No More Heroes 3 review: so much style, you don’t need substance


No more heroes 3 it is made up of many messy pieces. It’s a gross, hyper-violent hack and slash action game with mediocre combat. It is an open world game with a flat and barren world. It’s a landmark pop culture festival at a time when the crossovers between the major franchises aren’t all that special. It’s packed with dissonant aesthetics, with pixels and VHS tape deterioration bordering on anime and photomontage art. That mess can be jarring and occasionally tedious, but it’s also what it does. No more heroes 3 a fascinating and out of place game.

In its first hour, you see a surprisingly luxurious animated sequence narrating the backstory of the main antagonist, the intergalactic warlord Jess-Baptist VI, also known as FU. As the alien armies of FU invade Earth, No more heroes 3 throws you into a combat tutorial. The rest of the intro (and the full game) unfolds like an anime series, with an incredible opening title sequence and chapters divided by credit sequences ending with a “next episode in 3 … 2 … Netflix style. ” 1 … ”After the intro“ episode ”unfolds, you see protagonist Travis Touchdown and his friend Bishop talk about their favorite Takashi Miike movies for a while. Later they throw you into the game proper. It all feels like a multimedia art project that simply includes interactive elements.

Which is good, because most of what you do between these fascinating stylistic flourishes is standard swamp hack-and-slash combat and open-world side missions. Rather than climb the ranks of the United Assassins Association only to become the world’s greatest assassin, Travis has to prevent an alien invasion by climbing back up the ranks, now filled with FU’s best buddies. However, you still have to pay to participate in each boss fight, which means you have to earn cash in the game’s open world by completing minigames and fighting alien fodder.

These fights and part-time jobs, along with some exploration of the open world, make up the majority of the game’s runtime. Most combat missions pit you against two or three waves of two to five enemies each. First fights take as long to get in and out and to complete, thanks both to the brevity of the fights and the longevity of the transient animations and loading screens. During actual fights, it feels good to chain together light and heavy attacks, throws, and “Death Drive” special moves to melt the enemy’s health bars, but combat can also be tricky. Special moves often stink and enemies can hit you while you’re downed or even in the midst of the cool-looking slowdown effect that occurs every time you dodge an enemy’s attack.

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The big draw from previous No More Heroes games was the ranking fights, the big boss battles that ended in the open world, and the combat routines. On No more heroes 3, are no longer the main event. Although the new generation of assassins is made up of wacky aliens, they are quite bland compared to villains from previous games. Some of them trigger some genuinely novel fights, one involving a musical chair performance, for example, but they are often overshadowed by the general conflict between Travis, his friends, and FU.

Travis rides a motorcycle through the arid streets of Santa Destroy in No More Heroes 3

Image: Grasshopper Manufacturing via Polygon

The city of Santa Destroy isn’t what it used to be either. It has been replaced by five smaller open world areas that parody other game franchises; for example, an area full of bombed buildings and trenches is called a “Battle Call”. The textures in these worlds look muddy and the exterior sections look dull and lifeless, making exploring these areas to find all their secrets feel dull.

So the fights, the minigames, and the exploration of the open world are not convincing. But No more heroes 3 it’s so good at making everything you do feel good that it almost doesn’t matter. I was never afraid of getting funding for the next qualifying fight; The game makes the act of mowing the lawn, picking up trash, and increasing “traffic safety awareness” when ramming cars at racing events surprisingly stylish. The garbage collection minigame even lets you supplement some alligators as you walk through the submerged landfills. I didn’t like combat as much for the actual fight as for how vibrant it looks and sounds – a powerful stinger ends each encounter with the word “KILL” written in giant, bold, pixelated text while playing a shredded guitar riff . The soundtrack is basically all hits. These disparate chunks of awesomeness are small, but the game is so packed with these fantastic touches that it’s a pleasure to just take in their vibes. The more mechanical elements here are like scaffolding to withstand the delivery of those vibrations and somehow it works.

Through it all, you’re watching Travis and Bishop express their love for their favorite movies, comics, and TV shows through the myriad of references on display. That love of nerdy culture, a linchpin of No More Heroes’ style, resonates differently in 2021. When the original game was released in 2008, the idea of ​​a stylish action game where you played as an unrepentant otaku like Travis still felt novel. His little motel room, filled with posters, wrestler masks and anime statues, was in stark contrast to the mischievous affectations of many other “common man” killers like Nathan Drake from Uncharted. Having an interlude where you were playing a shooter game based on a fictional magical girl anime was a real surprise. It was a game about how cool it was to be a nerd that came right before the first MCU movie, Iron Man, he left. Nerddom wasn’t fringe, but it was going to take a bit longer to get really mainstream.

Travis in his apartment in No More Heroes 3

Image: Grasshopper Manufacturing via Polygon

Today, Doja Cat is a game ambassador for her fans. Henry Cavill builds his own computers and he’s not shy about it. You don’t have to be sneaky about how nerdy you are. The kind of references No More Heroes makes are downright subtle in a world where Superman is falling apart with Master Chief in Fortnite, RoboCop is firing rockets at the Terminator in Mortal Kombat eleven, and Ready Player One exists. So when an enemy in No more heroes 3 hatches from the same eggs that gave birth to the Alien xenomorphs, or the guide character Sylvia Christel appears as a Captain Marvel or Bond Girl knockoff for no explainable reason, the novelty barely registering.

No more heroes 3 works best when venturing into its own burrows. When Travis and Bishop get excited about their shared interests, for example, it plays out like a talk show; you watch them chatting through an old-school television, with Akira Toriyama-style cartoons appearing as the dials turn. They speak at length about Takashi Miike’s genius, naming Ichi the killer, 13 killers, and Visitor Q. They talk about tokusatsu Serie; they bring up casually Armored Soldier Votoms. These sections illustrate the passion that comes from loving a work of art, and you can tell that these references are not there because of some corporate bond, but because the people who make this game really love these things and want to share them with the world. .

However, references don’t always land, and because the game discards them so often, No more heroes 3 it is often only as good as the last clever trick you performed. At worst, it can seem like a condemnation of the kind of otaku culture you’re trying to celebrate, as if developer Grasshopper Manufacture caught me by making a pop culture reference and forcing me to smoke a whole package. Sometimes the avalanche of references becomes so frequent that it loses meaning, especially when compared to the more elaborate nods in the game.

An enemy robot gestures to the camera in No More Heroes 3

Image: Grasshopper Manufacturing via Polygon

When your novelty and style wear off, No more heroes 3 you don’t have much to lean on. Because the game is so obsessed with showing you how other things are great, there is nothing to hold onto when it comes time for its ending to capitalize on the story that was too distracted to really count on its own characters and world. Characters from previous games are joined by new ones that appear out of nowhere, only to be discarded and forgotten moments later. The ending falls completely flat because, in its rush to make you remember how much you love a ton of other movies, music, shows, and games, the game forgets to tell you to worry about itself.

But you don’t play a No More Heroes game because of its story. You play it for its style, and No more heroes 3 has style in spades. The best I can say about No more heroes 3 is that its open-world and combat design stays out of the way, letting its style take center stage, occasionally facilitating some really cool one-of-a-kind moments. His styles, tricks and shocking references are a testament to the powerful appeal of the superficial; Yet somehow he manages to be honest about his love of pop culture and art in a way that still feels special, even in the midst of our current metaverse hell. I know it worked because I started looking for Takashi Miike movies. Sounds very good.

No more heroes 3 launches August 27 Nintendo switch. The game was reviewed using a pre-launch download code provided by Grasshopper Manufacture. Vox Media has affiliate associations. These do not influence editorial content, although Vox Media may earn commissions for products purchased through affiliate links. You can find Additional information on Polygon’s ethics policy here.


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