Like many of you fellow gamers I've been playing games since I was a kid and haven't stopped since. Naturally there have been games I absolutely adored and others I utterly despised but I don't recall ever feeling so conflicted about a video game before.

Sure I've had games which I've liked but not felt all that strong about or played games that have been unimpressive but I've been able to get some size of fun out of them but No More Heroes made me feel something no game before it has ever done. I find this game somewhat of an irritating mess yet I love every sweet spoonful of it.

I will say the version I played through was the PS3 version. I do own it on the Wii but my unfortunate dislike the wii-remote left me to never progressing beyond the first boss. So maybe some of the problems could be related to a bad port? Who knows but onwards anyway. (also slight spoilers.)



One thing I hate for any video game to do is to throw in an badly made gameplay mechanic which only serves to make the game longer than it actually is. One of the most recent examples being Sonic Generations, to progress you need to do the boss battles and that's fine, but to get to these battles you have to play a number of small challenge levels in order to gain 3 keys which unlocks the gateway to the boss. Some could argue this adds variety to the game but I don't want to be forced into firing love hearts from Rouge the Bat at robots, I don't want to fucking compete with Knuckles!

These things by themselves are perfectly fine and valid so as long they are made optional but once the developer makes it non-optional and also required to progress in the game it instantly for me becomes an irritating chore. I just want to get back to speeding through levels!

And No More Heroes does this. In order to go onto the next mission you have to raise money and to get money you have to take on small part-time jobs, these include mini-game like scenario's which involve hitting tree's and picking up the coconuts or going out into a desert like field and finding scorpions...can I get back to killing people please? To the games credit doing these mundane tasks opens up small assassination jobs that are infinitely more enjoyable but again I have to play these in order to progress! However...



Some of these part time jobs are so absurd that I fucking love it! One of them involves pumping up and down to make a burger shop sign rotate to attract the customers below to come in and buy. This is such a tedious thing to do but it's so weirdly surreal and silly that I love it!

Another involves getting onto your bike and launching off as far as you can off a ramp straight into the ocean. The thought occurs as to why this is a job and who would even pay someone to do this! Again the game is forcing me to go out of my way to ride off a ramp into the ocean just so I can progress, it's so stupid but I love it!

Oh but there's a topic I have a certain nit-pick with. The god damn Motorbike! Granted it's not as bad as Mass Effect's vehicle sections and controls which legitimately made me want to cry and microwave the disc. However I've lost count of how many times I've accidentally driven into a wall and left unable to do anything else. Perhaps I just never discovered it but I'm damn certain there isn't a reverse function at all, which is odd because I'm fairly certain you could in the Wii version. This means I either have to walk the rest of the way or walk away far away enough to call up some random guy to drive it up to me! However...



I love how goofy and broken it is. I love that the collision physics are way off and just aren't finished or correctly made in the slightest. Hitting them just results in you jerking and clipping away from them, as if the cars have some weird invisible force field around them. What's even better is when you crash and the silly little cartoon sound effect plays making the absurdity of it all even sweeter!

I even love the guy that picks up the bike for you. Who the hell is that guy? And why is he always having a bad day?!

This leads me to one of my biggest problems with the game though, with what feels like an un-necessary choice to implement and comes off feeling like a poor man’s Grand Theft Auto on some levels. Yes of I am of course talking about the fucking Open World, Santa Destroy.

I find it hard to fathom why Suda51 chose to set the game in an Open World at all, there's just so little basis to it. Calling it an Open World is kind though considering how small it is and how little there is to do. Sure there are collectibles but the most you'll be finding are balls to upgrade yourself a bit, t-shirt designs and some extra money, not all that thrilling I'm afraid. It's a chore driving around such an empty faceless city when they could have just put all the shops in much smaller area thereby making it more convenient for the player. However...



I love how bland and buggy the city is. It's like some weird robot drone run city with how lifeless the NPC's are and how often you'll be pushed away by the force field cars. It creates a somewhat interesting contrast to the games otherwise crazy over the top nature. And the people in the shops aren't exactly bland or lifeless.

You'll have the gym which has an owner who seems to be really into you, in more ways than one, you'll have the assassin job centre with some random woman with her eyes covered and then you'll have the katana mechanic Naomi who is always unhappy to see you and repeatedly calls you an Otaku! It's a bland lifeless world that's bursting at the seams full of character and flavours, a town of Contradiction.

Now cut-scenes, I'm tired of them in video games. As a kid I loved them and would happily sit through them with strong attention. I always found it weird that my Mum would skip cut-scenes on the occasions that she played a game, but now I'm on the same boat. The only times I find them acceptable are the beginning and the end, any other time it's just in my way, I'm playing a video game which is an interactive type of media I should not be sitting here watching unable to do anything! It's taking control out of my hands and makes for fracturing and distracting experience. However...



Watching Travis deliver the line "Mister Sir Henry Motherfucker" almost had me in tears and even now as I'm typing this it brings a smile to my face. I love the cut-scenes in this game and they deliver some of the best dialogue and humour to be seen. Simply because the game doesn't take it's self seriously in the slightest, the dialogue is over the top and incredibly cheesy at times but that's what makes it so good! The game makes sure that no character is made boring or bland, everyone's got an eccentric personality and every single one of them are a joy to watch.

So much so that I actually don't want to kill the vast majority of these characters, I didn't want to kill Bad Girl, she's fucking awesome with her sassy mouth, cute outfit and her love for smashing gimp's skulls in. I didn't want to kill DestroyMan who wears a ridiculous outfit, who has an electric prank like glove and can fire god damn lasers!

It's perhaps a testament to Grasshopper's knack for designing characters and their personalities. We know nothing about these people at all other than we have to kill them but their unique designs and wacky personalities cemented our love for them.



I'll wrap things up here, there's so much more I could talk about but I think I've made my point clear. I have so many problems with this game, it does so many things wrong and does a number of mistakes but those wrongdoings and mistakes will just as easily engross me all the more and make me love the game all the more!

It's a game that constantly has me contradicting how I feel about it and that above all is what makes me love it the most!