So, from your response it sounds like they’re retreading the open-world-shapes empty-people critique of the first game? Or is it even, we’re just back to Grasshopper’s punk aesthetics, normie heart fallow period?
It’s in a weird position as a sequel to TSA/capstone to an uneven trilogy.
I’m not sure Grasshopper realise how solid TSA was as a much more limited side project with a more focused topic. It felt like veteran creators who have been reined in a lot to focus on what they are best at. I would argue that the combat in TSA is probably at the series’ most mechanically interesting but isn’t really as visceral as the slash motions and wrestling moves in the mainline series.
NMH3 is a lot better than later Grasshopper games like killer is dead or whatever and has a much more satisfying game loop (Let it Die notwithstanding). I can’t say it’s all style no substance but the game is not a grand return of anything necessarily. The open world is really just a weird middleground between the first game ‘all game worlds are empty’ idea and 2’s abstraction of that world into nothing but activity markers with empty space in between. I have a very specific aesthetic appreciation for deserted or empty spaces in videogames so it registered with me but I don’t think it’s necessarily what they are intending. Some late game areas are so barren (neo Brazil, Thunder Dome) that you wonder if the initial scope for the star -shaped over world was just chopped up for the sake of scope. Hell, Damon Tower doesn’t even exist even though the menus imply it does.
Aesthetics are definitely the strength everyone has identified but I think the only thing the game has in spades is variety. Jack of all styles. I need to really go back and listen but the OST is not as strong as any of the previous games and textures get extremely blurry, especially in the open world. Almost everything is focused in on the menus, cutscenes, and transitions. There’s a lot more animation style changes which is neat but it doesn’t quite feel as motivated or derealising as killer7, Black Knight Sword, or even killer is dead. NMH1 and even 2 at points felt much more grim. TSA too. 3 starts off quite dark with FU brutally killing and threatening tons of people but, by its end, 3 feels very lighthearted in comparison to other Grasshopper stuff and I’m not sure it gels super well with the pluralistic styles. In a way the postmodern skin makes its sincere themes feel a little empty. There’s no ominous teeth to it.
Some spoiler thoughts and reflections
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TSA introduced a variety of neat abilities that you could mix-and-match that were genuinely fun to experiment with even if the core gameplay was not amazing. 3 just brings in four of these abilities and that’s it, you start with one and unlock three of them in the same boss fight. Every single fight after that basically becomes the same order of spamming cooldowns and there’s never a reason not to constantly have them all activated. Again, it feels good to do all this stuff but it is pretty brainless. The game is excellent podcast material for this reason but it does beg the question of why no more heroes should continue with a certain idea of combat.
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Another thing that feels like it was The scope as there are no real stages before boss fights. I don’t mind so much since the boss fights themselves are essentially the spectacles and the stages in one and two are okay but they are basically just a corridor full of mooks in a themed environment.
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The games credits imply that this is the end of the series and the game is interestingly credited as ‘A Suda51 Games’ as if this is the final part of a longform game even though 2 was under different direction. I’m not sure how much sense it makes to see them as a continuous piece but I think this is more an effect of the throw things at the wall and see what sticks approach that this series and grasshopper generally has.
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More than any other game I feel like they really are just improvising story developments and things will happen in cut scenes that feel very spur of the moment even though they must have been scripted in advance. Many of the alien bosses are just killed off within five seconds of Travis meeting them or before he even see them. I kind of like this but it’s done so regularly throughout the game that it feels like irreverence has overtaken genuine criticism of the form. It’s neat that the top 10 is used as a framing device to pull Travis back into things but then is basically disrespected at every turn. The game completely forgoes the number two rank fight, rules and details of the UAA are hand waved away constantly and characters from previous games just happened to show up at the exact same time the ranked fight is happening. To recap:
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Mr. Blackhole - regular boss fight
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Gold Joe - regular boss fight
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Black Night direction - killed off at fight start to introduce Travis’s grandson as a ninja from the future.
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Vanishing Point - killed off at fight start to bring back Kimmy Howell and wrap up her B plot from NMH2 (awkward rap scene)
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Velvet chair girl - token ‘not a boss fight’ musical chairs minigame which does actually finish with a very brief boss fight against her vampire squid. Cool AC-bu animated cutscene
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Midori Midorikawa - survival horror genre shift + boss fight where you can’t actually play as regular Travis - reintroduces Kamui Uehara from TSA (not Silver Case since he’s like a preteen now?).
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Sniping Lee - killed off within a minute to introduce a new character that we’ve never met (the Champ) do immediately becomes friends with Travis before the game basically admits that there should be a boss fight here and Destroy Man is resurrected for his third appearance.
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Sonic Juice - neat JRPG genre shift before a regular boss fight
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Paradox Bandit - killed before Travis even meets him, replaced by a boss fight with Henry.
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FU - weird boss fight where cooldown abilities just aren’t useful before being supplanted for a quick time event boss and an admittedly humorous smash Bros parody against Damon Riticiello (a relatively minor character from TSA).
So almost half are fake outs to revisit Travis’ various friendships and past. It’s an interesting approach but never really pays off because the game doesn’t really want to commit to a completely contiguous conclusion. To be fair its in the series DNA.
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The whole Travis and friends angle makes the game feel a little bit more comfy. There’s an interesting contrast between the pre-ranking fight alien cuts in where friendships are shown to be superficial and flimsy, half the time they’re threatening each other or outright killing each other. A similar pre-ranking could see happens for Travis and his friends where they basically just around the apartment discussing Miike movies and anime and they don’t really seem that interested in the framework of the game or its stakes. It ends up feeling like the thematic meat because the ‘beat the top 10 assassins’ structure just isn’t as emotionally compelling to the writers any more. A comfortable subversion but then why not lean into this for the bulk of the experience?
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One detail that really goes against the theme is having Travis’ friends killed off or fridged as active helpers in the first hour. Again, it feels like a scope thing where extra playable characters and missions that involve the more prominently just fell by the wayside. They all come back at the end once Travis realises the true power of friendship but feels a little cheap.
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That said, one really nice change they make is that Jeane talks (with a voice) and follows Travis to every fight to provide banter. A really minor writing change but has a really good feeling to it. Like Jeane is just coming along to check out the fight and Travis doesn’t really see them as major events any more. Just a casual thing that friends go along to support each other with.
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I hate shield enemies in action games that you basically have to wait to damage (unless you have a particular super move stopped up that can get round the shield). The spiky head floating guys in this game can fuck off as they kill the pace and aren’t exciting to figure out or dispatch.
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I like that the game gives you the tools to generally keep track of where and how many side missions there are but there are far too many loading screens to get through the world quickly and attempt all defence missions in a reasonably straightforward way. When you go to a defence mission on the map and there’s no way of telling you whether you completed or not so you have to do some cross-referencing in the pause menu under the missions list. Given that this is the only other content there really is to do outside of the ranking battles it surprising that the game is in a bit easier to navigate with regards to this.
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After almost every boss fight Travis wants to talk to Sylvia about their kids and family and its strung along as a payoff (in a similar way to how Sylvia makes the grimy promise to sleep with Travis in 1 and 2 as a reward). I suspect that they never have this conversation because it would entail a certain emotional courage and tone to the writing that Suda has rarely expressed and I doubt has the ability or interest to go into despite having set it up. The true subversion would have been to actually address this resolution as few videogames ever actually explore mundane family difficulties in a compelling way.
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OST is pretty good but is surprisingly stronger when it comes to ambient and chillout tracks. Almost no memorable boss themes but will to reversal and generic combat music is pretty good. There’s a lot of novelty like the itadakimasu song and the variations on the anime closing credits sequence but honestly a lot of the best music is from previous games.
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Each ranking prep and fight section of the game is book ended by actual opening and closing credits. A neat aesthetic conceit but it gets very repetitive by the games end and especially if you’re playing in long sessions. This is a lesson learned from things like Alan Wake And it’s weird to see it here. Feels like a commitment to the streaming service visual gag they do the first time round.
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The first thing you see in the game is the death man arcade game which Travis recalls as being particularly meaningful in his childhood. I thought this was going to set up a big TSA style payoff and it kinda does. After Travis gets killed he basically just meets the main character of the game in a surreal afterlife which ultimately resurrects him in real-life. I read it as Travis kinda getting over his memories of childhood, specifically of a finnicky and unforgiving action game that mostly stands up as an aesthetic memory more so than it does an actual game (this is how I feel about almost every game I’ve ever played these days). By the end, you also realise that the parallel narrative of Damon and FU is kind of doing the same thing. Showing a genuinely optimistic and hopeful set of childhood memories (I love you Damon) that eventually gets twisted by corporate adulthood and personal desires (constant fucking bickering and just rich kid selfish bullshit). Travis engages with his hobbies and friends in a way that isn’t tied to corporate power, colonisation, domination, and petty egotism. The Deathman sequences aren’t really that prominent but at least they show that you can move beyond your memories of childhood but still have meaningful connections to those times. It was kinda sweet, but done better in TSA.
Dang, this all really makes me sound like I just Wanna play TSA again but I enjoyed 3 a lot. Considering 100%-ing it as it genuinely is a very good podcast game but we’ll see. I got a bunch out of it but won’t necessarily evangelise it.
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A few months ago, Oshii had an interview about Evangelion 3.0+1.0 where he praised Anno’s visual style but criticized him for not being able to express a theme using avantgarde presentation. He added that Anno stays true to himself because of honest and confessional style of storytelling, but is “more of a producer than a director these days” and possibly can’t figure out his own fundamental motivation for making art. I feel a lot of this relates to modern Suda? Same as Anno using Rebuilds to establish Khara and their production practices, Suda used TSA and NMH3 to figure out Grasshopper’s UE production pipeline after post-Let it Die restructuring of the company (there’s a scene where Travis explains how Takashi Miike uses the magical girl tokusatsu shows he occasionally directs to test the limits of the CGI teams he works with and it feels like Suda has a weirdly personal point to make there). The shared Grasshopper universe BS also feels like preparing for the future of the company – Flower Sun and Rain is getting remade for sure, 25th Ward’s YUKI chapter fits neatly with redone Kamui Uehara and Midori Midorikawa’s cross-media presence, Notorious from Fire Pro seems to have some future ahead of him as well, killer7 will probably return at some point – and I suppose the logic is to use GhM’s breakout IP to familiarize the audiences with the peripheral stuff they actually own the rights to. Not sure how well this will work and I’m not a fan of anything that reeks of MCU, but I suppose it fits with how Suda has always been trying to be corporate and punk at the same time.
I feel like this conflict is driving a lot of NMH3. The final boss encounter, a fight with The Man realized as a Smash Bros encounter, manages to comes off both like a middle finger to the industry (represented by a fictionalized version of John Riccitiello) and an expression of hurt stemming from the fact the industry hasn’t properly recognized GhM, if Sakurai won’t put us in Smash we will do it ourselves. Just like in NMH1, Sylvia represents an unattainable dream(*), but a different kind than before – she’s a super popular streamer now, able to make or break games based on her whims (meanwhile Travis’ stream overlay during sidequests always shows pitiful numbers), she’s able to hang with Riccitiello and FU and actually submit them to her will, she’s basically the Goddess of Gaming and she never even talks to Travis (which is the only thing in the game that actually makes him sound like he’s in pain). Santa Destroy’s new districts – a post-apocalyptic wasteland, a Gundam-like colony, a Call of Duty game – represent different kinds of geekdom, and Travis once again proves himself to be the absolute king there, he will shit talk you and kick your ass no matter if it’s a JRPG or a game of musical chairs, but there is still some emptiness and sadness underpinning it all. Like an image of a returning wrestler who’s talking himself up and trashing everyone else, is generally at peace with his thing by now, but is unsure if he can still make it or what would “making it” even mean to him.
(*) Despite fans’ speculations, Suda reaffirmed that he wrote the entirety of NMH2, which makes me wonder about how atypically warm Sylvia’s behavior towards Travis was in this game. Between deals with EA, Warner Bros and Ubisoft, was this an expression of him feeling like he’s on the top of the world just before the big comedown? And this is a half-baked thought, but maybe the way Prince FU is on the top of the world at Ricitiello’s side (check out this mindset, “apparently superheroes are popular in this country, so we’re gonna jump on that”) but only becomes more frustrated and hollow with time is also Suda killing something from his past?
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I’m liking a lot about this ‘reaction to the metaverse’ take. I’m still fermenting a lot of this but want to poke at my thoughts more at some point.
Shared universe stuff is crazy. Can’t tell if they want this or want to lampoon this. I’m fairly certain Fleming is canonically a videogame character from Travis’ perspective according to TSA so no idea how that works. I kinda appreciate how they dgaf about contiguity.
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I am really late to this. I’m playing on bitter and can’t beat the first dang boss. I feel like I’m missing something critical? or am i just old??
his AOE doesn’t seem to have any tells, and I can’t get out fast enough once he starts charging it. I found you can jump over the shockwaves in phase 2, but that doesn’t seem to work for the close ones. can’t guard them either.
i am depressed
oh wait i have a fucking dodge button
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Playing this. Should I just try to move forward in the story as fast as possible?
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Yes, I wouldn’t do tonnes of side content generally speaking. Depends on your tolerance for very little happening upon a sidequests completion or redoing the same minigames over and over.
Definitely avoid the mining minigame.
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I have owned this game since release and haven’t played past the second boss because the visual effects give me a massive headache. Has anyone else encountered this, and do you have a workaround for it?
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Should post here that I really enjoyed this! Every time the Fight Won screen came on was great.
Out of the NMH I think this one does the best to undermine expectations as a device. And also trying to back off The Killing. And it’s neat that Travis in fiction and as a character has now existed long enough to be a self-alligned Hero.
Talking to his colleagues about Miike, Pro-Resu, and anime that affected him and help him through the day was actually touching. It made me think maybe I should just stop complaining about things I don’t like all the time and instead talk more about Final Countdown and ska music. Probably healthier.
Will probably buy the PS4 port and give it a half-spin. Seems worthy of being On The Shelf.
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Only thing I can think of is to try and switch to easy (not sure you can change once the game has started) or stock up on the power ups that let you do more damage to get the fight over with more quickly. Easy autoblocks everything though so if you want a challenge it’s not the best but would allow you to effectively close your eyes through more visually nauseating sections perhaps. Not much that can change the display of the visuals or anything like that. Second boss is a bit visually dense and it won’t be the last one. Sad to say there’s not much the game can accommodate here.
Really underrated vibe of the game imo. Felt like the game is more about positive personal relationships via media than any other. Fu and other’s similar introductory cutscenes seem to be about how disconnected and uninterested in each other they are - a lot more shallow and fleeting.
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I’m going through No More Heroes 2 two years after 1.
NMH is a satire……. But the satire is so thin compared to the wish fulfillment, I really can’t see it as a justification for it.
I am absolutely bombarded with Sylvia cleavage, toilet humor and ecstatic fountains of blood. This is not, like. Haneke.
And yet the games still totally work, I think precisely because they’re so shamelessly trying to have their cake and eat it too. Being such a crowd pleaser for The Gamer while simultaneously trying to pretend it’s a critique of Him. Just the brazenness and incongruity of it. It just works in practice
It’s also fairly refreshing to see cutscenes with real good cinematography and sense of pacing, after Yakuza and Fire Emblem and basically every other game
I already bought NMH3, I’d like to try Travis Strikes Again first, but it never goes on sale anymore. Hmm. I’ll maybe wait another year after being done with NMH2 just to see if this changes
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Curious what you’ll think of the entire NMH2 experience! I think it has a strong beginning but kinda falters by the mid to end.
It’s definitely not as fun to replay as the first one was, at least according to my memories playing it back when it first came out. Maybe the re-releases fixed things though?
NMH2 I remember playing a lot better than 1 but being about half as interesting and definitely meanders a lot with what it’s trying to do. Music still excellent. Always curious to see more Travis Strikes Again discussion, I think it’s nearly my favourite of the whole series despite being a totally different thing.
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I agree, it’s a safe sequel. One way it’s clear it doesn’t really have anything interesting to say is that Travis gets a whole character arc about learning to respect his opponents that seems to be meant to be taken seriously
But it was still very enjoyable as a quick 7 hours playthrough full of little dumb surprises. I liked the pixel minigames and cat training exercises. The only significant nadir was the Destroymen fight
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One thing I can never get over is how playable Shinobu and Henry sections were kinda a selling point when it came out. Henry’s section is literally one awful bossfight. Barely worth including them in the sections they’re in really.
Also they’re cowards for not having Shinobu’s save screen being a toilet.
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yeah i really loved the idea of playing as Shinobu, but NMH2 just didn’t really do very much for me when it came out. kind of curious to revisit it, though.
i didn’t remember we had a NMH thread, but i posted my NMH3 thoughts somewhere in one of the “Games you played…” threads.
i had a good time with 3, but it seemed possibly unfinished. i would definitely play more of that game, if it existed.
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Shinobu is playable in TSA ᶦᶠ ʸᵒᵘ ᵇᵘʸ ᵗʰᵉ ᵈˡᶜ ᵒʳ ᶜᵒᵐᵖˡᵉᵗᵉ ᵉᵈᶦᵗᶦᵒⁿ
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is TSA actually worth playing? it seemed like a minigame collection and honestly (at the time) i was unconvinced Grasshopper could still make compelling games. the fact that i enjoyed NMH3 so much, though, made me reconsider
I hand on heart think it’s one of my favourite games of the past decade but it’s not everyone’s thing.
It’s not minigames but they did kinda market it that way when they revealed it, it’s essentially a shorter hack and slash game but the levels usually have a genre shift gimmick of some kind. Mechanically speaking it’s more complex than most NMH games combat-wise. NMH3 inherits the cooldown stuff from it but has fewer abilities overall. It’s got a lot of fun stuff in its narrative interludes and feels like a weird love-hate homage to games as a hobby (and profession to an extent) to me.
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