TGS: Hands-on – No More Heroes

“No More Heroes” is one of the main reasons I needed to go to TGS this year. Ever since this game was announced, I have been looking for any bits of information I can find on it. Today, I finally got to try it for myself with a special made-for-TGS demo.

The game looks very nice. Maybe not graphically impressive in a “Halo 3″ sort of way, but more in a highly stylized, artistic way. It’s a bit like Suda 51’s Gamecube release, “Killer 7,” but the characters and backgrounds are a bit more detailed. I would have loved to show you pictures from the game in play, but photos were prohibited, even the one below… probably.

I will try to explain the controls as best as I can. The analog stick on the nunchuck is used for moving your character around, and the “A” and “B” buttons are used for different attacks. You can “lock-on” to enemies with the Z-button, and from time to time, arrows will come up indicating that you can do a special attack. Swing the remote in the direction of the arrows to pull off special attacks that leave your opponent satisfyingly splattered. There seemed to be multiple ways to finish off opponents, but in my short time with the game, I only discovered a few.

The controls, I must admit, took a bit of getting used to. It might have been more fun to control the light sword by actually swinging the remote rather than hitting the A-button, but it isn’t a huge problem and the controls, even if a bit odd, are very responsive.

The cut scenes still had the over-the-top cheesy dialog and voice acting. This annoyed me when I first watched the videos long ago, but recently, I have come to embrace their very cheesiness and am finding it amazing in the same way as a comically dubbed kung-fu movie.

The build I was playing was specially made for TGS (it even had TGS posters up on some of the in-game walls), so a lot of the areas of the game were inaccessible, and there were only a few types of enemies. Still, I enjoyed my time with the game and look forward to playing even more.

On my way out of the booth, a girl dressed as one of the characters asked if I would like to pose with her. This is likely not the pose she had in mind, but after I saw that she had a sword, it was the only pose possible as far as I was concerned.

I was very hyped for this game before I came to TGS, and now after playing it, I can say most, if not all of my hype, was justified. I still have a lot of questions about how fun this game will be after the one level I played, but as long as Suda 51 keeps the pace going and the story interesting, this is a must-buy game for me.