This article contains spoilers for a ten year old video game released on an obsolete console. Like a lot of literature-based stories, this game required me to be at the right time in the right place for me to enjoy it, when I was on the same verge of realisation and dissatisfaction Travis is on throughout the game, had the same interest in video games, and the same taste for the weird pop-culture-in-a-blender aesthetic the game goes for, so I’m perfectly happy to spoil the shit out of it.
The setup to No More Heroes is ridiculously simple, especially by the standards of a video game released in 2007. Our hero, Travis Touchdown, lays it all out for us in an opening monologue: after winning a lightsaber beam katana off eBay an online auction site, he meets a woman in a bar who offers him a contract killing job. Killing the man got him the 11th rank in an organisation called the United Assassin’s Association, and he’s now obsessed with the idea of becoming the number one assassin in the UAA.
“I wanna be number one. Short and simple enough for ya?”
We’re thrown right into it. Travis knocks down the gates to a mansion, and through him we murder the bajeesus out of, like, a billion bodyguards, until we get to the target: Deathmetal, all one word, a badass motherfucker with a deep voice and a big sword. They share a nonsensical conversation killed with cool phrases like “I’m just looking for that exit to paradise”, before fighting. After he defeats Deathmetal, the beautiful woman, Sylvia, shows up, and Travis clarifies the rules of the competition with her. She lays it all out for him: once he pays the fee for the next rank, he gets a phone call for the location of the next assassin, he fights his way to that assassin, he fights the assassin, he gets cash prizes and the next rank.
And then the game gets strange.
It becomes apparent very quickly that Travis is not nearly as cool as he pretends. He lives in a motel in the fictional Californian city of Santa Destroy, and aside from his wrestling videos, his anime and toy collections, his cool bike, his gym membership, and his one friend from the video store, Travis doesn’t really have a lot going on in life. To pay for his rank fights, he has to do pretty demeaning jobs, and there’s a running gag of phone calls he gets from the local video store regarding videos he rents called “How to Please a Woman in Bed”. It can be (and frequently is) interpreted as a simple parody of exactly the kind of people who play video games like this, but I think there’s something a little more sophisticated going on.
“Formula” is generally a dirty word in fiction. Bad TV shows are formulaic. But video games are different – they have to work basically the same way over and over while providing enough variation to force you to think your way out of problems. This generally leads to video games taking a strict formula to gameplay that’s broken up by aesthetic – for example, Crash Bandicoot 3: Warped is broken up into five sections, which are themselves broken up into five levels, plus a boss fight, with each level having its own aesthetic (e.g. the future, jungles, etc).
No More Heroes fits this structure, almost ridiculously so for a game made in 2007. After a rank fight, you complete sidejobs to earn some more money, unlock more health or strength at the gym, and upgrade your katana before paying for the rank fight and moving on. The actual rank fights themselves have a much looser formula – you’re always fighting minions on the way to the assassin, but that always means something different. But they all have identically structured climaxes: you get a call from Sylvia telling you the odds are against you that ends with her telling you to enter the gardens of madness, you save, you get a cutscene of Travis talking to the assassin, you fight them, you get a cutscene of their death, you collect your rewards and get a cutscene with Sylvia, you get a “Congratulations!” screen.
Obviously, the big thing that makes this work is the shifting aesthetic – it’s all tied together by being within one very odd American city, so you fight through places like a baseball stadium, the school, and the bus depot; and each individual assassin is a very strange and unique individual (the first guy you fight is a karaoke-loving cowboy who talks about his estranged daughter, and he’s not even close to the weirdest). But what really ties it together is the specific and unique emotional arc. Firstly, there’s the simple fact that, for all its weirdness, a day in Travis’ life isn’t all that emotionally different from the life of a young male video game shut-in nerd. You do boring, repetitive jobs so you can afford to play at being an assassin fighting cool weirdos; it’s pretty difficult to miss and is usually what’s commented upon when talking about the game.
Less commented upon is the emotional arc of Travis. While his conversations with the various assassins are borderline incoherent, what is always perfectly clear is the way he feels in any given moment. Over the course of the game, we learn Travis’ personality, especially his sense of honour. Chiefly, he only fights fair, refusing to take cheap shots, getting angry with anyone who does, and getting very upset when he wins on a technicality without fighting at one point. There’s also his attitude towards women, both a willingness to leer over anyone who crosses his path and absolutely refusing to kill them (No More Heroes is an example of a story with a misogynistic character without being a misogynistic story).
What happens emotionally is, like many literary stories, very difficult to sum up and requires cherry-picking specific examples. The second woman Travis fights kills herself to fulfill the assassin sense of honour, shaking him to the core. As the game continues, the expense for advancing rises higher and higher. At one point, a cool and mysterious Irish man named Henry steals Travis’ kill, netting Travis advancement without work and rather spoiling the spirit of the game for him. At the same time, Travis starts becoming more and more sullen, slowly losing his cockiness and going through the motions. At some points it feels like he’s only advancing because he’s already put so much time and effort in, and what I think this conveys is a very specific moment in the life of young nerds, a moment I find very familiar.
Video games are unique amongst mediums in that they are ownage delivery systems by design. You can watch a film that contains no ownage, you can read a book that contains no ownage, but gameplay presents you with a problem that must be solved to advance; even games with no ‘story’ whatsoever, like Tetris, ask you to own. This is something that has dogged video games as they’ve tried to reach for something deeper and smarter than escapism. Deus Ex: Human Revolutions tried to reach for a story on transhumanism, but gave its protagonist a god damned uncritically presented changeling fantasy for a backstory. Grand Theft Auto IV tried to tell a realistic story about the American immigrant experience, but was let down by the fact that it’s fucking GTA, not The Wire. To put it in moral terms, these games tried to pretend that their highest point of morality is “being deep”, when in fact it’s “complete and total ownage”.
Ownage has many positive qualities, but there’s only so far you can go when it’s your whole centre of being, especially when you won’t admit that it’s your whole centre of being. What makes No More Heroes a great work of art is how it conveys the feeling of finding those limits. Travis makes a big show about wanting to be number one, but finds over the course of the game that he has ideals he’s going to have to betray to get there. It’s an artistic representation of realising just how much of your life has been spent playing video games, and realising what that means.
The ending plays off this beautifully, filled with nonsensical twists that either destroy the meaning of the story – Sylvia’s actually a con artist who’s been scamming you! – or create ridiculous, artificial meaning – Your master from the gym sacrifices his own life to save yours! The final assassin is your father! No he isn’t, he just got killed by Travis’ previously unmentioned dead girlfriend! Travis’ not-dead girlfriend is actually his half-sister and she killed his parents! Travis has been repressing his memories of all of this for the entire game but it was actually his motivation the whole time!!!
At times, it’s so ridiculous that the story starts breaking the fourth wall, which comes off less as cheap jokes and more as part of shoving in your face just how artificial the whole experience was, which is simply part of the ending’s goal to get you in Travis’ existentially baffled shoes. But it doesn’t stop there, because there’s a bonus ending you only get for upgrading your beam katana fully. An assassin appears to kill you and take your title, and Henry comes back and saves you, so that you can fight him properly. After you beat him, Travis demands to know why he’s so friendly, and Henry reveals he’s Travis’ twin brother, a fact which outrages Travis to the point that he breaks the fourth wall:
“That’s the craziest shit I ever heard! Why would you bring something like that up at very last minute of the game?!”
“I’d have thought you and the player would have expected a twist of fate of some kind.”
Henry then reveals that Sylvia, who has still disappeared, is actually his wife of ten years. He explains his income isn’t enough for her, so sometimes she vanishes and goes on cons. Travis and Henry start to actually kind of bond, before Henry asks Travis how he intends to tie up the loose ends of the story, seeing as he’s the protagonist, and Travis admits he just wants to escape, and they agree to find “that exit they call paradise”, lunging at each other one last time. It’s a deliriously brilliant punchline as the mask of reality just completely falls away, leaving us with the, uh, happy ending of Travis deciding that even if he doesn’t know what the real answers are, he’s going to go find them. He’s no longer the cheerful hedonist committing ownage for the sake of ownage.
Conceivably, this story could have been a TV show or movie – the game was heavily inspired by the movie El Topo – but the video game format lends certain effect to it. No More Heroes fits into pico79’s first category of video games, with a completely on-rails story. What this effectively means is that the player has no control over Travis’ motivations or choices and limited control over the logistics of how he accomplishes his goals. This adds a level of tension that isn’t present in, say, Mad Men or Cowboy Bebop. But this is also a video game that’s about both video games and the people who play them. Since the release of No More Heroes in 2007, video games have continued to shift and mature as a medium – Telltale’s The Walking Dead Season One is the best drama not called The Shield – and No More Heroes offered both gamers and game designers the chance to stop and take stock of what they’d done, and where they wanted to go next.