Just Don't Call It a Lightsaber

For gamers looking for a taste of something truly different, look no further: No More Heroes is a brash, absurd, and thoroughly entertaining game from Grasshopper Manufacture, an eccentric Japanese development house. You play as Travis Touchdown, the eleventh-best assassin in America, and—armed with a lightsaber you won in an online auction—you are going to kill the ten people ranked above you. They’re all hanging around a sunny, sleepy West Coast town called Santa Destroy.

Writer, director, and Grasshopper CEO Suda Gouichi clearly has Quentin Tarantino on the brain, and just as Kill Bill, Vol. 1 is a geeky L.A. guy’s violent, indulgent meditation on the Far East, No More Heroes is a geeky Japanese guy’s violent, indulgent meditation on Southern California.

The game is gleefully apolitical and amoral, all blood, testosterone, and stylized anime graphics. Travis battles assassins like Death Metal, a tattoo-covered millionaire with a giant, electrified meat cleaver, and Bad Girl, a tutu-wearing teenage sociopath who keeps an army of S&M bondage clones under the Santa Destroy Baseball Stadium. Our hero spends his free time making raunchy, unsuccessful advances towards Sylvia Christel, the petite blonde woman who arranges fights between the assassins, and mingling with the bizarre denizens of Santa Destroy’s seamy underbelly.

The gang at Grasshopper perhaps tried a little too hard to be cool, wacky, and shocking, but the everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach ultimately works in the game’s favor. No More Heroes is not the prettiest game, or the easiest to control, or the most innovative, but it is a master class in variety and pacing. Any one of its elements—the story, the combat, the exploration of Santa Destroy—would be unpalatable in high doses, but shuffled around and deployed in moderation, they’re all pretty delicious.

Taking out an assassin is a straightforward kill-a-thon: slice and dice henchmen until the boss shows up. Combat is simple, but a nice mix of button-mashing (for basic attacks) and Wii remote-swiping (which unleashes furious finishing moves) keeps things interesting. When Travis uses his non-Star-Wars-copyright-infringing “beam katana,” enemies explode in blood showers so gaudy that in Japan and Europe the gore was changed to grey ash.

After a successful mission, Travis returns to his motel room, where he can play with his cat or use the toilet, which is how one saves the game—but it’s pretty tasteful as far as these things go. Each assassin battle has an entry fee, and earning cash necessitates a trip to the temp agency, where Travis gets hired do things like pick up garbage and rescue stray cats. These chores are simple mini-games, and while they may be fun for all of five minutes, they only last for three, and they become increasingly outlandish as the game progresses—sweeping the beach for land mines, collecting scorpions on a dirt farm, etc. Before too long, Travis’s bank account is fat enough to challenge the next assassin.

The cycle of combat, chores, outlandish story sequences, and more combat would have made for an enjoyable action game, but what makes No More Heroes great is how it disrupts this comfortable rhythm in unexpected and hilarious ways. At one point, Travis has an assassination mission in a location he’s visited before. “Curse you, Grasshopper!” the player thinks. “You’re recycling levels and I’m barely halfway through the game.” But then, out of nowhere, comes Pure White Giant Glastonbury, an event best left unspoiled—suffice it to say all is forgiven. These moments are the highlights of No More Heroes, and they increase in frequency as the game hurtles toward its preposterous conclusion.

The most controversial element of the game, among gamers, has been the town of Santa Destroy. It looks like an open-world, Grand Theft Auto-style city, but its streets are sparsely populated, it looks like crap, and its only technical function is that Travis must drive through it to access various missions. Still, what GTA fans really mean when they bash Santa Destroy is that you can’t kill random people in the street, which would be antithetical to the essence of No More Heroes. Travis is an assassin, not an indiscriminate mass murderer. He and his kind blend in with the sedate suburban landscape, fighting in the underground parking lots and abandoned buildings. These small moments spent cruising the streets on the way to an assassination really hammer home the fact that the people of Santa Destroy have no idea about the crazy underground death ring just out of view. Even this boring, truly ugly landscape adds something to the No More Heroes experience.

None of this can excuse Santa Destroy’s Dreamcast-era visuals, or the bad level designs, shallow chores, and unfunny raunch that No More Heroes throws at the player from time to time. But praise is due to Suda and Grasshopper for giving a mostly glorious sheen to some homely raw materials.