Cruise Elroy

I’m done with No More Heroes now, and since I wrote my last post just a third of the way into the game I thought I’d put it to bed with some final thoughts.

Links

As it turns out, No More Heroes has inspired a ton of critical discourse, so rather than rehashing what everyone has already said I’ll just link them up here. I’ve mentioned a few of these already, but it’ll be useful to collect all of them one place:

• “No More Heroes is not punk” by Schlaghund (if you only read one of these links, make it this one)
• “No More Complaints” by Leigh Alexander
• “Do you feel lucky, punk?” by Michael Abbott
• “Grasshopper” by Steve Gaynor
• “It’s just lines and colors” by Michael Clarkson
• “What ‘No More Heroes’ Really Means” by “Cowzilla3″
• “No more No More Heroes embargo” by Mitch Krpata
• Zero Punctuation video review by Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw

Warning: choking hazard

One of the issues that comes up in several of those essays is the game’s low-fidelity aesthetic, especially the setting. Santa Destroy evokes the open-world environments of Grand Theft Auto but lacks any of the, well, fun. The city is drab and unremarkable, the people are wholly non-interactive, and the landmarks are few and far between. I actually spent the entire game using the mini-map to get around since there was nothing interesting or important to look at and never developed a mental map of the place. And why would I? There’s no there there.

With a game like No More Heroes, the obvious question is whether this is a flaw or an intentional part of the design. Here’s a snip from Yahtzee’s review:

The awkward thing about No More Heroes, or at least about reviewing it, is that like killer7 it’s intended to be satirical, and when there are problems with the gameplay I’m worried that it was intended to be that way as a satire of… I dunno, pretentious video games — and if I were to call it out on that, then I’d lose my credibility with the cool alternative crowd. But then I remember that any game designer who sacrifices fun to make an artistic statement is obviously stuck so far up his own ass that he’s in danger of choking on his own head.

I’ve been wrestling with that last claim ever since I watched Yahtzee’s video. Do video games need to be fun?

Practically speaking they probably do, if they want to sell copies. But what about something like Jason Rohrer’s Passage, an indie game which made waves last December for its emphasis on metaphor over gameplay? Isn’t the medium big enough to include fun but thematically vapid games like Unreal Tournament and games with higher aspirations like No More Heroes? (Hint: yes.)

In any case, here’s what Cowzilla3 had to say about Santa Destroy:

The entire world is based around what Travis has interest in, there is literally nothing else. What is Travis interested in? What most young male gamers are: obsessively collecting objects (in this case clothes and models), killing bad guys, movies, the gym, sports and gorgeous women. If it doesn’t have to do with these things then it isn’t important to Travis and it doesn’t deserve anything more then an ugly gray building. Santa Destroy is a literal recreation of the self-centered world of a 20-something male and a comment on how this gaming generation views what is important in life.

I’d buy that analysis. There’s an argument to be made here about whether authorial intent is relevant — if Santa Destroy is actually empty because Suda51 didn’t have the budget to fill it in, is Cowzilla3′s analysis still meaningful? — but we’ll save that for another day.

The dark side

No, this isn’t about those ridiculous dessert-themed special moves. I think there are more serious themes at play here than winking allusions and gleeful self-referentiality.

In my last post on No More Heroes I mentioned the game’s conflation of sex and violence vis-a-vis Travis’s beam sword. I thought it was a fairly light-hearted joke in the game — ha ha, you have to pretend to masturbate with the controller. Then Michael Clarkson had this to say in the comments:

I found it interesting that most of the sexual content has to do with sexual humiliation. I mean, without spoiling too much, Travis is deceived, used, and humiliated in nearly all his relationships with women, and then there’s the dialogue every time he goes to “train” with his “master”. Not to mention the regular calls he gets from the Beef Head video girl, which also have overtones of humiliation to them. Travis’s success with women usually involves killing them. Speaking of which, do you think the fight with Bad Girl might symbolize a confrontation with his sexual haplessness?

It’s a sobering analysis, and I was taken aback that anyone read the game on such a serious level. But when I used Michael’s comment as a jumping-off point to probe a bit deeper, I decided that the sex-violence conflation is perhaps less light-hearted than I thought. This was my eventual response:

Bad Girl is the most overtly sexual of Travis’s female targets — she exudes a mix of submissive innocence (her coy nickname, her Lolita-esque little girl outfit, her crying) and violent dominance (her baseball bat, her endless conveyor belt of cloned S&M-bound men). If we set aside the old woman Speed Buster, she’s also the only female target who Travis enjoys killing.

Significantly, the final blow isn’t just a straight-up decapitation. Travis impales her with his beam sword — which, I remind you, has been infused with phallic symbolism throughout the game — as she unsuccessfully tries to beat him away with her bat. “Naughty girls need spankings,” he mutters. After bleeding to death, Bad Girl goes limp lying on top of him with her legs spread, the sword still sticking through her body.

Now, what does that imagery remind you of?

No More Heroes is not a game about rape, but when we consider its conflation of violence and sex there’s an unmistakable edge to the sexual humiliation theme. In the end, Travis’s “revenge” goes beyond the hackneyed fights of destiny with Jeane and Henry. He’s trying to be something more than the loser otaku everyone takes him for and get back at them in the process.

Is it a stretch? Sure. Does it jibe with the vague uneasiness I felt after the Bad Girl fight? Absolutely.

For a game that ostensibly sacrifices fun for the sake of artistic merit, No More Heroes sure has a lot of both.