No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle Review

 (Originally published to Glitchwave on 11/27/2021)

[Image from igdb.com]

No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle

Developer: Grasshopper Manufacture

Publisher: Ubisoft

Genre(s): Hack and Slash

Platforms: Wii

Release Date: January 26, 2010

Sequels and franchises are so not punk rock. Then again, neither is sustaining one’s artistic career to the point where one can make a living. Yet, so many punk rock bands are guilty of making their once provocative, cutting-edge art into a commodity. No More Heroes, a game that proclaimed “punk’s not dead” on the developer’s logo, somehow exuded a punk rock ethos through the video game medium. Suda 51 surprisingly understood the punk rock ethos and translated that ethos into his crude, violent creation competently, making a parallel between the two. No More Heroes also did well for a Suda 51 game both critically and commercially, a surprise to anyone familiar with the man’s previous outputs. When a new IP in gaming warrants a certain amount of acclaim, what is the natural course of action? The developers make a sequel, and that’s exactly what No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle is. No More Heroes 2 marks the very first sequel made by Suda 51, and the fact of this goes against any credence he may have had as a maverick, auteur game developer. Yet, that age-old adage “punk’s not dead” is STILL a part of Grasshopper Manufacturer’s logo. The word “punk” is even spelled with an X in place of the K to be even more irksome to those who are familiar with the phrase. I’m sorry, Suda, but you can’t brandish this phrase in a sequel. Suda 51 sold out, but this game makes it seem that he’s entirely aware of this. No More Heroes 2 is a sequel that shamelessly lavishes in the excesses of stardom due to the success of the first game. If the first No More Heroes is the depiction of wading through the muck, No More Heroes 2 is the act of shimmering in the limelight after moving on.

Years have passed since the first game, and the assassination association Sylvia established has reached a scale of international popularity. It’s reached a surprising point of legitimacy that has garnered the attention of well over 50 different assassins that are competing in the rankings. Travis, who spurred this boom in the organization’s popularity, is no longer a contender in the rankings after retiring from his top spot after the events of the first game. Hearing of his return is exciting for many of the new assassins who have joined the rankings for the sole purpose of avenging their loved ones who have been slain by Travis, including the first boss Skelter Helter. This includes Jasper Batt Jr., CEO of the Santa Destroy conglomerate Pizza Batt and first-ranked assassin in the league. In the years that Travis has been gone, the Pizza Batt company has taken a monopoly over Santa Destroy and has a dominant presence over the city. Jasper takes revenge on Travis by sicing goons after his best friend Bishop (the guy from the first game that runs the video store) and sends his decapitated head to Travis to taunt him. Travis then seeks vengeance for his slain friend and plans to do this by climbing back up the rankings to duel Jasper and reclaim his title as the top-ranking assassin by proxy. With a whopping 50 assassins to contend with this time, this sequel is a revved-up No More Heroes experience with much more to offer.

...Or at least that’s what the game would lead you to believe. No More Heroes 2 is rather a sequel that trims the fat from the first game instead of expanding on it like most sequels tend to do. This seems unexpected due to the fatty number of ranked fights the game alludes to, but this isn’t the case. The larger number of assassins is merely a ruse for the sake of the narrative. The actual number of assassins the player fights in No More Heroes 2 is only a few more than the number of assassins from the first game. Travis begins ranked at 51, but he jumps through the rankings seemingly through multiples of five and ten in the blink of an eye. Some of Travis’s friends even step in to take care of some of the rankings for Travis, which somehow is still a legitimate victory for Travis. This doesn’t mean the player sits out on the action just because Travis gets to. The player gets to play as both Shinobu and Henry for at least one fight. Playing as Henry feels smooth and capable, but Shinobu is wrought with issues, mainly her jump controls. The platforming section with her in the bank vault was such an infuriating affair that it made me curse the day I was born. Adding more playable characters is a common trend in video game sequels but is this trend appropriate for a subversive, artful game like No More Heroes? In a way, yes, but there is a consequence to this. The premise of the first game and the structure of its narrative is flippantly twisted in the sequel. The rankings in the assassin league once provided No More Heroes with a concrete objective, and every rise up in those rankings gave the player a sense of accomplishment. The sequel seemingly offers a smorgasbord of assassins for Travis to decapitate but pulls the rug out from under the player by having the game frolic through the rankings and calling in substitutes at times. This fast-forwarded approach to the foundation of the first game is executed with a total sense of disregard for the ranking system. The negative impact is that beating an assassin and going up in the rankings feels much less impactful.

The impetus for doing this probably wasn’t just to disappoint the player, however. It seems like establishing the assassination league exactly how it was in the first game means that it’s the core of the franchise. Travis slaughtering his way up the rankings is as idiosyncratic with No More Heroes as Mario saving Peach from Bowser or Samus regaining all of her powerups. Suda 51 is still aware that this has been done before, which certainly can’t be said about any of his previous games. A sequel has to borrow assets from a previous game and use it as a crutch. Suda 51’s games don’t use crutches; they sporadically bounce around the constructs of a normal video game, leaving traces of spunk in their wake. Alas, No More Heroes 2 is still confined to a sense of familiarity from the first game in its role as a sequel. This familiarity would have signified a dearth of the creativity Suda 51 is known for, but he compensates for this by making the game into a farce. Suda 51 plays with the idea of a No More Heroes sequel by making the game slightly more irreverent in every aspect. This way, making a sequel doesn’t sacrifice the creative integrity Suda 51 is known for. No More Heroes 2 flaunts its role as a sequel with a self-effacing, tongue-in-cheek attitude that reflects a refreshing sense of self-awareness.

The quantity of the assassins in No More Heroes 2 was a mirage, but does the restrained number of assassins make up for this in terms of quality? Overall, I’d say no, but only in comparison to the first game. The assassins in No More Heroes 2 never reach the level of excellence of Bad Girl from the first game, but they still stand as unique challenges with a myriad of creative flair. However, the assassins don’t reach this level of quality until a certain point in the game. Until Travis reaches the tenth rank, the assassins he comes across are somewhat forgettable. Between the tenth and fiftieth rank, Travis only fights a mere five bosses, discounting the tutorial boss and the optional boss. While these bosses come with interesting designs, many of them are much too easy to be memorable. The tanky apparition Matt Helms has a hefty presence and an unsettling aura complete with a creepy baby mask, yet he doesn’t resonate with me all that much. Charlie MacDonald’s fight involves battling him in a mech made of cheerleaders, but the control scheme of the mech Travis uses feels far too simplified for the victory to be rewarding. I wish the mech Travis uses in this fight was used more than once for a more difficult fight, but its sole fight here is a waste of potential. The middle point of the game where this slew of underwhelming boss encounters accelerates is a fight between Dr. Shake, the brain cannon from the first game that Travis was swindled out of fighting by Henry. Defeating Dr. Shake catapults Travis to the tenth rank when the bosses ramp up in quality. Some standouts are the Japanese warrior Ryuji (even if the beginning segment with the dueling bikes sucks) and the Doctor Octopus-like Alice Twilight. Mimmy is not a ranked opponent, but the challenge she presents, combined with the absurd surrealism of her fight, makes her encounter notable. While these bosses in the upper echelon of the rankings are better than the ones before Dr. Shake, the game can’t seem to retain a consistent challenge.

Assassins in the top ten like Margaret Moonlight and Vladimir Taktarov are just as underwhelming as the first few assassins, despite their unique traits. Some easy bosses in the first game, like Death Metal and Harvey Volodarrskii, but they still resonated with me. I think the bosses in No More Heroes 2 feel comparatively lukewarm due to the less concise narrative that coincides with the bosses. Each boss encounter in the first game feels like a stepping stone in the game’s progress, and the bosses are personalized with great depth, like the gunmen from El Topo. Fighting hoards of goons before facing the boss gave each assassin a higher stature. In the sequel, the squadron of goons before the boss is either absent, seemingly skippable, or divided out like a horde mode. The developers didn’t trim the fat in this regard as they just supplemented the weight of the first game’s bosses with empty calories.

One positive way No More Heroes trimmed the fat of the first game and succeeded is the absence of the open world of Santa Destroy. The map of this sleazy California-Esque city has been streamlined into a menu that opens once Travis exits the hotel. In this menu, a white, opaque overlay of the city with icons that represent notable destinations. These destinations include the Area 51 clothing store, Naomi’s garage, and a gym owned by a flamboyant man named Ryan, who looks like a cuddlier Freddy Mercury. Odd jobs can also be accessed through this menu, and “revenge missions” are located at the bottom of the menu after they are unlocked. Accessing these locations is as simple as pressing a button, and I couldn't be happier. As wild and lawless as Santa Destroy seems, navigating through it in the first game was a drab experience. Constantly driving from place to place was always grating and tedious and was easily the worst aspect of the first game. The menu presents here in the sequel is quick and simple, and there is zero tedium while traversing through Santa Destroy. One might argue that this heavily simplified method of traversing through the game is a downgrade from the open-world of the first game because the open-world aspect could’ve been improved upon, considering the technology to expand the open-world genre grew between the first and second games. Implementing something so simple in place of the open world in a generation that sought to expand the parameters of gaming’s potential seems like a digression for the medium. Considering I never yearned for the open world of the first No More Heroes while playing this game, the simpler approach they decided on turned out to be more palatable. The core gameplay of No More Heroes never depended on the open-world aspect for effectiveness, so its omission is not detrimental to the game.

I also never yearned for the way the first game used currency to progress through the game. To unlock the next ranked fight, Travis had to earn a substantial amount of money and deposit a large quantity of it in an ATM. The primary method of earning a large sum of money was performing various odd jobs like picking up coconuts, erasing graffiti, and filling up cars with gas at a gas station. These odd jobs provided a fresh alternative to break up the gameplay to them initially, but they grew tired of several plays of them to raise enough money to progress through the game. Driving from the job center to the job’s location in the lifeless overworld was another factor that made these jobs all the more grating. Not only does the streamlined level selection of No More Heroes 2 do away with the tedium involved with driving, but No More Heroes 2 offers much more enjoyable odd jobs. These oddjob minigames are consistently stylized in the vein of 8-bit games from the NES era, consisting of rudimentary gameplay and sound design. The large variety of minigames presented here includes sucking up different kinds of pests in a vacuum as an exterminator, laying a series of pipes in a timed puzzle game, delivering pizzas in a Pole Position type game, and preparing steaks for irascible fat men. There are also minigames involving catching coconuts in a net, laying down tiles of different shapes, and picking up trash in space. I played these much less than the ones I previously mentioned. This 8-bit style also bleeds into the training aspect of this game. Two retro-styled minigames are presented in the gym to upgrade Travis’s strength and increase his maximum health.

I don’t think the developers incorporated all of these retro-pastiche minigames as an homage to a bygone era. Rather, I think the developers initially developed only one of these like an NES game, which proved to be more enjoyable than any of the jobs from the first game. The only job that hasn’t been treated to a retro flair is the scorpion pick-up job from the first game exactly how it was with an added medical treatment whenever the player gets stung. It wasn’t the worst job in the first game, but it’s easily the least enjoyable task presented here, highlighting how much these minigames have improved. While I begrudgingly made my commute to these jobs before fighting the next assassin in the first game, I replayed all of the minigames in No More Heroes 2 gleefully. The ironic aspect of these more enjoyable odd jobs is that the money Travis makes from doing them doesn’t count towards progressing through the game. Travis now gets to pocket all of his earnings without having to deposit a large sum into an ATM, possibly due to the increased funding the assassin league has because of the ramp in popularity. Travis now has a heaping amount of disposable income at his leisure to shop for clothes, train at the gym, and buy upgrades for his beam katana at Naomi’s garage. The grind to ascend to the top of the rankings that was such a huge part of the overall foundation of the first game is also thrown to the curb along with the rankings. I understand why the tedium of doing odd jobs was present in the narrative themes of the first game, but I vastly prefer the variety of retro romps in the sequel simply because they are more fun.

The quality improvements to the gameplay and general objectives in No More Heroes 2 are fantastic, but what kind of foundation do they hold? The ending of the first No More Heroes did not seem like it was open-ended to a sequel, so it arguably wasn’t necessary to extend Travis’s story to another game. Because the opportunity to bank off the success of the first game came knocking on the doorstep of Grasshopper Manufacture, the narrative presented in the first game had to be extended with the same characters. Most would argue that the sequel's narrative is nothing but cotton-candy fluff, an uninspired story devised to fuel what is now a standard video game franchise instead of a personal work of art. As I said, the developers seem to carry themselves here with a sense of self-awareness. A voice in the beginning cutscene of the game says that “the assassins' world has become a commodity,” which puts everything into perspective. All-new, cutting-edge forms of art eventually become a commodity at some point. Punk rock, for example, resonated strongly with disenfranchised young people back in the late 1970s. It garnered a massive audience, and any business would be foolish to not capitalize on this. The Clash didn’t become known as the “only band that mattered” with just word of mouth alone. Like the stadium-filling bands that rebelled against, the punk bands became the new trend of commercial success. Many punk bands hit that self-destruct switch, but derivative forms like new wave and (to a lesser extent) post-punk got to bask in the heights of glory that the initial punk scene created. The same happened in the 1990s with the grunge explosion and the industry overtake of alternative rock. The justification Suda 51 seems to have for making a sequel to No More Heroes is that all art, no matter how abrasive, obtuse, or non-commercial, is still a commodity manufactured by a business.

No More Heroes 2 is parallel to the peak of fame a once underground artist gets to while attempting to become accustomed to the new industry trends they helped popularize. After becoming the top-ranked assassin in the first game, Travis Touchdown is renowned worldwide as a legend in his craft. Whether the people he faces admire or want to bathe in his blood, they still easily recognize him. Travis inspires young people to become assassins and, more shockingly, has a legion of groupies Travis finally getting to have sex with Sylvia is the biggest spoiler of the entire series. No final boss can top that. . Travis is a fucking rockstar now, even though he’s still the same crass, anime-loving degenerate he always was. I suppose the ethos of “punk’s not dead” is carried on by Travis and not the game itself. He tries to be loyal to his passion and his roots, but he finds that this is difficult now that what he does is a legitimate business. The UAA is now a giant bureaucracy that Travis has discrepancies with. Once Travis defeats Ryuji, he feels reluctant to deliver a final blow because he respects Ryuji as a warrior. Sylvia then decides for him by comically filling him with a whole round of machine-gun bullets because killing your opponent is the rule of the game. Travis doesn’t comply with this and screams “fuck your rules” in her face.

Sylvia is now the callous business leader ready to drop her talent at the drop of a dime once they become useless to her. Jasper Batt Jr. is the personification of industry moguls that reminds me of Swan from Phantom of the Paradise. He’s a pint-sized, bald wimp of a man with an ego the size of his empire. The multi-phased boss's fight against him is another testament to this. He’s an exaggerated depiction of many real-life industry fat-cats that make art a commodity and the lack of real respect they have for the artists. The peak of fame and career prosperity doesn’t just apply to the music industry but also to any other industry as well like the one that published No More Heroes 1 and 2. We can wish for a figure like Travis to rebel against this callous bureaucracy, but it’s not wise to bite the hand that feeds you.

There’s a million-dollar question relating to No More Heroes 2: do all of the extra frills added as a sequel make for a less substantive experience? The tedium relating to odd job grinding in the first game was a large detriment, but I understood why this was interwoven in the narrative. While I consistently enjoyed No More Heroes 2 more than its predecessor, I felt it had less to say in its wacky story and presentation. While I managed to pull some insight from No More Heroes 2 as I did from the first one, a lot of what I said is a bit of a stretch. There’s plenty more in this game that I couldn’t connect to as an allegory of big industry because it was way too confusing. Then again, maybe I’m the type of person Suda 51 is taking the piss out of for taking No More Heroes too seriously by reading too much into it. Travis transforms into a fucking tiger, for christ's sake. My final verdict is that No More Heroes 2 is the more favorable game between the two. At the end of the day, video games are supposed to be fun, and my wish for No More Heroes without the tedium came to fruition in its sequel.