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.