No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise has you playing as the improbably-named Travis Touchdown, an stone-broke ex-wrestler and anime nut who possesses a beam katana (a bit like a light sabre) and resides in the almost as improbably-named town of Santa Destroy, California. While getting boozed up one night with the sexy Sylvia (a Paris Hilton lookalike with an unidentifiable European accent who Travis letches at throughout the story) Travis gets a job as an assassin, and when this job is completed he is contacted by Sylvia, who turns out to be a representative of ‘The Association’, about becoming a fighter, and is informed that he is now ranked number 11 and will have to kill the number 10 ranked fighter in order to move up the Assassins' league. Sylvia (who guides and erm... encourages you during your climb up the league) informs Travis that he’ll have to fight all of the higher-ranked assassins with all their varying weapons and skills in order to raise his ranking and gain the fame he craves. In true anime style the other bloodthirsty killers he comes up against all have their own twisted stories, and the almost nonstop fighting action (you have to hack, chop, slice, wrestle and stab your way through hordes of minions to get to the boss characters) is interspersed with lengthy cut scenes that fill in the back story.
Designed by the highly-regarded and slightly mental Goichi Suda (aka Suda-51), maker of the strange yet brilliant PS2 game killer7, No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise is a port of a Wii game and as such isn’t going to blow anyone away with its visuals. Apart from its basic graphics engine we were hugely disappointed to find that the game hasn’t even been optimised for UK widescreen so the picture in its raw form is displayed in a squished ‘4:3 into 16:9’ 50Hz way, and there are no in-game picture options to change it. If your TV has a zoom facility you should be able to fill the screen with the picture in the correct 4:3 aspect ratio though, so it doesn’t look too weird.
No More Heroes was hailed as one of the Wii’s first serious, non-Nintendo developed exclusives but despite the game’s unquestionable style and sense of humour I never really fell in love with it because the Wiimote was only used for finishing moves and dodging incoming attacks, with most sword slashes achieved simply by button presses. Sadly this is an unimaginative, direct port and uses a similar system even with the much more sensitive and accurate Move controllers available, which seems a huge waste. The game can also be played with a standard Sixaxis or Dualshock controller, which, for me at least, works much better-but more on that later.
Once you successfully dispatch your first rival (a tattooed weirdo called Death Metal) you are returned to Travis’s pad, where you can do all sorts of things in a kind of Shen Mue-ish way, including pet your kitten, change clothes, check the game map, save the game (amusingly by taking a dump) or take to your Lay-Z-Boy and watch replays of cut scenes (dreams) or re-fight boss battles (nightmares). You then meet again with Sylvia, and after seeming to nearly die of sexual frustration you get dumped out of her limo onto the street, from where you can explore Santa Destroy for the first time. It was at this point that the game started to remind me of Dreamcast classics like Jet Set Radio and Headhunter... but not in a good way.
You discover that you can get assassin jobs from the K-Entertainment agency in order to earn the entrance fee for the next ranking battle, and you’re not left too far from home so you can nip back to your motel and get Travis’s motorbike, which looks like a cross between a Dustbuster, a Sinclair C5, an X-Wing fighter and some sort of earth-moving machine (eventually this flame-belching monstrosity can be called up at any time). This should be the start of something exciting as you can now go explore the town GTA-style (there’s even an on-screen mini-map and part of the town is shut off by a closed bridge in typical GTA fashion). But if you were hoping for some GTA IV-style motorcycle action then I’m afraid you’ll be bitterly disappointed, you can wheelie and do jumps, but here’s the problem; the combination of rudimentary physics, jerky handling, awful collision detection and ridiculously fiddly and unresponsive controls makes riding the bike an intensely difficult and annoying thing to do. The Move control setup doesn’t sound too bad when you describe it: the bike is steered by tilting the Move controller left or right and you hold it horizontally like a bike’s throttle grip so that the bike is made to accelerate (in my case, this was often violently into a wall) by twisting it. The brakes are applied by pressing the ‘T’ button so all of a sudden the nav controller becomes virtually redundant, and all it’s used for is to pull up the map, which is weird. The ‘Square’ button makes Travis get on/off the bike, and you’ll be using this a lot as he falls off whenever you hit anything. I also found countless bits of sticky scenery and got stuck in several places including on phone poles, street lights, traffic lights, park benches – you name it... including one hilariously silly crash when we got stuck sideways on in a narrow alleyway – a true “Austin Powers event” where the bike was too long to turn left or right so we were well and truly wedged in there. With no reset button all you can do is move some distance away from your bike and then call to have it delivered by some unexplained stranger. Perhaps in a moment of realisation as to just how annoying their game was, and despite countless invisible walls, the designers do allow you the freedom to ride off a cliff into the sea and even put a ramp at the end of a pier to encourage you to do so.
You might think that I ”should just learn to ride the bike more carefully” but the controls are so twitchy and glitchy that you will end up getting stuck on something at some point. Most ‘sticky’ places can (if you’re dogged enough) be escaped by revving and wheelie-ing until eventually the bike jumps out, which usually causes another crash and on at least one occasion meant we were stuck again, this time in a fence! Although I did obtain some small level of control from time to time I decided that life is too short to master the controls for this mechanical aberration so I changed to joypad control, which was a somewhat less fraught experience, although just as twitchy, unresponsive and generally spazzy (there is literally NO better word in the English language to describe the handling/steering of Travis’s bike). Around this time we were informed that the “Job Center” was now open, so we went and got a job. Working for this Job Center (which, I was assured would turn me into a “first rater” if “I worked hard enough to puke blood”) included tasks as exciting as collecting coconuts, mowing lawns, picking up litter and waving flags at passing boats... trust me, you can only imagine what other thrilling tasks await you...
Playing the fighting sections of NMH with joypad controls works surprisingly well (compared to the Move controls at least), with the right stick taking the place of the Move controller and the left stick replicating the navigation controls. In combat mode ‘Triangle’ is the most frequently used to slash and once an enemy’s life runs out you go into death blow mode; click R3 and then move the stick in the direction indicated on-screen to simulate the blade’s movement and dispatch the enemy to the netherworld in the messiest way possible. The beam katana has a limited battery supply (indicated by a gauge on the right of the screen) so you have to hold ‘R1’ and shake the joypad (or the Move controller) up and down every now and then to recharge it. This is accompanied by an animated Travis shaking the beam katana up and down, which becomes a disturbingly masturbatory motion if the battery requires full charge. It’s vitally important to keep the katana charged as you can’t block attacks or cause any damage, as well as the fact that Travis makes you both look like complete wankers if you don’t...
Successful death blows make reels spin at the base of the screen (like a slot machine) and if three line up you win a special attack which can be unleashed by pressing ‘R2’ and ‘Circle’. Beat attacks can be performed with ‘X’ or ‘Circle’ (low or high). These blows may stun an enemy (with accompanying stars and tweety bird noise) at which point you can either finish ‘em off with a sword blow or throw them with ‘R2’, which will bring up more button prompts on-screen depending on which kind of throw is randomly selected (you unlock more as you progress).
The action is ultra-violent comic book style as you chop enemies’ heads off and even slice them clean in half! All this hackin’ and a-slashin’ is accompanied by gouts of blood and gore but then everything disappears, leaving the scenery looking remarkably free of blood ‘n’ guts. This is probably due to the limitations of the Wii original, but a bit more evidence of your gory path would have made the game feel a little less daft; the countless minions you have to kill on the way to a ranking fight might just as well be bloodless robots, which could have allowed them to drop the 18 certificate, particularly as so many other elements of the game would make it appear that it’s aimed at teenage males, or males with teenage mental ages (like me).
All games with an explorable world now seem to have collectibles objects to pad the gameplay and NMH collectibles include trading cards (wrestler’s masks), dumpsters in which you may find $2000 in cash or a T-shirt which you can change into (hastily avoiding trying to figure out why the heck you’d wear clothes found in a dumpster when you’ve just found $2000). You also have Lovikov balls, the collection of which can help Travis learn new techniques when you take them to a shady bar in the Gold Town area. If nothing else, the collectaholics out there have plenty to find in NMH.
As you progress new locations also open up where you can upgrade Travis’s various attributes and abilities, including Naomi’s lab where you can buy new Beam Katanas and tune-up parts for them.
I can accept that some of the humour and other nuances of this game may have been lost in translation (and some of the dialogue is pure nonsense) and that some Japan-centric references and in-jokes may have passed me by, but when you make a game that’s in any way similar to the best then I think you have to expect to be compared to them. The fact is that the free-roaming city section of NMH is pretty dire, which, even allowing for its Wii origins, is poor when compared to any number of city-based sandbox games whether you’re talking about Saints Row, GTA or Mafia II. The BIG problem is that the best part of the game (the beam katana sword-based combat sections) also soon becomes a repetitive chore whether you play with Move controls or not, and is much less fun than games such as Prince of Persia or Ninja Gaiden, and this is less forgivable. What tries to be a quirky and humorous take on an entire gamut of gaming genres is in fact a quick port of a rather tatty and underdeveloped Wii game, and for anyone other than cult-loving Suda-51 fans or lovers of everything Japanese, that just won’t do. No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise does however possess an endearing style and that “je ne sais quoi” that I can’t quite put my finger on. I couldn’t help liking it, despite its many technical frailties, puerile humour and eccentric quality, and I suspect you’ll feel the same way. Heroes Paradise has style, some substance but is SO badly implemented.
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