one company-going-out-of-business away from going extinct.

Enter Hi-Fi Rush.

Character action games are always described as musical in one way or another by people (like me) who push them onto an unsuspecting public who haven't yet tasted the ambrosia of their first SSS rank. You'll often hear words like "flow" or "like a dance" or "finding the rhythm" to describe the many acts of combat open to the player. Games like Bayonetta have combos that rely on intentionally delaying inputs in the string, forcing you to get a feel for the timing; Devil May Cry's famous royal guard requires the player to parry an enemy attack with near-perfect timing, usually relying on an audio cue to help them get it right.

Hi-Fi Rush takes the above concept to its logical extreme: everything in the game is based around the music. Enemies swing and shoot at the end of each measure. Your light and heavy attacks connect on every beat and every other beat, respectively. Even the shrubs and trees in the background will squash and stretch in time. You can call in partner assists to damage, stun, and knock up enemies, and this philosophy extends to them, too; Macaron — a huge, slow brawler — takes an extra measure to come off cooldown relative to your faster, more lithe allies. It doesn't take long before you start feeling the rhythm game highs of landing a combo in perfect sync with the music, unloading every tool in your kit at once, and then finishing off the enemies just in time for the song to end. It's an immensely satisfying gameplay loop, broken up a bit by platforming sections that are aggressively fine.

Chai is an exceptionally charming character, and the rest of the cast are no slouches, either. There's something about the kind of character who looks to camera and says "that just happened" that really only works if you make sure that guy is treated like the dumbest motherfucker in the room by everyone else. Chai gets away with it because he has a soul. He's a quippy loudmouth, but he never undercuts the emotions of his friends with a badly-timed riff. Every bit of development he gets is absolutely earned, and his constant, stubborn earnestness does a lot to attach you to his character. He's a stupid loser, but he's your stupid loser.

While I do have my complaints about the platforming, I don't care enough to go into them. I'm willing to pave over all of that and give the game a perfect score regardless. I want more games like this to come out. It feels like a title from the Xbox 360 days, plucked out of time and released today after twelve years of being considered lost media. This shit is Jurassic Park. I'm seeing ephemera brought back to life. It's a middle-budget AA title that was made as a passion project and dropped without any marketing. When was the last time you played something like that? Really, think about it. When was the last time? In an era so inundated with hype cycles and live service titles that rely on studios dumping a potentially-bankrupting amount of money into The One Big Game that they can milk for years after, how often do you get to see shit like this?

This is only thirty dollars? And it's on Game Pass, day one? What's your excuse for not playing it?

Admirable in the aesthetic sense, a modern-day revival of the Newgroundspunk manifesto that aided and abetted the creation of illegal little serotonin dispensers built from the pixellated bones of beloved franchises. It's about time folks were allowed to charge a couple of quid for this sort of thing - lawyers be damned! A miracle that it can walk around in Castlevania's skin and replicate its movements without anyone narcing to Konami; this is the Steam equivalent of that scene from Spider-Man 2 where everyone carries the unmasked Peter Parker down the train carriage without giving him up to Doc Ock.

As far as gameplay goes, though, I think this is somewhat abject and miserable. It gets its gamefeel just right, but locks satisfaction behind rote roguelite tedium and digital dicerolling, forcing you to relive its early-game boredom again and again until you have the means to boost ahead to the good stuff. It feels like a progression model that games just can't move on from, a skinner box that aims to rack up Steam hours punctuated with the fleeting thrills the store page promised you. Another "podcast game" in the pejorative sense, something your friend will recommend to you while frowning or shrugging.

Every game needs a turbo mode.

Played a stupid amount of this over the past couple of weeks, and the core reason, I think, is the momentum of fights. The game already has a great pace, able to fluidly control fights by dashing up and down lanes and the ability to throw enemies at the end of your combos - but start turning up the speed and you have a game that moves lightning-fast, where even the normally dominant parry starts to become a genuine risk, feeling like a game of chicken against the hyper-lethal enemies that can cross the screen in an instant. Play on the standard speed afterwards, and the game starts to feel positively glacial- a wonderfully transformative option.

Less enthusiastic about the structure; the most obvious path you’ll take on a first playthrough is one of the more repetitive, the midgame bogged down in a dreary set of forests and swamps, before picking back up during the infamous ferry ride (remember your parry)! And despite boasting a massive spreadsheet of endings, what it really entails is a series of grim little detours that merge back onto the main path. On the other hand, go for the best ending and you’re treated to a route that offers exciting fake-outs and unique bosses, and maybe most importantly: a chance to learn the patterns of the penultimate fights.

I mention this because the final room of the game has you fight against a trio of Dobermans and a pair of Jaguars, arguably some of the most dangerous enemies of the game, and, as was the case for me, enemies you wouldn't have fought if you took the main route. It makes for a gnarly difficulty spike, barely overcoming one batch of enemies, only to go into the next room, and fight an even tougher set of opponents that will summarily send you back to the beginning of the sequence. I can appreciate the old-school harshness of it, but even having done multiple playthroughs, it’s still something I dread. (Probably because of the time it takes to find a window to attack them safely) Very much the make-or-break point of any 1CC run.

But, hey, maybe it’s the dash of venom a game like this really needs, something to wake you up and make sure the prior 40 minutes won’t go to waste.

About halfway into this game, I made an interesting discovery - you can take any girl to the planetarium at any time and tell them that our stars are millions of years old; they no longer exist, and one day the same will be true of us, too. It will always make them really happy. It doesn’t matter if it’s the preppy girl, the nerdy girl, the clumsy girl or the punk girl - reminding someone of the pale blue dot will improve your relationship with them.

What does that mean, exactly? That people, regardless of personal status and beliefs and perceptions, find comfort in being reminded of their insignificant end? Or that you aren’t talking to people at all - you’re just stirring electrons across silicon to simulate a conversation with a girl, sending your light millions of miles away to a virtual Tokyo in 1997 that doesn’t exist? Or did the programmers just forget to account for variance in this one scenario out of thousands, and had all these digital girls react in the exact same way to your Carl Sagan impression? Who knows.

This “infinite diversity, infinite combinations” style of game-reading defines a shadow that will perpetually be cast over this game’s existence in the West by ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS Tokimeki Memorial, the video-essay that more or less lays the blueprint of many classic Backloggd reviews we’ve all grown to love. In my opinion, Tim Rogers (or at least the character of Tim Rogers that Tim Rogers presents in ACTION BUTTON REVIEWS: Season 1) is a patron saint of sorts for this site - a mortal archetype of game-liker who acts as a guiding light for the infamous reviewers here who like to compare 1994’s Game Boy port of Taz-Mania to a fond midsummer’s day, or speculate on the Gulf War-adjacent cultural implications of Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal for the PlayStation 3.

To me, these ‘deranged’ assessments of video games are the most enjoyable way to respond to what is essentially a consumable product - honestly documenting your personal reactions and mental explorations as prompted by a game and its world, eschewing even the slightest hint of constructing a GRAPHICS: 7 | REPLAYABILITY: 4 | STORY: 6 table, rejecting the need to perform a fumbled technical analysis of the ray-adjacent teralighting and polytetrahedro-counts. Years of reading games magazines and games websites has taken a dreadful toll on us, and I think we can unlearn what we have learned by dreaming of the stars while fragging pigcops in Duke Nukem 3D: Duke’s Penthouse Paradise.

This push-and-pull between souls and spreadsheets came to define my playthrough of Tokimeki Memorial: Densetsu no Ki no Shita de¹. To get it out of the way early: I don’t really approve of dating games. I think there’s something insidious and oily and ungodly about them - this idea that you can simulate a power fantasy where an entire class of schoolgirls dance in the palm of your hand, a hand that grips a cold plastic controller in place of the warm human hand of another soul. It is, in a word, pathetic. I don’t approve of dating games in much the same way I don’t enjoy the idea of the dating games we play with each other in reality. It’s not a healthy way to face our interpersonal realities. Dating sims write poems for the emasculated.

To give credit where credit is due - I think the functional bits and bytes of the gameplay here could easily transplant to a game where you are a 27 year old single person with a smartphone and an office job. Switch out Yoshio’s notepad for a Tinder contact lists and the local park for a local bar and I think you’d have a remarkable facsimile of the modern adult dating landscape. But that game doesn’t exist, and you instead find yourself trying to find meaning in a Japanese game developer’s longing for a high school experience he definitely never had. Applying this idea in reverse, does skinning the disposable round-robin experience of modern online dating with a coat of PG13+ 90s chou kawaii high school paint make it somehow more desirable to us, in much the same way we covet Japan’s urban sprawl and sakura scenery over the views of own environment?

For me, Tokimeki Memorial isn’t “the Rosetta Stone of gaming” by any meaningful stretch; I feel like Tim Rogers did a six-hour gold-panning in a dirty digital river, trying to find nuggets of meaning in an exploitative little product for lonely boys that isn’t really all that far off from the insidious pachislots that Konami are now infamously known for. Make a number go up until a girl acknowledges your existence, and then manipulate her into liking “you” by reading a strategy guide inside or outside the computer game. Roll the dice on whether your girlfriend likes blue dresses or green dresses. Got it wrong? Too bad. Perhaps you can live without regret by reloading another of your save files. Put another coin in the slot and hope the right number comes up this time. Want to form a meaningful, long-lasting bond with your oldest friend? Manage and manipulate the lives and hearts of everyone around you like a ruthless restaurant manager filling out a work schedule. And so on, until you stand under the Tree of Legends and pretend to yourself and your trophy sprite that this was all destined to be. You "love Mio"? What the fuck is Mio in relation to you? The sociopathy here is amusing to acknowledge, but can be worryingly internalised, like all bad jokes. How long before gamification inverts your digital and physical lives, and you demand that genuine girls give gratifying gamerscore?

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¹ Known as Heartthrob Memorial: Under the Tree of Legends when the English translation patch is applied.

Distills the vapid vapours of those Twitter and Instagram accounts that post screencaps of Goku and Shinji and Lain staring out into the mid-distance with fake subtitles like "Everything happens so much"; anime and depression as tumblr tote-bag therapy totems, medications as aesthetic-dialectic collectibles to be flexed on Discord and TikTok. Refines the things I didn't like about Milk Inside and discards the things I did like - a classic example of someone being given more time and space to speak and ultimately showing ass over class; everyone's entitled to express themselves however they like in their own art, but careless depiction of mental health is something I struggle to commend, especially given the target audience here. Milk Outside's not entirely without merit, but the most interesting nugget here - 'web people' and their existence as random images and text to be hoarded in your personal Pokedex in lieu of meaningful relationships (1300 webfriends who like drawing and a notebook with half a dozen drawings) - is coated on either side with an unpleasant film of gibberish that's hard to wipe off before digestion. Looks great, though!

The original Tetris Effect is one of the best games ever made, to the point that it was all I played for a few months straight when it originally released; I forewent a heap of other big 2018 releases just so I could keep playing it again, again and again again. That’s the mark of a good fuckin’ game right there! Maybe a perfect game, even…

If the original Tetris Effect had a flaw, though, it was that the experience could be quite isolating. It had a certain aura of loneliness that stood in stark contrast to its uplifting core message that humanity is a single-stacked mass of glowing, breathing blocks that deserve to be together in instrumentality, not held alone and apart. Singing “it’s all connected” is all well and good, but the sound of that voice can ring hollow when it’s bouncing off the walls of your empty living room.

I think Tetsuya Mizuguchi and his team may have been aware of this, too - because Connected is all about making the original Effect’s promises into a reality. It’s hard to know when this update was actually conceived of, but announcing it a few months into the original lockdown and delivering it during that harsh 2020 winter feels like a heartfelt gift from Monstars and Resonair to the planet. A puzzle game’s plea for love and mercy at a time when it was most needed.

I feel kinda guilty about ignoring the gift, though. This DLC/v1.5/whatever-it-is primarily focused on multiplayer, and not since Tetris Battle Gaiden have I seen a game actively innovate on what communal Tetris could be. I doubted this would be any different than other Tetris games that had tried and failed to unite players in the past. I checked it out for a bit at launch last year, but kinda left the Connected content by the wayside for a long time. I thought it wouldn’t be my kind of thing; only after watching three Tetris Pros absolutely demolish the Co-Op Journey did I begin to understand what I was missing out on.

The non-competitive multiplayer in this is a total delight, so much so that I beat the whole thing in one sitting with two random online dudes from Brazil and Japan in the middle of a random Sunday morning/Saturday night/Sunday night. We worked together to battle the stars and keep the galaxy’s light alive, all from our respective corners of our world. It was awesome to see three people span continents to co-operate and communicate via the medium of Tetris Ghost Pieces. “Put your S block here!” “Rotate the line!” “Put down your T piece here, and then I’ll put my square on top!” - I heard these people saying these things without ever registering a word. That’s crazy. That’s cool. That’s connected. And arguably it’s all the more powerful when played online with players across the globe.

Tetris Effect: Connected is the change it wants to see in the world. If you liked the original game - or are just a fan of Tetris in general - I highly recommend checking the online content out. Who knows? We might see each other out there, beyond the time.

As the Ultimate upgrade to Rise there's no real surprises here, but there's something to be said for such consistent franchise quality - Monster Hunter is the most rock-solid brand name in gaming at this point, and an expansion pack to one of the best entries in the series is more than welcome; I'd be more than happy if Capcom just kept using Rise as a bedrock for an MMO-lite every year or two until the Switch finally combusts under the heat their developers have been bringing to the platform. With its sheer depth of customisable content and player expression, this is basically FFXIV for people who don't pee into bottles under their computer desk.

Criticisms can be made of Sunbreak, but they're all short-term annoyances in an expansion that could comfortably push a hundred hours. Like the original, there's an overabundance of pop-ups explaining Lucent Cromp Wenbembo Gems and DX Bugwire Casking+ that you'll never remember (until you finally need them weeks later), but it's a just an awkward signifier of how much gameplay-focused content has been crammed in to an ever-evolving ecosystem that always feels perfect until the next great idea comes along and takes thing to snow-capped heights you never imagined yourself climbing. As a Scot it also kinda pains me to trade out Fake Japan for Fake England as a hunting hub, but Capcom have done a great job of steamlining the beautiful "living menu" system Monhun thrives on even further, making the TTK even shorter than it was already; the new environment and its characters are full of more life than ever, and the follower quests are a fantastic "about damn time" inclusion to the experience that helps form an NPC-bond that goes deeper than the usual "you have a cute idle animation" acknolwedgements.

As a Freedom Unite fan, the updated Jungle brought a pixellated 480x272 tear to my eye (bring back plessy too pls...), but the Citadel is the true star of this show. A masterclass in map design that maximises every advantage of the Rise toolset, it's gotta be one of my favourite Monhun maps of all time - an Akumajo Dracula-type beat that feels like the Magala's true resting place. While I love all the imports from MH4U, there's fewer new monsters than I'd have liked - but the Monster Mash trio are so incredibly well-crafted that it's hard to be annoyed that the roster has been padded out with Really Annoyed Nargacuga and Pissed-Off Pukei-Pukei - when the combat's this good, who doesn't love a bit of repetition anyways?

Like with the original game, it's hard to give a definitive opinion on something that outright acknowledges that it isn't finished - but I have loved every moment on the Rise train so far. I just like having fun with my friends, okay? 😊

”The most detestable habit in modern cinema is the homage. I don’t want to see another goddamn homage in anybody’s movie.” - Orson Welles, speaking at the Cinémathèque Française in 1982

Meaningless referencing is a hallmark of Grasshopper Manufacture video games. In The Silver Case, Tetsugoro Kusabi says a moment in time reminds him of the Rocky movies; Stephan Charbonie name-drops the 1994 FIFA World Cup in Flower, Sun, and Rain; one of my favourite vignettes in The 25th Ward essentially boils down to two detectives being jacked to the tits about going to Starbucks for a caramel macchiato. 


I didn’t bother fact-checking the references above for correctness - is that what those references were again? Is that what they actually referred to? I don’t remember. It was something like that, but I’m not sure - I doubt you knew if my references to these references were right, either. You just know that Suda 51 and his staff love to acknowledge things that they like inside things that they’ve created, right? That jarring feeling of hearing a sci-fi psycho killer monologue about the dollar menu at McDonalds, or watching the lyrics from your favourite moody new-wave hit crawl across the LEVEL COMPLETE screen. There’s something special about seeing and hearing a virtual world acknowledge another (real or fictional) world in material terms that we can recognise and appreciate.


References are, of course, an oft-maligned artistic technique - Orson Welles infamously condemned any artist who leaned on referential crutches. Ironically and hypocritically, the Welles filmography is stuffed with creations that he used as vessels of reference to other works of art. F for Fake - one of his best - is not much more than a series of homages to performances and works of art - both real and imagined - that Welles admired. Transformers: The Movie, his final performance, is nothing more than one big reference to a line of plastic Hasbro toys. Despite his trademark bullish blustering, even one of the all-time greats couldn’t avoid contradicting himself on the matter of referencing. Reference is an inevitable part of self-expression that even some of the best directors of adverts for frozen peas simply cannot avoid.

Cantankerous contradictions aside, I imagine most of us feel similarly to Welles about references. As the always-rolling stone of pop culture gathers more and more digital detritus, films, television shows and video games gain an ever-increasing pool of other people’s popular history to lean on - we’ve all no doubt rolled our eyes at a shameless Star Wars parody or Skyrim knee joke a few hundred times in our lives. Captain America’s infamous “I got that reference” line from Avengers has itself become a reference. 2020s culture has essentially become a referential ouroboros, with creators cyclically patting each other on the back with cameos, shoutouts and in-game tshirts.


Filling your own work with someone else’s work is often just a tedious exercise that outwardly effuses appreciation for another artist, but really just serves as a way for you to self-congratulate and show people what you and they already know. Despite the fact that all these shoutouts are essentially made unto a cultural void, there are still some references being made today that can become special to you or me. After all, we still hold some level of care for the pieces that make up each other's identities. 


Since playing Travis Strikes Again earlier this year, I’ve not been able to shake the memory of a moment that held an eerie serendipity for me. It happened during one of the game’s visual novel detours - in pursuit of a Death Ball, Travis is sent to a festival in Split, Croatia. Whoa! In 2019, the year TSA launched, I went to a festival in Split, Croatia! And then, not long after that, Travis talks about how his handler/girlfriend/wife is really into SUP (stand up paddleboard) yoga right now - my handler/girlfriend/wife is really into SUP (stand up paddleboard) yoga right now! What are the chances, eh?! Travis is just like me! Are we on the same journey? If we read Travis as an extension of Suda 51, is Mr. Goichi Suda himself on that journey with me, too?


Such is the power of a meaningless reference. Two throwaway lines with no broader meaning or significance can suddenly bring a viewer/consumer deeper into an artist/character’s world by giving them something in common - but only for the people who rolled the same numbers on the die of life and culture that the creator did. A true artist, Orson would likely argue, could create meaning through depiction of a universal human experience - one that doesn’t rely on creator and observer both owning the same DVDs or liking the same sports team.


I don’t think I’m alone in seeing superficial-referential similarities between myself and Travis Touchdown. In the wake of No More Heroes 3’s launch, I read a tweet about the game that was making the rounds on KamuiNet - not only did it praise the game for allowing Travis, Shinobu and Bad Girl to age in line with the real-life release dates of the No More Heroes video games, it also suggested that it was refreshing to see a creation where older characters can let their geek-freak flags fly. It’s cool that a 40 year old man can like Chr’s Cunterttack; it’s cool to drink beers on your couch and watch moe anime; it’s cool to be a fully grown adult and still swing a toy lightsaber around; uhhh… and more of that sort of thing (I wager the tweeter would love Kevin Smith’s Clerks 2). I’d reference the tweet, but I don’t know where it is now - hopefully this allusion is enough to keep you in the loop, even if I have likely muddied the specifics once again.


So - was that tweet made with tongue planted firmly in cheek? It’s hard to say. You’d assume a fan of No More Heroes would think twice before praising a game for permitting revelry in stunted consumerism, but hey - I know of people who own replicas of Travis Touchdown’s jacket. Suda himself retweeted a dude who has the beam katana tattooed all the way down his calf. Some people love these games without thinking too hard about all of it. And that’s fine! Whether the tweet was intentionally ironic or not, though, I still think it’s a worthy observation that drives its Akira motorcycle (omg it does The Slide!! sick reference!!!) quite close to what No More Heroes 3 is hopefully trying to truthfully achieve in its own scrappy texture-popping, frame-hitching, wall-clipping little way. 


I won’t waste too much time recapping how we got to No More Heroes 3 (you’re on Backloggd, after all, and can read excellent Top Reviews for each game in the series) but it’s worth considering what each NMH game was really about. The original game in particular, as it’s NMH3’s closest relative - No More Heroes 3 is to No More Heroes 1 as The Force Awakens was to A New Hope, to make another meaningless reference. A reboot and retread of well-worn ground that revels in all the superficial signifiers we’ve come to expect from each series. Revived from the dead with an injection of Disney/Marvelous cash and creatively controlled for a whole new generation. With each re-awakening, the main characters are now older and not necessarily any wiser, reliving glory days by referencing all that Good Shit you loved so much countless decades ago. Hey… They even both have blue lightsabers! What a reference! 


Surface-level symbology and parallels aside, probably the most important thing to keep in mind about No More Heroes 1 while playing No More Heroes 3 is its pop-punk meditation on consumer identity and how it was essentially used to trap Travis in someone else’s violent cycle of gig economics (again: read those Top Reviews!). It doesn’t even matter if he’s aware of the grind he’s trapped in and why it sucks - you and Travis still have to participate in your literal or figurative lawn-mowing in order to afford your new video game t-shirts. And this was before the inescapable collective consciousness of the 2.0 and 3.0 Internets forced us all to look at and buy the same things all the time. Ultimately, the only way Travis could escape his perpetual consumer torment was to go live in the woods and play someone else’s video game (fuck!!! a reference!!) all day instead. And even then, the past he wasn’t able to kill (in the form of a reference to a prior NMH game) still found him and brought him back to the modern metropolis.


When looked at through a lens crafted in the present day, the original No More Heroes couldn't have dropped at a better time. It released the same year as the first iPhone and the '07 Global Financial Crash, and just a few months later, Iron Man hit cinemas. Can you think of three bigger social and cultural touchstones for the 2010/20s era? NMH was the final checkpoint before the end of nerd culture's Bronze Age and the beginning of its Iron (Man) Age. Not a smartphone in sight. Just NEETs living in the moe-ment.

It may just be me attributing my own meaning to a personal period of time, of course - I played the first game as an unemployed 18 year old dweeb hiding out in his parents' back room, and I'm now a 31 year old dweeb with a mortgage and a (furry) child - but it does feel like there's been a momentous paradigm shift in The Culture since 2007. When I went to university, my peers at the pub would turn up their noses when I talked about comics, video games and anime - they were fringe, outsider topics that swam in channels separate from the mainstream. Nowadays, everyone I know knows their Monkey Balls from their Dragon Balls. My own grandmother congratulated me for putting out a Doom wad, for fuck's sake! Make a Super Mario reference in 2021, and the chances are high that your own mother would probably know what you're talking about. Whether they like it or not, everyone is at least partially immersed in this grand nouveau-nerd culture that capital has kindly crafted for us to consume. It's no coincidence that Damon Riccitiello, landlord maximus and CEO of Not-EA Games, is Earth's ambassador for an extraterrestrial apocalypse.

And that is the main thrust of what I think No More Heroes 3 is trying to drive itself toward. Despite the introspective events of Travis Strikes Again, Travis Touchdown returns to his mainline series in a relatively unscathed blaze of geeky glory. Like that tweeter I referenced earlier said, the 40 year old Travis is now definitively a child walking in the realm of adults. He even has 2.5 children and a wife - the all-time classic societal markers of adulthood - but still somehow lives alone with his punk IPAs and wrestling figures, decorating his motel room with anime witch girl posters and collecting trading cards for an 80s video game that he watches obsessively on YouTube. Not exactly society's Dad of the Year material. Is that his fault, though? And is that necessarily a bad thing? I feel like NMH3 is trying to explore these questions without being particularly confrontational or condemnational about them. Grasshopper are holding up a mirror in your peripheral vision while you play their latest game; they're showing you their painting of that guy at your job who wears his Joker t-shirt three times a week and takes his kids to Disneyland so that he and his wife can go see the Millennium Falcon. Is Travis that guy?

Travis is probably the most frequently and meticulously discussed video game character on Backloggd. If ever there was a meme to sum up the whole site, it would likely be that "OMG! THATS ME!" guy, looking at a picture of Travis Touchdown (alongside his close friends Tokio and Sumio). The type of person who likes Suda 51 games and posts on Backloggd is unlikely to clap when Captain America references Fortnite in a Marvel movie, though. They’re probably not going to laugh when Elon Musk acknowledges Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan in an episode of Rick and Morty. A Neon Genesis Evangelion reference in YIIK: A Post-Modern RPG is not gonna delight them. But they’ll still play these games, watch these movies, see these shows, and then seek out a social blogging website where they can share their disdain for said references and assign an appropriate star rating - as if that absolves them of their participation in said culture. What video game t-shirt did you wear in Travis Strikes Again, by the way? And how thick is that line of the web that separates you from that guy in the Joker t-shirt? How deep does your appreciation of the culture you appreciate really go? Could you pronounce "itadakimasu" (love the lyrics on that song!) any better than Travis does, despite playing all those Japanese video games of yours?

I say we're all "participating" in this international smorgasbord of culture-lite, but I think none of us are really all that free to choose how we interact with these things or allow ourselves to be molded by them, short of renting a trailer in the forest. Our friends chat about it, our mutuals snark about it, our coworkers use it for small talk. I didn't watch Loki, but it came up a lot in my daily team meetings. I know what happened in the show, even though I didn't want to think about it. I've played Call of Duty: Warzone with my buds, despite the fact I regularly condemn the Activision war machine. You gotta do what you gotta do. I saw Spider-Man: Far From Home because it's what my friends wanted to do one day. It wasn't a big deal. It's all a common ground we can embrace each other upon. In No More Heroes 3, one of the only ways Travis can relate to a bereaved Bad Girl is by barging into her bedroom and telling her to watch F-te/St-y N-ght or whatever that was. Meaningless references emit powerful psychoframes that connect us.

Meaningless referencing is a hallmark of Grasshopper Manufacture video games, and No More Heroes 3 is the platinum-stamped standard-bearer of that hallmark. You could even argue the gameplay itself (which I didn't even talk about here, lol) is just a series of references - you boot up your beam katana to the classic NMH beat, pull off various suplexes from the annals of NJPW and WWE history, drive the Akira bike down the highway, fly around in a knock-off Full Armor Unicorn Gundam, and mow lawns because you mowed lawns in the original No More Heroes. There's very little here that's of original invention, and Orson Welles, were he alive today and gaming his big ass off, would fucking hate that. It's all goddamn homage, all the goddamn time, you goddamn fuckhead. But in some weird way, there's an artistic bravery in building a game that's entirely about other people's work and how that makes you feel. If you can have a podcast about Takashi Miike, why can't you have a video game about Takashi Miike?

No More Heroes asked the player two questions - “Is this you?” and “Does it feel good?”

No More Heroes 3 tells the player two things - “This is you!” and “Man, does it feel good!” 

Those two new statements might not end with question marks, but I think they're intended to provoke you. Whether you like it or not, this is the way that it is.

Can you do anything about it?

Can Travis (that's me!) really change the future?

Is this really the end of history?

Is this really the end?

No more heroes.

An old woman stumbles towards you with a raised pitchfork in her hands. You stab in her in the face, causing her to stagger backwards in pain. This gives you enough distance to pop her kneecap open with a 9mm bullet, and she falls to her knees in agony. The woman's head is now at the perfect height for you to spin-kick it into the piranha-infested waters like a toxic football, separating from shoulders that gush powerful jets of blood. The sheer force of your kick causes her husband to stumble, tripping a landmine in the process. The mine incinerates the dock you're standing on, and the rest of the woman's family with it; they melt away into chicken eggs and pesetas. The threat neutralised, you pick up your phone and tell your operator the name of this Spanish village is an unpronouncable mouthful. Bullets pierce the screen and you're praised for how effectively the family was slain.

You return to Resident Evil 4 for a lot of things, but I think the paragraph above succinctly describes the core loop that we all keep coming back for on the GameCube, the Wii, the PlayStation 2, the PlayStation 3, the PlayStation 4, the PlayStation 5, the Xbox One, the Nintendo Switch, the PC and the Oculus Rift. The scenario might change, the enemies might change, the weapons might change, the graphics might change, but you are always controlling a baying mob in the cleanest, nastiest, most efficient way you possibly can. Bonus points if you can make it look goofy as Hell in the process.

Playing this right after Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening, it's plain to see how this game was originally a forking point between the two series - both games are essentially the same implementation of a core idea, but choose to tackle combat from different angles of genre. At their best, the two games emphasise close management of an advancing enemy pool using a fairly limited toolset that flows naturally into the other aspects of itself: Knife to pistol. Pistol to kick. Kick to grenade. Grenade to egg. The movements feel primitive, awkward and unintuitive at first, but soon reveal themselves to be expertly crafted for natural achievement of a precision-flow state, racking up minor-yet-satisfying hits to keep a crowd under control while setting up scenarios where bigger and badder moves can be unleashed at the appropriate time. Put Leon in a red trenchcoat and I bet he could manage at least a few floors of Bloody Palace.

This replay of the game was inspired by a conversation I had with my younger coworkers last week when the topic of the Resident Evil games came up. As someone who spends a lot of time talking shop to people about people like Shinji Mikami and Hideki Kamiya, it's easy to fall into the trap of evaluating these games as beautiful little puzzle boxes to be mechanically solved and understood - but spend ten minutes with someone who likes Resident Evil because they watched all the movies, and you'll discover that there are actually people out there who think Resident Evil 4 (in its current un-remade form) is as much stupid nonsense as your average Carry On film. I hate these people, but I do understand where they'e coming from - when this game originally came out, I bought it for my brother on his 14th birthday despite knowing he was deathly afraid of zombies and spiders and guns and all that; even worse, he was the type of person who said things like "you wouldn't actually say that" when Arnold told him to stick around. Resident Evil 4 was essentially his worsetest nightmare. I was selfishly buying a bowling ball for Marge, but unlike Homer, I never came to regret my heartless decision. Resident Evil 4 really is just that good.