This game just makes me happy. The entire series should never have worked, if you were to describe these games on paper there is no reason it ever should have made it past one game. You start as a guy who becomes an assassin with a Beam Katana he bought online who saves the game by going to the bathroom. To save up money to cover your entrance fee to face off against his fellow assassins he does odd jobs like mowing the lawn (Which has become a staple of the series). Then faces off against such foes as an elderly lady with a super cannon in a shopping cart, a dude who fires lasers from his crotch, and all kinds of ridiculous foes. Throw in a ridiculous amount of the fourth wall breaks, a lot of non-sequiturs and random aspects get thrown into the plot, sometimes in rapid succession, and a lot of possibly deep analysis of the nature of violence, killing, and more related fourth wall breaks. Also, the whole Assassin's Association doesn't exist, it was just a con set up by Sylvia, so all these murders and rankings happened for no reason. Oh, and at the end, you find out the top Ranked Assassin was Travis's sexually abused half-sister who murdered your parents, and the entire back story is told in a fast-forwarded cut scene to save on time and budget for the game (This was the in-game excuse).
I bring all that up, because it is important to know how this series began, and how baffling it is that it is so fun and works so well. Things do not calm down in the later games, and we see the third game kick off with an alien invasion, an ET like backstory for the villain and a human where ET ends up being evil, and the whole premise for the invasion is built around an assassin's ranking tournament run by the now legit Assassin's Association. That said, No More Heroes is so devoted to its own insanity despite how goofy this all is you still find yourself absorbed into it. Minor Spoiler for other games of the series, but Travis Strikes Again, the previous entry, saw you team up with Bad Man, father of Bad Girl. He first tries to kill you for killing Bad Girl in the first game, she was ranked number two assassin. Instead, you fought together to earn a wish from a powerful video game and inevitably brought back Bad Girl. This is important because the moment the story kicks off is the death of Bad Man. It immediately elevates the tension of the story, so despite how bizarre it all gets you still feel like you have a reason to take this guy down and stay invested.
As is normal, there are a lot of non-sequitur and out of nowhere twists. Some are welcome callbacks, like a returning Destroyman or someone Travis spared in the second game coming back for seconds. That said once you've hit the fourth sudden change of boss because someone else kills them and they are replaced, it starts to feel like an overused point in this game. There is also a bit of frustration a fairly relevant NPC was from a game that I don't know even came out in the west, but at the same time, the game cracks some jokes about how silly this is. Sometimes this can feel like a cop-out, but it just kind of fits the absurdity of the game, so I can let it slide. Even potential inconsistencies from one game to the next just... don't feel wrong.
The actual gameplay features two main parts. The overworld, which you traverse and play minigames and side missions on, as the combat. I will just get the overworld out of the way now, it sucks. It has a lot of visual flairs but just feels empty and lifeless no matter where you are on it. Minigames are a hit and miss, and it just feels like it's padding out the length of the game. There is hardly anything good to say about this part.
I'm a lot more complimentary of the combat, though it's kind of hard to put your finger on why exactly. To describe what you are doing it sounds fairly typical of a twitch-based third-person action game. Few abilities you can use, dodge with time slow down for a perfect dodge, and being able to throw stunned enemies. It's all backed up by a fairly finicky camera, but something about the game makes it stand out. Likely a failing on my part, but I could never really find the words to describe why it does. There is certainly a degree of style and flash to the visuals, and the sound effects are just glorious, but is that the only thing that makes it stand out? It's possibly a mix of that, and how often silly gimmicks that are fun change things up. I think it's in large part how well all the boss fights are put together.
All mechanics stay in place, but somehow you end up in situations where the game turns into a Turn-Based RPG for a fight, a life or death game of musical chairs where you get a seriously out of place Rocky reference, or the moment the game becomes Super Smash Brothers for about five to ten minutes. It's always throwing a bunch of bizarre curves in these boss fights that keep an otherwise fairly basic combat system feeling engaging throughout.
There is no one out there that makes games like No More Heroes, and that is in large part why I love it. It has a style that no one else has been able to replicate, and I have loved all four games of this series so far. The game manages to get you invested in whatever outlandish stuff is going on while giving you a constant stream of laughs (Assuming you can get into this kind of batshit crazy humor). If you have a hunger for violence and the absurd, I highly recommend this game (Though I do also recommend playing the previous games first. They are all fun).
