By: Erin
Posted: February 22, 2022
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This piece was originally a bit of a ramble created to explain why I loved this game and why it should win a “Game of the Year” tournament my group of friends were having. I’ve edited it a little to fit the format of the website, but the context is key.
Naming No More Heroes III my Game of the Year was no easy feat. It was always a hard battle between it and Yakuza: Like A Dragon for me, and hey, in many ways it still is. But the reason I’m stumping so hard for it is because it’s basically the perfect finale to not just the No More Heroes series but also this entire story that Suda51 has been building out in his personal life from a meta perspective. It’s savage, irreverent, satirical, biting, and hilarious, and it also manages to be absurdly stylish with some of the grandest and strangest boss fights you’ll ever face. In a series KNOWN for having spectacular boss fights, No More Heroes III somehow manages to deliver the best of the bunch. In order to explain exactly why I hold NMH3 in such high regard I’m going to have to go way back and give you all the context as to how it’s a miracle this game even exists in the form it does.
Goichi Suda. Man. Myth. Legend.
Suda51 has been making games for a long time. In many ways, No More Heroes as a series didn’t even start with No More Heroes. Before NMH there was Killer7 in 2005. Before Killer7 there was The Silver Case in 1999. Before Silver Case there was Super Fire Pro Wrestling Special in 1994. These are important to understand the growth of Suda as a creator – once a punk making transgressive and weird video games that dealt heavily with counter-culture subjects and never really went where traditional game design and narratives of the time made you think they were going. For example, your player character in Super Fire Pro Wrestling just kind of dies at the end. Like he sees his trainer die in the ring, his girlfriend dumps him, and despite being the champion finds that it’s lonely at the top and commits suicide. This was a pro wrestling game for the Super Nintendo. It’s actually extremely disturbing for what it was, with footage of your character’s home from the outside and a shot of an empty chair closing it out.
Even on the SNES, Thunder Ryu isn’t safe.
Anyway, yeah, that’s partly why No More Heroes was such a revelation at the time – it came out on the Wii which was famously a family-friendly console, got front page coverage in Nintendo Power, and was a grimy and blood-soaked mess with a lot to say about video game protagonists and their propensity for violence. The thing about Travis Touchdown is that he absolutely fucking sucks. This man got a lightsaber on eBay and met a girl at a bar who told him to go kill someone and ended up in a pyramid scheme. He’s a geek-ass loser who just wants to kill people and thinks he can eventually have sex with Sylvia, who runs said pyramid scheme. In between the fantastic boss fights are the most mind-numbing bullshit chores imaginable. It’s almost like Suda51 is making a statement about capitalism and exploitation or something along the way. Hm.
I dunno, I like slowly picking up trash for four hours so I can get an hour-long cheap thrill.
Then, in 2010, you get to No More Heroes 2. Some people are critical of No More Heroes 2. These people are wrong. No More Heroes 2 is where Suda goes full-on meta with the series. It released in 2010, and it completely lampooned how many sequels decide to shoehorn in tired revenge plots in nonsensical ways just to milk a franchise dry and it does this by killing off a character who barely had any presence in the original and suddenly elevating him to Travis’s Best Friend status, inventing a reason for Travis to be at the bottom of the assassin ranks again, and making the main antagonist someone loosely tied to a sidequest joke from the first game. It’s absurd. You combine that with bosses that have stunning atmosphere and are clearly setting up for bigger and better things and a final boss that is unfairly, stupidly difficult and ultimately unsatisfying and you have a game that handled “hey maybe revenge is boring and sequels focused on revenge are also boring and maybe THE CYCLE OF VIOLENCE is boring” a God Damn Decade before Neil Druckmann ever touched the subject with The Last Of Us 2 and it did it in a way that pre-emptively made fun of his dumb little revenge plot.
Now, in the time between No More Heroes 2 and Travis Strikes Again on Switch, something happened to Suda51. The once punk and counterculture creator was forced to become a studio head, commanding teams of people to make games, including ones he wanted to Sell. No longer dictated by his creative vision and given free reign, Suda now had to balance making games with the demands of producers and publishers as well as what it meant to be in a position of true power. You see this reflected in his work, and this isn’t a knock against his work as it’s mostly still quite interesting stuff, but there’s a palpable shift starting with NMH2 and it all leads in to 2011’s Shadows Of The Damned.
Oh boy!
Published by EA, and created alongside Shinji Mikami, Shadows of the Damned is an experience that would change Suda51 for life. According to several interviews he’s done since, it is a game he is not happy with, one he had all the hopes in the world for, but under the oppressive thumb of EA was forced to gut it, to draft the script five times, to change the focus of the plot, and to remove so many of the influences he had wanted to bring to the table in favor of bland gun gameplay and standard gods and monsters vibes because according to EA head John Riccitiello “Westerners are about guns”. I want you to keep that name in mind as we go forward because it’s going to be important.
Following Shadows of the Damned, Suda would make a few other games, including Let It Die, a decent free-to-play Soulslike involving a game system called the Death Drive and a fight to the top of a tower. It’s okay, but it lacks a lot of the magic at this point that Suda is known for. But then, things changed. Suda was freed, free to strike out and with Grasshopper Manufacture make something a little more independent, and that’s when we get to Travis Strikes Again. Travis Strikes Again was Suda’s own way of shaking him out of the corporate hellhole that game development had forced him into, and so he collaborated with a lot of indy creators to make something that paid tribute to overhead beat-em-ups and co-op bashers and combined it with tons of tributes to adventure games from the MSX, his old visual novels (like the aforementioned Silver Case), and in general references to his old catalogue in a game that allowed him to refresh himself and figure out where he wanted to go next.
It also came with plenty of cool new toilets to save at.
No More Heroes as a series has always, always at its core been about lampooning and skewering gaming trends and the evils of capitalism, and Suda51 was ready to take all the hatred and irritation he had built up and let it all out. In Travis Strikes Again, Travis is transported into a game console called the Death Drive and fights through it to try and find its creator. At the center of it all he finds a guy named Damon Riccitiello. No one in the game has anything nice to say about Damon Riccitiello.
There’s that name again.
Long story short, Travis leaves Damon beaten down, and this sets the stage for No More Heroes III. It’s incredible that after ten years, Suda51 still has it in him, a desire to create the game that would cap off this series once and for all, a game that no one thought would ever release, even after TSA. Like, why would it? It’s a niche series that has never tested well among wide audiences, only really gaining a cult following. But release it did, and once again, it’s only on Nintendo. It’s a true No More Heroes game through and through. One of the first things we learned about the game was that aliens have taken over Travis’s home city, the inner city of Santa Destroy, California, and the next thing we learned is that along with the alien FU the main antagonist of the game is Damon Riccitiello himself.
Now, I do think it’s spectacular that Suda51 managed to claw his way back into the series his diehard fans wanted him to conclude and in doing so managed to name the main villain of his game after the executive at EA that made his time in game development miserable. If all this backstory was all there was to No More Heroes III, I’d say it was a good game. For it to become my game of the year it had to pull off something special…and it DID. Over and over again it did. I’m going to try not to dive into any actual spoilers, but the reason I stump so hard for this game is because it succeeds on every single level for me – artistically, gameplay-wise, atmospherically, musically, from a meta-commentary standpoint, and by just being an incredible finale to a series I love.
Bring on the satire.
Now, what do I mean by a meta-commentary standpoint? I feel like I’ve illustrated already that the entire No More Heroes series is intrisically tied to media trends and is in part if not in full Suda51’s agonized yet sarcastic scream against the things he loves and the things he hates. No More Heroes 1 was about violent protagonists and skewering the Cool Chosen One Nerd archetype. No More Heroes 2 was about revenge stories and unneeded sequels. Travis Strikes Again was about the destruction of art in the hands of big corporations. So for No More Heroes III, Suda squarely took aim at some of the biggest things threatening culture in the modern day – the monolithic homogenization of fan culture, media, and art and how a handful of companies own so much of what the world consumes. It’s not exactly subtle about how it is a gigantic parody of Netflix, Marvel movies, the Disney corporation, and video game streaming and hype culture. There’s an email system in the game that constantly gives you spam emails of movies you might enjoy. Every time you talk to an NPC, Sylvia is shown recording your every move with a surveillance system that has an overlay that looks exactly like the PS4 streaming overlay complete with chat. Every “episode” of NMH3 begins with opening credits and ends with an evolving ending followed by a clear parody of the Netflix logo and a “Next episode in…” corner bar. It’s about the transient nature of how we’re expected to just binge our media and consume it without thinking critically about it, and it’s especially funny that almost every chapter of this game opens with a conversation between Travis and Bishop where they have pointless conversations about their favorite director, Takashi Miike, in what is presumably just their podcast that’s being streamed.
I admit, we lost our minds when they namedropped “Audition” in the voicelines.
Suda51’s “shared universe” is known as “Kill The Past”. Generally speaking, games in the “series” have more in common thematically than have shared characters and a tied-together plot, outside of a few similar names or oblique references for fun. It’s generally called that because each game focuses a lot on how we can’t lose ourselves in a hollow nostalgia or what we idealized before. Or at least, that’s how it was until the double whammy of TSA and No More Heroes III. In No More Heroes III, Kill The Past becomes an utterly opaque tangle of interconnected characters, cameos, and plot threads, and if you hadn’t played one of Suda’s games, well, good luck, buddy. The game further mixes it up by introducing new characters you hadn’t actually met yet and treating them in the same manner as the ones you have.
It’s a clear joke on the entire gimmick of the shared universe popularized by Marvel’s Cinematic Universe, lampooning everything from DC’s failed early DCEU attempts to the Dark Universe to the mild-to-severe continuity lockout you’re going to experience trying to watch any MCU movie nowadays, or for example how in order to understand a point in Star Wars Episode VIII: The Rise of Skywalker you had to know about the Fortnite event. Culture is locked behind a paywall for so many people nowadays. Combine this with FU’s spiel on how humans love superheroes and you have an entire game taking a look at the idea of the chosen one, which NMH already satirizes, and the idea of the monomyth and monoculture, the idea that our current wave of superhero films are somehow the new mythology, and the way corporations try and tell the world what to enjoy and what to accept in their reality, and crushing it under its heel. This is a game where the post-credits scene has credits that also have a post-credits scene because once again capitalism won’t let a story be over until it keeps raising the stakes. They confirmed early on there will never be DLC for this game. I’m not saying that Suda hates Disney specifically or anything, but he does have a lot to say about the commodification of artistic expression. As he should.
Many people missed the point, and hard.
I’m not going to talk about it here because it’s a moment that has to be experienced to believe, but the finale of the game is one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen a game do. The sheer vitriol Suda has for thoughtless crossover and product placement is utterly unbelievable and I had tears in my eyes the moment it happened. Imagine if the climactic moment of your favorite movie was suddenly interspersed with the product placement gag from Wayne’s World. It’s phenomenal.
“Contract or no, I will not bow to any sponsor!”
Artistically, No More Heroes III is one of the most beautiful games I’ve ever played, and I don’t mean that the environments look really nice or anything. I mean that every visual design choice it makes perfectly serves the point it’s trying to make. From the aforementioned fake opening and ending credits to the menus to the interface, the big sprawling boss fights all with unique gimmicks, the way the art style will shift wildly from cutscene to cutscene, including an entire boss fight with creature effects done by the artists who created Galo Sengen, this game is a mash of art styles and media styles that draw influences from old school manga, video games, anime, comics, tokusatsu, and more. One of the most memorable moments I had in this game was driving to a new section of the map labeled Call of Battle, only to find that it was a dirt-brown dust-covered generic FPS map complete with the Call of Duty font for a titlecard. Subtle? No. Nice to look at? Of course not. Hilarious and pointed? Absolutely. This game is a feast that melds style after style in an overwhelming sensory explosion and yet it all fits together to create something entrancing.
I’m going to embed the intro to the game, which was also the trailer shown at the 2019 Game Awards. Look at how many art shifts it has. Look at all the wild effects, the sheer energy radiating from it. The entire game is like that. There is so much effort and soul poured into every part of this game from a media standpoint. It’s basically an art project all on its own.
Ghibli into Galo Sengen. Amazing.
It also helps the game’s just fun! Like, it’s just really great! The combat is better than ever, keeping the fast pace of NMH1 and 2, with the additional chip actions from Travis Strikes Again, allowing for Travis to use moves that can slow down enemies, teleport him to their location with a Kamen Rider-esque kick, cause chip damage, and when combined with a quick dodge mechanic that slows down combat and allows him to hit some sick combos, the return of melee attacks and grapples, and the slot machine mechanic that allows for random buffs the whole thing is frenetic and cathartic. Bosses, always a high point in the series, are the best they’ve ever been with surprises, twists, killer atmosphere, incredible designs, and constant shifting mechanics that will surprise you entirely to the point that I don’t even want to talk about them so you can experience them yourself. It’s no wonder that my Boss Fight Of The Year is from this game, but we’ll talk about that later.
So, even taking all that in mind, the final reason that it’s my Game of the Year is that it just…never loses itself despite all of that. I’ve seen so many series I love swallowed up by the gaping maw of capitalism as they try to please everyone and end up pleasing no one. I’ve seen my favorite series in the world bend over backwards for one specific group of fans so hard that it pumped the brakes on every great thing it was trying to set up to deliver cheap and hollow nostalgia and an overwrought finale. As a fan of the series and someone who has grown to love Travis and other characters in the series, it warmed my heart to see the series tell a story of a Travis that has gone from geek-ass loser virgin anime fan to…married geek-ass loser anime fan with a purpose in life, a city he loves, friends he’s found, and one last enemy to take care of. Coming into No More Heroes III there were three things I wanted to see addressed by the narrative that were set up by the previous games, and by the end of the game all three delivered in some of the most memorable possible conclusions to those arcs. I couldn’t ask for a better end to them. And it did it all while remaining truly, totally unique and never compromising how it wanted its story to be told.
Jean-Baptiste VI, or “FU”
And my god, what a final act! My boss of the year is FU, the climactic boss of the game. In many ways, No More Heroes III is the story of FU and Damon, as for the first time in the series you spend the majority of your time between Travis running around doing odd jobs and assassination missions focusing on what’s happening with the main villains on top of Damon Tower as the alien Damon rescued as a child has come back to enslave the human race. FU’s fight is emblematic of everything that the series has tackled at this point but in a more nuanced and meaningful way than it ever has been. Travis wants to defeat FU so he can see Sylvia again, but instead of being a lonely virgin trapped in a pyramid scheme it’s so he can talk to her about their life together. Travis wants to defeat FU for revenge, but instead of a solo-minded rampage Travis wants to save his city and stand up to this alien prince who is harming those he cares about. And in doing these things, Travis is looking to kill the past, to sever the ties that Damon had to this now-grown-up alien who is preying on their old friendship and Damon’s childhood memories to get away with death, dismemberment, and enslavement.
You spend the entire game waiting for this fight and when it finally comes it’s one of the best god damn fights in the series, a final exam that relies on you mastering every single mechanic the game has given you up to that point complete with some absolutely killer music and a wicked difficulty spike that feels great. You have to have nerves of steel and a little bit of luck as you use your Chip weapons, the quick dodges, read his patterns, and slash his health away, and in the final phase of the battle you’re treated to the culmination of everything the series has worked towards showing that while it has its tongue firmly planted in its cheek there’s a heart there and a real love for the friends you make during your period of growth. Travis is still a geek-ass loser, but he’s a geek-ass loser who is better than he was yesterday, and so are you.
Even a game hell-bent on making fun of the player loves that you’ve played it.
So, you have a game that is emotionally resonant, twists your brain, is loud, colorful, and angry, has an entire backstory to explain the emotions Suda has poured into it, caps off the series in a magnificent (and gloriously bitter in some regards) way, gave me all the emotional beats I’ve been praying for for years, and in many ways justified all the readings and emotions the series has made me feel and it does it in a package that has utterly magnificent boss fights and is just fun. When playing No More Heroes III I felt like Suda51 was taking me by the hand and telling me that every metatextual and symbolic reading I’ve done for the previous three games was right on the money, that I was right to love this series both for what it was and what it was trying to say, and all of this combined created a gaming experience I’ll never be able to replicate or experience again. I play games for meaningful experiences, and as an experience this one deserves all the recognition in the world.
P.S. – It had my favorite soundtrack of the year as well, just as experimental and exciting as the rest of it. I wish I could post the entire soundtrack, but I want you to jam to this and remind yourself that this is just the shop theme. Like, it’s not even a battle song, you just hear it for a few seconds at a sushi stand. Wild.
Itadakimasu!