YMMV / No More Heroes

• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Many characters of No More Heroes, and especially Travis, have an even greater mixed reaction spectrum than what you can find in a 51 ingredient mixed salad. Most of the cast (i.e. the enemy Assassins) get limited screen time and backstory, leading the viewer to fill in the gaps or to interpret their actions.
  • Reactions to Travis range from "I WANNA BE THE GUY WHO KILLS PEOPLE FOR ANIME" to "what a loser", with plenty of variations in between. Some claim that he's an outright psychopath who mows down anyone for cash while espousing To Be a Master, while others state that he's just some lost fool like any other person on the planet, only armed with a lightsaber bought off eBay and put between a rock and a hard place before he realizes what he got himself into. Some claim he didn't learn anything from his climb up the ranks in No More Heroes, while others say that he did. It's not easy to pinpoint a clear consensus here.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: The bar "plastic model" shown in the game really exists. It's the favorite place of Suda51.
• Best Boss Ever: Henry is a Duel Boss with an outrageous amount of health on Bitter who is extremely deft with a blade and has what is perhaps the most awesome One-Hit Kill Meteor Move ever. And to top it off, the stellar Boss Remix known as "We Are Finally Cowboys" is blaring in the background. He's also the pinnacle of "Real Difficulty" in the game. Your standard dodge-and-counter tactics will work, but it will take forever. His attacks are telegraphed just enough to be fair, depending on how much damage they do. He can be dizzied, but it takes a suitably large number of consecutive hits to do it, but he also offers very small windows for guard breaks. And of course, he can take close to a thousand hits, not counting any wrestling moves you land on him. A Marathon Boss if there ever was one.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Travis' dream on the train to the Rank 4 fight, based on his favorite Bullet Hell game.
• Breather Level: The Letz Shake stage is merely a long corridor filled with easy-to-dispatch enemies. And there's no boss.
• Breather Boss: Destroyman, despite being a fan favorite, is a fairly easy boss to take care of and his stage is nothing special either. And it comes right in between Shinobu and Holly, who are considered two of the harder bosses in the game.
• Broken Base: Santa Destroy being almost deserted and there being nothing to do in it besides drive between the motel, sidequests and missions, and pick up money, cards, and Lovikov Balls. Some claim that it's a deliberate Take That! to Wide-Open Sandbox games that are only sandboxes to hop on the current gaming trend, while some counter that defenders that pulling a Deliberate Flaw Retcon, or that even if it is deliberate, it's still problem because it adds needless filler to the core gameplay loop. No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle removing the sandbox entirely was even more contentious even among detractors of the original sandbox, some liking that they just cut it out entirely, and some feeling that they took the lazy way out instead of putting more things to do in it.
• Camera Screw: The game switches from a controllable camera to a fixed camera when you hit the stairs to Travis's motel room. The camera angle changes such that if you hold down the control stick, Travis will hit the stairs, the camera will change, and Travis will run down the stairs and away from the hotel. It takes a very quick touch to hit the stairs at top running speed and not go backwards a few times.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Jeane's backstory. It contains many details that would have apparently raised the game's age rating had it not been intentionally sped up. Travis’ understandably shocked expressions throughout and Jeane’s smile after she finishes explaining makes it quite hilarious.
• Demonic Spiders: While Goddamned Bats under normal circumstances, gun Mooks become this in Free Fight challenges. Not only do they attack you from long-range, they're really difficult to draw away from other enemies that might attempt to get a cheap shot in on you. Handgun mooks in particular will try to run away from you as soon as you close in on them.
• Do Not Do This Cool Thing: Some argue that Travis isn't portrayed as enough of a loser for the message about him and the league of assassins in general to actually land.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Mister Sir Henry Motherfucker himself is a parody of this trope. It still didn't stop him from actually becoming one to the point of becoming playable in the sequel, although only for one boss battle.
    Henry: You're the protagonist. I'm just a cool, handsome foil who happens to be your twin brother.
  • Destroyman proved to be one of the more popular assassins in the first game due to his memorable boss battle and Large Ham tendencies, even if he was basically a Breather Boss. He was popular enough to return in both 2 and III.
  • Bad Girl in spite, or possibly because of, how Ax-Crazy she is, and her memorable theme song. This might be why her father shows up as a playable character in Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, and ended up a playable character herself in the DLC for the game.
  • Letz Shake despite being The Unfought in this game.
  • Holly Summers is a fan-favorite for the role she plays on making Travis start to realize what it means to be an assassin and her tragic death.
• Everyone Is Jesus in Purgatory: From the standard "is the hero imagining the whole thing" to fairly interesting examinations of the way the game links sex and violence, particularly in Travis' interactions with female opponents.
• Fanon:
  • Many believe Dr. Peace's estranged daughter is Bad Girl. Jossed in No More Heroes: Travis Strikes Again, when Bad Girl's actual father, the equally crazy leather-masked Bad Man, shows up hunting down Travis for revenge.
  • Fans like to theorize that Henry was the one who killed Shinobu's father since the only hint we get to his killer was that they used a beam katana.
• Fan Nickname:
  • Mister Sir Henry Motherfucker, coined by Travis after Henry jets off.
  • The nameless assassin that goes after Travis at the end of the game was nicknamed "Ermen Palmer" as a reference to a certain spoiler in killer7.
• Game-Breaker: The Tsubaki Mk. III is listed as the game's Infinity +1 Sword for a reason. What makes it break the game is its charged low attack, which is a three-hit combo that deals massive damage even when not fully charged. Getting the opportunity to spam this once the infinite battery is unlocked makes the rest of the game a cakewalk.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: The original game bombed in Japan but was a huge hit in the U.S., which is why the sequel was released there first.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • The Pizza Butt missions in the first game become a lot harsher once you discover the consequences in the sequel.
  • Holly Summers' suicide as well carries more weight after seeing Ryuji's fate in the sequel.
  • The entire fight with Bad Girl and how unsympathetically she’s portrayed in this game becomes far worse when you learn her backstory in Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes.
  • Jeane's "No More Heroes Forever" line - which at the time of release, was taking a pot shot at Duke Nukem Forever's Development Hell history - can take on a much harsher second meaning after the game actually was finished and released in 2011, but critically flopped, with one of the criticisms being that much of the gameplay mechanics and humor became outdated as a result of the delays. As a result, some people today still reference this line, this time in regards to how Duke Nukem Forever ultimately turned out and as a cautionary tale of how Development Hell can affect the quality of a finished product.
  • Jeane’s backstory becomes even worse when No More Heroes III has Henry reveal that their father was also a serial killer and that he tried to kill all three of them at least once while they were children (and possibly more than once).
  • The game has Bishop's ex-girlfriend texting him once in a while to tell him to go die. That's what happens in the sequel.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • "Too bad there won't be a sequel!" There is. Multiple, in fact.
  • No More Heroes was already chock full of Star Wars references, including the use of lightsabers. In a more original design, Henry wields a beam katana with a cross-guard made up of four laser blades. Nearly eight years after the game's release, The Force Awakens introduces Kylo Ren, who also wields a lightsaber with a cross-guard similar to Henry's (albeit made up of two blades instead of four).
  • The Last Jedi goes a step further by having "kill the past" as a theme; you know, Suda's signature theme that he puts into everything he writes, including No More Heroes.
  • Another Star Wars connection: A later Suda51 game, Let It Die, actually has Mark Hamill (Luke Skywalker) and Billy Dee Williams (Lando Calrissian) in the English cast, officially making Suda an Ascended Fanboy.
  • No More Heroes threw a Pokémon reference on having a Nintendo 64 in Travis' room. Come Pokémon GO, also having characters designed by Yusuke Kozaki, the same character designer for both No More Heroes games, the team leaders are really prone to Travis-style swearing in Appraisals with fully-customizable Pokémon nicknames being made. Also like the game sequel, Pokémon Go was released in USA first before reaching Japan.
  • Talbot and Weller's names can only be learned through the end credits, and optional content that Travis wouldn't be privy to. Come No More Heroes III, and Sylvia name-drops them to Travis' shock (he didn't think they even had names), with the rationale of "The series has to keep going, right?".
  • Similar to the Cross Sword example, No More Heroes had Thunder Ryu use a more archaic Beam Katana that used a scabbard. Over a decade later, some of the shorts in Star Wars: Visions featured lightsabers that use scabbards. The novel, Star Wars: Visions - Ronin, also reveals that the reason the Ronin from "The Duel" has a scabbard is similar to Thunder Ryu's, namely that the weapon is permanently active and thus, necessitates a scabbard. However, instead of outright not having an on/off switch like Thunder Ryu's, the switch on the Ronin's saber is broken.
• Magnificent Bastard:
  • Sylvia Christel is the sultry, sly head of the United Assassin Association (UAA). A conwoman who created the UAA as a way to scam assassins out of their money, upon encountering the drunk Travis Touchdown at a bar, Sylvia promises to help him get even with his sister Jeanne for killing his parents, signing him up for the UAA as a way to kill her, all while disguising the true reward by playing into Travis's want for sex. Establishing the UAA as an actual organization, Sylvia returns to help Travis get even with Jasper Batt, Jr., from signing him up as a ranked assassin; gunning down assassins Travis spares; enlisting the help of Shinobu to kill some assassins for him behind his back; and having a dozen of assassins killed by Dr. Letz Shake and getting Travis to kill him afterwards. Despite becoming a depressed stripper after the UAA collapses, Sylvia is able to recover by marrying Travis and establishing a loving family with him, understanding that his abandonment is to protect them. Creating the Galactic Superhero Rankings in order to get Travis to kill Prince FU's assassins, Sylvia manipulates events so that Travis kills FU and Damon Ricotello, becoming Earth's savior in the process.
  • Henry Cooldown is Travis's playful, Irish twin brother, and a passing assassin who acknowledges himself as the cool, handsome foil to his brother's rambunctious personality. Introduced killing Dr. Letz Shake before Travis can fight him, Henry later saves a defenseless Travis from a killer before challenging him to a fight. Saved by Travis after he's frozen in carbonite, Henry is able to recover and steal three of Travis's kills, sending him pictures of them to rub it in his face, while still able to assist Travis in the defeat of Jasper Batt, Jr. Returning as a psychopathic Hive Mind of clones hellbent on world domination, Henry is able to use one of his clones to distract Travis into dropping his guard and temporarily kills him while he's defenseless on the toilet, eventually creating a Bad Future where he successfully kills Travis for good and allies himself with aliens to become Earth's ruler.
  • Holly Summers, Rank #6, is an intellectual assassin who prefers luring opponents into sand traps and bombarding them with grenades. Upon her defeat at the hands of Travis Touchdown, after finding that Travis refuses to kill women, Holly calmly accepts her loss and commits suicide, but not before making him promise to never forget her, even leaving behind plans for the Tsubaki Mk-II beam katana as a thanks.
• Memetic Badass: Letz Shake is the hardest boss in this game. He's so hard, he's killed off in a cutscene and the sequel nerfs him so he can actually be fought.
• Misaimed Fandom: Believe it or not, there are many fans who revere Travis and aspire to be like him. You know, despite him being a loser otaku who spends all of his money (which he earns mostly from killing people) on anime stuff rather than improve his life and move out of a hotel room. Suda51 must be laughing his ass off at that.
• Most Wonderful Sound:
  • Travis' beam sword, as well as Henry's. Your ears will have an orgasm during the fight against Henry at the end of the game.
  • Within the second game, having the game pair up an This Is for Emphasis, Bitch! and Cluster F-Bomb whenever Travis cuts down/spinally fractures and impales some of the more annoying mooks throughout the game, especially the Kung Fu-Proof Mook katana and beam katana thugs and the Personal Space Invader meatheads. Up to eleven when killing a fat chainsaw thug yells out "This is a no-fuckhead zone!"
    Travis: FUCKHEAD!!!!
    Fat Thug: MOMMA-!
    *insert method of death here*
    *death groan*
    Travis: Fuck you.
• One-Scene Wonder: Technically speaking, most of the Assassins. The match is set up, they appear out of nowhere, some character development here and there, boss battle, then BOOM! Dead and gone. A few of them get a rather touching sendoff. This is grimly noted in the sequel.
• Polished Port: The Switch port, along with the port of the sequel. It runs at a nice framerate, only noticeably dipping whenever there's just a bit too much going on, looks amazing in such a high resolution and has better motion controls than the Wii thanks to Joy-Cons while still playing beautifully without motion enabled. Really, the only things to complain about are the removal of "Heavenly Star" and some minor lighting bugs.
• Porting Disaster: The PC port suffers from a number of bugs and issues:
  • It lacks any of the performance settings that even the simplest PC games have, such as window size and graphical quality. In addition, Xinput is the only control scheme supported by it. So, no keyboard and mouse, and a third-party program is required for most controllers, including - strangely enough - the Pro Controller, despite being a direct port of the Switch version.
  • The lack of motion controls, while obviously a necessity for a platform like PC, and for the most part doing an okay job of translating the motion controls into traditional controls, does become a major problem during the baseball missions. Originally, Travis would swing his beam katana as hard as the player swung their Wiimote, but here he uses the same amount of force every time... and it's not hard enough to hit the ball very far, rendering the first two baseball missions much more difficult than originally intended, and the third one Unintentionally Unwinnable.
  • Attempting to skip the results screen after certain battles will crash the game.
  • Heroes' Paradise, the Xbox 360/PS3 port of the game. The visuals themselves are divisive, but the performance, added content (some of which just being shoehorned in boss fights from No More Heroes 2), inferior motion controls and the entirety of the industrial area of Santa Destroy being sealed off are definitely some downsides.
• Spiritual Adaptation:
  • No More Heroes feels like an adaption of Afro Samurai and Afro Samurai: Ressurection set in the modern day. Both stories involve reaching the No.1 assassin/the No.1 headband, the cycle of revenge, and a sequel about the former No.1 getting back his title after falling out.
  • The concept of eccentric assassins competing over arbitrary ranks as satire appeared years earlier in Seijun Suzuki's Branded to Kill and Pistol Opera.
  • The premise of a loser in his mid-20s obsessed with video games on the Excuse Plot of "Kill a bunch of specific people in sequence in order to get the girl" essentially means this was a Scott Pilgrim video game three years before Scott Pilgrim vs. The World: The Game was.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • The Thunder Ryu Building is a gym in which Travis can upgrade his abilities. The background music is almost, but not quite, Survivor's "Eye of the Tiger."
  • Masafumi Takada's "Mach 13 Elephant Explosion" sounds suspiciously similar to Soulfly's "Umbabarauma".
  • The credits music sounds very similar to the Star Wars theme. The version that appears on the official soundtrack makes it even more obvious: not only is it played by an orchestra, as opposed to the 8-bit style version in the game; but the track itself is called "Staff Wars: Episode I"
• That One Boss:
  • Bad Girl is guaranteed to kill you at least once unless you already know that she's going to pull a Wounded Gazelle Gambit (and even then, just getting close enough to check to make sure she's not holding back will probably get you killed anyway). Then she's... still very hard, having great damage output, health and mobility. One of her nastier attacks involves her batting mooks your way. This is extremely difficult to turn against her with your own swing, as it deals massive damage, and still gives you more enemies to deal with even if you simply dodge.
  • Shinobu is one of the more reviled bosses, especially on Bitter. She's extremely dodgy and evasive, she'll outright make you lose every weapon clash, and she has that damn Gengoken (nearly instant-kill) and multi-shot Sonic Sword that will make you beg for mercy. Doing nothing but low charged attacks and some occasional sword swipes can make the fight easier, though.
  • Holly Summers. Take Shinobu's speed, add a tendency to run away whenever you get close, pits all over her arena that will interrupt your game flow and wear out your thumb, and unblockable butt rockets that seem to hit at least 50% of the time assuming your timing's average. Which she loves to spam. It may get to the point where you're purposefully falling into the pits just to dodge the rockets, because it's easier to dodge the grenade she throws into the pits, but that'll also give her plenty of time.
  • The fight with Jeane, the person can be an absolute nightmare if you aren't aware of Travis' charged attack having multiple steps in it, and without some serious upgrades. This boss is extremely nimble, dodges your attacks like it's nothing, and is flat-out immune to grappling, dealing damage against you instead. Windows for slash attacks are split-seconds long, negating that strategy. It takes a charged attack combo to do any serious damage in the fight (this strategy thankfully makes said fight much faster and easier).
• That One Sidequest:
  • The graffiti cleanup side job is not only difficult as-is, but it's impossible to actually complete it without the Memory of Child ability from Lovikov (as Travis has very little time to find all ten graffiti drawings, and they happen to be very far in-between). The worst part is that the reward (up to 20000 LB$, 2000 per graffiti removed) is too low by the standards of the moment when it's unlocked (past the game's first half).
  • The batter-up kill jobs are essentially a Luck-Based Mission depending on the timing of your swing, and it's never consistent.

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