Suda 51, sitting on his protagonist's favorite chair.
I’m not sure what to think of No More Heroes : Desperate Struggle. The original No More Heroes took me completely by surprise when it came out in 2008. I was expecting a sword-waggling action game and what I got instead was a darkly funny and deeply unsettling excercize in idiosyncratic game design and storytelling. The game is also one of the few video games that tries to address (in a critical manner) gaming culture itself.
So why am I worried about the sequel? Well, the fact that there even is a sequel is somewhat baffling, since the first game ended on a deeply fatalistic note that would seem to preclude this possibility. It is troubling that Suda 51 would undermine the dramatic power of that ending by arbitrarily continuing a story that had already concluded so brilliantly. But I’m not going to pass judgment on this until I play the game–let’s hope he proves me wrong.
Alas, what really has me worried at the moment has to do with the genral tone he has been taking in recent interviews, where he seems to be implicitly apologizing for things that, if anything, should be celebrated. IGN’s interview, published yesterday, is only the latest example:
IGN: How has the open world changed or been enhanced over the first game?
Suda 51: Rest assured that the city of Santa Destroy has been much improved and will offer you many more interesting opportunities. Sorry but I can’t discuss the details yet, you will find out more about this soon.
[...]
IGN: How have you enhanced the graphics over the first title?
Suda 51: We certainly think the graphics are better, you can be the judge.
The game did have ugly graphics and a laughably plain open world environment–a San Diego-esque city called Santa Destroy (Suda 51 tends to like names that are equal parts cool-sounding and absurd)–that functions as a hub but looks like an half-finished Nintendo 64 version of GTA: San Andreas. This crude presentation, however, fits in quite nicely with the themes explored later on in the game. For example, the generic architecture and empty sidewalks in Santa Destroy, rather than ” lacking polish,” can in fact be understood as a darkly sardonic portrayal the world as Travis sees it, one that is characterized above all by the general helplessness of his situation (e.g., living with his cat in a motel room, working at horrible part-time jobs for very low pay, sexually frustrated and lacking a partner), which he then attempts to transcend by entering the assasin’s tournament at the behest of an attractive French woman who recognizes his desperation.
It doesn’t take too much imagination to make artistic sense of No More Heroes’ graphical “problems;” and yet, part of what gave the game its ‘cool’ edge was the apparent indifference of its creators to geeky concerns such as “graphics” in the first place. Jesse Costantino made this point beautifully in his review for Game Revolution:
It’s as if to say, “HD? Who the ‘f’ needs that? We’ve got blood, money, chicks, cars, guns, swords, and endless amounts of fun. We’ll leave the pretty graphics to the pretty boys.”
Travis Touchdown, the protagonist of No More Heroes
He calls this type of gamer a “pretty boy,” though my preferred term is “dork.” It doesn’t matter: we’re speaking about the same person. It is the kind of person that complains about NMH’s part-time jobs because they aren’t “fun;” the kind of person who was devastated when he first realized that Bioshock did not include online co-op; in other words, it is the sort of person that will never accept (or understand) a game like No More Heroes, regardless of what Suda 51 and Grasshopper Manufacture do to try to appease him.
Ultimately, my fear is that Suda’s implicit recognition of graphical “shortcomings” in this interview might also extend to everything else that was so brilliant about the original game. Let’s hope not. After all, the first game evidently had a large enough audience to warrant a sequel, so it would make little sense to risk alienating these fans (not to mention compromising his original vision for the series) in pursuit of acceptance from the pretty boy demographic.
Suda doesn’t need them, nor do they need Suda. And fortunately for us, these gamers are currently distracted by Halo spinoffs, E3 “booth babes” and the like, so there is still plenty of time to ignore them.
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