FINAL IMPRESSIONS: No More Heroes (SPOILERS)
By Jacob Bond
February 14th, 2008

I'm not sure where to begin. My head is still spinning from playing the game for the past six hours.

Cliches:

I'll start with the story. One thing I've learned from playing the game is it heavily uses cliches. At first they aren't obvious or pointed out, but by the end they are literally piled on, one after the other. Even Jeanne mentions that her story is right out of a manga. When I watched her explanation slowed down (found HERE with spoilers!), I still had to stop and go back because of everything that happened to her to make her the wacked out nutjob she is.

To review: She is Travis' half-sister (same father, different mothers). Their father left, Jeanne's mother killed herself and Jeane had nowhere else to go but to her father. He sexually abused her, she killed them both (Travis' parents), then became an assassin. But to get the start up money she became a prostitute. Also, at some point she dated Travis (he didn't know they were related), and he didn't remember any of this until the end because he pushed it out of his mind.

That's fucked up.

I was surprised to hear all of that from a Nintendo game. I kind of wonder if Nintendo thought what she said was gibberish since it's sped up on the game, because I'm surprised they didn't have an issue with the whole incest and prostitution parts of the story.

Anyway, of course a lot of the cliches have to do with the bosses. They're pretty straight forward so I won't go into them. The biggest cliche has to be Henry. The idea that he's Travis' twin brother who shows up suddenly at the end of the game to reveal this (something even Travis points out) finally made me say to myself, "Okay, they're screwing with us."

And that's really it. The game keeps hinting at a deeper story but always using cliches. And when it finally ends it pretty much says, "Eh.... Sorry. It isn't deep at all." It piles on the cliches and makes fun of itself, destroying any bit of serious storytelling it was doing. It's pointing out that the game was never meant to be taken that seriously to begin with. It starts off with jokes and it ends with them. Just take it for what it is.

It's brilliant. I was so into the story all the way through to the Jeane fight when suddenly she started making references to it being a game (with a hilarious Duke Nukem Forever joke poking fun at it being delayed so long). After unlocking the Real Ending and Henry shows up pretty much any serious part of the script was thrown out the window and it became endless self references.

Silvia:

She really IS good con artist. How did she managed to fool all of those deadly assassins into believing her organization existed? I was shocked to find out it was all a lie and for nothing.

It was nice how they played that into her character, though. When she calls Travis for the final time and says she was toying with him from the beginning but then follows up claiming to be in love with him, it gave a glimpse at what she really was: even to the end she was a liar. Did she really love Travis? Or did she use him without a second thought? Considering she's Henry's wife, I think that answers that question.

Even when the final credits roll she continues to lie. She said there won't be a sequel but "To Be Continued" immediately flashes on the screen. Nothing she says is true. Period.

And seriously, what's with her daughter being named Jeane? How did she know the assassin Jeane? We never really got answers to any of that. But maybe that's part of the cliche: anime doesn't always answer the questions it should, and this game stopped being about what everyone thought it was towards the end.

Toughest Assassin:

It's odd. Playing through the game I expected each assassin to be harder to beat, but found their difficulty to jump around a lot. Looking on forums it also seems that not everyone had the same trouble with certain characters but did with others.

For example, by far Shinobu was the hardest character I had to face. She kicked my ass for over four hours before I finally beat her. I found Harvey to be the easiest (even easier than Death Metal). Yet I found a few people that found it to be the exact opposite. I'm not sure what factor causes this (is the difficulty random? Is it simply different playing styles not working against certain characters?) but it was interesting to see. It's also nice because it means everyone has a unique experience.

In order I felt these were the toughest, number one being the hardest:

10.) Harvey Moiseiwitsch Volodarski
9.) Dr. Peace
8.) Death Metal
7.) Destroyman
6.) Bad Girl
5.) Speed Buster
4.) Holly Summers
3.) Henry
2.) Jeane
1.) Shinobu

I should note that in the case of Speed Buster it wasn't fighting her that was hard (because really, all she does is fire that stupid cannon). Getting through that damn level while fighting those generic guys carrying the beam swords was a pain. It was annoying when I discovered later that in certain parts I could have just followed the back wall instead of putting myself in danger and I could have won if I had realized I needed to attack the pole. Bah.

I also want to note that Jeane was tough because her attack style limited what I could do (and severely limited my strategy). However, it was Henry that literally had my heart pounding when I finally beat him. Figuring out a way to beat him isn't the problem. It's that he takes so friggin' long to wear down you have to survive that whole time. The whole fight takes nearly half an hour and I really wasn't looking forward to having wasted that time.

One other thing is that I noticed that after the sixth ranked fight the game began to focus on the story over the fighting. If you payed attention you probably noticed that as with the previous fights there were a lot of obstacles and henchman before actually fighting Holly Summers. But after her fight the henchman in later ranked matches drastically decreases as does the time it takes to get to the bad guys. In the case of Harvey I think I found a total of three or four bad guys before getting to him. It didn't hurt the game any, but it was odd.

The Jokes:

This probably goes with the style, but the humor was great in the game. The constant reminders from the video store about Travis' porn tapes, the references to anime, the Duke Nukem joke, and above all the total annihilation of the fourth wall in the end. Terrific.

I know I'm forgetting a lot of things I wanted to talk about so I'm sure I'll add more to this after I've sorted out my thoughts on the game. But for now this pretty much does it.