NO MORE HEROES / RIVER CITY RANSOM

Playing No More Heroes is like playing River City Ransom for the NES - but not as cool. Director SUDA 51's latest, pits hero Travis Touchdown against Santa Destroy's toughest assassins, and for all its style and flash the game barely delivers. I admit, I'm not a gigantic fan of Grand Theft Auto and similar games, and No More Heroes steals a big part of its gameplay from this legacy. That said, the game still seems fundamentally lacking, bored and essentially a cliche waste of time.

The plot is designed around Travis killing the 10 best assassins in town for a mysterious woman who is advising him. This plot differs from River City Ransom's plot of killing about 10 gang leaders, in order to rescue your girlfriend. The differences are that the characters in River City Ransom are blocky 8-bit sprites, and the characters in No More Heroes are stylized cell shaded Warriors knockoffs. Unfortunatally the games are too similar, in No More Heroes after battling through a tough idiosyncratic gang, you return to town and upgrade your character, and eventually earn enough money to track down the next assassin and face his gang. This pattern occurs in River City Ransom as well except the cut scenes are shorter and feature less plot twists and oblique dialogue. In both games you learn cool and better moves as you progress, gain interesting new weapons, and you can even upgrade yourself in town. The largest difference between the two is that I HATED No More Heroes and I practically worship River City Ransom.

This problem falls on director SUDA 51's shoulders. As illustrated in the picture on the left SUDA 51 is clearly an asshole who surrounds himself with nerds who all would like to emulate hackneyed protagonist Travis Touchdown as best as possible. Where River City Ransom was developed and badly translated by faceless mother company American Technos, No More Heroes is bound to SUDA 51's bottomless pretension. Not only does Travis have a moronic last name, he is also a denizen of the curiously named villa "Santa Destroy" and he fights with what essentially amounts to a lightsaber - these elements have comic book nerd plastered all over them. Simultaneously we are allowed to dress our hero in tight fitting hipster garb, play with his cat and listen to rockabilly on the motorcycle jukebox - these elements have "cool" badly scribbled over their code. 

Basically I'm saying that I'm over it - I don't need to play the part of some digitized badass in a video game. I will forever love Bruce Campbell for his portrayal of awesome characters like Ash in the movies, but by no means does that draw me to the Gamestop to pick up some Bruce Campbell related Evil Dead video game. Similarly, Alex from River City Ransom seemed ultra-badass as a single minded crusader of his girlfriends freedom. All he needed was one dimension, and a taste for blood. This left a bit to my imagination, I could imagine myself as Alex - likewise I feel alienated from Travis Touchdown who seems to specifically personify a particular archetype of white, wasteoid male. What confuses me is that No More Heroes garnered terrific reviews which generally referred to it as "brilliant," while it really just smacked of a bunch of cliches being haphazardly thrown together in a manner which insults even my lowest tastes.

To save in No More Heroes is to use the bathroom. Perhaps in this lies the games brilliance: the game should only be saved in our memory next to the grossest necessary functions of human existence. Do not play this game, it is a waste of time, money, and energy.