No More Heroes (Wii)

Arrested development, meager streets and just desserts.
2/20/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 2 of 2

Now with fewer hookers

The setting is Santa Destroy, an obvious nod to the San Andreas of the last Grand Theft Auto. Travis has to ride his funky clunky chopper (which doesn't get its due until the end of the game) through the streets. These streets are mostly empty thanks to the Wii's last-gen graphics power. Don't mind the jaggies, however; you'll get used to them. The draw distance is another matter entirely. For whatever reason -- and I have a theory on this -- you'll spend the majority of the game traversing Santa Destroy and doing typical role-playing game things like earning money, raising your stats, learning new abilities, improving your weapon, and gathering collectibles -- sidequests, all. Because of some truly user-hostile choices about when and where the game is going to teleport you, you'll spend lots of time riding back and forth to reactivate missions that you've failed.

The easy explanation for all the filler that constitutes this annoying overworld is that Goichi Suda and the guys at Grasshopper Manufacture didn't know any better. Perhaps they wanted to capture a bit of that free-roaming open-world gameplay that drives Grand Theft Auto, Crackdown and Saints' Row, and they simply weren't up to the task. Perhaps the Nintendo Wii is partly to blame. Perhaps our expectations are too high.

Killing jokes

I have a theory that No More Heroes is making a meta-statement about games and gamers. About you. About your willingness to drive back and forth, to pick up trash, to search for meaningless little balls, to grind missions, to repeatedly press a button to lift weights and improve your strength stat, to collect cards and T-shirts. The city of Santa Destroy is a big, fat, overbearing wet blanket of a joke about filler. There are plenty of inside jokes here about movies and games (including a really odd Duke Nukem Forever reference). I wouldn't put it past Suda to make the gameplay part of the joke. No More Heroes is, in short, making fun of you.

There's a moment at the end of "Happiness," Todd Solenz's nightmare fairy tale, when a family laughs merrily despite having been through hell and back. "I'm not laughing at you," the lead character's sister reassures her. "I'm laughing with you."

"But I'm not laughing," she notes.

That's a bit how it feels with Suda's approach to No More Heroes. As games grow up and hew nearer to movies, we can see the points of comparison among our creative stars. We have our Spielberg (Blizzard?), our Pixar (Valve?), our Coen Brothers (Ken Levine?), our Frank Capra (Will Wright?), our Jerry Bruckheimer (EA?), our Michael Bay (David Jaffe?), our Terence Malick (Team Ico?), our P.T. Anderson (Rockstar?), our George Lucas (George Lucas), and our own innumerable Uwe Bolls. Goichi Suda should be our David Lynch or our Takashi Miike. But first he needs to learn that he's a game designer before all else, and all his creative insights will go nowhere until they're anchored in a good game. Until that happens, I'm not laughing. I am, however, running around yelling, "Raspberry Chocolate Sunday!"

This review was based on a retail copy of the game provided by the publisher.