No More Heroes is a solid action game bogged down by bafflingly unnecessary grinding in the worst hub world I’ve ever encountered in a video game. It’s difficult to overstate just how much the town of Santa Destroy kills No More Heroes’ pacing. Following each ranked fight, Travis must raise money to pay for his entrance fee into the next battle. In order to earn money, you need to complete part-time jobs and assasination missions until you have enough to enter the next level. At first, this is kind of entertaining. Watching Travis lug around coconuts and punch trees is pretty funny, and there seems to be some interesting ideas expressed about the nature of this kind of work. In order to accept a part-time job mission, you need to talk to this guy who constantly calls Travis a “third-rater”, even until the end of the game. It adds to the irony of Travis’ desire to be the number one ranked assassin, as at the end of the day it doesn’t even make much of a difference in normal society. Travis, a loser who lives in a motel surrounded by anime figurines and who is the type of person to watch a DVD called “How to Please a Woman 101” is the perfect sort of person to seek to become the best at something so pointless. He has given up his place at the bottom of normal society to seek the top of a disgusting, harmful and useless subculture. As the game progresses, the grind for money becomes agonizing. Repeating the same mission over and over again, even the more lucrative assasination missions, is a complete waste of the player’s time. It feels like most of my playtime on this game is dissociating behind my computer monitor while I kill ten guys in a subway over and over again until I can finally play the real game. If you completely cut out these missions, the game’s pacing would be lightning fast, and really enjoyable to blaze through. This is not the game we ended up receiving.

Speaking of Travis, I find him to be a pretty interesting character. He perfectly portrays the type of extremely online, extremely delusional, extremely misogynistic losers who are common not only on the Internet, but in the real world. He’s a complete incel. If the game was primarily just riffling off how pathetic Travis is as a human being, that would be fine. However, the game clearly wants you to think that, on some level, Travis is cool. All it takes is two seconds of scrolling under any YouTube video about No More Heroes to find someone calling him cool, or something to that effect. Suda’s tendency towards unfocused writing doesn’t work with Travis, because he does not grow or change at any point throughout the game’s runtime. I don’t think the writer’s intent was for the player to respect or admire Travis in any way, but unfortunately the allure of someone who beheads hordes of enemies with a lightsaber is too strong to bear. The insertion of more normal people into the game would be a nice way to put Travis’ insanity into perspective. Maybe through Bishop, his friend who works at the video store? I will likely not play any future No More Heroes titles (aside from maybe Travis Strikes Again), so I don’t know how his character develops, if at all.

I think No More Heroes had a lot of potential to be a pretty cool and good game. I don’t think it’s entirely bad, per se, but it certainly doesn’t reach the heights of some of Suda’s prior works.