Raining Blood

Going into No More Heroes I was excited for a game that was an over the top experience that spoke to video game and anime fanatics. It’s style accomplishes this right out of the gate, but the game as a whole falls a little short. No More Heroes does an excellent job of grabbing you in with a character in Travis Touchdown that is bad ass, but at the same time has the same wants and needs of your average gamer (girls out of their league, fighting hordes of henchmen, and of course money). No More Heroes does a fantastic job of letting you know right off the bat, this is a video game, we know this a video game, and we made this game for people who like video games way too much. At no point does it try to be more than what it is.

The concept of No More Heroes in a nutshell is Travis Touchdown starts out as the eleventh ranked assassin, and must continue to kill those ranked ahead of him to become number one. Each assassin along your path to number one has a unique style, and these battles are the best part of the game, but as it goes on they seem to get less interesting and the fights become less exciting. Even Travis’ banter with the enemies seems to trail off as the game goes on. Whether this is to show that he is becoming colder by the entire experience, or that there simply wasn’t anymore material I do not know, but either way it made the confrontations less enjoyable.



The biggest issue with No More Heroes is the time spent in between ranked fights. In order to drag out what would be a solid six to eight hour experience into a ten to twelve, you are forced to work in order to pay an entrance fee. This leads to navigating an city that has very little to no interaction, and taking part time jobs in the form of mini games. These mini games lead to assassination missions for more cash, which may sound like a good idea to keep the action up, but when you come to realize you’re just killing a Pizza Butt CEO four different times in a garage with the remaining assassinations just being kill guys until time runs out, it loses its pizzazz.

When it is all said and done No More Heroes is a great action title for the Wii when you consider its library of Mature action games. While it seems that I didn’t enjoy the game at all, it was worth the rent and to some Wii only owners it could be worth a buy with replays on harder difficulties, and the fact there isn’t much of this type of game on Wii. To multi console owners I say keep yourself busy with Devil May Cry 4 and wait for Ninja Gaiden 2.