No More Heroes is a Wii game I bought because the Wii didn't have any games. When I take a glance at the case sitting on the shelf, I think of all the incredibly polished NEXT GEN GRAPHICS and REALISTIC PHYSICS ENGINES on other systems and in other software, I almost have to sigh with relief that thank God I don't have to deal with that videogame marketing shit in this game. What does the back of the box say, anyway? Here, let me read you some of the bullet-points:1) "Slash your way to the top with your trusty beam katana."
Okay, that's true. You do hack bad guys. You also have a lightsaber. The marketing team at Ubisoft was pretty trustworthy on this one.
2) "Complete side jobs for extra cash to customize your character and weapons."
This, while knowing why undergoing side jobs should be listed as a positive bulletpoint is a joke in itself, is also true. So far, you special marketing team you, are not completely bullshitting me.
3) "Bring the pain with an arsenal of over-the-top combat moves."
Yes. Okay. But enough of that.
Like I said before, No More Heroes was a game I bought because the Wii didn't have any games. Metroid Prime 3 was dead and gone, a mere shell of what the original had been, and you can only play Wii Sports for so long before it becomes something akin to actual work. As a skinny kid pretending to be a fat kid for the sake of this blog entry, I'd like to say that, yes, Wii Sports was my weight-loss savior, but now that all the women flock to me like my old-fat-self to a Krispy Kreme donut, I really don't want to mimic swinging a tennis racket anymore. I'd also like to point out the state of our nation when people actually get tired by pretending to play a sport in front of a television set -- and doctors, for christsake, are forced to give a "scientific" name to a "disease" caused by this "exercise".
But since I'm not a fat kid anymore (or never really was -- it's your call), I guess I can sympathize.
Anyway, when the first trailer for No More Heroes was posted online, I watched it with little curiosity. The game at the time was dubbed just Heroes. The trailer starred a dude with a lightsaber named "Travis Touchdown" and another dude with a cigar and long silver hair named "Helter Skelter". Personally, I was rooting for the silver-haired dude because I was a fan of Final Fantasy, and even though I'm not gay, I would totally go for a dude that looked like a chick. Travis Touchdown looked like a Johnny Knoxville clone, and Jackass isn't all that appealing to a not-gay dude who could totally go for dudes that look like chicks.
In the end, the trailer was poorly voice-acted and honestly looked like it was destined for the bargain bin within a week after release. Plus, my effeminate-looking-cigar-smoking dude lost the duel! Not cool!
A couple months later, a second trailer was released at the Tokyo Game Show (and this would also become the game's opening). This, however, immediately made a fan of me -- even before the game was released! I mean, here you have this satirical videogame about a guy who doesn't have any money, decides to become a serial killer to earn a living, and gradually make his way to the top of the serial killer food-chain. How could that not be appealing to anyone who plays videogames? Most games have a main objective: destroy anything that moves. See that goomba walking toward you on screen? Stomp it to bloody bits. How about those ghosts? Eat the shit out of them. And those falling bricks that threaten screen-closing demise? Line those suckers up for ultimate decimation.
Maybe the Tetris reference should be rendered moot, but my point here is that anyone who has ever picked up a videogame has probably killed something in that virtual world. That's okay -- I'm not saying this should be taken negatively; just mull it over for awhile. Destroying stuff has always been fun, like smashing an expertly-built sand castle. What's wrong with taking out a bunch of Nazi scum in Call of Duty? Nothing. But that's because it isn't real.
Silvia, your assassin boss, contacts you during your first real mission. You've already slashed about a hundred guys into fountains of blood and cash and exaggerated vocals, and now, your controller begins to vibrate. It's Silvia. You put the controller to your ear, like a cell phone. Your boss really has nothing but frenchly-accented gibberish to say, but you think it's cool anyway that the developers had the incentive to make the Wii remote into something of a phone. The only reason you are impressed by this, though, is because you've played many a videogame before.
No More Heroes was made for people like you and me, people who watched all the Star Wars movies and can quote Han Solo's script word for word; people who get excited when a new Sin and Punishment is announced; people who, when the Wii was first revealed, daydreamed during dull math lectures about pretending to be a Jedi and swinging that goddamn controller around like a lightsaber.
What do you do with a lightsaber, exactly?
Kill stuff, that's what.
We're a nation of murderers. That last sentence isn't a cut on who we are as people -- it's just simple fact. Destruction is in our nature, and by God, do we like to slash the everloving shit out of salary-men, baseball players, wannabe-superheroes, katana-wielding minors, bad girls, and most importantly, magicians. Slash left: Travis twirls his fluorescent blade and massacres a dude into a fountain of blood (bastard!). Slash down: Travis leaps into the air and slices another dude in two (my spleen!). Slash right: you get the picture.
It's like lightsaber porn, really. At the beginning of the game, we're so jazzed up by the action on screen and the motions the game demands of us, but by the end, we've killed so many guys and defeated so many bosses that becoming number one doesn't seem so glamorous anymore. Travis, too, seems more and more disgusted by the people he meets (and eventually kills) -- a trait which makes him surprisingly human.
In the end, Travis kills his father. Er, he doesn't kill his father! His sister kills his father, but then his sister, who actually is only a half-sister, reveals that the person she just killed wasn't Travis' father at all -- but she did kill his real father a few years back.
This is good, isn't it? A mish-mash of convoluted plot-lines that really don't matter in a game where all you want to do is massacre the shit out of assassins and Pizza-Butt CEO's. Or maybe, near the end, the game has affected you in such a way that you end up caring for these characters.
Or maybe not.
P.S. -- The music is awesome, bro! Let's see how far we can take this thing!
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