While not perfect, No More Heroes is one badass game.
A year and some change later, Project Heroes became No More Heroes and Travis Touchdown didn't seem that bad of a protagonist. This is because, Suda 51 (director) made Travis Touchdown probably the most identifiable character to gamers, EVER. Travis Touchdown is an Otaku, a BIG Otaku. In case you don't know what an Otaku is, it's a person who's social life consists of them sitting around watching anime, reading manga, and being a general nerd. On top of that, Travis' interests include watching old wrestling videos, porn, and online auctions. His love for online auctions is what originally drives the game.
Travis wins a beam katana online, how such weapons are able to be sold online, is beyond me. So what do you do when you get a beam katana? Kill people thats what. Why kill people? Well... Travis needs money for some video games. Yeah, he takes his games seriously.
As the story goes, after killing the first guy, (Helter Skelter aka the original trailer) Travis is contacted by the sexy french (maybe russian?) Sylvia Christel who tells him he's become the number 11th ranked assassin, and if he continues to kill the higher ranked assassins he'll be number 1. After asking Sylvia if she'll have sex with him if he continues killing people, he decides to start killing people nevertheless and so the game starts.
The majority of the game is kill random guys, open door, kill, door, assassin you need to kill. The controls aren't what most think, instead of swinging the wiimote to swing your sword, you use the A button for sword and B for other attacks. The wiimote and nunchuck are used for finishing moves where you'll be shown an arrow on screen and then have to move the wiimote/nunchuck in that direction to either cut some heads off, cut people in half, or do a german suplex (or other wrestling moves.)
When you're cursing around Santa Destroy, you'll need to earn some money in order to participate in the main assassinations, this is where things get weird. You'll do odd jobs, and I mean odd. Everything from collecting coconuts to mowing the lawn. Other ways to spend your cash includes new duds for Travis to wear including new jackets, otaku styled shirts, and other pieces of clothing. If you don't want to do work, you can either go to the gym work out, or chill in your motel room, watch videos, and play with your cat.
The graphics style is very stylized. I'll take stylized graphics above pixel pushers and HDR lighting, and No More Heroes has one of the best styled games on the Wii. Along with the sharp cell shaded graphics, the HUD is done in a very retro 8 Bit style which really does bring a sense of nostalgia to the game.
All weirdness aside, the game has a pretty deep mature story. Some of the assassins have certain ties to Travis which go into parts of his past revealing some pretty messed up things. It really does drive the game forward when you figure all these things out.
No More Heroes is just a fun game to play. Its a great testament to what Third Party Wii games could be. The game has foul language, tons of blood, and tons of violence. A Wii game doesn't have to be a mini game frenzy to be good, and No More Heroes proves that time and time again. If you wanted a mature action game for the Wii, here you go. BUY NO MORE HEROES.
PS. forgot to mention, one of the game's mechanics is shamelessly based on male self stimulation, pure gold.