A frustrating experience. Frustrating because what's good here is really great close to masterful even. But it's always marred by the issues the game has in design and execution that drags the experience into mediocrity.

The great:

- Combat and vocations. The combat is a lot of fun and the abilities are varied and all feel useful. I tried few vocations and they all were more fun than what I imagined them to be.

- The Pawn system. They legit felt like a party alongside you on the journey. using strangers or friends pawns was really cool to see what they are using. The pawns AI was mostly great as well. Catching you as you fall, offering hints to quest and fights.

- Some of the quests were brilliant. The quests were obtuse and vague but I felt in a good way. It lead to experimentation and once you figure things out, you feel pretty good about yourself. Some really creative quests that allowed multiple solutions. Many quests had choices that led to drastic results.

- Some of the game friction is actually great and unique. Missable quests for example. I liked a game having many quests that get missed either because you ignored them for too long or you progressed the main story. It makes the game more unique and choosing your time on the quests feels meaningful.

The bad:

- Enemy variety and density. There is a lot of talk about the friction this games offer, like the lack of easy fast travel. Itsuno said "if traveling is boring you would have to use fast ravel then your game is boring" Well Itsuno, you made the most boring game to travel in. Because the game lacks enemy variety you would have to go through the same enemies through the whole journey back and forth. Skipping and using easier fast travel option would have been less boring. The game doesn't have good traversal system either. Just walk on foot with stamina gauge all the time. Many games that offered fast travel I didn't use because traversing those world were fun. Not here..

-Many of the quests were just fetch quests going through the same locations over and over to grab flowers or some rocks.. Other quests were escort missions with the classic NPCs slower than the player. Just tedium designs really.

- Lack of location variety. Really mostly just two locations through the whole game.

- Terrible performance and frame pacing. The game looks great but horrible performance in cities that has most of the quests anyways.
- The game is quiet buggy. Many quests bugged, many enemies died in glitches, many of my pawns just died by getting stuck to the ground.
- The plot and story lol...

I came out feeling the game is undercooked and unfinished. From the quests, locales, enemy variety, and story. Even the great combat could have used extra abilities. Just another wasted potential game.

7/10

What a weird game. None of the individual elements in it feel like they work with each other.
Combat is fun, fast and fluid, freely letting you change classes is very welcome and offers a lot of possibilities. But combat also gets extremely easy very early on and besides the Dragons never changes. You'll spend most of the game fighting the same 4-5 enemies, none of which will pose a challenge to you. And that's a shame because the combat offers a lot of possibilities. A mage can cast an ice attack that a fighter then might use as a ramp to jump onto an enemy! That's neat! But the fights are usually so easy there is never much need for it. It can happen for fun, and is fun, but it never feels necessary or strategic. Since the combat is so braindead easy getting new gear barely feels like a reward since it won't change the way you play the game and will just...do more damage. And that's if you can find gear for your class at all. The much maligned fast travel system (or lack thereof) worked for me - until it didn't. There are definitely "I'm miles away from the next town, I'm running low on supplies, everybody is hurting and it's getting dark" moments which feel great. But the downside is that you'll have to run through the same environement over and over and over and over again, fighting the same enemies over and over again.
I don't care how much people love the pawns in this game, I don't get it. I can only hear them repeat the same dialogue 4 times, which you will usually do within a single trip, before wanting to throw them off a bridge. I don't think it's charming, it just feels soulless, sorry. Soulless is also a good way to describe the story and characters which were so uninteresting I stopped paying any attention at some point. But every time I thought I was done something happened in the open world that gave me some hope that there might be more to it. Be it a griffon carrying me away (which then killed me but it was fun regardless) or encountering a dragon fighting a cyclops.
I just wish there was something more to it. If it had engagine side quests, if the combat was just a bit more complex, if there were more interesting things to find in the open world, if travelling from place to place actually felt dangerous and not like a chore, this could've been a really cool game. Instead it is a game that charmed me for the first 10ish hours when all of that still felt like a possibility, entertained me for 5 more hours and then bored me.

"The world once shaped by the great will has come to an end.
It was a foregone conclusion. All is preordained.

If in spite of this you still have the will to fight, now is your chance to prove it."

This is a particularly difficult game for me to write about because I want to greedily compare and contrast every ballhair with the first title’s, just so I can diagnose exactly where my issues with it lie - why a game that is functionally so similar in DNA to one of my all-timers doesn’t hit the mark. Personally speakin, the long & short of it is that Dragon’s Dogma 2 is something of a sidegrade to the original title that distances itself too much from what I found spectacular about it to begin with.

Possibly my favourite element of Dragon’s Dogma 2 is one that could be felt from the moment you first gain control of your character. There’s a palpable heft to character locomotion, complimented by the multilayered textuality of the land itself & the threats of wrong turns into the unknown or slipping off a slick cliffside to your untimely demise - it leans wonderfully far into the concept of traversal being a battle unto itself. As was the case with DD1, being tasked to travel from safety to a marker deep into the fog of war is never a simple request. Goblins, ogres, harpies, and whoever else decides to grace you with their presence are waiting in the bushes to act as regular speedbumps to be carefully considered and planned for accordingly.

Where DD2 slips at this for me is in how little it reciprocates for what it demands. This is a sequel that has ballooned itself in scale to a dizzying near 5x the original map’s size, but hasn’t developed the enemy roster nor the environmental design acumen to make use of it. Take for instance that DD2 has fifty caves strewn around its tectonic world map, and I don’t think a single one is as impressive as one that could be found in DD1. Where the caves/dungeons in DD1 were concerned, there would be special objectives relevant to the overall story, a person you were going there on behalf of who represented a town or group, they would unlock shortcuts for faster world traversal and upon repeat visits you’d notice the location’s role in the world change for the denizens. They would be densely designed so that every corner was worth being scanned to the best of your ability for pickups, shortcuts, levers, climbing points - lending to the almost DnD-esque adventure core followed passionately by the game’s design. Hell, the locales would generally sound and look different too, built to purpose so as to become plausible enough to justify their utility in the world and lend credence to exploring them.

Compared to that, DD2 has shockingly little of this. Its myriad nondescript caves wallhugging the world could scarcely be five prefab rooms tied into a loop to house a few potions, or some equipment you could find at a store. No unique gimmicks or trials, only populated by a handful of gobbos and maybe a midboss as a treat. I feel that Dragonsbreath Tower was supposed to act as something of a callback to Bluemoon Tower from DD1 - it being a perilous journey across a handful of biomes towards a crumbling hanging dungeon that houses a flying peril, but it’s so bereft of pomp and confidence. A truly memetic core routine that made me think less of adventures and more of waypoints and upgrade materials. I want to use a Neuralyzer to remove BotW shrines from the face of the earth. And god why is none of the new music good.

DD2 implies at a big story, but to me it felt like nothing came together. I had no idea who anyone was supposed to be beyond Brant, Sven and Wilhelmina. DD1’s progression from Wyrmhunt -> Investigate the Cult -> Kill Grigori -> Deal with the Everfall -> Confront the Seneschal was great, and throughout all of that you kept up with characters like the King and got to see his downfall. The writing and delivery of the cult leader and Grigori himself far surpasses anything in DD2, despite having very similar subjects. Outpaced by DD1 in setpieces and pop-offs and thematics. There's barely any antagonistic people in the game and once you get to Battahl it feels as though the game trails off like it’s got dementia.

It's a completely different kind of design that, sure, encourages player freedom - but communicates it in this really loose way that I just don't care about. I spent much of my playthrough having no idea what I was doing besides wiping off the blank smudges of world map. What expounds this problem is that quest discoverability is astonishingly low here, oftentimes made worse by restricting itself to AI astrology, time of day, relationship levels (??). The duke could stand to commission a farcking quest board imo!!! I won’t kid myself and say that the quests in DD1 were even a bronze standard, but they worked and communicated exactly what they needed to do while also leaving open ends available for interpretation. But in DD2, they’re just awful, I absolutely hated the experience of trying to clear up Vermund’s quests before pushing Main Story progression and at this point I wish I cared as little as the game does. What need is there for almost all of them to have a “return to me in a few days” component in a game with such limited fast travel, do you want me to throw you into the brine? Frankly the game is never as interesting as when you're doing Sphinx riddles.

Combat’s good enough, I do enjoy how the interplay of systems would present the player with all sorts of unique situations, but even these can and do begin to feel samey when a very slim enemy pool on shuffle. What makes these emergent conflicts even less impressive to me is how I can't help but feel as though the ogres, trolls and chimeras in particular have had their difficulties neutered. The hardest time I had with the chimera was during a sidequest where you had to get the poison-lover to be doused in chimeric snake venom. They're barely a threat otherwise, and can either be chain stunlocked with well-placed shots or slashes, or get too lost in their own attack animations to really hit anyone. Comparing these enemies to DD1 where climbing was far more effective at dealing damage encouraged the player to get real up close to them and it felt like their AI knew how to deal with that. Like when I fought the Medusa it felt like they didn't have any idea where the party even was. I think if the hardest encounters the game has to offer is Too Many Goblins we have a problem. (Dullahan is very cool though)

I’m not miffed no matter how miffed I sound. When do people like me ever get sequels to games they love? I’ll tell u dear reader it’s Never. Dragon’s Dogma 2 is full of wonder & delight and I think anyone less fatigued by SCALE and SANDBOX than me has a home in it. I feel a little left behind, having spent 12 years wasting away in the waiting room rotating in my head the concepts DD1 confidently wields, and its further potential as a foundation for a sequel. A game that was absolutely 'for me', course correcting into sick-of-this-already airspace. I’ll be excited to see whatever news, expansions or the like the future holds for DD2. Right now, though? I think DD1 has a stronger jawline.

”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.