No More Heroes 2 fixes nothing that it needed to and changes what didn’t need much change to begin with. I started to wonder if my enjoyment of the first game was merely due to the spectacle of being so different, particularly on the Nintendo Wii system, but my ultimate conclusion is that Desperate Struggle is worse than its predecessor.

I’m not too certain who I should blame for the problems, though. Should I blame Suda 51 and Grasshopper Manufacture since they were the developers, or should I blame all the idiots that wanted it to be Grand Theft Auto as soon as they heard they could drive around a city?

I shit you not, people complained about traveling around the city because it “wasn’t enough like Grand Theft Auto”. Then again, maybe I should blame some journalist for saying you can wander around Santa Destroy “like in Grand Theft Auto”. Either way, gamers got some stupid expectations and weren’t happy. This is to be expected, however. See, gamers may want you to do something different, but all that means is to take all of the top ten selling games and make a slight modification to them.

In other words, if you are going to have a city to drive around in, they want to be able to do everything that you can in Grand Theft Auto.

This is stupid. Maybe, as punishment for our foolish indiscretions, Suda 51 took the city out so we could suffer.

No, that cannot be true. See, another problem gamers had was it took too long to cut through the story. The game forced you to earn a certain amount of money to move onto the next mission, and gamers hated this. How dare the developers try and spice up the experience! Shame on them!

Well instead of just taking the pay requirement out, the whole city was removed. Now if you want to just go from plot point to plot point it is as easy as leaving the Motel and hitting up “Ranking Battle”. At first this seems like a good thing. You no longer have to go through side jobs, especially repeating lesser rewarding ones over and over since the higher earning tasks are frustrating and near impossible.

Unless you are playing on easy difficulty this is actually a bad move. It is in this form that you begin to see how shallow and repetitious the combat is. In some ways it feels like they actually removed some good ideas from the first game, but honestly it’s been so long I can’t even remember if I truly liked No More Heroes that much at all. Playing just one level after the next begins to drag, especially once you near the end and the levels are so long and so full of enemies.

I can only imagine how painful it would have been had I not bought the two optional sabers and maxed out my fitness.

Yes, you read that right. Two optional sabers. I’ll get to that later.

If you want the game to be challenging and yet not be madly tedious or mind-splittingly challenging, you will still have to do the side jobs in order to afford keeping your character fit at the gym. Making the side jobs simple 8-bit games sounds like a clever and even awesome idea at first. However, if you want to do them just for quick then you’ll find you are getting very little cash overall. You’ll still be poor and will need to do a lot of jobs. So you may as well stick with them for all four stages per job, only the difficulty starts to reach retro styles of stupid-hard. The time invested doesn’t justify the monetary gain.

This same level of idiotic challenge applies to the retro-style games for working out. While stamina isn’t so bad even on the harder levels of challenge, the strength one becomes a huge money sink. It just devours your cash like a ravenous beast until it deems you worthy of boosting your attack power.

This confuses me the most since the work-out mini-games in the first game were completely fine as-is. They weren’t extremely challenging and allowed you to easy keep up with the pace of the game’s difficulty curve. Yet in this one it sometimes feels more worth the time to just skip it altogether. That is, until it starts taking an agonizingly long time to whittle down a regular foe’s health, let alone one of the bosses.

So in trying to speed up the gameplay they instead forced you into doing what amounts to being even more annoying side jobs. They have effectively made the game worse than the original.

As for those two optional sabers, those are a very interesting detail. See, considering how many additional weapons and modifications you could get from Naomi’s Lab in the first game, there is an assumption that you will have plenty of extra weapons to buy in Desperate Struggle. So when you see the suddenly huge price tag on the second saber you think to yourself “crap, now I have to grind in order to afford it”. You’ll expect every other saber after to require just as much work.

Only there are no other sabers after. That’s it. The price tag is only so high as to prevent you from buying it too early, or so I can imagine. Which makes sense considering how powerful it is, but at the same time it is a dreadfully slow-moving weapon. Typically I do not like such weapons in a game, but on the whole this really was the saber of choice for tackling the other assassins.

By modifying the side-jobs and navigation of Santa Destroy so much they have, in effect, wrecked the entire balance of the game. All because of how much gamers complained. Then again, maybe it would have been better for Grasshopper to have made the actual gameplay a little more varied. As it is, the other great flaw is how little has change from the first. The gameplay is more of the same, and they force so much of it on you that it only becomes all the more tired and tedious.

Perhaps the worst part about the gameplay is how unresponsive it is. Maybe this was a throwback to the games of yore, where programming was terrible and characters didn’t always listen when you told them to jump over the cliff. It’s as if all 8-bit game characters were clinically depressed and suicidal. Sometimes Travis Touchdown has that same level of responsive behavior. You think you press the dodge button just in time, but instead Travis stands there watching a giant blade coming for his torso.

If you want to survive in No More Heroes 2, the best thing to do is not mash the attack button. In most other slashing games I’ve played, no matter how much you jam the attack button it will register an attempt to dodge or parry as soon as it is pressed. Not so with Desperate Struggle! You must be careful or else you will try and dodge too late.

Whether this is user error or design flaw is up to debate, I imagine. After all, a player “that’s got skillz yo” surely wouldn’t be mashing a button. Of course, it’s not like there are any real combos. Sure with certain weapons you can extend your combo by pointing the Wii remote up and down at key intervals, but you are always mashing the A button over and over with the occasional press of the B button to maybe break the enemy’s defenses (though this isn’t at all required since merely chopping at the enemy enough will break it. Once again I’m left to wonder if they dumbed it down from the first game or not).

I think the worst atrocity this game commits, however, is the story. From the get-go the original No More Heroes established itself as being a comedy. It was over-the-top and our Otaku hero makes a deal that if he becomes number one assassin a hot blonde will procreate with him. Nothing in the game after that can be taken seriously, even though there are some moments that seem to suggest a more serious message underneath.

With Desperate Struggle I’m not sure what the Hell they were doing. The jokes are old by now, but from the beginning they are starting off pretty seriously. The story seems to try and be more artful than before though it continues to be over the top. It’s no longer really all that funny (unless Drawn Together is your idea of good comedy, in which case STRANGLE YOURSELF).

I remember being a big fan of the original No More Heroes. I brought it to my school’s gaming club because I wanted to show it to others and let them see how funny it was. The premise alone is so ridiculous it is the perfect kind of absurd geek humor. Yet the second title felt more like a chore to play through. I wasn’t pleased with it and I was having less fun than I ought to have been.

Was this really the sequel to what many considered the first true “hardcore” Wii game? Well, that would make sense. The masses and their delusions tend to result in some very shallow and trite entertainment. That No More Heroes would join those ranks is of no doubt to me.

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