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Analysis: The Design And Spiritual Evolution Of No More Heroes 2
by Leigh Alexander [PC, Console/PC, Columns, Exclusive]
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February 8, 2010
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[Is a better-designed game really "better" -- and what does that really mean? Gamasutra's Leigh Alexander takes a look at how Grasshopper Manufacture's No More Heroes 2 for Wii evolves on its predecessor.]
In the original No More Heroes, Suda51 had a brilliant concept which critics largely agreed stumbled slightly on the execution -- the main criticism being that the open world lacked depth. With very little to do in the city of Santa Destroy, most seemed to feel the sequences in between missions were sprawling empty space, listless filler that could have just as easily been bypassed.
In No More Heroes 2, that bypass wish is fulfilled; gone is the player's ability to take Travis' motorcycle to the streets, and in its place is a streamlined, 8 bit-inspired (naturally) navigation menu.
The game is still challenging enough that it requires a little bit of grinding -- as with the original No More Heroes, this takes the place of menial odd jobs that luckless otaku Travis can do to earn cash for weapons upgrades, or visits to the gym by which he can become stronger, and these are the spots that players can visit from Santa Destroy's new interface.
Here is another major change: whereas in the first title, players did weird chores like garbage pickup and pest control with the game's standard controls, No More Heroes 2 replaces Travis' part-time work with mini arcade games, brilliantly designed to look, feel and sound like real old-school replicas.
It's easy to see that the result is quite streamlined and compact relative to the original game -- rather than take the long, tedious drive to a work site, using a map to navigate, players essentially pick a mini-game from the menu, give it their best shot, and earn upgrade cash from the result. Levels feel like tauter, more segregated experiences, with far less prelude to the title fights.
In that way, No More Heroes 2 should be praised for addressing player criticisms of its predecessor; Gamasutra's own Chris Remo recently analyzed Mass Effect 2's efforts to do the same. But in this case, amid the changes that birthed No More Heroes 2, has a subtle character loss taken place?
It's not just the Brainy Gamer's Michael Abbott who feels something subtle's missing in the leaner, meaner format for Travis' wild assassin's saga -- I've had a lot of conversations with gamer friends and fellow critics who agree.
But that stance certainly prompts a healthy scoop of mulling on what constitutes "character." Part of the spiritual shift in No More Heroes 2 is in the game's changed tone -- in the original, Travis' motive for ascending the ranks of the assassins' league was nothing more dire than to get laid. This time, he wants revenge for a murdered friend, lending the game a severity that makes it feel different -- less joyous, less silly.
Certainly, many players whose itches aren't quite scratched by No More Heroes 2 may be responding to that tonal shift: Sustaining the silliness is a reasonable wish. But perhaps there's another principle at work.
In the past, goes the theory, we've had two kinds of video games, if we're generalizing: gloss-polished, listless genre derivatives, and beloved, starkly flawed auteur projects. Has something of an expectation developed among game fans and critics that anything with grit and spirit must have something broken in it?
Perhaps there's a point where creators reach a crossroads: they can elect to follow their vision at the expense of intuitive game design -- as Metal Gear Solid's Hideo Kojima consciously did with the fourth installment's notorious yet self-aware protracted cutscenes -- or they can sacrifice an artistic goal in favor of wise best practices.
Has Suda51 done the latter in the polishing of No More Heroes 2? Save only for some balancing issues -- a difficulty ramp-up that could have been subtler, and a fairly broad schism between the game's two difficulty levels, for example -- and some gameplay sequences that many of my friends and colleagues have found needlessly repetitious, the sequel is watertight from a design perspective.
And from an artistic perspective, the same wild "punk's not dead" spirit seems to be on full, flagrantly absurd display -- within No More Heroes 2's first hour, for example, the player will have beheaded an overt send-up of Final Fantasy VII's Cloud Strife and engaged in a mecha battle in a football stadium against an athletic enemy who assembles his giant robot from a legion of identical blond cheerleaders.
But if many players feel like something's missing, it's worth wondering whether gamers have come to correlate tight design with a constraint of vision -- and whether there really is a trade-off.
And it's worth wondering whether Suda51 feels the same, and whether that emotion of constraint is expressed in the game. No More Heroes 2 opens with Travis having plummeted from the top spot in the assassin's league to the 51st -- a fall from grace that the game's exposition mocks the player for wondering about, so that initially it simply serves as a conceit to create new goals for the protagonist.
Lots has lapsed, in fact: Travis' cat Jeane has gotten fat, and weapons whiz Naomi also seems to have put on some weight -- to be specific, she appears to have had cosmetic surgery to boost her assets, and she'll even chide players for noticing.
So not only is No More Heroes 2's narrative darker, it's also peppered throughout with warnings of the kind of complacency that can come with success, along with the insincerity of artifice. Through and through, the game's a story of someone who's lost things amid the machinery of achievement, who's paid the price for skill. The first installment saw a hero-in-training flail his way to the top for his own dumb pleasure; the second gives us a hero cleaving coolly through obstacles with the kind of purpose that can only come from an external motive.
Maybe gamers do expect a somewhat broken game to be part of Suda51's "identity"; maybe they feel they've come to know the creator by being able to see his flaws. Perhaps instead they're reading those subtle messages of discontent from the narrative. Or maybe it's just that Travis acting on his friend Bishop's behalf isn't as convincing to some as Travis acting for the fun of it.
Two things are certain, though: First, No More Heroes 2 is absolutely and unequivocally a better-designed game than its predecessor. And second, better-designed doesn't mean "better" to everyone.
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A) A certain lack of pride and respect for the accomplishments of the original game and
B) work against the spirit that drove that game to it's ridiculous heights?
Playing No More Heroes back in 2008 was a revelatory experience for me, not simply because I enjoyed the game(I found it rapturous, from it's ludicrous set pieces, it's bizarre and totally out of place inside jokes, and the very precise way the game constitutes video game combat into the realm of male fantasy, sexuality, and masturbatory fulfillment). For me, the moments in which No More Heroes was "purposely" bad and "actually" bad seemed perfectly clear to me: the elements of combat that were imprecise, like the difficulty of pulling off some of the motion control moves, the difficulty of dodging, the inaccurate targeting....those seemed the results of inadequate programming and design (or, I suppose, hardware constriction). But the open world of Santa Destroy-- this lifeless, purposeless, barren open environment that was, at best, totally frustrating-- was, for me, absolutely riotous, and curiously thoughtful.
Playing No More Heroes in 2008, I should be specific, means playing the game just before the release of GTA4, and that means I was playing NMH right before other developers finally managed to "crack the code" on making open world games fun. This was the world before GTA4, and the world before the Open World explosion that defined late 2008 and most of 2009. Before the release of these games, however, how many non-Rockstar related Open World Games had been released? And how many of them were worth a damn? Not many! The market was FULL of developers trying desperately to rope in the GTA4 fanbase, but the great majority of those games were total garbage, like the miserable True Crime games, the grave-robbing Scarface game, the half-hearted Godfather game. I count the number of good non-Rockstar open world games on one hand, and those games that managed to ape the formula were either shamefully derivative (like the original Saint's Row) or broken in their own way (like Crackdown). Only the Grand Theft Auto games, and perhaps Rockstar's Bully, had managed to capture the fire that made open world games so lucrative and successful.
But here comes the original No More Heroes in 2008, and it poses a question: What on earth is THE POINT of an open world game? Why would you EVER want to revolve around a world where you make your own purposeless, meaningless fun? Nothing in an Open World Game of any impact or substance actually happens in the open world: if it's not related to the actual storyline or plot or ideas of the game, than the open world is MEANINGLESS.
And that's the world the original No More Heroes presents: an open world in which nothing involved in the storyline actually occurs. Nothing fun could occur in this environment, and, compared with the lavish set piece boss battles that constitute the actual No More Heroes game, you would never want to spend time in this environment. It's senseless.
The whole idea of the open world game-- the open sandbox-- is not infused with actual meaning or purpose by the developer. They fill it with "activity potential" and tell the player to go nuts. This is meaningless fun, according to Suda 51, and the real strengths of a game come from a story line which the player, whether they realize it or not, is led from beginning to end by the developer.
To see a video game go out of its way to deliberately satirize a wildly successful game design staple, and use gameplay to make those points--it was a defining moment in my game education. To see a game reject the platforms and tenants of an entire gaming style was fascinating.
And to see GTA4 come out a few months later, and have the same thoughts about Open World Design? How could anyone predict that the company that made the open world design style a massive hit would release a game that tried to change the way players saw the open world? In GTA 4, the open world is less of a playground-- a place where random, player driven activity can occur-- and more of a way to make the missions that take place throughout the game feel more natural and less linear. GTA 4 put a far greater precedent on its own storytelling and character development than on random player wish fulfillment, and it was the best game in the series for that. For the team that popularized open world games, that genre was no longer suitable for their ultimate desire: to tell a great storyline.
So.....yeah. I think pretty highly of No More Heroes.
And to see a game that tries to make "improvements on the formula" acknowledges the very thing that Suda 51 seemed to best rail against: formula. Predictability. Safety in design. An obligation to give players “a good time". Grasshopper may proudly proclaim that "Punk is not dead", but in a world where sequels are not so much a surprise as they are an "expectation", there seems nothing quite as mercenary and against the spirit of Suda's games than make improvements, trying to up sell players with "features" and "improvements." It makes the sequel feel shallow, and damages my goodwill towards the original game (similar to the way I feel about Bioshock 2).
The reason I brought up all of that open world stuff was because I found the "joke" of that gameplay section to be absolutely riotous, surprisingly thoughtful and (this is the key) totally unrelated to the parts that made No More Heroes fun to play. The original game did suffer from control awkwardness, but that didn't stop the game from being a total blast to play. There are certainly a similar number of "bad on purpose" games inside of No More Heroes: the minigames where you play for cash are accurately bad explorations of the kinds of games that came out in arcades or on the NES. But the actual bad sections of NMH2 seem to exist inside the gameplay(if I can be vague and slightly spoiler-y, the platforming section at the end of the game). It is an obstacle between various parts of the game, just like the original's open world, but the bad sections in NMH2 are actual story requirements, sections that Grasshopper NEEDS you to play through to see the game to it's inclusion. The unnecessary nature of the open world in NMH fit perfectly within a discussion of the merits (or lack thereof) of open world games. Bad platforming jokes? I can play Leisure Suit Larry: Box Office Bust for that.
So, what I'm trying to say here is......yes. I agree with the key point of the article: better isn't always better. NMH2's design improvements are the result of careful thinking, of feature improvement and usability improvement. It's a game that was made for me, instead of game made for Suda and shared with everyone else. It's a game that wants to appeal to me, and it seems less interested in making me think about the game and gameplay, and would rather have me simply enjoy the game. I want Suda 51 games to be broken, because Suda 51 games are DELIBERATELY BROKEN. They're broken to make you think about why they're broken. NMH2 wants to make a more fun version of the original game and, as a result, I'm not sure I want to play it at all. If the game plays better, that means Suda 51 doesn't want me to think about it.
From this objective view, it's hard for me not to find a loose character parallel from pop culture movies. We're talking about the type of character that is a particular mix of silly comic relief and power protagonist. Rather than like Nathan Drake, where the silly comes in the form of one-liners sprinkled on top of straight power action; this character is more like (and I'm dating myself here) Axel Foley from Beverly Hills cop. The interest with Axel was in trying to see if he could succeed powerfully despite consistently choosing silly actions. At the time, this was irreverence within a straight setting, with the irreverence winning. To me, that's similar to the tone the first NMH struck, a power fantasy setting that uses irreverent choices to propel the action successfully, even if some elements of the setting itself were also pretty silly.
The audience draw you're speaking of, as I see it, is in the departure from the "solve critical problem with sober action", to a style that is much more, "solve critical problem while not treating it as critical, or while treating the silly with serious sobriety".
Thanks, Leigh.