Dispatches

Dispatches: No More Heroes, Part One; Or: For Esme, With Love and Rockets

It’s taken a while now, but in the new action smörgåsbord No More Heroes the Nintendo Wii finally has one of those lynchpin titles necessary to prove its strength as a console in the long run– an original, exclusive third-party game that capitalizes on the best aspects of the system’s motion-controls while delivering a universally solid gameplay experience. Furthermore, it’s from one of the premier modern gaming auteurs, the ever avant-garde Goicha Suda, creator of the Gamecube curiosity Killer 7. As such, it stands as one of the most perversely satisfying and deeply frustrating gaming experiences of the next-gen generation, and even half-way through at this point, I feel like I’ve got more to say about it than most other games I’ve played in quite a while. Not all of it is good, of course, but that’s so much the better.

What I can say is this: No More Heroes is quite possibly the most important game that may ever be released for the Wii, and very probably the single most offensive piece of shit I’ve ever laid my thumbs on. Strangely enough, both these sentiments come from one of the game’s defining features:

It’s pretentious.

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