Episode 104 - The Zazu Pieces - No More Heroes

Coconuts are more valuable than podcast lives! Welcome back! Today
on the podcast we’re going to be talking about No More Heroes, a
hack’n’slash action game, and likely the game that made Suda51 a
name people recognized. A definitely very quirky game with a, uh,
we’ll say virile sense of humor, No More Heroes is a game that
seems like it tries to make as many choices as it can to stand out
and be different from most games released at the time. And I think
this wild differentiation is what made it such a remarkable game at
the time of its release. The version of the game we played prior to
this episode, however, was the Switch port, which notably does not
feature the motion controls made so famous by the original.
Mechanically translating any game from the Wii is going to cause
some hiccups, but without the novelty of masturbating your sword
with a physical motion (and maybe some other changes), the
blemishes in design really come to the forefront. We’re going to be
talking about mechanical strengths and weaknesses both in regular
combat and in boss fights, the open world and how it mostly
subtracts from the overall quality of the game, and studying the
blade. Thank you for joining us again this week! This was
definitely a fun one to talk about, even if there was some
disagreement as to whether it was fun to play. One of the side
effects of mostly being a retrospective show is that when you put a
game like this in a modern context, it makes you think about how
far we’ve come and what types of mechanic sets hold up best over
the years. Do you think we were too harsh on the game? Not harsh
enough? Let us know over on Discord or in the comment section of
wherever you’re listening to this, and make sure you join us next
time because we’re looking at another game from a lot of years ago
in Final Fantasy X.