Cruise Elroy

I started No More Heroes over the weekend. There’s not much to add to the excellent critiques from Leigh Alexander, Michael Abbott, and Steve Gaynor — among others — but I thought I’d offer up my first impressions anyway.

In a word, it’s hilarious. The essays I linked above all talked about how No More Heroes is a gamer’s game, chock full of inside jokes and self-parody, and they’re spot on. I especially love how it simultaneously references new and old video games: the pixelated graphical interface superimposed on the Grand Theft Auto-like city, the 8-bit sound effects with the modern J-Pop soundtrack, the 3D cel-shaded boss fights giving way to a 1980s arcade-style high score board. It grabs disparate elements and recombines them in a postmodern mash-up, sending it all up but also paying tribute in a great gaming roast. It’s like a gruesome, black-humored EarthBound, and I love it.

You play the ludicrously named Travis Touchdown, who hails from the equally ludicrously named Santa Destroy. Travis is a shiftless game- and porn-addicted otaku who decides to become the best professional assassin in the world on the offhand suggestion of a girl he doesn’t know. And that’s probably the least absurd part of the game.

Travis fights with a “beam sword,” a battery-powered weapon that seems to be a cross between a lightsaber and a fluorescent light bulb, but it’s clear from the beginning that there will be no sterilized Star Wars swordfighting. In the intro cinematic, Travis crashes through the gate of a mansion on his giant motorbike, soars through the air, and messily decapitates the guards while yelling “Fuckhead!” over a screaming distorted guitar riff. The game never looks back from there.

Designer Goichi “Suda51″ Suda had the stated intention of making No More Heroes more violent than the grisly Manhunt 2, but the fetishization of violence here is so cartoonish and over the top that it crosses over into comedy. The amount of blood that spouts from fallen enemies makes Mortal Kombat‘s fatalities look like paper cuts. Amusingly, the enemies also spew gold coins from their wounds, which pour right into Travis’ pockets in a parodic simplification of the grinding process.

Even more telling is the game’s conflation of violence with sex. There’s Silvia Christel, the femme fatale who gets Travis into the assassination game in the first place, hypersexualized as per the long tradition of female game characters.

But then there’s Travis’ weapon.

The jaded English major in me rolls his eyes whenever some random cylindrical object is designated “phallic,” but even I have to concede this one: When the beam sword runs out of energy, the player mimics masturbation with the Wii remote to recharge it, and Travis responds by sticking the beam sword between his legs and literally jerking it up and down. No More Heroes bluntly reminds us that for all the artistic pretensions of video games, present company included, in the end we’re just fucking around.

So far I’ve had a lot of fun with No More Heroes, although I worry that a lot of my enjoyment doesn’t stem directly from the gameplay. Hopefully its thematic strength is enough to overcome the admittedly repetitive mechanics and niggling problems so I can see it through to the end.