Review: No More Heroes 1 & 2 (Nintendo Switch)

Looking past the aesthetics, the best way to describe what No More Heroes and its sequel are is Quintin Tarantino but interactive. Playing as Travis Touchdown, you mash your way through hordes of enemies (lots of blood and all) on your way to a boss battle. Then you kill that boss, bloodily, and move on to the next job. Suda has always enjoyed the aesthetics of excess, and in addition to the blood, Travis can pull off ridiculous wrestling moves, and the action is often hard to keep up with because it’s filled with all kinds of little quick-time events, slot machine reels that launch players into specials, and strange little mini-games that seem to be there just to throw the action rhythm into a loop and unbalance players. There are differences between the two. For example, the original No More Heroes has an arbitrary, and incredibly boring open world that is almost certainly there as a joke on open worlds, but Suda seemed to realise that boring people as a joke is still boring them, so removed that for the sequel. However, despite those differences, the quality of the action across both is equivalent, and when No More Heroes gets going, it pulls you through its gauntlets as though they are one wild ride. 

The bosses are the best part of these games though, by far. Goichi Suda has always been a fan of vivid, multi-stage boss battles, and No More Heroes and its sequel really established the standard for this. Each boss will test everything you know about the game, from specific combinations to timing, to your ability to adapt on the fly and learning enemy patterns. They can be unforgiving, and Goichi Suda has always enjoyed handing players a Game Over if they can’t figure the “trick” to a boss out, but the variations and rhythms of these battles are stand out, even today. No More Heroes first landed in 2007 – three years before FromSoftware launched its first Souls game (Demon’s Souls), and while the Soulslikes have since set the standard for boss battles in video games, the higher energy and twitch-testing challenge of No More Heroes is still very welcome here. 

The game’s attitude goes with its gameplay energy perfectly. No More Heroes loves crass humour – toilets are save points and the games have a grindhouse attitude towards sex and character motivations (i.e. it’s pretty exploitatative). Travis wields a battery-powered lightsaber-like weapon, and if you play with motion controls you recharges the battery by shaking in in a manner that Travis makes pretty clear on-screen (i.e. up and down like men do with a certain other stick). Suda also loves to pepper his games with popular culture references and homages to his two great loves – retro games and wrestling – and it’s all so manic it ends up working despite being a mess of juxtapositions at times. It should say a lot that Suda’s later work – Lollipop Chainsaw and Killer is Dead – comes across as relatively refined and “stable” in comparison to No More Heroes and its sequel. 

These two games are straight ports that have been thrown on the Switch to introduce newer players to the No More Heroes series, but they are worth revisiting because it’s truly impressive how little they seem to age. Do we have faster-paced and more complex brawlers now thanks to the likes of Devil May Cry V? Sure. However No More Heroes is its own beast because it blends its punkish attitude and humour in with a surrealistic bent and some of the most memorable boss battles you’ll ever play in video games. For these reasons, Suda’s classics are every bit as entertaining and brash as ever, and it’s great that they continue to be available to players on current consoles.

– Matt S. 
Editor-in-Chief
Find me on Twitter: @mattsainsb

The critic was provided a copy of the game for review.