Why is it that Travis Touchdown is always just coming out of the bathroom? In No More Heroes trailers, and even the TGS demo, they can't just wait to turn on the camera until after he's got his pants on. That said, once he does up his fly and the beam katakana starts swinging, things become anything but mundane.
Suda 51's Killer 7-style cell shaded Wii action game surprised me by not being another one of those hack 'n slashers where you just wave the remote around and hope you hit something. The most basic attack is actually still just mapped to the A button, with motion sensing only used for special instances.
One of the motion driven moments is the power up move that recharges Travis' sword, which takes the typical dirty-minded interpretation of shaking the Wiimote up and makes it fairly blatant. You might just have to see it... More commonly used quick-time finishing moves require horizontal and vertical moves according to the direction a pixelated arrow points on screen. The pixel aesthetic is also exhibited in other places, such as your life bar, which instead of being an actual bar is a big heart made up of chunky pixels that disappear when you're it. Enemies rain fountains of coins when they die; the amount seemed to be proportional to the outcome of a mini-slot machine that ran on the bottom of the screen.
We fought a variety of enemies including a gaggle of gun-toting gangsters with kitty-eared paper bags over their heads, a rival beam katana wielder, and for the final boss, a pseudo-Captain America rip-off who shoots lasers and seemed to draw at least some of his power from flashing lights around the room. Once you smash those, he lost his power to levitate and that brought the battle to a pretty swift end.
Since they made us skip the story elements for time, it wasn't really clear what the objective was, but we did note that when Travis pulls out his cell, your remote becomes the phone and you hold it to your ear to hear what the person on the other end of the line has to say.
Since Ubisoft has announced the stateside release for February, we imagine we'll be seeing more of No More Heroes soon. That counts as a plus in my book.
