No More Heroes was one of my favorite titles of the Wii generation. It felt fresh, it was wild, it was flashy, cool, bloody, and was simple dumb fun with a equally silly story full of memorable characters. The title really stood out amongst all the shovelware that graced Nintendo’s little white box. It later made its way onto the PS3 and now it has come to the PC. But does it hold up all these years later on a platform very far removed from the gimmick of motion controls?
You play as Travis Touchdown, a modern cool-guy otaku who gets his hand on a Beam Katana and takes to the streets to become the greatest assassin in the small town of Santa Destroy. With the aid of a sexy and seductive business agent, Travis works to climb the ranks of a secret assassin order on the road to becoming number one. Suda 51, the mind behind the title, managed to merge East and West in an over-the-top manner that works to build a familiar yet very different world than our own. It’s as is Japan and American merged and then the pop-culture result was pumped with human growth hormones.
The story and look was enough to draw people in at the time and the same can be said today. The move into HD has worked wonders and the cel-shaded look holds up over time better than most games of the era without it. But it’s where the gameplay in which No More Heroes really shined at the time. The idea of motion controls is now not looked back on very fondly (it wasn’t looked great on at the time to many of us), but there where a handful of games where it really worked well. Strangely enough, No More Heroes is one such title that works better with motion controls than without, if only to mask its shortcomings.
Attacking is done with a single button and can be done in a high or low position to get past the two enemy guard positions. After a number of attacks the screen displays an arrow in which you would slash with the Wii-Remote to initiate a bloody kill. You can also stun enemies and pull off wrestling moves which required you to slash in a direction with the Wii-Remote and Nunchuk. In this new PC update you do all the slashing using the thumbsticks and this works relatively well but does take a bit of getting used to if you played the original. That said, it does feel better and more visceral using motion controls, but it does expose something: No More Heroes is sort of a shallow experience.
You take away the motion control gimmick and you are left with a pretty bare-bones experience. No More Heroes suffers from rinse-and-repeat syndrome, especially outside of the amazingly slick boss battles. You must pay to enter boss battles and so you’ll be rolling across town doing odd jobs and killing small mobs of baddies to gain money to enter events. The first few times they are fun but these never really change and it gets pretty tedious. Take away the swinging about in your living room and you’re left with mashing the A button and flicking the joystick after a few seconds. While No More Heroes is wicked cool and has super interesting bosses, most of the game is driving back and forth across town doing the same missions over and over again to earn more money.
That isn’t the worst thing in the world, but the the driving is terrible, Santa Destroy is lifeless, and killing the same Pizza CEO a dozen times gets really old. This is clearly a game with style coming out its ears but one that lacks a lot of substance when the motion gimmick it was built around is stripped away. But what’s worse is that this port is simply lazy on all fronts which makes it feel like a cash grab for an old game. It brings back to mind the nightmares of the PC ports of console games from the early 2000s. You can’t even play the game using a mouse and keyboard and only via a gamepad. That’s not a deal killer in 2021 like it would be back in the day, but using a mouse for camera control and slashes would have been a perfect fit, especially since the camera is garbage.
Another more pressing matter is that there are no settings available to you in-game. Sliders don’t exist for anything other than audio, and even these jump up and down at will between fights and cutscenes. There are no settings outside the pre-loading configuration menu that allow you to play in a window or full-screen. The game does not natively support 4K and likes to auto adjust to the resolution of you monitor. On the gamepad front, which you are forced to use, you can’t even remap the buttons. What makes this stranger is that even using an Xbox gamepad there were time when the game told me to hit “A” when the “B” button was the correct one. The game makes you use a gamepad and can’t even get its own buttons right.
At the end of the day, No More Heroes is a fantastic tale that is light on gameplay, but the lack of options and settings on PC make it a very lazy port. If you only have a PC then take the leap and hope mods come around to add what PC players expect. If you have the Nintendo Switch then I’d suggest you pick that version up as it’s probably the best way to play the game outside the Wii original. Maybe wait for a sale before you bite the bullet on this port.
Final Score:
No More Heroes
Genre: Action
Developer: GRASSHOPPER MANUFACTURE INC.
Publisher: Marvelous USA
Platform: Steam (PC)
Release: Jun 9, 2021
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