No More Heroes 2: Positives
The best thing I can really think to say about No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle is that it doesn’t exactly suck. It’s just not very fun. You can play it for an hour or two and feel satisfied. I don’t mean in the sense that you’ll enjoy it in several hour or two long sessions until completion, either. I mean once you’re done with that first play of the game you’re pretty much done.
There are a few things it certainly does well. The voice acting is surprisingly capable for an over-the-top game making fun of anime and geek culture in general. Of course, something I forgot to mention last time is that despite the good voice acting you’ll tire of hearing the same dialogue over and over. From Travis shouting “what the fuck?!†after being struck to the villains crying “you fucker!†when getting split in half. In fact, I’m pretty sure the enemies have the exact same dialogue as the first game. They didn’t even bother to add anything. They just left what was there before and called it a day.
This is a bad thing, and technically discussing bad things today is off-topic. So I shall instead move on to good things.
If you remember from the previous game Travis owned a kitten named Jeanne. Well, in Desperate Struggle Jeanne has transformed into a fuzzy ball of four-legged lard. She just lies there absorbing weight from her surroundings, or so it seems. Now, you don’t have to help her lose weight, but after every mission you have the option of going through four exercises and then feeding her. I guess feeding her is supposed to make her gain weight on occasion, but it never really does. The activities are nothing more than button-pressing events of an easy nature and joystick waggling, but they are fun for the quick five minute distraction that they are. Help Jeanne lose weight unlocks a really awesome and potentially over-powered attack, so five minutes after each mission is a small price to pay for an excellent move.
In fact, that’s pretty much perfect game design right there. Entice people to do a simple side gimmick that’s fun enough but isn’t too time consuming, and then grant an excellent reward for the time invested. It’s the antithesis of the retro side jobs, which is also why it works.
It is the only change in the game that does, unfortunately.
There are a few moments in the game that I was surprised to be enjoying myself. The fourth ranking assassin was actually a really enjoyable boss fight, for example. Her attacks were certainly powerful, but they were also obvious enough that you could easily dodge them once you figured the pattern out. To some of you the idea of being able to defeat a boss without taking any damage may sound too easy. To you I give the middle finger. A video game should be making me feel good about myself, not terrible. While I may not be getting hit, I still need to play intelligently to avoid all that damage. Pace your attacks so you only swing a few times, only attacking after she’s left herself open and vulnerable. If you just go all out then you will get your ass handed to you.
It’s like playing a Mega Man game. Before you’ve figured out the attack patterns the Robot Master is going to shove his gun up your Mega Colon and fill it with painful exuberance. Once you’ve figured out the weakness and patterns, however, the Robot Masters can take as little as ten or fifteen seconds to defeat without a single wound to show for it.
This isn’t bad game design, this is allowing players to be better than the game by outsmarting it. The reward is taking no damage. A video game shouldn’t do its best to pummel its player into submission providing them few possibilities of getting out, nor should those chances be absolutely slim (the Mech Fight boss that looks like a fighting game is guilty of this hardcore). A game should be completable. You can make it more difficult by boosting damage ratings rather than artificially inflating it by simply making the enemy cheap.
There are three levels where the game allows you to take control of characters aside from Travis Touchdown. While the game doesn’t change drastically, each character is given their own unique abilities that varies it up. This is sort of nice, but it’s also too small of an effort to make a difference in the end.
Finally, while there are only four different beam sabers, they each seem to have their own use. The default saber really isn’t all that good or useful for the most part, but the remaining three each have their own positive and negative attributes. In particular is the Peony saber, the $200,000 one that is a pain to get. While it is slow and leaves Travis open, its strikes are powerful. I mean powerful. Any other weapon in the game will have you chopping at the bosses forever, but the Peony can easily make short work of them if you use it right. Wait for your enemy to leave themselves open, then strike once or twice before dodging away. It may sound tedious, but it is actually the fastest way to take bosses down in the entire game. In fact, it’s almost a requirement if you want to be able to defeat the final boss.
Who sucks, by the way.
Well, that’s about all the good stuff I can say about No More Heroes 2. One boss stood out as being good fun (with excellent music, by the way), helping the cat lose weight was enjoyable and rewarding, one of the lightsabers was awesome once you sunk the time and money into purchasing it and there were a couple of bonus characters to play as.
Honestly, those aren’t incentives to play the game. Forget it. It’s not even close to being worth your time. If you are really aching for a new game on your Wii, you can grab something like Silent Hill: Shattered Memories, Battalion Wars 2, Metroid Prime Trilogy, New Super Mario Bros. Wii or even MadWorld. They’re all better than Desperate Struggle and more worth the time to boot.
