No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle

I changed the banner temporarly for the holidays (using my mediocre Photoshop skills). Check out the Santa hat on Super Mario Galaxy Mario and Rudolph's nose on Baby Mario. :D -Kyle

I loved the original No More Heroes. I loved the awesome style, crazy characters, and oh-so-fun combat. When I heard Suda51 had started to work on a sequel: No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle, of course I was excited. Even so, the first game had it's fair share of problems. NMH:DS is scheduled for a 2010 release, giving it plenty of time to iron out the flaws of the first. Read on to find how I think the sequel should be.

Better open world/More confined hub world
One of the major disappointments of the original No More Heroes was the lacking open world. It was basically a hub for missions. There wasn't really anything to do other than ride your bike to the next objective. The people and cars were pretty lifeless. Nothing like a GTA or Saint's Row.

So in the second, I hope Suda and his team work to make the open world a lot better. The other option would be to confine it a bit more too. Make it more of an overworld map that you use the IR pointer to select buildings/missions. Both ideas would work, but since Suda himself said they were working to make the open world a lot better, it'll probably the former.

Limited MotionPlus
When I heard that Suda hadn't even looked into Wii MotionPlus, but he would, I hoped for the better. What better? That if he used it, it'd be sparingly.

The original had very awesome fighting. Generally, you'd swing your beam katana (aka lightsaber) with the A button. The general position of the Wii remote would determine if the attack was high or low. Once you got the enemy down to it's final bit of health, the screen would go gray, everything would go super slow-mo, and an giant pixelated arrow would appear on the screen, prompting you to swing the remote in the indicated direction, finishing the foe off. It was highly stylized and highly badass.

So what I'm getting at here is I really don't want the second game to use Wii MotionPlus to mimic a real sword. Sure it'd be cool if you had new finishers with forward and backward directions, but no Red Steel-like movements, please!

Polish, polish, polish (with extra polish)
The original had a very awesome cel-shaded style. It may have looked cool, but the game wasn't very polished. The game was ridden with graphical flaws. For example, driving in the open world you'd notice horrible draw distances, with palm trees appears only twenty or so feet away from you (in the game). Since the game's not due until 2010, I'm pretty confident Suda51 and his team will bring out the game with it's presentation very polished.

Don't know what game(s) I'm talking about? Check out No More Heroes (the original for only twenty bucks at Amazon) or the trailer of the sequel.

Comments or questions? Drop an email to kylehogg@gmail.com or leave a comment below...