No More Heroes (Wii)

Arrested development, meager streets and just desserts.
2/20/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 2

Travis Touchdown doesn't have any friends. Instead, he has a cat. He doesn't live in a house, or even an apartment. He lives in a room littered with collectibles (i.e. toys) and he's still got a Nintendo 64. Much of his wardrobe consists of T-shirts fished out of dumpsters. He's into anime, wrestling and a girl way out of his league. Although his lifelong dream is to reach the top of an aggressively 8-bit high-score screen, he spends an inordinate amount of time at crappy jobs like scrubbing walls, mowing lawns, and pumping gas. He's got some pretty snazzy beam katana skills, but for the most part, he is the very picture of gamer dude arrested development. In No More Heroes, Travis Touchdown is you.

Enter the mind of a Killer7

The most intriguing thing about this game -- before and after playing it -- is that it was created by Goichi Suda, the head of Japanese developer Grasshopper Manufacture and the designer of Killer7. Killer7 was about... Well, okay, there's no easy way to complete that sentence. But whatever meaning you culled from Killer7's splintered narrative, it was a forceful and profound struggle with concepts such as terrorism, American hegemony, drugs, madness, cultural identity and child abuse. For starters. No More Heroes touches on only one of those issues (possibly two if you watch a certain cut scene in slow motion). Whereas Killer7 was a fascinating cipher, No More Heroes is more of a goof.

The core of the gameplay is straightforward over-the-top Devil May Cry Slashing for Dummies, combined with an occasional flick of the Wii remote to administer a gory killing blow. As Travis fights his way to each of the world's top 10 assassins, he slices through throwaway bad guys crammed into antechambers. He eventually gets to the assassin, a boss du jour introduced with a weird cut scene. Said boss is then dispatched via a typical boss battle: Watch the pattern and attack during the vulnerable point in the boss' animation. Another cut scene follows.

Jackpot!

These bouts of swordplay are entertaining enough, even if they aren't quite as inspired as the underappreciated God Hand, which cornered the market on inspired, wacky fighting scenes. No More Heroes has its moments, though. When your beam katana (the name "light saber" was already taken) runs out of juice, you have to shake the Wii remote to recharge it while Travis assumes an amusingly suggestive position. Travis learns Wii remote-driven wrestling moves to incapacitate bad guys. There are even some really cool tricks that use the Wii remote's speaker. Button mashing will do just fine for the most part, and the convenient save points minimize frustration.

There's no meaningful loot or collecting, but there is a slot machine pull with every fatality. If you line up three symbols, Travis will enthusiastically proclaim the name of some random dessert to go along with a temporary power-up. "Raspberry Chocolate Sundae!" he cries, as the world goes black-and-white and all the bad guys move in slow motion. A tiger crosses the screen to time it out. It makes no sense, but that doesn't dampen the enthusiasm with which it is presented.

In fact, that's No More Heroes in a nutshell: It makes no sense, substituting for anything meaningful a boundless glee at lopping off someone's head to send a geyser of coins and blood gushing from his neck stump. The storyline is disjointed, but there are occasional payoffs, mostly for sheer outrageous style. As a storyteller, Suda is practically bursting at the seams with profane vulgar creativity. Sure, you get a spirited and weird fighting game, but it is driven by even more spirited and weirder cut scenes, which come perilously close to going absolutely nowhere. Just hang in there.