No Idea: No More Heroes (Wii) Review
Posted on
Friday, February 01, 2008
by Gary A. Ballard
Imagine the immature, socially-retarded cousins of Sid Vicious and Johnny Knoxville met, fell in love and had babies. Now imagine those babies were raised on Atari 2600 games, mixed with a liberal dose of Grand Theft Auto 3 and anime. Imagine that child grew up to be a game designer. Had that hypothetical scenario been a reality, that demon spawn would have produced No More Heroes for the Nintendo Wii.
The developer, Suda 51, is the fevered mind behind the game Killer 7, which I have routinely criticized as a game too interested in being a pretentious, avant garde statement on the concept of video games than in being a playable game. I'm happy to say that NMH is not that kind of game. It is a puzzling game, nonetheless.
The main character is Travis Touchdown, a Johnny Knoxville-inspired anime assassin looking to raise his world assassin ranking by killing the ten assassins ranked above him. For some reason, he's also hoping to get into the pants of his handler, the blonde Frenchie named Sylvia, who appears to be more interested in abusing Travis than getting freaky with him. Armed with his lightsaber-like beam katana, he has to work odd jobs and various assassination missions to pay for the entry fees to his ranked fights. Yes, I'm well aware that this entire scenario makes no sense whatsoever. At best, it's a manga storyline told with as much sardonic disdain as abject reverence. At worst, it's just a mishmash of things that the developer thought would be funny.
I have a difficult time trying to define an audience that would like this game. On the one hand, it's a third-person adventure game, similar to Prince of Persia without the acrobatics or really anything other than slicing and dicing. Travis mows through hordes of faceless thugs, with the occasional mini-boss, before reaching a boss battle. Between those boss battles (called ranked fights), Travis is given timed missions which are either action missions, or really irritating mini-games. All the mini-games and missions are strung together in a Grand Theft Auto-style city that Travis drives around on his motorcycle.
With one notable exception, all of these different types of gameplay are at best mediocre, such as the thug-killing missions. At worst, they are downright insulting, especially the collection mini-games. One such mini-game involves Travis karate chopping trees until coconuts fall out, gathering up the coconuts and pressing the A-button Track-and-Field style to run back to the coconut turn-in point. At some points of the game, these mini-games are not optional, because they make Travis the money he needs to enter the ranked fights. The driving game is poorly controlled and seems to serve no purpose other than to pay homage to the Grand Theft series. The city is uninteresting. Running over pedestrians causes no consequences, Travis can't perform any jumps or tricks with his bike, and in the 4 hours I played, there seemed to be no emergent gameplay in these sections. The long corridors of thug-bashing gets old really quickly, as there seems to be little strategy needed to dispatch the hordes, and it all serves to distract from the best parts of the game, the boss battles.
Had NMH just focused solely on making boss battles and lots of them, it would have been a fantastic game. The boss battles are challenging, exciting affairs, where tactics are needed to overcome the enemy. But knowing there are likely only 10 boss battles (with perhaps a few more added as challengers come after Travis' rank) means the game will have very little worthwhile gameplay chopped up by mediocre and irritating mini-games. None of the mini-games will stand out on its own. As a result, the game likely won't appeal to most fans of any of those types of games, which makes me confused as to who the real audience would be.
The game's main selling point seems to be its style. While some will find it humorous or downright hysterical, I just found it was trying too hard to be "punk" and "irreverant." Things like making Travis take a dump to save the game, or his begging Sylvia to "do it" didn't make me laugh so much as cringe. The crew of Jackass might enjoy these parts, but I'm not sure who else would. The graphics are a mixed bag, using a jagged, cel-shaded art style which works well at times. At other times, the scenery is horribly anti-aliased, worse than I've seen on most Wii games. The system is capable of better visuals.
The game uses the Wii's motion controls sparingly, as finishing moves on combos, or gimmicky sections of the mini-games. There is nothing done with these controls that couldn't be accomplished with a PS2 controller, and that's a real shame. A lightsaber/sword game with motion controls would have been more interesting than the control scheme used.
In all, the game is worthy of a rental at best, and then only if the things mentioned above aren't a hindrance. For me, four hours was enough to know I wouldn't care to finish the game. The boss battles were great, but the majority of the game wasn't worth slogging through to get to them. I'd rate the game a 6 out of 10.
The developer, Suda 51, is the fevered mind behind the game Killer 7, which I have routinely criticized as a game too interested in being a pretentious, avant garde statement on the concept of video games than in being a playable game. I'm happy to say that NMH is not that kind of game. It is a puzzling game, nonetheless.
The main character is Travis Touchdown, a Johnny Knoxville-inspired anime assassin looking to raise his world assassin ranking by killing the ten assassins ranked above him. For some reason, he's also hoping to get into the pants of his handler, the blonde Frenchie named Sylvia, who appears to be more interested in abusing Travis than getting freaky with him. Armed with his lightsaber-like beam katana, he has to work odd jobs and various assassination missions to pay for the entry fees to his ranked fights. Yes, I'm well aware that this entire scenario makes no sense whatsoever. At best, it's a manga storyline told with as much sardonic disdain as abject reverence. At worst, it's just a mishmash of things that the developer thought would be funny.
I have a difficult time trying to define an audience that would like this game. On the one hand, it's a third-person adventure game, similar to Prince of Persia without the acrobatics or really anything other than slicing and dicing. Travis mows through hordes of faceless thugs, with the occasional mini-boss, before reaching a boss battle. Between those boss battles (called ranked fights), Travis is given timed missions which are either action missions, or really irritating mini-games. All the mini-games and missions are strung together in a Grand Theft Auto-style city that Travis drives around on his motorcycle.
With one notable exception, all of these different types of gameplay are at best mediocre, such as the thug-killing missions. At worst, they are downright insulting, especially the collection mini-games. One such mini-game involves Travis karate chopping trees until coconuts fall out, gathering up the coconuts and pressing the A-button Track-and-Field style to run back to the coconut turn-in point. At some points of the game, these mini-games are not optional, because they make Travis the money he needs to enter the ranked fights. The driving game is poorly controlled and seems to serve no purpose other than to pay homage to the Grand Theft series. The city is uninteresting. Running over pedestrians causes no consequences, Travis can't perform any jumps or tricks with his bike, and in the 4 hours I played, there seemed to be no emergent gameplay in these sections. The long corridors of thug-bashing gets old really quickly, as there seems to be little strategy needed to dispatch the hordes, and it all serves to distract from the best parts of the game, the boss battles.
Had NMH just focused solely on making boss battles and lots of them, it would have been a fantastic game. The boss battles are challenging, exciting affairs, where tactics are needed to overcome the enemy. But knowing there are likely only 10 boss battles (with perhaps a few more added as challengers come after Travis' rank) means the game will have very little worthwhile gameplay chopped up by mediocre and irritating mini-games. None of the mini-games will stand out on its own. As a result, the game likely won't appeal to most fans of any of those types of games, which makes me confused as to who the real audience would be.
The game's main selling point seems to be its style. While some will find it humorous or downright hysterical, I just found it was trying too hard to be "punk" and "irreverant." Things like making Travis take a dump to save the game, or his begging Sylvia to "do it" didn't make me laugh so much as cringe. The crew of Jackass might enjoy these parts, but I'm not sure who else would. The graphics are a mixed bag, using a jagged, cel-shaded art style which works well at times. At other times, the scenery is horribly anti-aliased, worse than I've seen on most Wii games. The system is capable of better visuals.
The game uses the Wii's motion controls sparingly, as finishing moves on combos, or gimmicky sections of the mini-games. There is nothing done with these controls that couldn't be accomplished with a PS2 controller, and that's a real shame. A lightsaber/sword game with motion controls would have been more interesting than the control scheme used.
In all, the game is worthy of a rental at best, and then only if the things mentioned above aren't a hindrance. For me, four hours was enough to know I wouldn't care to finish the game. The boss battles were great, but the majority of the game wasn't worth slogging through to get to them. I'd rate the game a 6 out of 10.
Labels: Video Games, Wii
posted by Gary A. Ballard @ 3:47 PM
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