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"Trust your Force, and head for the Garden of Madness!"
"I wanna be number one. How's that? Short and simple enough for ya? It's gonna be a long, hard road. But who knows? Could kick ass. Could be dangerous. Could totally suck. Whaddaya say bro, join me: let's see how far we can take this. And for you out there holding the Wii Remote/controller right now? Just press the A/â—‹ (Circle)/START button... Let the bloodshed begin!"
Travis Touchdown

No More Heroes is the story of Travis Touchdown, a perennially-broke Occidental Otaku who wins a beam katana off of "an Internet auction site" and becomes a part-time assassin to pay for his otaku lifestyle. After taking a job from the mysterious Sylvia Christel, Travis unwittingly becomes the 11th-best assassin in the United States and decides to climb the ranks of the United Assassin's Association the hard way: challenging the ten assassins ranked higher than him, and taking them out one-by-one.

Developed by Grasshopper Manufacture and directed by Suda51, the mastermind behind the divisive Killer7, No More Heroes is simultaneously a celebration, parody and deconstruction of sandbox games, American geek culture, and the concept of an Anti-Hero. It juxtaposes the glamorous and high-octane battles of an assassin's lifestyle with the grim reality of a main character who lives in a motel room, roots through dumpsters for collectibles and needs to do menial labour to pay his U.A.A. fees. It gives you a Wide-Open Sandbox and a kickass motorcycle, but also the stark realization that the world Travis lives in is mostly empty and devoid of things he can actually affect; even running down pedestrians is completely ineffective. All that Travis has going for him is his delusional grandeur and self-image as a cool protagonist, and even that is slowly stripped away as the game presents him with the harsh truths of a professional killer, and the fact that his murderous rampage is fueled by nothing more than a shallow need for self-gratification.

That said, no game lets you rain down on Mooks like some sort of angry nerd god quite like No More Heroes.

It was given a remaster (No More Heroes: Red Zone Edition/Heroes' Paradise) for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3, exclusive to the latter in all regions except Japan, based on the belief that its poor sales were due to the Wii being unreceptive to this kind of game. This belief got a dose of reality when the game opened only a little better than the first game (on both systems), and sales legs dropped off even more quickly. Nevertheless, the game is an incremental step up from the original, featuring oodles of bonus content (including bosses from No More Heroes 2) and gameplay tweaks (like allowing you to "stock" your special moves, which addressed the primary criticism of the original's semi-randomized Super Mode feature).

A sequel, No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, was released on the Wii in 2010.

An Android and iOS entry in the series, titled No More Heroes: World Ranker, was released exclusively in Japan at the end of August 2012. This entry allows players to create their own beam-katana-wielding assassin and rise through the UAA ranks via missions, including fights with some of the notable bosses of both the main games.

In 2017, Suda announced that he would be directing a new game in the series for the Nintendo Switch, titled Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes. In it, Travis gets trapped inside a video game alongside Bad Man, the vengeful father of Bad Girl, and together they must fight their way out. The game launched in January 2019, and it’s is the first game Suda has directed since the first No More Heroes. On October of the same year it received ports for both PC (via Steam) and Playstation 4.

At 2019's E3, it was announced during Nintendo's conference that Travis would be starring in a full-fledged No More Heroes III (as opposed to the smaller game that Travis Strikes Again was), to be released on the Nintendo Switch on August 27, 2021. As a leadup to III, the first two games were re-released digitally on the Switch on October 28, 2020. Furthermore, a Mii Swordfighter costume of Travis was released for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate on October 13, 2020.


This game has examples of:

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  • 100% Completion: Going so Over the Top in this regard it's not funny, the game features a set of "trading cards" that the player can collect. There are 50 cards on the first run through of the game, each bearing the picture of a wrestler's mask. There are in reality a total of 150 cards in the game, which must be replayed at least twice from clear files to achieve this (due to the later 100 being exclusive to the New Game Plus. The game also has the numerous purchasable clothes, the gold medal ranks in all sidequests (side jobs, assassination gigs and One-Hit-Point Wonder challenges), the training lessons from Thunder Ryu, and the 49 Lovikov Balls to earn the seven unique abilities from Lovikov in his bar. Last, but far from least, you have the purchasable lightsabers and their upgrades (you even need to buy the most expensive lightsaber to unlock the True Final Boss). This all fits in with the game's over-the-top nature, as the "hero" is an obsessive otaku.
  • Abnormal Ammo: Bad Girl hits her ammo at you with her baseball bat. Her ammo? Gimps.
  • Abusive Parents: In a scene near the end, it's revealed that Travis' father constantly molested his sister. She eventually gets revenge by killing him, his wife, and attempting to kill his son. Although, having a sexually abusive father is quite possibly the most normal thing about her story...
  • Action Commands: You use these to perform wrestling moves, get out of traps, recharge your katana, and perform killing blows on foes after depleting their health bar.
  • Affably Evil: Death Metal, Dr. Peace, Harvey Moiseiwitsch Volodarskii and Henry.
  • Alas, Poor Villain:
    • Jeane. It's one of the few kills Travis isn't proud of.
    • Holly Summers, made worse because Travis was willing to let her live but she committed suicide instead because as she states, "Assassins must die when they lose". Her last request is that Travis never forget her and Travis states that he had loved her soul before burying her. The last seconds of her life has her admitting that she herself wanted to fantasize having a normal life where a knight in shining armor saved her, before smiling while she puts a grenade in her mouth, while Travis is screaming for her not to go through with this.
    Travis: Wait, Number Six! NO!!!
  • Alliterative Name: Travis Touchdown.
  • All There in the Manual:
    • Literally, when you need info about Travis's Dark Side moves.
    • On a New Game Plus, you can find design art cards. They contain many facts about the characters in the game, including the real names of most of the assassins. And the breed of Travis's cat (Scottish Fold).
    • Also Subverted, as the instruction manual states that Naomi has a mysterious secret about her. All she does in the game is upgrade Travis' beam katana. Either this idea was dropped or Suda51 loves messing with ya. This could also be a possible Metal Gear shout out. Rumors have it that Naomi is in her 60's, which would probably be the secret.
  • Already Done for You: The game begins with Travis going after Death Metal, the 10th ranked assassin. Originally, Travis was going to fight the 11th rank, Helter Skelter, first. Instead, the fight was cut, moved to the opening cutscene, and Travis starts out as the 11th rank.
  • American Kirby Is Hardcore: The American box art of the first game has Travis Touchdown holding his beam katana against a blank white backdrop with an aggressive look. The European and Japanese box art has Travis standing in the streets of Santa Destroy with a cocky smile on his face and an arm around Sylvia's waist. The box art for the Updated Re-release is like a hybrid of the two, depicting a smiling Travis standing in front of a blood red background holding his beam katana (which is emitting lightning) and surrounded by women (Shinobu, Holly Summers, Bad Girl and Sylvia Christel).
  • Ammo-Using Melee Weapon: Travis Touchdown's beam katanas will gradually run out of battery power, and must be manually re-charged.
  • And Your Reward Is Clothes: Which you have to pay for. Or dig out of the dumpster.
  • Animal Motifs: Travis is associated with tigers in a number of ways: many of his optional clothing items have tiger designs; the meter for his Dark Side mode is a tiger walking across the screen; his bike is named the "Schpeltiger"; the guard of the Tsubaki Mk III is a stylized Japanese "tiger" kanji; and his ultimate wrestling move is the Tiger Suplex. One of the obtainable shirts explains this: It has Travis' name transliterated in katakana ("TORABISU") and has a tiger ("tora") design on it. In Desperate Struggle, Travis can even transform into a tiger as one of his Dark Side modes.
  • Animesque: Played with. This game and its sequels sport a mix of cel-shading and realism with a So-California setting, western-style character designs and names. However, all games do make multiple references to anime media, since Travis Touchdown is a big anime fan.
  • Anti-Hero: Travis Touchdown seems to be an experiment as to how far you can push the "anti" of Anti-Hero before he lapses into Villain Protagonist.
  • Arc Number: The game has a clothing store named Area 51. Also, leading up to the first game's release, the game's Japanese website featured 51 gameplay clips.
  • Arc Words: "Head for the Garden of Madness!", and "Jeanne".
  • Artificial Limbs:
    • Holly Summers has an artificial leg. In addition, Shinobu gets a mechanical replacement for the hand Travis chops off at the end of her fight with him.
    • In Japan, due to Bowdlerization, Shinobu doesn't get her hand cut off at the end of the fight, which led to some confusion about whether or not her losing the hand was canon. This was settled in No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, which confirmed she has a mechanical hand.
  • Ascended Fanboy: The Anarchy in the Galaxy attack is the same attack used by the Glastonbury in the Pure White Giant Glastonbury game. It's also implied that his other Dark Side attacks are from Pure White Lover Bizarre Jelly. The characters are Strawberry, Blueberry, and Cranberry. The attacks are Strawberry on the Shortcake, Blueberry Cheese Brownie, and Cranberry Chocolate Sundae.
  • Athletic Arena Level: Destroy Stadium, a setting visited twice in the game. What happens there includes killing bad guys by deflecting a pitch, battles in the vast outfield, and facing a Tennis Boss via a man-launching batting cage.
  • Attack! Attack! Attack!: Bad Girl employs this strategy against Travis in a cutscene after her defeat. Despite being impaled by a beam katana, she continues to bat him over the head with the blade still stuck in her body.
    I won't lose... I will never lose...
  • Authority Equals Asskicking: The bosses are tiered in the UAA according to their ranking as an assassin. While this trope is played straight in all games with the higher-ranked assassins, it also tends to be subverted at times: higher ranked assassins like Destroyman and Capt. Vladimir tend to be easier compared to lower assassins like Shinobu, Margaret, and Ryuji. It could be possible that Shinobu, Margaret, and Ryuji were still cutting their way up to a higher rank when Travis came along.
  • Automatic New Game: The game does this, only pausing to let you choose your difficulty level and then throwing you in. After you save, it takes this trope further, automatically loading the most recent file whenever you turn on your Wii. To get to another save, you have to wait for the recent one to load, then go to the pause menu to access the load screen.
  • Awesome, but Impractical: Charging the katana hits tons of enemies—while leaving you extremely open to attack and only dealing about as much damage as two or three quick regular attacks and it uses a lot of energy before the katana is upgraded. The high charge attack is even more impractical since you can't move while charging. Once you get the unlimited energy upgrade though, the low charge attack becomes much more useful to spam. In the "impractical weapon" department, the way Travis' beam katana is built means it should actually be pretty fragile.
  • Awesomeness Meter: Depending on how awesome you were during the stage, you'll get bonus points at the end of a stage.
  • Ax-Crazy: Beating blindfolded men to death with a baseball bat is Bad Girl's idea of a fine time. While she is not the only psycho Travis ends up fighting, she's by far the craziest.
  • Badass Biker: Travis' motorcycle is impressively tricked out, and intentionally designed to look like an X-Wing starfighter.
  • Badass Creed: Travis has far too many to tell.
  • Badass Family: Although they don't fit the trope perfectly, Travis, Henry and Jeane: long lost siblings who all ended up as assassins.
  • Badass Normal:
    • While not normal mentally, Bad Girl is the only assassin who doesn't use crazy tricks (apart from the gimps used as projectiles). The only things she has are a baseball bat and a serious problem. Well, she does also have her flask and lighter...
    • Travis himself also qualifies, given that he's just an ordinary guy with a Laser Blade who manages to take down high-ranking assassins.
  • Bad Vibrations: Before the start of the battle with Destroyman, sudden rumbles occur just before he transforms.
  • Bait-and-Switch Boss: Dark Star. As soon as he finishes talking to Travis to start the battle, he's backstabbed by Jeane, Travis' former fiancée and sister.
  • Bathroom Stall Graffiti: There's graffiti in every save room in the game, which happen to be—you guessed it—Bathrooms.
  • Batter Up!: Bad Girl's weapon and apparently, one of her combos. Travis is also occasionally seen using his beam katana as a bat "substitute".
  • Battle Against the Sunset: Shinobu is fought while the sun is setting, albeit in a building, mainly to compliment her samurai-ninja-schoolgirl motifs.
  • Battle Cry: Quite a few characters have one, including Travis himself prior to some of the boss battles.
  • Battle Theme Music: Each boss in the game has their own battle theme, and the style or genre of said theme will reflect the boss's personality and/or combat style. For example, Shinobu's theme is electronic-flavored with distorted voices, to reflect her efficiency at swordplay and determination in trying to kill Travis; Speed Buster's theme invokes Autobots, Rock Out! to reflect her sociopathy plus her overkill methods when using her cannon to obliterate everybody; Henry's theme mixes soft rock with trance to reflect his coolness and his exceptional combat skills. And so on.
  • Beach Episode: The level and fight against Holly Summers takes place on Santa Destroy's beach, Body Slam Beach. It also features a gratuitous Fanservice skit with a bikini-clad Sylvia, with Travis applying sun lotion on her while she tells him about the fight.
  • Beware the Superman: A recurring antagonist throughout the mainline games is Destroyman, a superhero-themed contract killer who really puts the "ass" in "assassin". He returns in the second game as a pair of cyborgs after being bisected, and in the third game has a subplot where he's a hired terrorist trying to Take Over the World with mass-produced copies of himself.
  • BFG: Speed Buster uses a huge cannon capable of unleashing a Wave-Motion Gun. Disabling this cannon is the only way to reach her and defeat her.
  • BFS:
    • Death Metal, your first assassin to face off with, wields an impressive transforming Orange MK-II. Plus, Travis gains one Laser Blade comprised of five beams at Buster Sword length.
    • Dark Star has a katana large enough to be the stage of one fight.
  • Big Bad: Dark Star is the number-1-ranked assassin whom Travis Touchdown must kill to become the top assassin. Except he turns out to be a minor player; the real villains are Sylvia Christel, Travis' girlfriend who conned him into killing the other assassins, and Jeane, Travis' ex-girlfriend and half-sister who killed his parents in front of him, triggering his desire for vengeance.
  • Big Damn Heroes: Shinobu in the 1st rank fight, and later Henry during the True Ending.
  • Big "NO!": Travis yells this as Holly Summers puts a grenade in her mouth, as he realizes that she will kill herself because he won't do the deed for her.
  • BFS: Death Metal's Orange MK II, and Travis' most impressive Tsubaki MK-II, comprised of five beams at Buster Sword length; consequentially, it looks more like a club than a sword.
  • Black-and-Black Morality: Naturally, all the assassins are unclean, including Travis. This even applies to Sylvia, who set up the UAA in order to con Travis out of his money in exchange for several lives.
  • Black Blood: The Japanese and European releases of the game turn all the blood black, which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't close to being a playable Tarantino movie. A scene involves the sequence where, after defeating a woman in battle, she commits honourable suicide by depinning a grenade and holding it in her mouth, with predicable results. Since, just before, she told the main character that she was attracted to him, he awkwardly hugs her dead, still-standing, headless body. In the censored version, her head and shoulders are still attached, but completely black, ruining the impact.
  • Black Comedy: A lot of the humor in the series revolves around the sheer dark absurdity of an anti-social otaku slicing people into bits... and that's just the tip of the iceburg.
  • Blade Lock: Whenever you and an enemy try to attack each other at the same time. Winning the ensuing struggle gets you a free death blow. Also happens during the cutscene following the Henry boss fight.
  • Bling-Bling-BANG!: Dr. Peace's weapon in the Rank 9 fight is a pair of gold plated revolvers.
  • Blocking Stops All Damage: Downplayed. Blocking fully protects against regular attacks but not against charged attacks or insta-kill moves. This goes for enemies as well as the player.
  • Blood Knight: Travis Touchdown. Most of the assassins probably qualify to some degree.
  • Bloodless Carnage: The bowdlerised version removes all the blood (despite keeping in the swearing and sexual content) so every enemy killed will instead explode into ash when killed. This also translates into the cutscenes.
  • Blown Across the Room: Used pretty blatantly (although the bullet is explosive) in the scene where Travis confronts Dr. Peace. For the sake of drama, Travis hits one of Peace's bullets with his Beam Katana and is rocketed into the wall with such force that his body smashes an outline into it.
  • Bondage Is Bad: One of the many reasons Travis considers Bad Girl a "perverted killer" is her extensive use of gimps. For batting practice.
  • Bond One-Liner: Precedes every ranked battle, and sometimes right after them, too. "It's open mic night in Hell, old man."
  • Bookends:
    • The title screen takes place in the parking lot of the No More Heroes Motel. The True Final Boss is fought in this same parking lot.
    • Travis mutters how he's "gotta find the exit" in the beginning and at the True Ending.
  • Booze Flamethrower: Bad Girl uses this to set her baseball bat on fire when she Turns Red.
  • Boss Banter: Most of the bosses in this and all subsequent games chastise Travis during battle.
  • Boss Corridor: The hallways preceding the boss fights usually have a full battery and health container (and a wrestling mask in the original game) as well as a convenient save point to help prepare for the upcoming battle. Played more straight in the first game, as there are long corridors that lead up to the fight (and Sylvia calls him via cellphone about the next fight and the chances he has of dying), as opposed to the shorter boss corridors in Desperate Struggle.
  • Boss Dissonance: The levels are all rather easy with very basic enemies, with occasional issues with mass gunfire. The boss battles were the obvious focus, where all the work was put in, although it varies from boss to boss.
  • Boss Game: While there's plenty of Mooks to hack and slash, the bosses are the real stars of the show.
  • Boss Remix: The final boss, Henry, uses the theme "We Are Finally Cowboys", a remix of the main theme.
  • Boss Subtitles: The game does this (with the exception of the first boss) whenever you enter a boss fight. Starting with a digitized voice announcing the boss's name and a quote from them.
  • Bottomless Bladder: Subverted by having Travis go to the bathroom in order to save the game.
  • Bowdlerise: Though not how you might expect.
    • The original intent for the game had tons of gore and left the bodies of ranked fight opponents after they die. This was how the American version of the game was released. The Japanese version removed all the blood, replacing it with smoke, and turned the bodies to immediate piles of ashes when they die. This was apparently intentional, as excessive violence is less acceptable in modern-day mainstream Japanese games. To the consternation of many European fans, the PAL version is taken from the Japanese cut, as Rising Star Games decided this version would appeal to a wider audience and improve sales. It had also just released after the classification controversy over Manhunt 2, and Red Star may have been attempting to avoid a similar problem. They promised the sequel would not be censored, and it wasn't (the Japanese version is still censored). The PS3 and Xbox 360 remake No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise is uncensored.
    • One bit of censorship created a bit of discussion: in the American version, Shinobu loses a hand at the end of her fight with Travis (he can't bring himself to kill her, but needs to incapacitate her to win the fight). This doesn't happen in the Japanese version, and so fans debated whether her losing her hand was canonical. The sequel finally confirmed it was, as Shinobu now has an Artificial Limb.
    • The European Spanish translation from Virgin Play removes a lot of the swear words, even though the game is rated 16+ and Spain makes no fuss over swearing. Plus, since only the subtitles were only translated, players can clearly hear any characters swearing while the subtitles omit it.
  • Braggart Boss: Destroyman. As a regular person, he's not too remarkable, but as soon as he puts on the "superhero" clothes, he prepares a triumphant presentation of himself for the battle. He calls his attacks by name, and overall pretends to be more than he actually is (note that he's only ranked 7th in the UAA).
  • Brain in a Jar: Letz Shake's machine, Dr. Shake, who later ascends to assassin level.
  • Breaking the Fourth Wall: The final ranked battle does this impressively, with characters discussing changing the rating of the game and possibly delaying it, including a Take That! against Duke Nukem Forever. The following scene is then literally fast forwarded to avoid that. If you slow down the speed, you can get more detail. The True Ending is even more crazy: Henry comes to Travis and not only reveals that he is Travis's twin brother, but that he's been married to Sylvia for ten years. The revelations are so unbelievable that Travis actually says "That's the craziest shit I ever heard! Why would you bring up something like that at the very last minute of the game?!", to which Henry replies "I would've thought you and the player would at least expect a twist of fate of some kind!" They then proceed to discuss Video Game Tropes and the impossibility of escaping from this particular game for the next few minutes. It's even implied that they both kill each other in battle just to escape the video game they're in, complete with Sylvia joking about how disappointing it is that there won't be a sequel.
  • Brick Joke: Henry's very presence in the first game is a giant Brick Joke of its own, as despite killing the fifth-ranked assassin and immediately challenging Travis to a duel, it's interrupted by Silvia, with Henry disappearing without giving Travis a chance to fight him. It's only in the True Ending when Henry returns and is actually fought.
  • Brother–Sister Incest: Travis and Jeane, though the former was unaware of their blood relationship at the time.
  • Bullet Catch:
    • Travis has no problem blocking any bullets flying at him — even ones fired from behind him — so long as you hold that lock-on button for dear life.
    • In the fight against Dr. Peace, he plays baseball with a bullet and his Beam Katana. Subverted, though, in that he didn't realize it was an exploding shell and gets tossed into the backdrop.
  • Bullet Hell: During a dream sequence before the fight with Harvey, you play a top-down, vertical-scrolling space shooter of the mech Glastonbury based on the Bizarre Jelly franchise, called Pure White Giant Glastonbury, with very simple graphics. Also an example of Game Within a Game. Afterwards, you can play it some more at Travis' apartment.
  • Bunny-Ears Lawyer: Half the assassins of the UAA easily fall into this category to varying degrees, including Travis himself. Plus half of the business owners in Santa Destroy.
  • Burger Fool: There's a fast food joint just outside of Travis' hotel named "Burger Suplex", which also keeps the flow of naming many landmarks after pro wrestling moves. It's engaged in a shadow war with the incroaching "Pizza Butt" franchise, and there are three assassination jobs where you pick off Pizza Butt executives at their request. This turns out to be a major plot point in the sequel: Jasper Butt Jr. is the Big Bad, and the men you assassinated were his father and two brothers.
  • But Not Too Foreign: Sylvia Christel is a blonde-haired, blue-eyed half-Japanese, half-Ukrainian bombshell raised in France but United States resident. This is evidenced solely by her French accent and a single random card that can only found in a New Game+. Her name, quite fittingly for such a sexy and seductive character, is also a shout out to the French classic "Emmanuelle" whose part was played by actress... Sylvia Kristel.
  • Call-Back: During the fight against Death Metal, Travis muses on how having a life like Death Metal would've been, noting several times that he should try and find the exit to Paradise, as it could end up being too much for him. During the real ending, Travis realizes that his life has become too much to handle (at least in tying up the loose ends Henry dropped on him), and laments that he can't find that exit to Paradise.
  • Calling Your Attacks: Travis, Shinobu and Destroyman do this. It's played with by Destroyman, whose calling of attacks makes his SFX Converter perform them.
  • Camping a Crapper: The standard ending ends with a new assassin attacking Travis while he's unarmed on the toilet. In the secret ending, Henry saves him. Presumably this is why in the sequel, he keeps his various beam katanas at the ready on his belt.
  • Car Fu: The Rank 2 level starts with Travis on the Schpeltiger, which he can use to mow down a bunch of mooks.
  • Carnival of Killers: The premise of the UAA rankings. The only way to move up is kill the other assassins.
  • Cat-and-Mouse Boss: Harvey Moiseiwitsch Volodarskii is vulnerable in the brief periods when he's not doing a magic attack (i.e. is only attacking with his beam katanas), so Travis has to go after him to hurt him. But when he is doing a magic attack, it's Travis who has to keep distance to avoid it.
  • Catchphrase: Sylvia would very much like you to trust your Force, and head for the Garden of Madness. Whatever that means.
  • Caught with Your Pants Down: Travis get ambushed while using the restroom, caught literally with his pants down.
  • Changing Clothes Is a Free Action: At first, it seems like this trope would be subverted by Destroyman, who has to ask Travis to turn around so he can change. However, this is only so Destroyman can get a cheap shot at him, as he has somehow managed to change from a mailman uniform to head-to-toe spandex in about the space of a second.
  • Character Customization: The player can change Travis' sunglasses, jacket, shirt, belt, and pants.
  • Charged Attack: A basic charged circular slice for low grip and a charged overhead slash for high grip.
  • Chase Fight: The cutscene after the final fight between Travis and Henry features this, as a visual metaphor for them trying to "find that exit they call paradise"
  • Chest Blaster: Destroyman has nipple machine guns. And a crotch laser.
  • Chiaroscuro: To the point where you wonder if everyone has their own personal spotlight.
  • Chunky Salsa Rule: During the fight with Bad Girl, getting close to her when she's crying if she has her hand on her bat results in her repeatedly beating your head with her bat until you're dead, no matter how much life you had before. A couple of other bosses have instant-kill attacks as well; Henry's is particularly impressive.
  • Cleanup Crew: Nice men show up to clean up the chunks of whatever is left of the assassin you just killed.
  • Cluster F-Bomb: All over the place. You can force Travis to say it by charging a high attack.
  • Coconut Meets Cranium: One of the job mini-games has you collecting coconuts. If you're not careful or really unlucky, Travis can get hit on the head with them, dazing him for a few seconds.
  • Code Name: Nearly everybody; in the original, Holly, Harvey, and Travis are the only ranked assassins without one, and even then Harvey's could be a stage name for all we're shown.
  • Cold Sniper: Speed Buster uses a Wave-Motion Gun in this way. It's extremely flashy, but with a weapon like that, she didn't become the #3-ranked assassin for nothing. Travis Touchdown is the only person who does not die from her first hit due to catching on to what she can do, and she is an inconspicuous bag lady who disguises her laser cannon as a shopping cart when not in combat.
  • Collection Sidequest: Collectible cards. You must beat the game twice minimum if you fail to acquire one of the cards on a playthrough. The second playthrough allows you to collect a new, different, second set of cards. Other collectibles include Lovikov Balls (which are used to earn new skills) and unique T-shirts hidden in the city of Santa Destroy.
  • Combining Mecha: Travis Touchdown's favorite show Pure White Lover Bizarre Jelly is about three magical girls with mecha that combine to form Pure White Giant Glastonberry.
  • Comic-Book Fantasy Casting: The game has a real affinity for modeling a number of its characters after famous personalities. Examples include.
  • Compensating for Something: These games take "sword = penis" and roll with it, and then keep rolling and rolling and...
  • Concept Art Gallery: The collectible cards that can be found in the New Game Plus (those accessible from the first playthrough avert the trope). These cards show concept art from the game's characters, including both supporting ones and the antagonistic assassins.
  • Console Cameo: Travis has a Nintendo 64 sitting on his shelf in the first game.
  • Contract on the Hitman: By signing the contract, you get pay and your next assassin's location. Also an example of But Thou Must!, as you don't have the option NOT to sign it. The game forces you to do so in order to continue playing. The contract will stay on screen until you sign it, and there's no other way to make it go away.
  • Contractual Boss Immunity: Bosses are completely immune to regular attacks, unless they are struck during specific times during their attacks. They're all immune to Anarchy in the Galaxy, which instantly kills regular enemies.
  • Corridor Cubbyhole Run: The Speed Buster battle. Travis has to smash his way into abandoned, ruined houses on either side of a street to avoid blasts from the bag lady/witch's Wave-Motion Gun.
  • Corrupted Character Copy: The game has two of the same character (namely, Dante), in the form of Travis Touchdown and Helter Skelter.
    • Helter Skelter is a jab at Dante's nature as an overly-edgy broody Bishōnen hero, being an albino with two guns that shoot bullets and missiles and have retractable bayonets. The trailer initially builds him up as the protagonist until Travis kills him, and in the game proper Travis muses that he can't decide whether Helter was "the shit or just plain shit".
    • Travis Touchdown has the red coat, the cool sword, the motorbike, and the brother for a rival, but Dante's love of conventionally "cool" things like rock music replaced by nerdier interests like anime and video games, and his roguish attitude is more aggressive and vulgar than Dante's.
  • Cosmic Deadline: Parodied. Jeane's backstory is literally fast-forwarded in game to get to the "final" boss. Not only a cosmic deadline, but a cosmic limitation. The characters seem to believe there's a limit to how much messed-up stuff they can say before the game gets cancelled or delayed. If the scene is replayed at a slowed rate, the story becomes understandable. It is notable as an example that combines terror and No Fourth Wall as Jeane's backstory goes from heartbreaking to unimaginably screwed up quickly, making the reaction portrayed beliveable. And then comes the true ending, where Travis finds out that Henry, the assassin who killed Dr. Letz Shake earlier in the game, is his twin Irish brother and the husband of Jeane, and at that point what little that remained of the fourth wall was done away with.
    Travis: "That's the craziest shit I've ever heard! Why would you bring up something like that at the very last minute of the game?"
  • Coup de Grâce Cutscene: The game does this with all of its bosses. Starting from No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle onwards, you perform an unloseable Action Command to deliver the final blow yourself.
  • Crapsack World: Santa Destroy, as shown through Travis' map of the place. The beach is full of toxic chemicals, there is an old weapons testing ground filled with killer scorpions, the people are actually ashamed to live in the town and all too happy to leave, the job employers send you tips for work at the assassination center disguised as an advertising agency, and the fast food places are garbage. That's not even getting into the Ranked Assassins.
  • Critical Existence Failure: Travis and his foes remain perfectly fine up until they lose all of their health, at which point they're defeated and/or die.
  • Crocodile Tears: Bad Girl has an attack that utilizes this. At any point during her boss fight, she will stop and cry on the floor. If the player attacks her while she is fake crying, she will attack the player with her bat with such a savage attack it might as well be a one-hit kill (though the player can survive if it has almost full health). However, she isn't faking all the time, she is, after all, fighting you while blindingly drunk, and if both of her hands are on her face, she is genuinely crying, but if she has one hand in her face and another in her weapon, it's a trick.
  • Cruel and Unusual Death: The game features — in cutscenes — disembowelment, vertical bisection, suicide by grenade-in-mouth, another vertical bisection followed by being blown up, an Eye Scream followed by yet another vertical bisection performed by a huge buzzsaw, being TRISECTED, and someone's CROTCH getting PUNCHED through, along with the usual beheadings and impalement in cutscenes and during gameplay. There's also Cranberry Chocolate Sundae, a Limit Break based on the concept of killing as many Mooks this way as possible.
  • Cute Kitten:
    • Jeane the cat, the closest thing to family our homicidal hero Travis has in Santa Destroy. The player can interact and play with her by selecting the "Jeane" option in Travis' living room. There is absolutely nothing gained by doing this. Try to stop yourself doing it every time you're in the room.
    • One of the jobs in the first game has Travis wondering around picking up cute runaway cats.
  • Cutscene Boss:
    • Helter Skelter is fought briefly in a cutscene at the beginning of the game. You get to see more of it if you watch the game trailer on Travis' TV.
    • Letz Shake is also killed by Henry before you get to fight him, though he returns in the sequel for a proper fight.
  • Damage Over Time: Getting hit with a flaming bat will make Travis catch on fire and take damage until he uses a fire extinguisher or dies.
  • Damage-Proof Vehicle: You can crash Travis' motorcycle all you want, but it will always stay in perfect condition. At least until the endgame.
  • Damage-Sponge Boss: The secret final battle against Henry, Travis's half-brother. As a boss he's rather easy, with AI that can easily be tricked into a loop, but it still takes upwards of 10 minutes to whittle down his health bar and win the fight.
  • Dark Action Girl: Nearly every female character, Speed Buster being an elderly example.
  • David Versus Goliath: Usually, you're fighting someone with far more experience and better weapons than you, on their own turf, on their own terms. Especially true with Letz Shake or it would have been if you actually got to fight him, and Speed Buster. Inverted rather unsettlingly with the Final Boss, where Travis faces off with a completely unarmored and unarmed opponent.
  • Deconstruction: The game plays out as a mockery of the Excuse Plot and how messed up (an assassin) and simple ("I just wanna be #1") someone would have to be to go through with the kind of violence found in video games. It gets to the point where Travis fights his brother Henry while Henry openly mocks how Travis doesn't even know why they're fighting. The game also takes great pains to show how videogames are not like real life at all, and trying to project your videogame fantasies onto reality would be horribly messed up. Note that most of the "levels" Travis slaughters his way through are just dingy, run-down places like subways or construction sites, and the whole mood of these areas evokes a very "Snuff-film" feeling.
  • Deconstructor Fleet: The game rips into To Be a Master and Gotta Kill 'Em All plots, showing just what kind of sick, twisted world an equally sick protagonist would actually want to participate in.
  • Deliberate Values Dissonance: Everything about the game, right down to the name "Travis Touchdown," is meant to evoke different emotions from Japanese and American gamers. It is supposed to be a linear, pseudo-sandbox game in part because of how differently Japanese and American gamers react to the concept. As for the name "Travis Touchdown," Suda 51 has explicitly said the name was chosen because it sounds like an over-the-top action hero to Japanese audiences but positively goofy to American ones.
  • Denser and Wackier: Compared to Suda51's previous works, this is much more silly work, though it is FAR from light hearted.
  • Desperation Attack: There's at least one desperation attack for most bosses. Some bosses gain a One-Hit KO when they are down to about half health.
  • Diegetic Soundtrack Usage: At the very beginning of the game, Travis whistles the game's theme.
  • Dirty Cop: Dr. Peace is a Dirty Cop, a Deadly Doctor, and a skilled assassin with many interests outside the law.
  • Disappearing Box: Harvey's instant kill move, which succeeds if you fail the QTE.
  • Disappointed by the Motive: Most of the assassins have something behind them, some reason for what they do or at least some sort of emotional core. Bad Girl just kills people because she wants to. Travis is not prepared for this, and his reaction is stripped of all his usual snark.
  • Distant Finale: The jazz album The Outer Rim features drama segments starring Travis and Sylvia. Turns out they're immortal. And on the moon.
  • Dodge the Bullet: Beam katana wielders can deflect bullets with more ease than Jedi and Sith can deflect blaster shots. The only drawback is that it drains the battery.
  • Does This Remind You of Anything?:
    • If the Beam Katana runs out of power, then in order to recharge it, Travis has to furiously shake the handle. And he does this while holding it directly in front of him and gyrating his crotch, grunting if you have to do it long enough. It, of course, requires shaking the Wiimote in a similar fashion. Destroyman also fires giants lasers out of his crotch.
    • Speed Buster's weapon, the Buster Launcher, has a barrel extending from its shopping cart base that's maybe fifty feet long—a barrel she shoots particle beams from. As in, a giant phallic objected aimed at the player. Doubles as a stealth pun, as in the Design Materials you can see art of the various phases of her weapon's transformation, from an Egg Mart shopping cart, to the shape of a baby chick's head, to a completed form resembling a mechanical rooster's head with the barrel extending from the beak.
  • Doppelgänger Attack: Death Metal, the Rank 10 Assassin in No More Heroes, produces two doppelgangers when his health gets low enough. They have as much health as he does at that point, making finding the real one a bit of a chore.
  • Double-Meaning Title: The game is a heavily deconstructive satire on the Anti-Hero, with its protagonist, Travis Touchdown, being merely one immature, bloodthirsty miscreant in a world of violent assassins that — while some may be played more sympathetically than others — are certainly still not "good" people. In that sense, the world has "no more heroes" to really uphold a traditional moral bedrock (which poses an interesting series of twists that causes Travis' philosophies to shift anyway).
  • Downer Ending: The first, obviously false ending: if Travis Touchdown doesn't get all the beam katana upgrades, he will end the game with a Garcian Smith Expy ready to murder him in his own apartment while he's on the toilet, which immediately cuts to the closing credits. The real ending continues from there.
  • The Driver: Bishop Shidux will always ride out your motorcycle to you if you get too far from it in the overworld.
  • Drunken Master: Randall Lovikov is the town lush. He's also implied to be way beyond Travis in ability, and his advice to "keep practicing" might as well be continued with "and you'll be almost as cool as me one day."
  • Dude, Where's My Respect?: Travis gets strung along by Sylvia and tricked a lot.
  • Duel Boss: After a slew of boss fights against all manner of miscreants and misanthropes, the True Final Boss of the whole game is Travis' long-lost Irish brother and Sylvia's husband of ten years, Henry. No gimmicks, no interventions, just two young men with Laser Blades, similar fighting styles and a score to settle in a deserted car park.
  • Dying Town: Santa Destroy seems to be this, or closer to the small-town version of Vice City. It is generally portrayed as a derelict, seedy place with a menial population and a notable lack of care for education, infrastructure and culture. It is heavily implied that most of the inhabitants remain there simply because they couldn't leave for one reason or another.
  • Eagleland: This game and all its sequels are games made by a Japanese man obsessed with American pop culture about an American man obsessed with Japanese pop culture, which makes for interesting examples, insofar as they are as explicitly concerned with America and its popular culture as any Japanese game since the Mother series.
  • Earthquake Machine: This is Letz Shake's weapon of choice: a giant, silo-like device capable of unleashing a magnitude 20 seismic blast when fully charged. We never get to see it in action as the instant before it finally charges up, he and the device get slashed completely in half by Henry.
  • Easy Levels, Hard Bosses: The game lets you slice up mooks with relative impunity. The first boss will tear you up if you rush him the same way. It just gets worse from there.
  • Edge Gravity:
    • Contributes to the Rank 6 boss. You two battle on a beach, which she has filled with pitfall traps. When you run over one the first time, Travis falls in and has to climb out fast before a grenade the boss tosses in goes off. Once the pit is exposed, however, it has no edge gravity - running into it forces another climbing session, as does running too close to it.
    • You cannot run into the ocean. You can drive into it, the game takes you back to the motel.
  • Electric Joybuzzer: Destroyman uses this during the pre-battle on Travis by honoring their battle with a hand-shake and activating his Destory-Spark. He seriously thought he was going to die laughing from how Travis fell for it so easily.
  • Elegant Gothic Lolita: Bad Girl's design in the original is similar to Sweet Lolita or Little Bo Peep. Bad Girl herself is... not so sweet.
  • The Ending Changes Everything: The UAA being a scam and Travis fighting for the purpose of getting revenge on Jeane.
  • Endless Corridor: The path to the Rank 5 fight is literally a long, long, long hallway.
  • End-of-Series Awareness: There are two gags at the end of the game that joke about how it probably won't get a sequel. Including one crack about how the sequel could turn into No More Heroes Forever and be delayed forever and another where a character flat out says "Too bad there will never be a sequel!" All of it was averted, since it was able to get a sequel.
  • Enemy-Detecting Radar: requires you to earn the "Memory of White", a minimap with the enemies in purple and the treasures in yellow, by collecting Lovikov balls.
  • Energy Weapon: Destroyman and Speed Buster have this, and they're both an instant game over.
  • Enormous Engine: Travis's scooter, the Schpeltiger, which is painted to look like an X-Wing fighter.
  • Environmental Symbolism: Throughout the game, but most notably in the Final Boss fight with Jeane, where both you and your opponent are motivated by revenge and Travis' unusually eloquent last words before the fight starts are "Vengeance begets vengeance." Appropriately, you and your enemy are in a ring made from an energy-dragon-sword-thing that looks like a representation of the Ouroborus and shrinks as the fight progresses.
  • Everyone Is Related: Played for laughs most of the time.
  • Expository Gameplay Limitation: Whenever Sylvia calls Travis on the phone, the game restricts his movement to just walking.
  • Expy:
    • The assassin who attacks Travis at the end of the game is very similar to Garcian Smith in appearance, and the scene parallels both an event from Garcian's backstory as well as a less serious one from killer7 in which the player can walk in on that game's Travis exercising (in both cases, the respective Travis responds with "Can't a guy have/get some privacy?").
    • Helter Skelter is an expy of Dante from Devil May Cry, though with some hints of Sephiroth thrown in - an idea which they ran with for the sequel, where his brother Skelter Helter is a more obvious expy of Cloud.
    • Speed Buster is a pretty sadistic Marisa expy. Complete with Nuclear Master Spark.
  • Extended Gameplay: Done sneakily in the game, as after becoming the #1 Assassin, the player is given the choice to save a clear file and watch one of two endings. The second ending, which is only made available after you buy all the beam katana upgrades, involves you killing one more boss - the same boss that cheated you out of one of your own boss fights, the putative endgame boss being a Anticlimax Boss.
  • Eye Scream: Travis Touchdown blinds Harvey Moiseiwitsch Volodarskii by throwing his beam katana at him, cutting out both of his eyes.
  • The Faceless: The taller of Sylvia's cleaners never has his face shown on-camera. Even happens when she tosses him Speed Buster's severed head and he grabs it and holds it in front of his face for way longer than necessary.
  • Fake Longevity: In order to enter into ranking fights with opposing assassins, you have to first perform side jobs and miscellaneous assassination requests to work up the cash needed to enter the fights. It didn't help that most of these side quests were quite tedious.
  • Fake Weakness: Bad Girl: hit her when she's faking it and it's an instant KO for you.
  • Fanservice: The 360/PS3 versions have a mode that ups the sexy for the already provocative female outfits (see through shirts, cheerleader outfits, bikinis etc).
  • Fast-Forward Gag: One late game conversation is fast forwarded; slowed down it reveals father-daughter incest. The game hints ("It's impossible, it'll only jack up the age rating of this game even further") that the conversation was fast-forwarded to avoid a higher rating, but this isn't actually the case: Suda51 states that it was actually sped up due to Rule of Funny... that, and the dialogue is a fairly lengthy Infodump. Travis' shocked reactions are priceless. Of course, whether the ESRB ever listened to a slowed-down version, and if they didn't, how they would have reacted to it, is a mystery for the ages.
  • Faux Affably Evil: Destroyman and Bad Girl. They look like graceful opponents for Travis, but they're obviously faking the attitude, being unrepentant scums.
  • Final Boss Preview: The game has this happen during the 5th ranked fight with Letz Shake. Just before the fight starts, Henry pops in and easily strikes him down with the intent of dueling with Travis. Before the two of them come to blows, Sylvia calls the fight off and Travis grudgingly has to wait until beating the game and earning the real ending to fight him.
  • Final-Exam Boss: Henry is the pinnacle of real difficulty. You have to manage to learn how to Dark Step, emergency evade, and slash the hell out of him. He manages to be completely fair, despite his various unblockable attacks and his dreaded yet awesome One-Hit Kill, plus the Boss Remix "We Are Finally Cowboys" blaring in the background. The game actually makes sure that you're (hopefully) at the top of your game by requiring you to attain all beam katanas before facing off against him.
  • Finishing Move: Travis rakes his beam saber across the chest of an enemy after suplexing them.
  • Fixed-Floor Fighting: There's no way you can move out of the boss arenas or the enemy rushes.
  • Flaming Sword: Bad Girl, who wields a flaming baseball bat, made possible by her spitting alcohol all over it and lighting it up.
  • Flash Step:
    • In the Final Boss battle, Jeane is capable of streaking around the battlefield in a decidedly Dragon Ball Z-esque manner. While this is likely utilized to show off just how patently nasty and tough the boss is in addition to disorienting the player, it's worth noting that you have no trouble keeping locked on to and tracking the boss's movements; Travis is capable of blocking every bullet fired from a full Uzi clip, after all.
    • Travis himself can do this by pressing a direction in the control stick right after guarding an attack. From his perspective, he just does a regular dodge in Bullet Time.
  • Floral Theme Naming: Aside from the Blood Berry, all of Travis's beam katanas are named for flowers, with this game giving him the Tsubaki Mk. I, II, and III.
  • Flunky Boss: Bad Girl. At one point of the battle, she brings up several tied men to the battlefield to bat them at Travis.
  • Flushing-Edge Interactivity: Subverted. Every save point is some kind of toilet, and your file data is on toilet paper.
  • Foreshadowing:
    • Going through the game a second time around reveals hints about Jeane, and Travis becoming an assassin in order to kill her, such as the "promise" Travis mentions after killing Death Metal, the remarks about Travis' parents just before he fights Harvey and the song Dr. Peace sings, "The Virgin Child Makes Her Wish Without Feeling Anything", echoes Jeane's backstory.
    • The introductory boss fight against Death Metal is overlaid with an Inner Monologue by Travis, who at first imagines himself in the seemingly glamorous life of his accomplished opponent before slowly realizing that not only may it be too much, it actually might be a trap into his own downfall with no way out. By this point in time in the story, Travis is largely more interested in being number 1 of the UAA before the game really starts playing its deconstructive hand, so in retrospect, this moment reveals that even by the start of the game, a faint part of him is aware that he might be in for a world much darker than he expected.
    • Sylvia on the entry fee to the UAA. Turns out that she is ripping Travis off with his money.
  • Fragile Speedster: Jeane has remarkably low health for a boss, but can counter your grabs, dodge almost all of your attacks, and moves incredibly fast.
  • Freudian Threat: Sylvia says to Travis: "If I ever hear you mumble another woman's name in your sleep, you'll wake up the next morning with your joystick missing."
  • Funny Background Event: In the bedroom of Travis's apartment, a cat toy is hanging from the ceiling fan. Occasionally, Travis's cat Jeane can be seen swinging around in a circle, hanging from the cat toy.

    G-L 
  • Gainax Ending: It's played for laughs, but that doesn't make it any less gainaxy. Travis starts learning of his family history and real reasons for fighting right about when the fourth wall disappears for good. He goes home and gets attacked by somebody who looks suspiciously like Garcian Smith while on the toilet, when Henry shows up, kills Not-Garcian and fights Travis because reasons. After the boss battle, they run down the street talking about how they can't escape from the game, before clashing blades again. Meanwhile, Sylvia and her daughter, who is the third character in the game named Jeane, are admiring a painting of said event. Most of the plot is still vague at this point, and Sylvia taunts the player about how there won't be a sequel to clear it up, before the words "TO BE CONTINUED" appear a few screens later.
  • Game-Breaking Bug: If you load a saved game right before the True Final Boss, the Dark Step ability sometimes can end up disabled. On Mild, this is only a minor inconvenience, but on Bitter...
  • Game Within a Game: Whilst travelling via train during one of his missions, Travis pulls out a hand-held console and starts playing Pure White Tiny Giant Glastonbury (which itself is a spin-off of a fictional anime Travis is obsessed with). Once the game is complete, the mission continues and the game is unlocked at his home for future playing.
  • Gang of Hats: Played straight by the early bosses and their mooks.
  • Genre Deconstruction: The game is a deconstruction of the Power Fantasy. The borderline Villain Protagonist is a psychopath who treats real life like a video game, and this might work out for him when he's killing other like-minded individuals, but in-between the intense fights he has to earn enough money to enter the next fight by doing menial jobs. In the action stages he's powerful, but in his day-to-day life he's just an otaku creep - exactly the kind of person who would be playing the game. Even his motivation for killing is initially just money to buy videogames and a half-promise of sex, and his enemies commonly have much more sympathetic backstories than he does - and when he gets attached to them, he has to live with the fact that because of the structure of the game, they must die anyway. Wide-Open Sandbox gets some jabs too, with a open-world city in which there's barely anything to do because no matter how much freedom he has, Travis can't really affect anything in his life.
  • Genre Savvy:
    • Travis acknowledges he's in a video game at one point or another, but Henry flat-out calls him on it:
    Henry: Lemme ask ya... how do you plan to put an end to all of this?
    Travis: Wait a sec... you want me to tie up all these loose ends? I don't think so!
    Henry: You're the protagonist! I'm just the cool, handsome foil, who happens to be your twin brother. Hate to say it, but it's your job!
    Travis: Answer me!
    Jeane: It's impossible.
    Travis: Impossible? What do you mean?!
    Jeane: It's too terrible. It alone would jack up the age rating of this game even further.
    Travis: So what? Who cares?!
    Jeane: What if the game gets delayed? You wouldn't want this to become No More Heroes Forever, do you?
    Travis: Alright, I'll fast forward this so you can tell me.
  • "Get Back Here!" Boss: Holly Summers is hard to catch not only because she moves fast, but also because there are many buried traps and mines in the battlefield (a coast).
  • Giant Space Flea from Nowhere: The final boss is Jeane, a character only mentioned in the game manual and once in passing, who appears and reels off a huge amount of tragic backstory and villainous exposition before her fight. The pre-fight scene assigns her as the major antagonist of the game, and it all happens moments before the final sequence of the game.
  • Gimmick Level: The game features the motorbike sequences in the last two standard stages (the ones respectively leading to the Rank 2 and Rank 1 fights). Travis has to defeat his enemies by running over them instead of slashing them with his beam katana. The Rank 1 scene also has an area where you have to exit from an illusory forest, killing more enemies in the process.
  • Glass Cannon:
    • Oddly for the standard Final Boss, Jeane. Her health is relatively low, but she dodges most of your attacks, will counter your grabs, moves really fast and has a large number of unblockable attacks and damaging abilities. The cutscenes actually imply that she isn't even glass, as you'd never win without help. An even straighter example is Speed Buster, who has a Wave-Motion Gun, but dies as soon as you make it to her. A Justified Trope with her: being that her primary weapon is a laser cannon, she's probably not very well versed in close combat. Even if she was, she's shown to be an older, out of shape assassin, so she'd probably not put up much of a fight up close.
    • Shinobu, who makes up for her extreme fragility with ridiculous power and speed. Even her taunt can do significant damage if Travis is careless, and several of her later attacks leave him one hit from death. Doubles as a Wake-Up Call Boss, since the only way to beat her is to out-maneuver her.
  • Go Wait Outside: When you give Naomi the Military Secret or Japanese Sword, she tells you to come back later for a new beam katana. "Later", of course, means "as long as it takes to leave and come back in"... though they're so expensive it's more like "leave, do a few assassination side-jobs, come back in".
  • Gotta Catch Them All: The game has several collectibles in both the overworld and the rank stages. The most notable case, however, is the cards: Only the first 50 can be found in the first playthrough (and all of them are in the rank stages), and they're based on purely fictional wrestlers. In the New Game Plus, 100 more cards are added, and they're based on ranked assassins and supporting characters; some of these extra cards aren't found on the rank stages but on the mainland of Santa Destroy, so Travis has to look for them extensively in order to complete the collection.
  • Gotta Kill Them All: As the main character, Travis has to murder the top ten ranked assassins in the nation, one by one, to rise through the ranks and gain the top spot for himself.
  • Gutted Like a Fish: Travis Touchdown Dr. Peace this way after he wins his fight against him.
  • Go Wait Outside: When you give Naomi the Military Secret or Japanese Sword, she tells you to come back later for a new beam katana. "Later", of course, means "as long as it takes to leave and come back in"... though they're so expensive it's more like "leave, do a few assassination side-jobs, come back in".
  • Graceful Loser: Every battle with a ranked assassin is a fight to the death, but some of the assassins you beat will calmly admit they were beaten, possibly even congratulate you, and wait for the killing blow with their heads held high. The clearest examples are numbers 10, 6, 3 and Jeane.
  • Gratuitous Japanese: Travis. Also Shinobu, the rank 8 boss' nickname.
  • Greater-Scope Villain: If you slow down the exposition delivered by Jeane, you'll learn that her actions were out of revenge for Travis's father abusing her as a child.
  • Groin Attack: Dark Star is punched through the groin by Jeane.
  • Half the Man He Used to Be:
    • Travis can chop enemies in half with the finishing blow.
    • Travis does this vertically to Speed Buster in a cutscene after defeating her in the PAL version of the game (in the US version he decapitates her). Henry finishes off an assassin who came after Travis horizontally in the ending.
    • Travis also cuts Destroyman cleanly in two vertically. He somehow returns in the sequel as a pair of cyborgs, each half of his biological body supplemented by a robot half.
  • Heart Container: The game awards Travis with a Zelda-style Heart Container upon the defeat of a boss. An extra Container is gained when the training with Thunder Ryu is completed.
  • Hearts Are Health: A pixelated heart represents health in this and all main games in the series, with the pixels being the real units of health. Max health increases change the color of the center of the heart, creating layers of pixels with each color.
  • Hide Your Children: The only child is shown after the credits after all the bloodshed is over.
  • Hidden Depths: Dr. Peace, the 9th ranked assassin, is described as a corrupt police officer with ties to the mafia and a merciless Gunslinger archetype. When you finally reach the battleground, you find that he's also a fan of karaoke, and has a damn good singing voice to boot. Plus, he wanted to see his wife and daughter one last time before dying.
  • High-Pressure Blood: Often, blood will spurn out wildly and cover anything in a 100-yard radius. Its equivalent of Everything Fades is dead bodies vanishing in a puff of blood — apparently, any non-major character who dies simply explodes into a smoky cloud of blood. This was only applied to the USA release; the Japanese and European releases replaced the blood with black mist.
  • Hoist by His Own Petard:
    • Harvey Volodarskii, who gets blinded by Travis and killed by the same giant-circular-saw illusion he tried to kill Travis with before the fight began.
    • Holly Summers' instant death attack is evaded by deliberately falling into one of the trap holes she dug to trap you.
  • Hot Paint Job: The leopard jeans are dark blue and have flames embroidered on the side. Their item description says this:
    Everyone knows adding flames to something makes it cooler.
  • Hotter and Sexier: Heroes Paradise is the original game with improved graphics and an extra gamemode called Very Sweet Mode added, which has all the female characters from the original game in a lot skimpier outfits. Whether this is a good thing or a bad thing depends on which character being depicted, but it should be noted that this applies to literally all of the female characters. Including Speed Buster, a fat, elderly woman.
  • Hub Level: The game takes place in the city of Santa Destroy, which may seem like a Wide-Open Sandbox to the untrained eye, but is in practice more of an extremely elaborate hubworld where the player can take menial part-time jobs and low-paying assassination gigs between tackling the game's boss levels.
  • Humble Goal: Although perhaps not a lofty goal, Travis initially only joins the ranking battles because Sylvia said she would bang him if he made it to the top. She also only seemed to have been manipulating him and he was simply stupid and horny enough to fall for it.
  • Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: With short descriptions.
  • Idiot Ball: Travis has it during the leadup to the seventh battle.
  • I Know Madden Kombat: Travis Touchdown mixes his apparently professional sword training with Mexican luchador wrestling moves learned by watching video tapes, as well as special attacks learned from his favorite fictional moe anime, 'Pure White Lover Bizarre Jelly'. Despite his last name, he has no attacks that have anything to do with football.
  • I Know Mortal Kombat: Travis learns new moves by renting wrestling videos, and "remembers" other moves by finding wrestling masks lying about with notes reminding him of them stuffed into the masks' mouths.
  • Impossibly Cool Weapon: The final five-ranked assassins in the first game come at you with a portable brain-powered earthquake generator, a magic show, a Wave-Motion Gun disguised as a shopping cart, the aforementioned lightsaber dragon, and... a wooden baseball bat. And the assassin who totes that last one is by far the deadliest of the bunch.
  • Improbable Age: Henry and Sylvia were married and in college 10 years prior. Since Henry is Travis's twin brother, that would mean that Henry and Sylvia were attending college and got married at around 17.
  • Improbable Weapon User: Death Metal has a giant katana that transforms from something resembling a briefcase, Destroyman has a laser codpiece, Holly wields a shovel and fires rockets out of her prosthetic leg, Letz Shake has a giant earthquake-maker, complete with a Brain in a Jar, Speed Buster has a shopping cart/Wave-Motion Gun, Bad Girl has a baseball bat and gimps (she attacks by hitting gimps hard enough to send them flying at Travis which he can hit back or land and serve as regular mooks), and Dark Star pulls a laser whip shaped like a dragon's tail out of his helmet.
  • Incendiary Exponent: In Pinch Mode, Bad Girl spits out alcohol all over her bat. That's when the lighter comes out.
  • Inescapable Ambush: The game does this during most boss fights, and in some Mook Fights as well. The most annoying one being during the 1st-ranked Assassin fight, where the border is a glowing serpent-like dragon, that shrinks the arena during the fight twice. As your opponent is a martial-arts master with a lot of very fast dash moves, this makes the fight a frustrating experience to say the least.
  • Inexplicably Awesome: The majority of characters, including Travis. If you're lucky, you'll get a brief snippet of vague backstory for your next assassin, but other than that there's no explanation for the insane mailman superhero with the crotch laser (who even comes back as two separate characters in the sequel despite (or due to) being bisected), the unstable baseball bat-wielding ballerina with an army of gimps, and many other characters. Even the UAA itself is strange and incomprehensible; somehow Sylvia managed to dupe at least 11 dangerous killers (and one loser otaku with a beam katana) into believing they were part of a fictional organization and get them to kill each other. But then in the sequel it's suddenly a real organization again.
  • Infinity +1 Sword: The Tsubaki Mk. III is the infinity sword. With a price comparable to the entry fees for Ranking Matches, it doesn't just increase your attacking power, it also has increased range with its finishing moves, allowing you to kill several enemies at once, and extends the charge attack to a slightly more useful three hit combo. The Tsubaki Mk III's Energy Saver is what makes it a literal infinity+1 sword - costing a whopping $999,999, it gives the Tsubaki Mk III infinite energy. In effect, this means you can spam the charged attacks as much as you want. The sole downside is that it's not quite as powerful as the Mk. II.
  • Inherently Funny Words: Killing enemies occasionally causes them to shout "My spleen!" as they die. See also some of the luchadore mask cards. Clearly someone recognized the comedy in a name like "La Guerra, Jr." and ran with it, because "Jr." recurs several times in the card collection and keeps getting funnier. It's Truth in Television though, as many Luchadore names are passed on this way. 'Hijo de ____', '_______ Jr.' are very common things to see in a Luchadore name.
  • Instant Costume Change: When Travis arrives in Destroyman's arena to face him for his spot in the assassin rankings, he finds him wearing his civilian outfit, a normal postman uniform. Destroyman asks Travis to turn around just for a moment so he can change, and Travis complies. The moment Travis turns his back to him, Destroyman fires his Wave-Motion Gun, and Travis just barely manages to dodge it in time. When Travis turns, he sees Destroyman has already changed into his outfit in an instant.
  • Insurmountable Waist-Height Fence: The game features insurmountable ankle-height curbs in various parts of Santa Destroy.
  • Interface Screw: The Rank 4 boss can either invert your controls, your screen, or, if you're really unlucky, both at the same time.
  • Intimate Lotion Application: When Travis goes to talk to Sylvia before the Holly Summers fight, she's sunbathing without a care at the Body Slam Beach. Being The Tease, she asks him to rub oil on her while she briefs him on the next mission and since Travis is extremely horny, he all but jumps at the opportunity to get his hands on his Lust Object. He even goes so far as to get his hands close to her inner thigh, but Sylvia shoves him off then, reminding him that she won't sleep with him until he's the number 1 assassin.
  • Invulnerable Attack:
    • Travis is invulnerable while executing a charged attack. It's mostly useless throughout the game, because none of the charged attacks last very long, and they're a huge drain on your weapon's power... until you get the Infinity +1 Sword and its power upgrades. It comes with a charged combo and the upgrades give it infinite energy, making it game-breaking, especially in subsequent playthroughs.
    • Shinobu's special move. Get hit, and you'll be knocked down to three hit points.
  • Jumped at the Call: Travis Touchdown is an otaku who spends 95% of his time watching wrestling tapes, various anime, and occasionally going out and slaughtering en masse. He literally buys a beam katana off of eBay, then when a random woman in a bar asks him to decapitate someone with it, is only too happy to do so. Then again, he also loves to grab the Idiot Ball as well.
  • Justified Save Point: Parodied, since there's No Fourth Wall. Travis saves by going to toilet to drop a save.
  • Kamehame Hadoken: As opposed to the honorable trope namers, the game's resident cheating bastard, Destroyman, uses the sphere-type Destroy Cannon. The Destroy Buster (beam-type), however, comes from somewhere else.
  • Katanas Are Just Better:
    • Beam katanas, no less. They're really just called that, since they're more your regular lightsaber, with only Thunder Ryu's D.O.S. and the Tsubaki Mk III that's built out of it even vaguely resembling an actual katana (though both go all-out on that resemblance; the D.O.S. gets an actual wooden sheath, while Travis activates the Mk III before battle by drawing it from his hip in a manner resembling iaijutsu). Death Metal's sword resembles a giant straight razor more than anything else, but is still called a beam katana. Henry is a bit of an inversion however, as his style, or at least the stances, seem to be far more based on Western styles of swordsmanship, and his weapon, the Cross Sabre, looks much more like a claymore. It's worth noting that he's faster and stronger than Travis, and his weapon is parallel to if not greater than yours.
    • Shinobu stands out by using real genuine katana. No crazy electric beams here. She's consistently considered one of the harder bosses to fight as well.
  • Kick the Dog: Most of the later assassins enjoy kicking the nearest canine. Since the viewpoint character isn't exactly a friend to all living things, this is probably there to justify the bad guy's eventual gory deaths. Number 2, Bad Girl, states that she feels no remorse about killing anyone while slaughtering clones for fun, Number 3, Speed Buster, kills a major trainer in a rather messy manner, and Number 7, DestroyMan, cheats so consistently it's remarkable. As a twist, a good bunch do not kick the dog, however.
  • Kill Enemies to Open: Each stage requires Travis taking down various Mooks before he can enter the next area.
  • Kill Steal:
    • Henry does this in a cutscene for Letz Shake, the fifth ranked assassin.
    Travis: Where are your manners? That was my kill you naughty boy!
    • Jeane does this as well to Dark Star, the first ranked assassin. It should be noted that the association has apparently thought of this ahead of time, however: in both cases, despite Travis not having killed his intended opponent himself (or the person who stole his kill, in Henry's case), Travis is still declared the "winner" and takes their rank.
  • Kitsch Collection: Travis' collection of luchadore masks that you amass through the game, which will also transfer to the sequel if you start the game with save data from this one. There is also his massive collection of Pure White Lover Bizarre Jelly merchandise.
  • Klingon Promotion: Exactly how the UAA works. Wanna be the #1 assassin in America? Then just go kill the current #1, as well as any other assassins ranked ahead of you.
  • Land Mine Goes "Click!": Travis encounters a lot of these during the beach mission. Since he perpetually carries the Idiot Ball, this results in him stepping on several mines in-cutscene, resulting in the "click," then getting blown up. Luckily, he's strangely unharmed. The last one makes fun of this, as he sees the mine, steps over it with a chuckle... and steps on a buried one. "FUUUUUUUUUUUUU-" BOOM.
  • Laser Blade:
    • Travis' blue-colored Beam Katana actually handles this in a sensible and relatively realistic manner. The hilt extends a "cap" to terminate the beam, and the beam is projected along a central filament strung between the hilt and the cap. The downside is that this makes the Beam Katana look like nothing so much as a Fluorescent Light-bulb Of Death. Then again, given the game's sense of humor, this was probably intentional.
    • Sometime after the game's equator, the Beam Katana can be upgraded to a five-bladed version of the Beam Katana (Tsubaki-II), which looks less like a sword than a large laser club. The ultimate weapon (Tsubaki-III) plays this trope straight, being quite literally a green-colored beam katana, fashioned after the weapon of his recently deceased master; a similar, purple blade is wielded by Henry, the True Final Boss.
    • There are a few characters who wield downplayed examples that also appear more plausible: Helter Skelter and Death Metal wield standard-looking blades, albeit very large ones, whose lasers simply run along their sharp edges and, just like Travis's weapon, terminate at their tips.
  • Last Lousy Point: Getting Gold Medals on the Pizza Butt missions, for a mix of unreasonable par times, guns, and enemy beam katanas. note 
  • Left Hanging: The game really ends with just Travis Touchdown and Henry striking each other by the Santa Destroy flag. This leaves many things to consider, such as what the UAA really is, who Travis's parents were, who Darkstar was, and, of course, if the events affected the video game's real world or if it really was Silvia's daughter Jeane day dreaming about a picture. Some, but not all, of these questions are answered in No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle.
  • Leitmotif: Travis and Henry. All of the other assassins also have their own unique themes.
  • Level in Boss Clothing: Speed Buster, who attacks with a large Wave-Motion Gun that deals a lot of damage, and from the long distance is impossible to defeat, so the only thing Travis can do is to approach her step by step until he manages to disable the weapon and then reach her to kill her instantly.
  • Life Meter: Travis' health is represented by an 8-bit heart, with each "pixel" being a unit of health (though if his health is upgraded, some of the pixels change color to represent more than one health unit.) Enemy life meters are a ring of "pixels" around the enemy, with each pixel getting smaller in a clockwise pattern as the enemy takes damage.
  • Light Is Not Good: Destroyman appears to be a superhero and claims to fight with honour... but it's not hard to see that he's one of the most dirty fighting, Ax-Crazy assassins that Travis has to fight.
  • Limit Break: Amusingly preceded by Travis loudly yelling the names of his favorite anime characters' attacks.
    Travis: Blueberry Cheese BROWNIE!
  • Literal Disarming: Used twice; first against Death Metal, the very first boss in the game, where Travis slices off both hands, causing his BFS to go flying into the ceiling. The second one is used against Shinobu, removing her right hand (and her katana), preventing her from fighting Travis any further.
  • Loads and Loads of Loading: The game has a fair amount of loading, but also includes something to fidget with during them. Pressing the B button lets you bounce the rotating star, and if it goes off the top of the screen, it loops around the bottom and changes colour.
  • Long Song, Short Scene: A tune plays at the beginning of the fight against Holly Summers. Then, you fall into a hole, a cutscene is triggered, and the music changes for the rest of the fight, never to be heard again.
  • The Lost Woods: The Forest of Bewilderment, which makes up for the second half of the Rank 1 stage. It's an illusory forest (the place Travis reaches to after the highway chase sequence in the first half) with branching paths. Choosing the wrong way will take him back to the start, but the spirit of his late mentor guides him by pinpointing the correct paths. Interestingly, the boss (Jeane, who ends up killing the 1st Rank assassin) is fought in a Shifting Sand Land battlefield.
  • Lovely Assistant: Features Harvey Moiseiwitsch Volodarskii, an assassin magician. His two silent, lovely "asseestahnts!" are under his loyal command, until Travis blinds him and they provide the wheel saw for his execution.
  • Ludicrous Gibs: Every time you kill someone, they explode into a huge shower of blood. The game was preemptively censored by the developers for Japan and Europe, with the splatter replaced by an explosion of black pixels and coins raining down, which still kind of fits the mood in an old-school arcade game kind of way.
  • Luke, I Am Your Father: Subverted at first, when Dark Star uses this line on Travis, but is quickly shown to be lying through his teeth. But then played straight when Travis' ex-girlfriend Jeane turns out to be his half sister... and rival Henry his twin brother. For the latter, Travis asks him why the hell he waited until the end of the game to reveal that. Although Henry tried to tell him that after killstealing Letz Shake, and Travis cut him off.

    M-R 
  • Macross Missile Massacre: Holly Summers in is fond of launching salvo upon salvo of missiles from her prosthetic leg. This is also the only attack Helter Skelter shows in the game's teaser trailer/prologue.
  • Made of Iron:
    • Travis can survive things that would otherwise be fatal, especially in cutscenes. These particularly daring feats include being tossed around with lasers, being blown up, beaten savagely, being blown up, his sister thrusting her hand into his rib cage, and being blown up. This is arguably the only thing Travis has on his opponents. Several characters use beam katanas, which often are better looking and/or stronger than Travis'. In fact, after some of the more brutal beatings, some of his opponents automatically assume he's already dead. And then this is Subverted with Bad Girl beating Travis to death with a baseball bat if you fall for her trap.
    • Destroyman somehow survived being cut in half.
  • Madness Mantra: Though the real significance of it isn't revealed until the game's end, Travis Touchdown has a nice inner monologue during the first boss fight, which ends with the repetition of the phrase "Can't find the exit" a good twenty times.
  • Magical Realism: It's a world that mostly seems grounded in reality for your average citizen, yet also one where you can order lightsabers off of eBay if you want glory. Most bosses have something about them that definitely fits into this, from Holly's prosthetic leg firing missiles to Destroyman's superhero lasers.
  • Major Injury Underreaction: Upon being brutally sliced in half, Mooks will sometimes scream "My spleen!" Another possible line is "I don't feel shit."
  • Making a Spectacle of Yourself: Travis Touchdown wears a variety of coloured shades... his default one are 'Sunflower Yellow', but they're also available in Peony Pink, Cobalt Blue, Pumking Seed Orange, and - if you're feeling particularly boring - traditional grey.
  • Malevolent Masked Men: There are characters who wear masks and are extremely dangerous, including:
    • Destroyman, a wannabe superhero wish a masked costume, deadly gadgets, and a twisted mind.
    • Letz Shake, a Singaporean rock star with a mask covering his mouth and an Earthquake Maker superweapon.
    • Harvey Moiseiwitsch Volodarrskii, a stage magician with deadly tricks and a mask covering the left side of his face like The Phantom of the Opera.
    • Dark Star, a Darth Vader expy with a massive dragon-bladed beam katana.
  • Man on Fire: One of the mooks during the Rank 8 level has the ability to set Travis on fire. If this happens, Travis runs around, slowly burning to death until he can get his hands on an extinguisher.
  • Manipulative Bastard: Sylvia rips Travis for money by pretending that there's an entry fee to pay.
  • Marathon Boss:
    • The normal final boss, Jeane, takes a very long time to wear down, especially on Bitter difficulty. And each time she takes a certain amount of damage, she'll reduce the diameter of the battlefield, forcing Travis to focus on evading her attacks and only retaliating when there's a reliable window.
    • The True Final Boss, Henry, on Bitter difficulty, can take nearly a thousand hits before dying. You generally can do less than ten hits off a dark step (the timing for which is tighter in this fight than in any other in the game). Trying to exploit his normal openings will land you maybe three hits at a time, and a high chance of getting countered by something nasty.
  • Marathon Level: The Rank 5 stage is a tunnel that just keeps going and going. And at the end Henry pulls a Kill Steal.
  • Masked Luchador: This is Suda. None make an actual appearance, though Travis learns new wrestling moves by reading notes left on Luchador masks and watching lucha libre videos. And few masks might look a bit familiar to you.
  • Master Swordsman: Travis Touchdown. He can deflect automatic gunfire with his sword, slaughter scores of mooks at a time, and is able to defeat virtually every other swordsperson he encounters.
  • Media Watchdog: The game parodied the censorship issue by joking that putting anything more extreme into the game would get the game an AO rating (an Adults-Only rating is suicide for a game, because a certain large retailer refuses to stock games with the AO rating). In the dialogue before the final battle, no less. There's also the implication that the game would have to be re-edited if the plot point referenced was actually uttered, thereby delaying the game. To top it off, this is all followed by the line, "You don't want this game to become No More Heroes Forever, do you?" This line is in the original Japanese version as well, since CERO (Japan's equivalent of the ESRB) is similar in how they act. You can slow down the speed so you can hear what is really being said.
  • Men Are the Expendable Gender: In all games, the women are killed off every bit as brutally as the men, but they are still portrayed much more sympathetically than them. Travis is still reluctant to kill women, but a female assassin tells him that it must be done. All mooks are still male, though.
  • The Mentor: Thunder Ryu, to a tee. Except for the implications about sex with Travis. But the fact that he still instructs Travis as a blue-tinted ghost after his death really seals the deal.
  • Metal Detector Puzzle: You can buy an add-on for your beam katana that works as a metal detector to find hidden treasures throughout the city. There's also a Side Job minigame where Travis has to use a traditional detector to find and deactivate mines in the beach (said mines are remnants of the warlike activity in the Rank 6 stage, hence why the minigame is only unlocked after you defeat that level's boss).
  • Meteor Move: Henry has one of the most spectacular ones: he impales Travis, flings him off the beam katana into the sky, at a 45-degree angle, jumps into the air and knocks him straight upwards after he's already a good forty feet up, and when he's high in the sky, leaps up once more, grabs him, hurls him downwards with a bodyslam, and finishes it by descending, standing on his beam katana, to impale Travis again, so hard it sends chunks of pavement flying. This is a One-Hit Kill.
  • Mind Screw: Relatively straightforward compared to, say, Killer7, but it's still pretty bizarre, it just plays it for comedy more often than befuddlement. Definitely has a Gainax Ending, though, even if it's something of a parody.
  • Money Grinding: The filler play between bosses, since challenging the next ranked assassin requires paying a certain amount of money, which will be steeper the higher the rank is; it's lampshaded as well. This requires playing the Side Jobs and Assassination Gigs repeatedly, in particular if you're also investing in clothes, katana blades and upgrades.
  • Money Is Experience Points: In addition to using money to pay off the hefty entry fee for fighting assassins and buying costumes, Travis can also upgrade his stats at a gym and upgrade his beam katana at a workshop.
  • Mood Whiplash:
    • The bizarre way the game operates simultaneously on Rule of Cool, Rule of Funny, and Rule of Fun inevitably leads to this. The most jarring example is a moment where the mood goes from Travis whining comically about how his entrance fee to fight Dr. Peace went to giving Peace a fine night on the town... then transitioning seamlessly to a serious discussion of how Dr. Peace's life as an assassin and dirty Private Investigator has permanently estranged him from his ex-wife and daughter, how he couldn't even enjoy the high-class meal due to his own daughter never looking him in the eye, and how both he and Travis are ruthless sociopaths "addicted to blood". Then Travis tries to play baseball with one of Dr. Peace's bullets and gets blown into the wall behind him, just to bring it back down to comical again.
    • And then there's the final battle, where Travis confronts his former lover and realizes she was the killer of his parents, then demands to hear her tragic backstory. She refuses, saying "It's too horrible. It alone would jack up the age rating of this game even further." Travis then gets her speech past the censors by fast-forwarding it, making her voice high-pitched and squeaky, accompanied by his comical reaction shots.
  • Mook: Travis will clear his way through large groups of enemies before getting to the boss fight for each ranked fight. The mooks in question vary depending on the location where Travis is fighting, but they're all made up of hired crooks, lowlives and weirdos that come from Santa Destroy's seedier sides or it's criminal underworld - including street thugs, Yakuza-esque gangsters, violent high school delinquents, corrupt army personnel, gimps, etc.
  • Mook Horror Show: The Dark Side mode. The screen turns black-and-white (except for red for Travis's katana and the inevitable bloodshed) and all mooks in the area start cowering away from Travis as he walks menacingly towards them and systematically murders them for the duration of the mode.
  • Morality Pet: Jeane (the kitten) is a literal version of this.
  • Multiple Endings: An anticlimactic one and a real one. The game doesn't even pretend like the first one is the real ending either, presenting the "Real Ending" option to you even if you haven't unlocked it yet (by buying all of the beam katanas, for some reason).
  • Mundane Made Awesome: The job guy tries to do this, and with each of them taking place in a minigame with upbeat music and control prompts similar to the assassination missions, it's hard to argue with him.
  • Murder, Inc.: The UAA (United Assassins Association) follows this trope. Interestingly enough, it also sets up deathmatches between members of its own organization, allowing ambitious killers to climb their way up the UAA's assassin rankings.
  • Near-Villain Victory: Jeane manages to shove her fist inside of Travis' heart and needs only rip it out. Then enters Shinobu, paying you back for sparing her life, who then proceeds to cut the arm off as Travis goes for the finish.
  • Nerd Hoard: Travis Touchdown's place is crammed with Pure White Lover Bizarre Jelly merchandise and luchador masks.
  • Never Mess with Granny: Speed Buster with her Wave-Motion Gun in a shopping cart.
  • New Game Plus: The game lets you start over with all the items, weapons and techniques you learned the first time around, and has a whole bunch of new collectables lying around. You'll also unlock a new difficulty level (Bitter), which gives you the option to apply your knowledge and experience on the game for a more difficult second playthrough.
  • New Job as the Plot Demands: Travis earns his money in both games by doing every job imaginable, however, his boss in each job is always the same. It probably has something to do with "the unspoken laws of Santa Destroy" he keeps babbling about.
  • Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: The game has several of these, such as Shinobu, the afro ninja schoolgirl.
  • No Body Left Behind: In the English/uncensored version, the enemies, after being cutting in half, while stay for a few seconds before disappearing, giving enough time for blood geysers to erupt, where as in the Japanese/censored version, they just turn into dust right away. This is noticeable for the bosses. In America, the bosses won't disappear after dying. They'll just sit there, gruesomely dead, where as in the Japan, the bodies will turn to dust when needed. Special notice goes to Holly Summers, whose head gets blown off. In America, the head is gone and you bury her. In Japan, well, it's like in the cartoons where the character has black all over their face. And you still bury her.
  • Nobody Poops: Averted. Toilets are save points, and they are everywhere.
  • No Celebrities Were Harmed:
    • Dr. Peace bears a great resemblance to actor Charles Bronson, and is a doctor, a policeman, and an assassin, three roles Bronson was famous for playing.
    • Travis Touchdown's design is heavily based off of Johnny Knoxville... with a lot more otaku thrown in. His design is also reminiscent of Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden in his first appearances in Fight Club.
    • Then there's Sylvia Christel, which is either a Shout-Out to softcore actress Sylvia Kristel or a hell of a coincidence.
  • No Cutscene Inventory Inertia: Generally averted in the games, where the cutscenes will show Travis wearing whatever he's wearing and wielding whatever weapon he's using in gameplay, even getting entirely different animations for activating his beam katana before gameplay actually starts depending on the sword.
  • No Ending: A very deliberate and meta example. Travis has taken down every assassin and killed his half sister. Then he gets saved from a surprise assassin attack by his twin brother that he never knew about, who has also been married to Sylvia for a decade, and they have a fight to the death while discussing how ridiculous it all is with the final shot being a freeze-frame of them attacking each other. After the credits, Sylvia notes how ridiculous it is and notes that it's a shame there won't be a sequel. Luckily, there was.
  • No Fourth Wall: Right off the bat in the intro. "Just push the 'A' Button!" Then slowly chipped them away one by one until the last mission and then completely destroyed at the end ("I would expect you and your players would expect a twist or some kind!").
  • Non-Fatal Explosions: During a cut-scene, Travis falls into a trap laid by the assassin Holy Summers, who proceeds to throw three grenades in after him which explode on his face. Naturally, Travis escapes the pit without so much as a scratch. Not only that but, on the way to fight Holy, Travis steps on several landmines and yet, is barely slowed down.
  • No One Should Survive That!: Travis Touchdown survives several such episodes in the first game and its sequels, one of the most notable occasions being in a cut-scene before his battle with Holly Summers in the first game. He ends up in a pit of sand, and has three hand-grenades dropped directly onto his chest. This merely means he is bounced out of the hole by consecutive explosions, and he continues the game with no lasting ill effects. Every cutscene before a boss fight has him surviving way more than anyone should. During the final battle with Jeanne, she punches through his heart, but he just shrugs it off.
  • No OSHA Compliance: Even by Santa Destroy standards, Body Slam Beach is one massive health code nightmare. According to the town guide, the water is so highly contaminated from industrial waste and sewage, that beachgoers only come to sunbathe. However, the U.S. military also used the beach to test land mines, and there are still active mines buried in the sand.
  • "No Peeking!" Request: When Travis arrives in Destroyman's arena to face him for his spot in the assassin rankings, he finds him wearing his civilian outfit, a normal postman uniform. Destroyman asks Travis to turn around just for a moment so he can change, and Travis complies. The moment Travis turns his back to him, Destroyman fires his Wave-Motion Gun, and Travis just barely manages to dodge it in time. When Travis turns, he sees Destroyman has already changed into his outfit in an instant, making it clear the whole thing was a charade to get a cheap shot.
  • No Sidepaths, No Exploration, No Freedom: The Rank 5 stage consists of a long, grey, linear corridor. However, that level and the following "boss" are both like that just to screw with the player.
  • No Sneak Attacks: Typically played straight in this and all of Travis's subsequent games, but there's one of the enemies with the idea to attack Travis as he's taking a toilet break. Travis has no real defense to this, and it requires Henry to come by and rescue him.
  • No-Tell Motel: No More Heroes Motel is the residence of one Travis Touchdown. While it does seem bright and cheery, it is still in Santa Destroy.
  • Obvious Villain, Secret Villain: The game has a variant of this with Sylvia Christel and Jeane. Prior to the leadup for the Rank 1 battle, Travis Touchdown and the player were lead to believe that Sylvia was working for the United Assassins Association, but when he uses the company's phone number it's actually the one for her mother, who reveals that the UAA doesn't actually exist and was used as nothing more than a money scam. Of course, even that turns out to have an ulterior motive: Sylvia was purposely training Travis so that he could take on Jeane, his ex-girlfriend and the murderer of his parents, who kills the actual number one ranked assassin Dark Star after Travis finally reaches his estate.
  • Offscreen Start Bonus: You start each level leaving this motel. The hidden path behind the motel has a bunch of Lovikov balls that can be traded for power ups.
  • Oh, Crap!: On the path to Holly Summers, nearly every barricade Travis destroys has a landmine behind it, to which Travis always winds up stepping on it and gets knocked back from the explosion. The final barricade has a landmine Travis nearly steps on, but he spots it and moves his foot ahead of it. He winds up stepping on a hidden land mine and realizes he is going to get blown up yet again. If you fall onto one of the many sand pits Holly digs and don't get out in time, it will explode and kill Travis.
  • One-Hit Kill:
    • Travis' Darkside Mode allows for one-hit-kills of a most violent degree.
    • When Dr. Peace is almost defeated, he and Travis agree to perform a Wild West style duel in which the first person to draw his weapon will be able to kill the other. Failure to press the proper button will prompt Dr. Peace to perform a roll to shot Travis from behind, killing him instantly. This also doubles as Kaizo Trap.
    • Shinobu has a pair of near instant-death attacks after she Turns Red: she can take you from full health to two points with her supercharged Gengoken attack, and her multi-Sonic Sword attack will off you if she hits you with all the blades. And she is the third boss of the game.
    • Harvey Moisewitch Volodarskii and Bad Girl also have instant-death attacks, the former if you fail to break out of his magic box, and the latter if you fall for her trap.
    • During the True Final Boss battle, Henry breaks one out once his health reaches Turns Red territory; it's the one that looks like the Stinger from Devil May Cry and plants you into the concrete.
  • One of These Doors Is Not Like the Other: The final area ends in The Lost Woods, covered in fog, and it warps Travis back to the start if he takes the wrong path. Of course, he's guided by the ghost of Thunder Ryu, who points the way for him.
  • One-Steve Limit: Averted with three characters named Jeane.
  • Only a Flesh Wound: The game is well known for the killings of each boss.
    • The first boss, Death Metal, gets his arms cut off while in mid-swing of his giant sword which would get stuck in the ceiling. Death Metal then has time to talk to Travis, but is later decapitated. An even better example would be Bad Girl's death. Travis completely pushed his light saber through her back and twists it. Bad Girl turns around, whacks Travis across the head, and continues to pummel him while on the ground so hard that Travis actually gives up, luckily, Bad Girl dies seconds later on top of Travis. During the second-to-last boss battle, Jeane punches Travis through the heart. Travis doesn't die, or show any pain, and instead is able to land the finishing blows on Jeane.
    • There’s also Shinobu. Travis, unable to kill a girl at this point, simply cuts off her arm. Granted, he does use a laser katana, so the wound was probably cauterised.
  • Optional Boss: In Heroes' Paradise, at least five of the bosses from the sequel appear as optional fights; namely: Skelter Helter, Nathan Copeland, Kimmy Howell, Matt Helms and Alice Twilight though the fights happen as dreams. To do so, players need to accept the option to have Travis doze off on his toilet after beating certain bosses in the story.
  • Our Dragons Are Different: The game has a lightsaber dragon that comes out of a lightsaber. You don't get to fight it, though.
  • Ouroboros: The last boss fight takes place in an arena surrounded by an energy dragon that eats its own tail. It constricts more tightly as the battle progresses, representing the self-destructive cycle of revenge.
  • Outside-the-Box Tactic: Shinobu on Bitter mode, while already a hard boss in Sweet and Mild, becomes insane dodging every other attack including your killing blows and using her own even if you win the bladelock and you can only hit her for two or three hits at most in each opening. Charging the katana in low stance, normally not very useful even with the infinite power upgrade that removes its excessive cost, will make short work of her.
  • Overly Long Fighting Animation: Subverted: Letz Shake's "Disaster Blaster" Earthquake Generator has this massively long cutscene where it charges up and prepares to flatten the battlefield, but then Henry shows up out of nowhere and proceeds to cut the machine (and Letz Shake) to pieces.
  • Ow, My Body Part!: Some Mooks in the game lament their spleens after Travis delivers the deathblow on them.
  • Painting the Medium:
    • When Travis gets a call on his cell phone, it comes through the Wii Remote's speaker instead of the TV's speakers. As such, the volume is (in theory) lower and thus you're holding the Wii Remote to your ear as Travis holds his cell phone to his. In practice, the voice coming through the remote is surprisingly loud — Sylvia has No Indoor Voice.
    • Everything that happens once you finally make it to the final ranked battle. The poor, unfortunate fourth wall gets painted, destroyed, rebuilt, destroyed again, and then the pieces get repainted.
  • Palmtree Panic: The Rank 6 stage takes Travis to the beaches of Santa Destroy, filled with explosive mines buried beneath the sands. There's a Side Job minigame that is set here as well, and the objective is to remove the mines to bring safety to the tourists.
  • Parrying Bullets: Travis can parry bullets with his beam katana, but doing so eats away at its battery charge (especially if he's blocking an entire clip from a machine pistol). The only exception is Dr. Peace's charge attack, which is powerful enough to send him flying across the arena.
  • Permanently Missable Content: The collectible cards scattered around in each of the ranking matches are permanently missable once you finish that level. The first time through is not a problem, since they're just trading cards of fake Mexican wrestlers, but in New Game Plus, you lose concept art of the assassin from the current stage, so there's no chance for 100% Completion. Of course, you can always just start another New Game Plus.
  • Perpetual Poverty: Travis Touchdown, at least at the beginning of the game, is broke and lives in a motel room, despite owning a gigantic X-Wing styled motorscooter, an insane amount of anime and wresting merchandise, and buying a beam katana from Ebay. Possibly the reason he's broke is that he spends all of his money on this stuff.
  • Pet the Dog: Travis Touchdown: assassin, otaku, kitty owner.
  • Phallic Weapon: In this game and its sequels, Travis's Beam Sword recharges through shaking a dynamo within it. The way Travis charges it, however, has him holding the sword in front of his pelvic area, pointing outwards and slightly upwards, and him vigorously shaking it back and forth panting heavily, making it look amazingly like masturbating. As Travis is vulnerable when he's recharging, and the sword's power frequently runs out in the heat of battle, you'll most often see Travis performing this animation in a remote corner, facing a wall. To make it even more obvious, the second game's charge meter for the sword looks like a red exclamation mark with a face that stands erect when the gauge is full and starts to flop more and more the emptier it gets.
  • Phlebotinum Breakdown: At one point in the game, an enemy sets off the sprinklers when he sees Travis coming. The water shorts out his beam katana's battery, and a segment follows where Travis, being electrocuted, must run a gauntlet of enemies to reach the room with the sprinkler controls. Even after the sprinklers are turned off, you have to recharge the katana, though the game does give you a Full Battery power-up.
  • Pickup Hierarchy:
    • Primary: Ranks, including the Job/Asssassination medals
    • Secondary: Trading Cards, Lovikov Balls
    • Tertiary: Money, Clothing
    • Extra: Swords
  • Pink Is Erotic: Bad Girl is introduced bludgoning clones in S&M gear with a bat and is a representation of the dominance and submission fetish. Bad Girl is given a lot of sexual references and she's completely shameless and honest about her enjoyment of killing, unlike Travis who justifies his killings as desiring to be the best. The fact that the clones are wearing S&M gear implies that she takes sexual gratification from killing and the fight against her includes a raunchy theme called "Pleather for Breakfast". After the fight, Travis stabs her with his katana while saying "Naughty girls need spankings." but she refuses to submit and continues to beat Travis until he surrenders out of pity. Accepting his surrender, Bad Girl lays on top of Travis, recreating a sexual position and her final words almost sounds like she's climaxed from Travis's surrender. Her outfits have a pink color scheme and her fight against Travis has her wear a pink frilly dress.
    Travis: "You're no assassin, you're just a perverted killing maniac."
    Bad Girl: "In essence, they're the same. Don't go on thinking you're better than me. You think you're hot shit! Who the fuck do you think you are?
  • Pink Means Feminine: Bad Girl wears pink, but given her badass nature, this seems to be just to keep up her Sweet Lolita image.
  • Pipe Pain: Many mooks use pipes as their weapon of choice.
  • The Pirates Who Don't Do Anything: Averted; several of the assassins make reference to "outside work". Travis himself seems like an example, although he takes assassination missions from K Entertainment. Additionally, his ranked fights could be considered an assassination (he is, after all, being paid to kill a certain person).
  • Player Headquarters: The game has Travis' hotel room where he can change, watch TV or save the game. He also receives missions via the phone.
  • Playing Possum: Bad Girl will drop at random and start crying, though there are times her hands are completely off her bat, which means she's open to a Travis Touchdown spanking. If she's got one hand on her bat, approaching her is a bad idea.
  • Post-Climax Confrontation: The "Real Ending" leads to the long-awaited confrontation between Travis and Henry, despite the original conflict of the assassin rankings having been resolved in the previous fight.
  • Postmodernism: Both games are Suda ridiculing the player. See Travis Touchdown, the loser otaku who spends all his money on anime and fights rather than moving out of a hotel? This Loser Is You. The empty sandbox plays into that, as the only locations you can actually visit are a few nerdy stores and Travis' various jobs.
  • Premiseville: The game, which revolves around assassinations, takes place largely in a small California city called Santa Destroy.
  • Professional Killer:
    • Travis Touchdown. His weapon of choice (a Beam Katana), impressive feats of physical skill and endurance, occasional displays of chivalry and honor, and overall competence are very assassin-like. But his Perpetual Poverty, complete lack of stealth or subtlety, and overall tastelessness push him more towards the hitman category.
    • In addition, being an assassin seems to be the occupation of choice in Travis's world. It's a highly glamorized job with lots of good publicity; most of the people Travis meets are either assassins, trying to be assassins, or working directly with one. Considering the sheer numbers of these guys and the impressive hits they accomplish (the moment someone acquires any sort of fame, a rival will send an assassin to kill him or her, unless that someone is an assassin or has hired one as a bodyguard), it's a wonder there's anyone left.
  • Psycho for Hire: Most of the UAA members, most notably Destroyman, Letz Shake and Bad Girl. Jeane qualifies too.
  • Quick Draw: The Boss Battle between Travis and Dr.Peace in the Rank 9 stage ends this way. The player has to press the button indicated on-screen so Travis wins, or else Dr. Peace will kill him. And this happens after Travis has made it to this point, close to victory.
  • Ramp Jump: The final Side Job tasks Travis to perform a risky jump across a ramp aiming at the sea of Santa Destroy. In order to succeed, Travis has to reach the ramp at full speed, or else he'll flub the jump and fail the job's objective instantly.
  • Rated M for Manly: When your game is about an average guy buying a katana lightsaber from the internet to become a top assassin, and the excessive blood, fanservice, and adult themes, you kind of have to expect this.
  • Real Men Wear Pink: Travis Touchdown. Any anime-loving Troper has to respect how he can go out and kill people while wearing a pink ensemble of made-to-order merchandise for his favourite anime. Incidentally, it's the most expensive outfit. Also, his favourite anime is a Magical Girl show featuring incredibly moe characters, and if Sylvia's comments are anything to go by he knows how to give massages too. He also loves his cat.
  • "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Given to Travis by Sylvia via cellphone right before the Dark Star fight.
    "Now be honest. Did you really think I would let you do me if you hit number one? You really are an idiot, aren't you, Travis? Come back to reality! I mean, look at yourself! You are a dopy, otaku assassin. The bottom of the barrel. No woman would be caught dead with you... unless she was a desperate bitch! Where in the world could you find a woman who could fall in love with someone like you?"
  • Recovery Attack: Travis can perform one to recover. When crowded by enemies, this can knock them back giving room to plan and counter-attack.
  • Recurring Riff: The game is positively filled with remixes of its main theme, Beam Katana Chronicles, with variations popping up as in-game battle music, background music in cutscenes and occasionally doing Diegetic Soundtrack Usage when whistled by the protagonist.
  • Reference Overdosed: A trend that began in this game and carried over to all subsequent games in the series. This game alone has copious references to works like Star Wars, Kill Bill, Miyuki, fellow Suda 51 game Killer7, Planet Terror, Devil May Cry, and El Topo, only to name a few.
  • Refuge in Audacity: Nearly every aspect of the game reeks of this trope.
  • Remixed Level:
    • Two of the assassin stages take place in the baseball stadium of Santa Destroy. However, whereas the earlier stage is mainly set within the corridors of the stadium and places the boss in the field, the later one does it the other way around.
    • Two of the assassin stages require Travis to cross Santa Destroy's interstate road. But in the first one, Travis is boarding a terminal's bus to have a comfy travel... until the mooks start attacking him while the bus drives, anyway; the second time, Travis has to retrieve his stolen motorbike in the avenue whose road forks into the interstate route, and upon doing so he proceeds to drive across it on his own while dispatching all the mooks that appear along the way, eventually reaching a different destination; this turns out to be the final level.
  • Revolvers Are Just Better: Dr. Peace, the 9th ranked assassin in the world, uses a pair of golden revolvers during his fights.
  • Rival Final Boss: In the Golden Ending, after Travis defeats the #1 ranked assassin, he has one extra final opponent: His rival and half-brother Henry.
  • R-Rated Opening: The game pointedly reminds the player on its rating by showing Travis Touchdown decapitate a man in its intro.
  • Ruins for Ruins' Sake: Speed City is a modern metropolis that's abandoned and dust-choked for no adequately explained reason.
  • Rule of Cool: Beam katanas are impressive, but more impressive is what can block them—Jeane can even block it with a kick. Holly can block it with a shovel, too.
  • Rule of Seven: The game references Killer7 with the Lovikov Balls, as there are 49 of them in total (7 x 7), seven are required for a new ability, of which there are seven as well (each of them based on one of Emir's personalities from Killer 7). Also, one of the Dark Side powers are enabled when the jackpot (which appears every time an enemy is killed) hits 777.
  • Rummage Sale Reject: Travis Touchdown is no doubt a pathetic enough Otaku to deliberately dress this way. At least the single glove seems kinda handy for using his beam katana, but the rest... the player can choose exactly how ridiculous Travis' outfit becomes by buying more clothes (or diving for shirts in Santa Destroy's many dumpsters), all of them awesomely tasteless Otaku wear.
  • Running Gag:
    • After each of his ranking matches, Travis receives a message from Diane, an employee Beef Head Videos, to remind him to return a video from the store, with the video usually being pornographic in nature, such as the "How to please a woman in bed" series. Her voice grows wearier and wearier with each message.
    • Similarly, before each of his ranking matches, Travis has a phone conversation with Sylvia, usually involving her doing something outrageous in the background while an exasperated Travis listens in, and they get more and more ridiculous as the game goes on. Sometimes she's doing some sexy activity and acts as The Tease, sometimes she's in a party with loud music, or in a battleground full of gunshot noises. And then by the end of the game Travis gets a phone call from her mother saying Sylvia was scamming him the whole time.

    S-Z 
  • Samurai Shinobi: Shinobu is an Occidental Otaku (a lot like the protagonist), who combines aspects of Ninja and Samurai while living a double life as a schoolgirl (at least until the second game, when she's graduated and become a full-time assassin). Notably, her outfit and fighting style suggests a stereotypical ninja, but she uses a katana and is fond of at least giving lip service to honor and duty (such as avenging her father). It's made clear this is because she's invoking the trope in-universe as part of her aesthetic.
  • Save-Game Limits: The games use restrooms as save points. The problem? In rank missions, these are only found right before their concluding boss battles, so you'll have to survive until then. In the first game, outside the missions, the only place to save (and thus the only default resuming point in your playthrough) is the bathroom located within Travis' motel room; with the massive city Santa Destroy is, it can be tedious to navigate through it to access the assassination jobs, part-time sidequests, and the many collectible items scattered, and then make your way back to the motel to save all your progress (even when you're using your motorbike to drive). The game also resumes from the latest save file used (for this same reason, it forces Automatic New Game when it's booted for the first time), so you have to manually switch to another file after resuming the current one). This is alleviated in the sequels: No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle eliminates the need to traverse the city, giving you access to all activities from a menu; because No More Heroes III brings back the explorable overworld, it adds multiple restrooms that, upon being repaired, serve as helpful Save Points. And in these sequels, the inconvenience over file resuming is eliminated by giving you the option to choose which file to load from the title screen's menu (and there are more of them as well: ten in the second and twenty in the third, compared to the first's mere four).
  • Save Point: You save in the bathroom. And there's always a bathroom right by the boss area; even in the middle of the woods.
  • Save the Villain: A variation regarding Destroyman. Travis Touchdown has already dealt a fatal wound to his opponent by impaling him through the chest with his beam katana. Nevertheless, Destroyman begs Travis to help him. Travis, who has already fallen for Destroyman's tricks a couple of times before, rips the weapon violently out of his chest. As his final vindictive act, Destroyman whips around and opens fire on Travis with his nipple-mounted machine guns; he suffers his Karmic Death immediately thereafter, however, as Travis simply cleaves Destroyman from crotch to skull while bullets whiz past on either side of him. He comes back later in Desperate Struggle, but it's Shinobu who dispatches him in that case.
  • Saw a Woman in Half: The Rank 4 stage's (second) bossnote  is a stage magician who fights Travis at his show; before the fight, one of the two tricks he does involves cutting a woman in half — with a buzzsaw. He later uses the saw in an attempt to bisect Travis vertically and it plays a role in his own demise.
  • Scary Scorpions: The game has a minigame where Travis has to scoop up scorpions while avoiding stings. Their speed and agility will be determined by their color, with the blue ones being the hardest (but also the most valuable score-wise). It's recommended to only play this minigame if you've unlocked the sprint skill.
  • Schmuck Bait: Bad Girl when she throws a fit. If she has her hand on the bat, then it's a trap and attacking her lands a One-Hit Kill on Travis; if not, you can attack without repercussions.
  • School Setting Simulation: The Rank 8 stage is set within the Santa Destroy High School, and there Travis has to find and challenge Shinobu, who's not only a dedicated student but also a professional assassin. She wishes to kill Travis because she (erroneously) believes Travis killed her father. After the battle, Travis settles the misunderstanding and spares her.
  • Second-Person Attack:
    • A gruesome example. When Travis decapitates Speed Buster, we see her head fly to the ground from her POV.
    • A more Downplayed example is with Harvey, where the camera shows his point of view as Travis throws his beam katana at him, it cuts a red line across his vision, and then that line turns black and expands over the entire screen. The next several seconds are entirely black as Harvey complains that he's been blinded.
  • Self-Made Orphan: Jeane. The woman, not the girl or the cat.
  • Sequel Snark: The very last line is Sylvia lampshading the bizarre ending of the game with "Too bad there won't be a sequel!" This, of course, turns out to be a lie.
  • Serial-Killer Killer: The game's in part all about this sort of thing. While the player character Travis Touchdown is part of a union of assassins, and as such does get the occasional mission to, indeed, assassinate someone, for the most part, his only concern is becoming the highest-ranked assassin in the union by killing off all the higher-ranked ones.
  • Sex Is Violence: For many assassins, violence is arousing; Travis even recharges his Beam Katana by shaking it vertically, as if he was masturbating. The trope is even more evident with Bad Girl.
  • "Shaggy Dog" Story: The UAA, which Travis spends the entire game killing for, Isn't real. It's a scam Sylvia came up with to swindle Travis. Travis is equally incredulous:
    Travis: You're joking right? Do you know how many people I've killed?
  • Shirtless Scene: From the beginning, you have the option of removing Travis's shirt.
  • Shockwave Stomp: Bad Girl, a dainty brat with a penchant for hitting men around the head with a baseball bat, can perform this move in battle. Jeane can also do it despite being very lightweight.
  • Shoot the Dog: Travis definitely didn't mean it this way, but most of the assassins are probably better off dead.
  • Shopping Cart Antics: The assassin Speed Buster is an old lady with a shopping cart full of groceries ... which is actually a disguise for its function as a devastating Wave-Motion Gun.
  • Shout-Out: Has it's very own page now!
  • Show Within a Show: The Magical Girl Super Robot anime Pure White Lover Bizarre Jelly, and the shmup minigame that is based on it.
  • Shut Up, Kirk!: Travis is on the receiving end of this just before his fight with Bad Girl:
    Travis: You're no assassin. You're just a perverted killing maniac.
    Bad Girl: In essence, they're the same. Don't go on thinking you're better than me. You think you're hot shit! Who the fuck do you think you are?!
  • Silliness Switch: Purchasing every article of clothing in Area 51 unlocks an amazingly gaudy pink ensemble themed after Pure White Lover Bizarre Jelly.
  • Single-Stroke Battle: The first trailer for the game, which can also be seen from the TV of Travis' motel room, features Travis and Helter Skelter in a Single Stroke Battle. Travis wins, and Helter either collapses, or has his head removed, depending on the trailer version. "Your shining armor and fine words won't get you anywhere!"
  • Sinister Silhouettes: Entering a ranking area shows the boss's silhouette.
  • Sinister Subway: The game has Travis fighting Mooks in the stations and trains of an abandoned (but still functional) subway system in two of the rank stages. In the second one, Travis falls asleep on one train and dreams a Shoot 'Em Up minigame.
  • Small Girl, Big Gun: Speed Buster is anything but small or a girl, but the gun is very big, so it kind of balances out.
  • Smart Bomb: Travis's Anarchy in the Galaxy power gives him a Smart Bomb that he can set off at will, killing all enemies in the immediate area around him.
  • Smashing Survival:
    • If you lock weapons with an opponent, you can rotate the Wiimote in order to overpower the opponent and get a free death blow. If you fail to do so, they overpower you instead.
    • Shaking the remote and mashing buttons is the quickest way to escape Holly Summer's holes, and also is your only hope of escaping Harvey's dissappearing box.
  • Something Else Also Rises: A Running Gag in the game is using Travis beam katanas being synonymous with a certain male body part.
  • Sorting Algorithm of Evil: Travis' goal is essentially to run through this and put himself on top.
  • Sorting Algorithm of Weapon Effectiveness: Played straight, each new sword basically replaces the last.
  • Soundtrack Dissonance:
    • A surprisingly touching, well-sung ballad precedes the 9th rank fight and plays over the end credits in the normal ending (though "normal" fight music plays over the actual 9th fight). There is also an instrumental version of the song that plays in Gold Town, the bar where Lovikov is. (It should be noted that the lyrics to this song, 'the virgin child makes her wish without feeling anything', are actually very dark, but that this trope still occurs due to the upbeat melody of the song).
    • Heavenly Star, the incredibly sweet Genki Rockets song that plays in shops and is available in music video form (complete with birds, sparkles, and rainbows) in the Japanese and European versions of the game, strikes a stark contrast with the game's content and overall theme.
  • Spiritual Antithesis: To Killer7. k7 deals with political issues, NMH deals with social ones. k7 focuses on a group of professional assassins, NMH focuses on a singular youth who stumbled into the business. In k7 you can only walk on very specific paths, while in NMH you can wander around the entire city. The list goes on...
  • Sprint Meter: One of the unlockable abilities is the "Technique of Bizarre", AKA the ability to run, stopping in exhaustion for a few seconds should you sprint the meter completely empty. The beam sword charge gauge pulls double-duty as the sprint meter, so you can't actually run while in battle. It's still a good way to get around the alleys in town that a bike has trouble maneuvering in, and it's practically a requirement to get a good score in some of the side-jobs. Sprinting makes Travis cannonball forward with enough velocity to outrun a car for about fifteen seconds. And he's winded for three.
  • Sprint Shoes: While the game starts out with Travis already owning a very cool motorcycle to get around in, he also has the ability to learn to dash short distances.
  • Stage Magician: The Rank 4 boss, Harvey Moisewich Volodarskii, is a professional magician who has a Siegfried/Roy accent and dresses like David Copperfield. He fights Travis at his show, and has a One-Hit Kill attack where he has his assistants lock Travis into an exploding box.
  • Stationary Boss: Dr. Peace, in a rare case of a human boss. He is always placed on the center of the baseball stadium, shooting Travis from that position with his Golden Gun.
  • Stealth Pun: In wrestling, to win a round is to perform a hold, lock, or pin on a downed opponent. In the world of assassination, when Travis finishes an enemy with a wrestling move, the beam katana falls and skewers, or pins a downed enemy.
  • The Stinger: The subverts this in that it taunts the player about the game's cliffhanger ending instead of setting up for the next game. And then a "To Be Continued" screen pops up in the middle of the opening credits.
  • Studiopolis: The Rank 7 stage has Travis travel via subway train to the Bear Hug Studio, a large film studio within a warehouse. It is there where he meets John Harnet, a seemingly-humble man who likes to act as a superhero. But that man is an assassin, and after fooling Travis twice with an Electric Joybuzzer he enters into character and changes his clothes to those of his superhero persona, Destroyman.
  • Summon a Ride: The game gives Travis the ability to call his friend in order to retrieve his motorcycle anywhere in the city.
  • Super Mode: Travis Touchdown utilizes an ability called Dark Side mode that randomly triggers as he kills enemies. Depending on the matching slots shown, the powers he gains are different such as moving at fast speed, killing single enemies instantly and destroying all enemies in the area.
  • Superpowered Evil Side: Every so often after landing a deathblow, Travis will randomly enter a "Dark Side Mode" where he can do some crazy stuff. These include:
    • Cherry: Slows down all enemies to a crawl, giving Travis a powerful advantage.
    • Cranberry Chocolate Sundae: All enemies become scared witless of Travis as his movement slows down to a menacing walk. Upon approaching an enemy, Travis can execute a One-Hit Kill by following the Action Commands prompt.
    • Blueberry Cheese Brownie: Travis becomes capable of firing Sword Beams that can kill most enemies in a single hit.
    • Strawberry on the Shortcake: Travis's beam katana becomes hypercharged, allowing him to initiate deathblows with a single blow.
    • Anarchy in the Galaxy: Travis gains a Smart Bomb that he can set off at will, killing all enemies in the immediate area around him.
  • Suplex Finisher: Travis can perform wrestling moves (the majority of them being different suplex variants) on stunned enemies, including bosses. This is usually followed by Travis' beam katana falling on the fallen enemy. Not only do you learn progressively cooler and cooler suplexes, but each boss has a difficult to set up custom boss suplex, except for the final boss of the first game, who is immune to and reverses any grabs, and any boss in either game who isn't fought in close combat, or who is fought by Henry or Shinobu. Namely, you have access to the following variations: Belly-to-Belly, Captured, Full Nelson, German, Trap, Double Wrist, Tiger among others.
  • Surprise Incest: Happens prior to the Final Boss battle, when Travis is informed that his ex-girlfriend Jeane, who he did sleep with, was his half-sister, which she knew beforehand. He reacts appropriately.
  • Surprisingly Realistic Outcome:
    • While most of the assassins match Travis in fighting ability, endurance, or at least the ability to move around and adapt to how he comes at them, the third-ranked assassin Speed Buster has none of these - she's a frail old woman with a Wave-Motion Gun and nothing else. The entire point of the stage is simply getting close enough to take that gun out of commission - once that's dealt with, she doesn't even try to fight Travis because there's nothing she can do.
    • Background material notes that Thunder Ryu's beam katana is a unique design with no power switch, instead activating automatically once it's removed from its sheath. It also notes that this makes it an incredibly dangerous weapon, as much to its user as to its enemies, even just trying to deactivate it by returning it to the sheath: it's a blade of pure energy with no weight outside of the handle itself and no "safe" spot to touch it. Notably, when you acquire his beam katana and turn it in to Naomi to design the completed Tsubaki Mk III, she only borrows its ability to emit a blade without a retractable guide frame while keeping a proper power switch and giving it a stylized handguard to keep Travis from cutting off his fingers.
  • Surreal Humor: The game features an Excuse Plot involving a Carnival of Killers and injects it with some downright bizarre humor. Your opponents in the first game alone include a mad scientist with an earthquake machine operated by a Brain in a Jar who gets taken out by your rival in the middle of a cut-scene, an old bag lady whose shopping cart turns into a Wave-Motion Gun, and a creepy woman-child who attacks with sports equipment and an army of gimps.
  • Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: A health pack, toilet, and sword-energy refill are awaiting Travis before every Boss Battle. Another tell is that Travis' informant, Sylvia, will always call him on his phone (with her voice even heard on the mic if you're playing the Wii version), telling him to get ready (like going to the bathroom, which is game's save point) for upcoming boss. The trope is also justified, since the boss fights are pre-arranged duels.
  • Sword and Fist: Travis Touchdown uses a combination of sword strikes, unarmed strikes, and wrestling moves. His non-sword attacks were used to stun or break a guard of an enemy or boss, so you could pull off a grapple that either does large damage or instant kills a mook. The damage output for his punch attacks were minimal, but you could charge it to stun targets faster.
  • Sword Beam: Shinobu's Signature Move in her boss fight is a technique called "Sonic Sword", which becomes a Beam Spam after she Turns Red. Travis Touchdown himself gets Blueberry Cheese Brownie, one of his "Dark Side" Super Mode attacks. His sword beams make people explode.
  • Sword Fight: A number of the Ranking Fights in this game and its sequels are of the good ol' fashioned "One-on-one sword fight" variety, albeit with laser swords and Mexican Luchador wrestling thrown in. Off the top of the head, the battles with Death Metal, Shinobu, Harvey Moiseiwitsch Volodarskii, Dark Star, and Henry in the first game are all sword duels.
  • Sword Lines: The Beam Katanas have this effect. But even Shinobu's sword leaves trails, and it's metal. It's assumed that all weapons are somehow beam-edged, so that they can block other beam-edged weapons. This includes: Jeane's legs.
  • Symbolic Blood: In the Japanese and European versions of the game, the enemies die in what could only be described as a fountain of digitized ash.
  • Tactical Suicide Boss: All of the bosses in the game are actually completely invincible or extremely evasive most of the time. There are usually only small windows of opportunity where the boss is actually vulnerable to your attacks; learning when these windows appear and exploiting them is almost the only way to win the game.
  • Take That!: "What if the game gets delayed? You wouldn't want this to become No More Heroes Forever, do you?" The fact that the name is also a nice pun just makes it gravy, considering what could have been the canonical ending.
  • Take That, Critics!: Seeing as No More Heroes is in many ways an antithesis and response to killer7, a lot of No More Heroes' gameplay decisions can be seen as maliciously complying to killer7 criticisms. Gamers don't like that you could only move on rails? Now you can go anywhere you want in the city, even though there's nothing to do there. People found the plot too confusing? No More Heroes opens with Travis mentioning that gamers don't have much patience and asking the player if the premise is "short and simple enough" for them.
  • Tank Controls: The Sword Beam and One-Hit Kill Dark Side modes give Travis tank controls for the duration.
  • Taught by Television: Travis Touchdown learns new wrestling moves by watching old videos.
  • Taunting the Unconscious: Destroyman tricks Travis into shaking hands which puts the latter in range of being electrocuted by the "Destroy Spark". As Travis lays on the ground half conscious, Destroyman breaks into mocking laughter.
    Destroyman: Oh, this is great! Is this guy an idiot or what?! Hahaha!... You fell for the oldest trick in the book!
  • The Tease: Sylvia Christel, almost sadistically so. The person she's teasing is Travis, a bit of an easy target and she easily becomes his Lust Object, convincing him to go along with the fights by promising to sleep with him when he reaches 1st place (she doesn't).
  • Technology Porn: Done before the nonexistent boss fight with Letz Shake and Dr. Shake. The game goes to great lengths to show the Earthquake Generator powering up before Henry shows up and cuts Letz and his machine in half.
  • Telepathic Sprinklers: A mook holds a torch up to a sprinkler, causing all the sprinklers in the hallway to go off. Travis's beam katana isn't waterproof, so it results in a comedic electrocution, and a short detour to turn off the sprinklers.
  • Teleport Spam: Shinobu does this if she scores a hit with the "super" Gentoken (seen when she Turns Red); likely resulting in death for Travis.
  • Tennis Boss:
    • When Bad Girl bats projectiles at you, you can deflect them back, although it's optional. Travis also tries this before the fight with Dr. Peace, but there is more to his gun than his gaudy tastes in coloration.
    • Can be done in both Dr. Peace's battle (Slashing back his explosive quick draw) and Destroyman (Knocking back Destroy Cannon). Both are of course optional.
  • Theme-and-Variations Soundtrack: The game has its main theme, a jazzy little 1:30-ish tune. Which is remixed into a rock version, a techno version, a trance version... which isn't to say the entire OST is comprised of them, but you'd better get ready to get used to it.
  • There Can Be Only One: The game revolves around Travis Touchdown, 11th best assassin in the United Assassins Association, working his way up the rankings by killing off the top ten one by one. One of the series's themes, which started near the end of the first game and is rampant through the second one, is that there will always be more assassins coming up from behind, so there will never really be "just one".
  • There's No Kill like Overkill:
    • After hitting a mook enough times, Travis can perform a special move that decapitates the mook, showering Travis in blood and coins. This becomes practical later in the game — said special move can also decapitate/split in half other mooks nearby, resulting in multiple showers of blood and coins.
    • Once he's been knocked down to half health, Henry gains an unbelievably awesome One-Hit Kill move. He impales Travis, flings him off the beam katana into the sky, at a 45-degree angle, jumps into the air and knocks him straight upwards after he's already a good forty feet up, and when he's high in the sky, leaps up once more, grabs him, hurls him downwards with a bodyslam, and finishes it by descending, standing on his beam katana, to impale Travis again, so hard it sends chunks of pavement flying.
  • Think of the Censors!: Jeane doesn't want to tell Travis about her Dark and Troubled Past, because it's awful enough to jack up the age rating on the already M-rated game even further. As a compromise, Travis agrees to fast-forward through the story so the audience wouldn't be subjected to it. For those of you who are curious enough...
    Jeane: "What if the game gets delayed? You don't want this to become No More Heroes Forever, do you?"
  • This Ain't Rocket Surgery: The final boss of the game (a really hard fight and a freaking ton of crazy plot twists) has a kickass battle theme called, appropriately, "Rocket Surgeon".
  • This Is for Emphasis, Bitch!: There's quite the handful.
    • "So what you're tellin' me is that I gotta continue fighting. There's no way out of this. You set me up, bitch!"
    • "You are the 3rd ranked assassin, bitch?"
  • This Loser Is You: Travis is a 27 year old anime obsessed, professional wrestling watching, video game playing loser who dreams of adventure and getting laid. Even if you become the world's deadliest assassin, you are still a stain of a human being. This might qualify as a deconstruction. What kind of person buys a lightsaber off of ebay and becomes the world's greatest assassin? An otaku, that's who.
  • Three Plus Two: In the Magical Girl / Super Robot Genre show/game within a show Pure White Lover Bizarre Jelly, the power trio is Strawberry (on the Shortcake!), Blueberry (Cheese Brownie!), and Cranberry (Chocolate Sundae!).
  • Throw the Mook at Them: Bad Girl has an attack sequence where she launches gimps at you with her baseball bat. Usually, it's easy enough to just avoid them, but with a well-timed sword swing, Travis can send them flying back at her.
  • Throwing Your Sword Always Works: Travis does this in order to blind Harvey. He also tosses it into the air when doing a wrestling move. Depending on whether the move finishes off the opponent, either Travis will catch it, or the unfortunate mook's chest will.
  • Title Drop:
    • It's both the name of the motel Travis lives in and displayed in one way or another in every save bathroom.
    • Jeane says it during their fourth wall demolition.
  • To Be a Master: Travis Touchdown's quest in the game is to be the greatest assassin. Of course, the whole thing is quite thoroughly deconstructed. For starters, Travis is a deluded Otaku Blood Knight who may qualify as a Villain Protagonist, and the entire thing is a con set up by Sylvia.
  • Toilet Humor: Through the series, toilets have served as save points, with Travis dropping his drawers and copping a squat when saving progress and toilet paper "tastefully" blocking the view of Travis's genitals.
  • Too Awesome to Use: Anarchy In The Galaxy, the ability you get for hitting 777 on the slot machine. It instantly kills every non-boss enemy in the room (but does zero damage to bosses), but aside from being extremely rare (you'll usually see no more than one a playthrough), you get a 10,000 dollar bonus per use for holding onto it when you kill the boss (which gets even higher on New Game Plus), making it even harder to want to use it.
  • Too Many Belts: Travis has some pants with pointless belts attached to them for style, though at least a few are used to hang his beam katanas.
  • Toplessness from the Back: During one of the skits with Sylvia, Travis talks to her over the phone as she's naked and trying on a dress, but the camera angle shows her back, or her holding the dress over her chest.
  • Torpedo Tits: Destroyman invokes an uncommon male example after Travis withdraws his sword from his chest in one last attempt to take down Travis. Travis is understandably quick to bisect his cowardly ass, top down.
  • Training from Hell: The game has a vanilla "training" in Thunder Ryu's gym, which is just dumbbells, bench pressing and squats (although Thunder Ryu is kind of predatory...). But it also has training from Hell when you give Lovikov the Lovikov balls. Judging by the sound effects, he teaches Travis his techniques by beating the crap out of him.
  • True Final Boss: Henry, fightable after killing Jeane and buying every beam katana and the infinite battery.
  • Try Not to Die: Used by Sylvia to Travis verbatim in in the game. Her usual parting statement (before her Character Catchphrase) before boss battles is predicting an increasingly high probability that he'll get killed.
  • Turns Red: Every boss becomes more aggressive with depleted health. Some learn new attacks, while others employ new tactics. The first boss from the first game, for example, triplicates himself. These "new attacks" are, in a couple of cases (Shinobu most comes to mind), unblockable insta-kill attacks which can only be avoided if the player has memorised the pose the boss takes, and knows they have to run away as fast as possible whenever they see this boss doing this.
  • "Uh-Oh" Eyes: Jeane, who has red eyes.
  • Ultra Super Death Gore Fest Chainsawer 3000: Lampshaded interestingly. The game is in many ways a violent slugfest, but the game (and Suda51) has no problem in lampshading this repeatedly and mocking you for your violent, mindless tastes.
  • Unexpected Shmup Level: The game fills the time to the Rank 4 fight by having Travis fall asleep on a train and dream that he's playing a vertical shooter based on the Show Within a Show Pure White Lover Bizarre Jelly.
  • Unexpected Gameplay Change: Travis' dream sequence on the way to the fourth-ranked battle, Pure White Giant Glastonbury, which is done in the style of a Galaga-type shooter.
  • The Unfought: Parodied. Letz Shake, the 5th-ranked assassin, is killed right before the boss fight would start, causing Travis to complain about being cheated out of a fight. Happens again with [[spoiler:the 1st ranked assassin.
  • Unit Confusion: An infamous example occurs in the lawnmowing minigame, where "square meter" has been culturally "translated" into "acre" (roughly four thousand square metres).
  • Unknown Rematch Conclusion: Travis, previously upset over Henry pulling a Kill Steal to a targeted assassin, gets a chance to defeat Henry himself in an unlockable True Final Boss fight as revenge. This fight concludes as Travis and Henry continue clashing their Beam Katanas while arguing aggressively. When they do decide to put an end to the fight, they go for one more clash to see who lands the final blow... and then the game's credits roll while keeping the last moment of that fight frozen in the background. The outcome isn't revealed until the sequel No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle, which takes place three years in the future.
  • Unknown Rival: Henry. When he is first encountered, he kills the Rank 5 assassin Letz Shake before the protagonist, Travis Touchdown, has a chance to in a pre-organised fight. However, after the player defeats Henry in a final bonus battle, Henry reveals himself to be Travis's twin brother (although the ambiguous plot of the game means that this is not necessarily true).
  • Unlockable Difficulty Levels: This game and its sequels have each three difficulty levels: Sweet, Mild and Bitter. In all games, Bitter is accessible upon first completion.
  • Unusually Uninteresting Sight: On your way to the Rank 5 fight, a trail of blood pools leads you to a dead body (which also leads you to a path to the same fight) and everybody just goes on with their business. Possibly justified, considering what kind of environment Santa Destroy is.
  • Unusual Weapon Mounting: Destroyman has a crotch-mounted laser, earpiece lasers, and "machine gun jumblies".
  • Updated Re-release: No More Heroes: Heroes' Paradise for the Xbox 360 and PS3 features improved HD graphics and a 'Very Sweet' mode which features the female characters in skimpy outfits (if they weren't already).
  • Useless Spleen: Several types of enemies yell "MY SPLEEN!" upon getting killed. Considering that they usually get chopped in half, you would think that would be the least of their concerns.
  • Vader Breath: Dark Star breathes this way, befitting his parody to Star Wars alongside his voice and looks.
  • The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Played straight at first, with the 1st Rank battle taking Travis well outside Santa Destroy and through an ominous forest, with the battle itself happening right outside the 1st Rank assassin's personal castle. Ultimately subverted with the True Final Boss battle with Henry, however, which happens in the parking lot of the Motel No More Heroes where Travis lives.
  • Vice City: Santa Destroy features street thugs in bondage gear armed to the teeth and out for the player's blood, to the point where no-one actually stays in the city willingly and desperately wants to take the first bus out of town.
  • Villainous Incest: At the end of the game, Travis (a very dark antihero to begin with) discovers that Jeane (the Final Boss, not his pet cat), the girl he's been searching for and was once romantically involved with is his half-sister. Travis is as squicked out as the player is. Jeane, on the other hand, doesn't seem to mind that it happened. In the end, the two reconcile right before Travis kills Jeane.
  • Villain Protagonist: Travis Touchdown creates the line in the sand for a character who either just barely counts as a Villain Protagonist (he has very few, if any, likable qualities, and kills people for a living) or is not quite evil enough to be a Villain Protagonist (the people he kills are, for the most part, even more sick and twisted than he is, or at the very least other assassins).
  • Villains Never Lie: Parodied, where the Final Boss Dark Star claims to be protagonist Travis Touchdown's father, and after a moment of trying to remember, Travis seems to remember him. Then Travis' hitherto-unmentioned step-sister Jeane comes out of nowhere to punch through Dark Star's ribcage and remind Travis that no, that guy isn't his father - Travis saw both his real parents die right in front of him as a kid. Dark Star simply liked lying like that to get into his opponents' heads so they'd be unable to focus on the fight, and therefore easier to kill.
  • Wake-Up Call Boss: Shinobu. You can brute-force the first two bosses by relentlessly attacking them; Shinobu is the first boss that requires beginners to be patient, observe attack patterns and openings, and make use of the block/dodge commands.
  • Warmup Boss: Death Metal. Being the first boss in the game, his battle serves as a practice for subsequent boss encounters, and his attacks aren't too powerful.
  • Wave-Motion Gun: #3 ranked Speed Buster's weapon, which is the end result of a transformation of a shopping cart.
  • Wham Episode: A few, but the most notable is the cut scene after you pay the money for the Rank 1 fight, where Travis learns that the UAA is not real, just a front for Sylvia to con suckers out of their money.
  • Wham Line: At the very end of the game and a long fight with Henry, we get this gem of a line.
    Henry: I'm your twin brother.
  • Where It All Began: The Final Battle with Henry takes place where the game started: the parking lot of the NO MORE HEROES Motel.
  • Why Don't Ya Just Shoot Him?:
    • In the ending, a would-be assassin foregoes the whole "ranking match" setup and simply attacks Travis while he's on the toilet.
    • In the Letz Shake cutscene, Travis starts charging Shake towards the end of his weapon's start-up sequence, while Shake helpfully gives a "T-Minus X seconds!" countdown. He doesn't quite make it before it fires, but Henry just comes out of nowhere and cuts the whole thing in half.
  • Vice City: Santa Destroy has street thugs in bondage gear armed to the teeth and out for the player's blood, to the point where no-one actually stays in the city willingly and desperately wants to take the first bus out of town.
  • The Voice: The long-suffering Diane, from Beef Head Videos.
  • Wham Episode: The game has a few of these, including the rank 6 (Travis sympathizes with his opponent, beginning to see that killing people isn't a game... but she kills herself because someone has to win), 5 (Travis doesn't get to fight his opponent at all - a strange man in a tux drops in, one-shots him, and walks away), and 3 (Thunder Ryu dies) battles. But the rank 1 battle is the most shocking of all. The entire UAA was a scam designed by Sylvia to extort money out of Travis. He goes out to fight Rank 1 anyway, only for the Rank 1 assassin, Dark Star, to be killed by a strange woman - who happens to be Travis's ex Jeane. Who is also Travis's sister.
  • Where It All Began: If you upgrade Travis's sword to its fullest, you end up fighting the True Final Boss, Henry, in the parking lot right outside Travis' own home where he'd be after every Ranked Fight.
  • Wide-Open Sandbox: Subverted; you are given an overworld to explore, but you can't actually interact with much of anything beyond searching for collectibles in the alleys.
  • With This Herring: Played straight, justified and somewhat averted. Travis begins the game fairly broke money-wise. Why? To buy your trusty lightsaber beam katana Blood Berry of course. While Blood Berry is a powerful weapon, it pales in comparison to the later weapons you can get (especially The Tsubaki Mk. 3). The shops DO charge you full price on everything and Sylvia explicitly tells you you gotta do part-time jobs ("as a third-rater", so the job guy said) to pay the entry fee to the next matches, beam katana upgrades, accessories, etc., etc. You're hardly saving the world though, just killing a bunch of guys for money.
  • Worthy Opponent: Shinobu gains the respect of Travis Touchdown, who spares her life with the intent of fighting her again when she's stronger. This turns out to be the right move when she later saves his life. Henry, as well. Incidentally, they're both playable in the sequel.
  • Would Hit a Girl: This is discussed via Travis Touchdown. Although he is hesitant to kill women, he sees no problem hitting them. He battles five female assassins and kills three of them. However, he didn't kill the first he fought; the second was the one who chastised him for not killing her, calling it weakness, not mercy, before killing herself. There were some form of circumstances with the other three as well the first killed his master in front of him, the second bled out after making him admit defeat, and for the last, "It's Personal".
  • Wouldn't Hit a Girl: The real reason Travis couldn't kill Shinobu or Holly, and why Holly had to kill herself. He gets over it, demonstrated when he decapitates Speed Buster, impales Bad Girl, and cuts Jeane to pieces.
  • World of Badass: A world in which, it seems, anyone can easily become an assassin if they so desire.
  • Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Bad Girl, the number 2 ranked assassin, sometimes collapses to the ground and starts crying. Sometimes, she's genuinely crying, meaning you can get some free hits in. More often than not, though, it's a facade, and if you fall for it, she will One-Hit Kill you. The trick is to see if she's holding her bat: if she is, steer clear, and if she's not, go nuts.
  • Wrestler in All of Us: Using wrestling moves is quite effective during most of the boss fights, taking off a good chunk of the victim's health. The fact that they don't work on Jeane, the normal final boss makes her as hard as Henry, the Perfect Run Final Boss. This is justified though; Travis apparently has dabbled in wrestling in Calgary and at the beginning of the game is still very friendly with his old teacher, the legendery former pro Thunder Ryu.
  • You Bastard!: Travis actually calls out the player for enjoying watching him and his fellow assassins fight to the death towards the end of the second game. Well, technically he calls out Sylvia and the UAA, but the way he does it certainly causes the player to pause and say, "Wait, is he talking to me?"
  • You Have No Chance to Survive: Sylvia does this by phone (namely, the Wiimote speaker) before every boss battle. She's supposed to be your ally.
    "Give it your best shot! I am 100% certain you're returning from this battle, Travis. ...In a body bag."
    "I'm sorry to say this, but I'm 1800% positive that you will die here. But trust your Force... And head for the Garden of Madness."
    "I am 3,602,600,218% certain you will die. But trust your Force... And head for the Garden of Madness."
  • You Have Researched Breathing: One of the abilities Travis Touchdown can learn via being beaten up by a Russian drunkard in exchange for some plastic balls scattered throughout the city is how to run.
  • You Killed My Father:
    • Shinobu, the Rank 8 boss, seems relatively unemotional right up until Travis turns on his beam katana. When she sees that, she accuses him of having killed her father and goes ballistic. He didn't. He never even met Master Jacobs, though he did watch his training video until it broke.
    • At the end of the game, Travis learns that his sister Jeane killed his parents. If what she said is true, though, the elder Touchdown really deserved it.
  • You Kill It, You Bought It: In this system, when an assassin kills a higher ranking assassin, he gains the slain assassin's rank. Unfortunately Travis doesn't realize the downside of that - he'll be a target for every other up-and-coming assassin - until Sylvia tells him after he kills the tenth-ranked. This convinces him that the only way out is simply to get rid of them all.
  • You Killed My Father: Shinobu to Travis (though she is mistaken), and Travis to Jeane (this one is true).
  • Your Head A-Splode: Travis defeats Holly. After losing, she tells him she has a thing for him, then takes one of her grenades, pulls the pin, and puts it in her mouth, with predictable results. Travis, desperately trying to pay respects, hugs her headless body. And buries her in a pit-trap she dug.
  • Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: It seems like you're finally the number one assassin; finally defeating everyone else. Time to use the potty... then before you know it, an assassin busts in and cuts your head off. Unless you get the good ending, where the assassin is killed and you have to fight your brother.
  • You Watch Too Much X: Travis' line to Shinobu in a cutscene where she starts attacking him: "Something tells me you watch too many samurai movies, little girl."


 
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Destroyman fools Travis into a feigned gesture of sportsmanship.

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