Monday, May 2, 2022

New Review: Repetitive, ugly, and incredibly boring, No More Heroes 3 is probably the final nail in the coffin for Grasshopper Manufacture.





Repetitive, ugly, and incredibly boring, No More Heroes 3 just might be the final nail in the coffin for me as far as any hopes that Grasshopper Manufacture will ever go on to recapture the magic that made them such an interesting studio during the era of Killer 7 and the original No More Heroes.

It hurts to say, especially as someone who was once a huge fan of Suda 51 and his crazy, stylistically violent games, but I haven’t enjoyed anything his studio’s put out since 2008.

There were glimpses here and there of fun and cooky artistry in games like Shadows of the Damned and the James Gunn-penned Lollipop Chainsaw, but to increasingly diminishing results and not nearly enough to have overcome their rough gameplay and lack of depth and polish. After trying twice but being unable to force myself through the unbearable Killer is Dead, I’d all but written off the indie studio, though I couldn’t help but give them one more shot with No More Heroes 3, which promised the return of Suda 51 to the Director’s chair, (albeit as a co-director) something he hadn’t been for the majority of Grasshopper’s output following the original No More Heroes.

On a very surface level, No More Heroes 3 feels more like a sequel to the original game than to the far more limited No More Heroes 2; returning from the 1st game is the ability to explore the world of Santa Destroy, the GTA-like hub where you travel from place to place and embark on missions and side missions. You are Travis Touchdown, the incredibly nerdy and angry main character who, as is series tradition, must move up the ranks of Assassins by challenging and killing various bosses, each complete with their own backstories, the pre-boss conversations with Sylvia also returning after their absence in the previous game. As with the original No More Heroes, you spend time in between assassination missions taking on odd jobs around town to earn the money necessary to qualify for the missions themselves. No More Heroes 3 replaces the traditional pre-boss hack and slash levels with individual combat missions scattered throughout the open world that also have to be completed to unlock the Ranked Assassin Missions, which now just takes you directly to the boss fight. It’s a choice that makes sense in the context of today’s open world games, but one that ultimately makes this third installment feel more slow-paced than the others. Still, it’s something different, and the studio bringing back many of the features that were removed from No More Heroes 2 was a reason for me to be somewhat interested in giving this a shot.

The results, unfortunately, are depressingly bad. Almost from minute one, I found myself struggling to follow the lengthy, jumpy, confusing cutscenes that open the game up. Once I finally did catch up and manage to figure out exactly what was going on, I was able to somewhat appreciate the interesting dynamics between the game’s villains, and there are a couple somewhat humorous moments throughout, though the majority of No More Heroes 3’s attempts at humor land with a thud. Sadly however, despite this being the first return of Travis Touchdown (spinoff aside) to his own proper game in over 11 years, I was hit with a wave of indifference from almost the minute the game began. The open world’s ridiculously fragmented into tiny, poorly-designed pieces that are unlocked like levels and just aren’t any fun to explore. The “alien” theme’s both generic and under-developed at the same time, while the graphics are bathed in a dark, dreary, blue tint that makes this easily the worst-looking numbered No More Heroes game yet, despite it being the first in HD. Santa Destroy in the original game had a bright, fun, cel shaded summer vibe to it, but the open world in No More Heroes 3 (where you spend the majority of your time) feels entirely devoid of life and atmosphere outside of the Perfect World section of the map, and never managed to immerse me or develop any sort of sense of place.

Everything, presentationally, about No More Heroes 3 feels like the wrong choice, from the constant stream of in-game credits sequences that begin and end each “chapter” to the bland, forgettable and often downbeat music that plays throughout. The homages to the 8-bit era that this series has always dabbled in are cranked up to 11 here, and serve as a complete distraction. The deliberately pixelated radar in the corner of the screen is so hard to use that I almost always had to pull up the full-size map just to have an idea of where I was going.  This map strangely displays a huge chunk of the world that you’re never actually allowed to visit, and the load times that take place through all of this feel abrupt, disruptive, and excessive. The game (which lacks an auto-save feature) once froze on me at the worst possible time, forcing me to repeat about a half hour of playtime over again. Chapters are bookended with pointless cutscenes featuring Travis and one of his friends sitting in his living room discussing Takashi Miike movies. In addition to the scenes being presented with all the visual flair of having been recorded off a security monitor, the dialogue between the two characters isn’t funny at all and doesn’t even seem to be attempting to be, and as someone unfamiliar with Miike’s movies, I of course had little idea what they were discussing. Even if I had, though, their analysis is incredibly shallow and not particularly interesting; I get the sense that I could find more in-depth analysis from high schoolers on a Miike-devoted message board. The payoff from having to sit through these puzzling cutscenes comes far too late to have been worth the effort.

That isn’t to say that everything about No More Heroes 3 is horrible; the combat system remains fun and fast, albeit veering into frustration a little too often and easily, just like it did in No More Heroes 2 and all of Grasshopper Manufacture’s games since. Still, battles are chaotic and visually striking, and the leveling up system for Travis offers a solid amount of customization. Boss encounters still don’t have the depth, personality, or the extravagance of the fights from the original game, but they’re more or less on par with its sequel in providing interesting personalities and solid gameplay variety. As with its predecessors, motion controls are integrated perfectly, in a way that isn’t even close to being excessive but one that feels so satisfying.

The quirky odd jobs, however, are tedious and lack any of the charm of either previous No More Heroes game. After trying a couple of them, I decided to focus entirely on combat challenges as a means to earn money instead. The characters you encounter around the world are strange in the usual Suda 51 way but lack a lot of the charm that existed in the original, with No More Heroes 3 often feeling like it’s trying desperately to grasp something that the studio just doesn’t seem to have in them anymore.

This is most clear in the storyline that propels the adventure forward. Every tone that it strikes just hits the wrong note; Travis seems angry and unpleasant, almost all of the likability he had in the first two games somehow nonexistent. The villains are both too menacing to be truly funny and yet too funny to be taken seriously, and the side characters (especially Shinobu) are given so little to do that I wondered why they were even included. The writing itself is oftentimes incomprehensible and never as funny as it seems to think it is. Travis yelling out the names of various fruits every 10 seconds in battle is supposed to be funny because of its randomness, but weirdness just for the sake of weirdness isn’t automatically deep or funny; it actually has to go somewhere, and No More Heroes 3’s just doesn’t. As with many modern GHM games, cutscene after cutscene ends with thoughts of “huh. That was weird,” with the studio seeming to think that weirdness alone makes them profound, or hilarious, or innovative. But as with all of their modern games, they simply come across as weird, but little else.  

It’s sad how far Grasshopper Manufacture seems to have fallen. As someone who loved the original No More Heroes and the divisive Killer 7 before it, nobody was hoping more than me that No More Heroes 3 would see a return to at least some of that former glory. Unfortunately, the aggressively confusing storyline, tonal inconsistencies, terrible visuals and presentation, a boring, soulless world along with repetitive, unexciting gameplay ends up leaving almost nothing for me to recommend about No More Heroes 3, even with a solid and usually fun combat system. I do hope that the studio can somehow manage to find its sweet spot in the HD era at some point, but I worry that they just don’t have the amount of people, the budget, or the focus to pull it off. As a former fan of Suda 51’s strange and inventive games, it’s a difficult pill to swallow, but something that just seems to be, for now, the way it is.

2/5