A while back, a little game called No More Heroes was released for the Wii. It was a hardcore game in a time when the Wii had even fewer hardcore offerings than it does now, back when everyone was giving Mario blowjobs for his recent space adventure. It was made by Suda 51, the brilliant but eccentric mind behind killer seven, another cult-classic for the Gamecube. It featured Travis Touchdown, an obsessive otaku who managed to buy a beam sword off Ebay. One day he witnesses an assassination by accident, gets targeted by the assassin who committed said assassination … by accident, and kills said assassin which ends up by default ranking him as the 10th best assassin in the world and forces him to kill every other assassin to hit number one, finally get some peace and quiet, and hopefully get laid along the way, all by accident. It was a mediocre game at best that was known for its humorous dialogue and excessive breaking of the fourth wall, but it suffered from lots of problems including repetitive gameplay, and overworld which was just a waste of time, and a general lack of polish.

Well several years have passed and Travis Touchdown has come back from a mysterious disappearance for No More Heroes 2. That disappearance is not explained as the characters themselves state that it would be boring for people who haven’t played the first game. Travis once again accidentally kills an assassin although this time he is ranked 51st. This once again sends Travis off in a race to the top, partially because he still wants to get laid, and partially because the number one assassin had the clerk in the local video store killed who is the closest thing Travis has to a friend, besides his fat cat Jeane, and now Travis has no way to rent Wrestling videos, anime, and porn.

No More Heroes 2 has fixed every single problem the first No More Heroes had. Let’s compare. In the first No More Heroes, you had to slowly build up funds to enter in every ranked assassin battle. This involved driving around the overworld slowly on your bike, doing boring mini-game type odd jobs before taking on uninteresting “kill everyone” missions to get enough money to eventually enter the next ranked battle, and do it all over again. It was repetitive as all hell, and was one of the biggest problems that the first game had.

No More Heroes 2 completely does away with the overworld, so no more boring 5 minute long bike rides just so you can get to where you want to go. Instead, the game is handled via a fast travel map right from the get go. With a simple menu selection, Travis will instantly travel to any odd job location, store, gym, or mission site. This immediately tones down the monotony of the game and gives it a sense of pacing that the first game simply didn’t have.

Ranking battles are now free to enter, so no more wasting your time with menial tasks just so you can move the game forward. If you want, you can easily blaze through every mission that the game has to offer without ever stopping to upgrade your beam katana or buy a new t-shirt. If you are the kind of person that wants to upgrade his stats, weapons, and cool look, then you’ll want to hit up the odd-jobs again, but this time they are vastly improved. Instead of being uninteresting mini-games with horrible controls that seem to serve no purpose than to waste your time, the odd-jobs are now retro style NES games complete with sprite graphics, bit music, and horrible grainy voice chip technology. It’s great!

Each odd-job has several different levels to conquer and totally different gameplay mechanics. There is an action game where you suck bugs through a vacuum, a racing game that has you delivering pizzas, a pipe dream-esque sewer construction game, and much much more. Some of the better ones feel as if they could have been their own downloadable Wiiware titles. They are just that fun. You earn cash fast, and you never feel like you are needlessly grinding. You can easily get all the money you need to get new weapons and buff your stats with just a few short mini-games, and if you want to trick out Travis in your own personal clothing style, it will only take a few more. You earn plenty of cash from the main missions, so these mini-games are basically there as something that is totally optional for completionists and other obsessive compulsive types, or people who just dig the retro style.

There are plenty of other distractions too! Travis’s apartment has copies of a magical girl anime you can watch, and even a Japanese shoot-em-up game based on that anime that looks and plays like something you might have gotten on the Dreamcast back in the day. Your cat, Jeane, has gotten kind of fat, and you can play with her to get her skinny again, which is just the cutest and most adorable thing I have ever seen. Some of the main gameplay also serves as a distraction as well. The third assassin you kill in the game is a football player who merges with his cheerleader squad to become a giant robot, and Travis, just so happens to also be able to pull a giant robot out of his ass. Cue the awesome giant robot battle. It’s just so cool.

For those of you looking to stay on track and experience the main storyline, the basic gameplay is more of the same. Travis wanders through stages, killing everyone and everything in his path, before taking out the big baddy assassin at the end. The stages are shorter this time around, but are more interactive. One early stage has you taking cover from a helicopter that is firing at you from outside a hotel window. Another has you avoiding searchlights before you start your killing spree. You can find new magazines, which allow you to learn new wrestling moves, from random treasure chests in stages as well as knickknacks and decorations for your Motel room as well, but both of these are not necessary for game completion, and you won’t feel bad if you miss them.

Travis controls just how he always did. The A button slashes, the B button punches and kicks, and a flick of the Wiimote triggers finishing moves that chop off foes’ body parts. Each finishing move spins the a slot machine, just like in the first game, and if the slots match up Travis gets to do some sort of super move ranging from a large AOE wave of destruction, to massively increasing his speed and granting him one hit kills, to turning him into a tiger, pretty much randomly. I’m not kidding. If Travis is violent enough to cause the little sprite tiger on your HUD to start breathing fire (once again, not kidding) he can go into a bullet time mode where he moves extra fast and all the enemies slow down. Z button blocks and locks on, raising or lowering the Wiimote changes Travis’s stance, and the C button re-centers the camera (which is good because you don’t have any sort of manual camera control). It’s fun and bloody and just as hack and slash as the first one was.

The concept of fighting 51 assassins (51 Assasins … Suda 51 … hey I get it!) is actually more of an illusion than anything else. In reality, you will be fighting about 15 assassins. The game makes sure to give you lame excuses for why you are climbing the ranks so quickly, but it doesn’t really matter. For example, the football player who kill as the third battle in the game was ranked 25th. It just so happened that his cheerleader squad who he merged with to become a giant robot was ranked 49th-26th. Since you killed them all at once, that is one small step for Travis Touchdown, one giant leap up the assassin rankings. Just in case you think this might get boring or monotonous, some of the missions actually involve controlling Travis’s old friends Shinobu or Henry who have different fighting styles, but just as much awesome witty dialogue.

No More Heroes will never be as big as Mario, or Zelda, or Metroid, or any of the other big names on the Wii, but that doesn’t mean it is a bad game. It is a cult classic game that is designed for the self-aware otaku. You have to be able to laugh at yourself to be able to appreciate No More Heroes, so if the wonky plot or strange Suda 51 style of No More heroes turned you off from the first one, it will probably turn you off to No More Heroes 2 as well. However, if the only thing that turned you off from No More Heroes was its repetitive gameplay and lack of polish, then pick up No More Heroes 2 because the game has been fixed everywhere it counts and then some. Early in the game, Travis utters the line “Everyone deals with grief differently. Some people fuck at weddings. I cut off heads.” That … pretty much describes No More Heroes 2 in a nutshell.

Oh and did I mention that you get to see boobs? Yeah, you get to see boobs.

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