GAME CLEAR No. 51 -- No More Heroes III

No More Heroes III (2021, Switch)

Developer: Grasshopper Manufacture
Publisher: Grasshopper Manufacture
Clear Date: 9/12/2021

Suda51 is back with another messy, as-good-as-it-is-bad game that I couldn’t help but still enjoy.

No More Heroes (2008) came out at a perfect time for me to love it. I was rounding the corner to 15 and it was an ultraviolent, bloody action game with a weirdo director and weirdo vibes. And it was only on Wii. The perfect kind of game for an “I don’t just play what everyone else is playing” kind of kid. I was the only kid at school who gave a shit about it, and that’s just the way I wanted it. The game came out and was everything I wanted. I enjoyed No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle (2010) and Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes (2019) as well, but like so many firsts, the original No More Heroes had its own singular impact on me. I think it sort of felt like the first time I was playing something truly niche. The first thing that made me feel like I was above the Call of Duty and Grand Theft Auto riff raff. It was great on its own merits, but being great and underappreciated I think was what really did it for me.

Now it’s 2021 and 2008 was nearly half my life ago. I have obviously grown considerably. In my Halo: Reach piece, I mused about how turning my nose up at ultra-popular media was probably to my detriment. Yet it’s still an urge I fight! And in the same way, Travis Touchdown and Suda still speak to me. As embarrassing as it is, part of me identifies with the goofy otaku lightsaber murderer guy. Now, though, I have friends who have heard of Travis Touchdown. Even a couple that have played his games! I’m not so special anymore.

But enough about me. Is the game any good?

Well, yes. It is.

The game picks up back in Travis’s home of Santa Destroy after the events of Travis Strikes Again, but the ways in which TSA’s plot matters are minimal and pretty quickly disposed of. The extremely short version of the premise is that a big bad alien named Jess-Baptiste VI (aka FU) and his goons invade Earth to take it over, and Travis has to stop them. Through some Suda-style contrivances, this is able to be accomplished through yet another series of ranking battles organized by the United Assassins Association from the first to games, which it plays out fairly similarly to. Basically, Travis does a ranked battle to move up in the rankings, and between these battles, he must do odd jobs and combat missions to pay his entry fee to the next battle. It’s a fine formula, and it works at least as well now as it did over a decade ago.

The combat is where these games really shine, and I’m pleased to say it’s as good as it has ever been in No More Heroes III. Combat scenes run well and maintain a fairly smooth 60fps to the best of my ability to tell, and Travis comes equipped with plenty of abilities. Grunts are beatable by just wailing on ’em with the beam katana, but tougher enemies require a little more thought. Travis still has his joycon-looking “Death Glove” from Travis Strikes Again, but it comes with just four abilities rather than the many interchangeable ones found in TSA. Travis can use it to toss enemies across the arena, slow down time in an AOE, do passive damage in an AOE, or to do a devastating drop kick. These abilities all have a cooldown time, and in my experience, I was firing them as soon as they were available. They are critical for enemy management as the game gets tougher, which I think is great! No More Heroes III does a great job of demanding that you use your whole kit while simultaneously never being too frustratingly tough. That’s a tricky thing to get right, and I think Grasshopper Manufacture did a great job.

Which is why it’s such a shame it’s wasted on the least interesting cast of villains in the series. FU and his assassin henchmen simply don’t really do it for me. Their designs are colorful and unique yet simultaneously completely uninteresting. Additionally, Grasshopper made the weird choice to have boss fights take place without the levels leading up to them that the previous games had (lesser enemies are fought in arena-based “qualifying matches” outside the context of the ranking battles). In the first and second games, these levels provided some context to the person you were about to fight. Absent that, the boss fights end up feeling like killing somebody you just met and know nothing about. Kind of a bummer!

The other bummer is the return of an overworld to No More Heroes. It was godawful in the first No More Heroes, and things are not better here. Albeit considerably expanded from the first entry, it remains hideous and largely vacant. It serves only as a spacial representation of where you’re going to do the various things you need to do. But when qualifying matches warp you to space-based arenas and odd-job-givers likewise just drop you into a separate space to do a side quest, the whole overworld seems purposeless. It’s just a walkable menu, which is why No More Heroes 2 just made it a menu. Suda was right to do it then, and it’s too bad he listened to fans who whined for the open world to return. It didn’t need to!

But I did say the game was good, and I still believe that. Even though the boss characters are uninteresting, the fights are still good. Even though the story is the least good of the series, it’s still all right and often very funny (which is half of what I play these games for anyway). Even though the overworld is bad and ugly and underperformant, it’s still utterly unique in its styling, and the bike can be fun to zoom around in if you can get the hang of it.

Ultimately, the most important thing is it still feels good to step into Travis Touchdown’s shoes and hack away at some bad guys. I do wish that this final chapter in Travis’s story had been a little better-executed, but Suda’s games always have some jank to them, so I’ve learned to live with that. And now that he’s free of this franchise, I’m curious to see what he does next. It’s nice to see a director truly put an end to a series in the way Suda has. Four games is plenty, and at least they were all at least okay. I know I’ll revisit Travis’s exploits over the years, and there is no need to drag the series on forever.

Now I guess I’ve just got to find another series to make me feel like I’m a special boy that digs the deep cuts.