No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle Review
With the Wii enjoying perhaps the best few months for new releases it has ever seen, can the much-anticipated return of Travis Touchdown hold its own amid a bevy of top-notch contenders?
In addition to mastering Travis’s move set, players can also expect to take control of two other characters as well. Fan favourites Henry and Shinobu both return in playable form but don’t benefit the game as much as we expected. Each has their own unique fighting style – aerial combos and ranged attacks for Shinobu, dashes and fireballs for Henry – which definitely brings respite from Travis overkill, but is let down by a couple of serious flaws. Shinobu is the worst afflicted, her ability to jump leading Grasshopper to design awkward platform levels around her that expertly combine awkward camera movement, invisible walls and trial-and-error leaps, to provoke unprecedented levels of frustration. Henry plays well enough, on the other hand, but can only be played for a single boss battle. His other three missions happen off-camera and are only seen through a series of Polaroids, teasingly shown to the player. Now, we know Suda51 has a habit of winding up his fans, either with chore-like gameplay or by referring to absent content, but this just feels particularly mean given how popular the cult figure of Henry has become.
Playable characters are important, of course, but No More Heroes is just as much about those you kill as those you control. Fifteen bosses appear this time around, and all are just as memorable, crazy and fun to fight as the original game’s ten. Some familiar faces return in very unexpected ways, and each has an axe to grind… right through Travis’s face. New bosses comprise a fat undead man in a haunted house; a melancholy pop singer with Doctor Octopus-style beam katana arms; a Cloud Strife lookalike; a cosmonaut who’s been lost in space for decades; and a high school girl, with a recorder/double-ended beam katana, who’s intent on working through her crush on Travis by killing him. Quite how some of these people managed to gain UAA membership status we cannot fathom.
Humour is, once again, the main motivation for working your way through the ranks. The absurdity of each boss battle has been diminished by not one single laugh, not even with Platinum Games increasingly stepping on Grasshopper’s turf. The jokes come thick and fast throughout the 12-hour playtime, and take in the usual themes of sexual depravity, ultra violence and knowing jabs at videogame convention. It’s lowbrow humour by anyone’s standards, naturally, but it’s taken to such extremes, and so indulgently, that you can’t help but laugh along with the designers.
To outside observers, Desperate Struggle’s post-modern blend of in-jokes, high-speed action and blood splattered combat may seem like hyperactive nonsense, but then Grasshopper has never made games for the uninitiated. This is a videogame for people who are already in on the joke, those gamers who’ve suffered through decades of intolerably bad anime and lived to appreciate the parodies, watched Dante ride his bike up a wall, longing to see something more stupid, and played killer7 hardly caring that the story didn’t make a lick of sense.
Those gamers will have definitely played the first No More Heroes, of course, which arguably makes a sequel rather redundant. Perhaps this is why Grasshopper saw fit to overhaul the game so completely, creating as many problems as have been fixed along the way. But we’re not going to be so miserable that we’d complain about a second dose of lovingly developed insanity. Desperate Struggle’s cocktail of much improved gameplay, streamlined structure and adolescent fantasy may not have the perfect mix of ingredients, but we love the way it tastes all the same.
for all the latest videogames news, reviews, previews, interviews and features, while our 
fan page is the best place to communicate with other fans of games™ magazine.
