You can count on one hand the number of “M”-rated games on Nintendo’s fam-centric Wii, and it’ll take you only slightly more fingers to count the number of quality third-party software titles, too.
Add one to both categories—a bloody, hilarious and utterly immature thrill ride with more pop-culture and videogame history references than an episode of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer.” No More Heroes is the videogame equivalent of a Quentin Tarantino movie, and I mean that in the best possible sense.
 Now that’s a knife: Cyber butcher Travis Touchdown goes all Kill Bill on some bad guys in No More Heroes. |
Our protagonist is the brilliantly named Travis Touchdown, an anime-, porn- and wrestling-obsessed would-be assassin. To fend off boredom and do the dirty with the French blonde he met in a bar the night before, Travis finds himself going all Luke Skywalker with his lightsaber-like beam katana, battling his way up the weirdest assassin leaderboard ever to grace a videogame. The rogue’s gallery features a singing, gun-slinging doctor, a woman who fires bombs from a prosthetic leg, and a Houdini-like magician, just to name three. All of ’em are distinct, fascinating characters, brought to bizarre life through a funky animation style and first-rate voice-acting.
Oddly enough, Heroes’ most entertaining parts are actually its most repetitive—clicking and slashing the Wii remote and nunchuk to eviscerate the endless stream of grunts, all of whom erupt in firework-like fountains of blood and gold coins after you deliver the coup de grace. After each kill, a set of three slots spin at the bottom of the screen; if they match up, Travis can unleash brutal moves with ridiculous, dessert-based names. It’s like a trip to Assassin Vegas with a pit stop at a blood-drenched Dairy Queen.
Even the side missions are a trip down the freakshow highway. To earn the extra scratch needed to enter ranking matches, you’ll find yourself mowing lawns, lugging coconuts and stabbing the beach with your katana to score buried treasure. At several points, you’ll have to use the sword as a baseball bat, smacking fastballs back at enemies to mow them all down. Oh, and you save the game by camping Travis on a toilet. Need we say more?
Outside of the 20 or so specific locations that are key to the story, Santa Destroy—the city Travis and the rest of this assassin tango calls home—isn’t exactly what you’d call a vibrant metropolis. There are the cursory cars and pedestrians, but the Wii doesn’t sport the graphical firepower to make a city come alive the way the Xbox 360 and PS3 can. Basically, you can consider the time you’ll spend trolling from Point A to Point B on your motorcycle as a brief purgatory between missions. For a hell this hilarious and delicious, it’s utterly worth it.