 created, written, and directed in that order by Pseudo51, a developer who has made some of my favorite hack and slash games to date. If you've ever danced around zombies as a high school cheerleader wielding a chainsaw with the disembodied head of a boyfriend attached to a hip, or if you've ever helped a demon hunter get his girlfriend back from the Lord of Demons by traveling through the underworld with his sidekick that also happens to be his gun torch and motorcycle, then you might be familiar with Pseudo51 and his wacky approach to game design and storytelling. Nothing is ever off limits in his video games. Anything can and most likely will happen. So it's no surprise that No More Heroes became a cult hit back in 2007 when Pseudo released the first game on the Wii. There was perfect timing for the action-packed, mature, rated hack and slash adventure featuring oh so much blood, swearing, and not to mention an open world to explore. At the time, Wii owners really only had the option of either Nintendo's own stellar family-friendly first party selection or just a plethora of shovelware and fitness games. Other open world experiences at the time like your GDAs or your Assassin's Creed's were nowhere to be seen. And the Wii wasn't doing much at all to cater to its older audience. No More Heroes quickly found its audience and performed well enough to garner a sequel three years later which was loved just as much as the first. So you can imagine the hype over a decade and two console generations later when a third installment in the franchise was finally revealed. Although the gene was kind of already out of the bag, as in 2019 there was a spinoff title called Travis Strikes Again on the Switch and Pseudo said at the time that if that game performed well, he would make the long-awaited third game next and um… well I guess he was just feeling generous. Okay, I need to take a quick second here. I wasn't playing around when I said Pseudo is one of my favourite video game creators. I've been playing his games for the last 15 years. Ternocereal and an honour to be reached out by his PR team and to be given a code for the game over a month early. So I didn't have to buy the game but of course I was going to help support one of my all-time favourite video game creators. Hey! Oh shoot, sorry. What are you doing? ExpressVPN to watch shows and movies not in our country? Oh sweet! Like Brooklyn Nine-Nine, Rick and Morty? Yep! And South Park, Modern Family? You name it. Well what else can ExpressVPN do? Well I'm glad you asked, Harry. Using the internet without ExpressVPN is like keeping all your important passwords on post-it notes stuck to your monitor hoping no one will see them. I mean you can do better than that. ExpressVPN will protect you at home, at work or anywhere online by routing your connection through one of ExpressVPN's 3,000 plus servers, protecting your IP address, social media logins, credit card information and more. Of course you can use it for fun things too like watching Netflix. I'm doing this one to spot just fine, thank you. Okay, Jesus. Like watching Netflix or being able to download and play games a day earlier just by changing your location. Try it out by going to expressvpn.com forward slash beta months and find out how you can get 3 months of ExpressVPN free. Are you done? Thank you ExpressVPN for sponsoring the video. Surprising no one. No More Heroes 3 is an absolute wild trip from the very start. Opening cold into a Mega Drive reminiscent game that has you defeating aliens with a beam weapon then you're treated to this beautifully animated opening cutscene that tells the story of a boy named Damon who finds and rescues a small fluffy alien named Foo. After helping Foo return to his home planet decades pass and Foo returns but this time he's grown into a planet conquering alien akin to Vegeta who while still befriending Damon plans to completely destroy the earth with his alien buddies. Hi, I'm Nappa and that's Vegeta. He was a prison b****. Shut the hell up Nappa. It's a fantastic setup for a story as the previous two games were focused on the assassin rankings and Travis having to beat ten ranked assassins to become number one. It's what these games have always been about but I feel like the shtick could have got an older third time. So introducing bloodthirsty aliens with an intergalactic ranking system was a brilliant idea. Yes, yeah, becoming Earth's number one assassin is cool and all but becoming the galaxy's number one assassin, I mean move over Luke Skywalker would Boba Fett or Jango Fett have worked better for that analogy probably. The Studio Ghibli style animation is wonderful and my only complaint is that I want so much more of it because there's no more after that intro but the gameplay, muah, slicing and dicing enemies with a beam katana, drop kicking and suplexing with your wrestling moves and blasting rockets with your gun damn mech suit. No more Heroes 3 has perfected the series combat and it feels better than ever. Super smooth controls, fast paced action and there's nothing more satisfying than the confetti blood explosion streaming upwards from alien necks. I should probably see a therapist. As you slash away at an enemy's health bar you're trying to get them down to the point where you can deliver the final blow. It's so immensely satisfying especially so on tougher enemies or boss battles you've been struggling on for a while made even better by the motion controls. Yeah, this is one of the few times where it's fun to be holding a joy con and just take them out. When that arrow hits the screen it's a moment of triumph and satisfaction with that final swing feeling oh so good. In the previous games you were thrown more bodies than you knew what to do with but those bodies were weak and often only took a couple of hits before you could deliver that finishing blow and that just kind of became more of a game halting annoyance every few seconds so making the change to less enemies that are much tougher was a great choice and paid off well. Delivering this final watcher will trigger a slot machine minigame on the screen. If you're lucky you can get power boost special moves in game currency or a devastating one-time mech suit use. It's a really fun idea that the series has had since the start always introducing new ideas moves and concepts for the payouts oh and we can't forget the AEW wrestling moves probably more like old Japan. Professional wrestling culture has always been embedded in No More Heroes since the first game with Travis being able to perform suplexes power bombs and more in the third game you can break enemy defenses by keeping up the pressure while attacking. Once you see these stars shooting around the enemy head it's time to unleash your own shooting star press. These moves will somehow instantly fully charge your beam sword back up so they're great for keeping momentum in combat. Oh yeah your energy sword depletes while you use it and if you let that happen you'll have to go stand in a corner somewhere and charge it back up by shaking so yeah don't let that happen. Although good news if it does happen and you get game over you get to play another minigame this time a roulette wheel and I kind of love this one. Step right up try your luck and see what you get. If you get a 1.5 attack modifier you might get absolutely nothing. Ha! Cool! Good God y'all. But if you're really lucky you can get another life and revive instantly on the spot. You also got perfect dodges that slow down time for special abilities like this one that also slows down time. My only complaint is that I like in my hack and slash games and even the ones that Pseudo has made when it gives the player more abilities or combos to unlock as they progress. In Travis you just kind of got what you got and it's that way for the whole game. It does lead to the game's combat feeling a bit stale before the end. You can level up some stuff using experience points and there is one branch that will give you extra abilities but other than the double dash which isn't very exciting but would be useful the others don't really seem to be worth it which is crazy since this tier costs a lot to level up. Way more than the health for example. So you won't feasibly be able to unlock these abilities before the end of one playthrough unless you want to ignore leveling up your attack health and charge and all of which become pretty crucial. So while the combat does become a little sainy it's the enemy type variation and boss battles that help break it up and keep it fresh with no two boss battles feeling the same at all and the mix of enemies always leaving you trying to figure out if you should take out the long range or the short range fighters first. I swear some of these basic normal enemies you come across end up feeling like boss battles. So that's the story and the combat. Um yeah we'll just end it there. That's all we won't now we'll just stop right there. There's one more thing we haven't talked about and that's the world. It's um, well it's bad. Yeah I can't beat around the beam katana here. It's really not great. Beyond even its visuals being poor to borderline abysmal the world itself serves no true purpose other than to add padding into the game's runtime. Let's get to the visuals next because that's not even the main problem but in between each alien assassination you're thrown back into this world and tasked with coming up with the entrance fee for the next fight as well as needing to qualify for the next fight. To do that you need to travel the world in search for these yellow spots, finding markers and then competing in a pre-qualifier battle. Now you would think that when you get to one of these markers you would take part in the battle there you know where you just drove to in the world but no wherever you end up having to go is completely arbitrary, arbitrary, arbitrary. Why am I saying that? Weird. It doesn't matter where it is it'll cut to a load screen as it beams you aboard a spaceship somewhere and often into the exact same cargo looking room to fight a few aliens before spitting you back out into the world. Then rinse and repeat several times before the next ranked battle. There is literally never a fight that takes place in the world. In fact combat isn't even an option. In the first game driving to a location meant beating up enemies in that location then the ranked battles were often in that place too but every single fight in No More Heroes 3 is either in a spaceship or in space or another planet altogether which is cool. I mean that's awesome in itself and you know I prefer the change there. So I'm really not sure what the point was of having to drive to location markers around the world other than just patting out the game's runtime. And this method became pretty stale before the fourth chapter and you have to do it again and again right up until the end of the game. The only thing that breaks up the fighting is the driving to the fighting. It would be a little better if any main or even side story elements were delivered in these downtime moments when you're driving around competing in the pre-qualifying fights but it's like the game just goes on hold for an hour while you take care of this and then get right back into the story in action. And I mean even that would be okay if the world itself wasn't so barren. There's no buildings or shops that you can enter. There are just a few sushi stands around, some weird motionless aliens that you can buy one shirt from each time and a few mini games like Cotton Grass for pocket money or picking up trash from the ocean but nothing that you can interact with in the world itself and I mean nothing. Don't even try to touch the other cars. Now I wondered why the first game wouldn't even let you get close to a vehicle. The game screen would literally freak out if you even tried to get near one. Honestly, they should have done that. Oh my God, there's two cars. It doesn't know what to do. Now I know why they just disappear. Look, I feel bad. I really do feel bad saying all of this. I'm not trying to tear into the game or paint a bad picture. I'm just trying to explain what happens. I can't be the guy that literally demolished Cyberpunk for its world design and then say that this is fine because I really love Suda51 games. The difference is Suda didn't promise a next gen open world or anything but regardless of that, this isn't even this gen, last gen or any gen. I mean, it's empty and lifeless. Even on the Wii's No More Heroes, the NPCs had better AI. And, you know, visually, it's a mess. Like, I'm not sure why the cars were so detailed in the first game but here they're just giant pink cubes. In fact, the first game was more detailed in almost every aspect, from the cleaner textures to the pretty much everything else. The amount of pop in here is crazy. The whole city acts like a kid's pop-up book while driving towards it. Certain fences or objects would just appear a couple feet in front of you. I mean, most of the world seems like it's hanging on with sticky tape and glue. Like, I can see through this hill. It's just like a little pop on top. And I can sit in this hedge. Like, this hedge, it doesn't actually exist. It's fake. I mean, I guess everything is fake but you know what I mean? Like, this world just doesn't come together in a way that feels real. You can see the strings. You can see the game design, all right? I guess the lack thereof. Same goes for a lot of the game's visuals. Like this Kimmy Love boss battle where the backdrop was literally just a black box and an orange box and the crowd was non-existent. And don't ask me why they put such a hideous filter on this part of the world. I absolutely hate it. The game's world is broken up into segments. You reach with a load screen in between and this call of battle area is easily the worst. Maybe the fog is to hide how empty the level is since some other areas, it's painfully obvious what little effort was made. And however bad you think it looks in dock mode, I'm pretty sure it's like 360P and handheld. Does any of that really matter though? I mean, visually no. It's ugly as hell, but it didn't really bother me. At least it ran smooth. I think it's 60 FPS. I just feel like it was a little rushed so the game's detriment at times. Like maybe don't have it pan up from the grass during a cut scene if the grass looks like this or maybe just fix the damn grass for that one scene. It's the small things too that you miss out on like the way Travis's jacket was animated in the second game. That was a nice little detail, but here we are 11 years later. Maybe they had more time to flesh out the second game because they dropped the open world completely and focused on the narrative world building gameplay, cutting out all that padding from the first game. That really works for me and I'm not sure why they tried to reintroduce the open world again here for the third when it doesn't really serve any purpose and the game's story takes place literally everywhere other than Earth. So all that said, obviously I think there's good parts and there's rough parts. And I'd say I'd agree with most of the other reviews that it's still a great game but didn't really live up to the standard of previous titles. Any longtime pseudo 51 or No More Heroes fans like myself are still going to love the third game and I did, I loved it. But for any first time players, they might find themselves a little baffled by the experience and possibly confused as the story does nothing to catch you up to speed with what happened in any of the previous games and it's all just expected knowledge of the world, humor and its characters. No More Heroes 3 is unapologetically a game made for No More Heroes fans with literally no one else in mind. And I think that's a fantastic thing for the fans but it makes it a little hard for me to recommend it to newcomers. Thankfully though, the first two games are also on the Switch and the first No More Heroes is as good today as when it released in 2007. So it's easy for me to recommend that. Start at the start and by the time you get to No More Heroes 3 you'll be ready to take it all in. But hey, the moral of the story is don't forget to check out the sponsor of the video, ExpressVPN. Remember, you can download it using my link and if you do so, you can watch it. Ah! If you don't subscribe. What? That'll be you next. You're probably gonna wanna do that as well as hit the like button. If you don't do that, I'll just cut an arm off or something. You won't, I won't completely not alive you but you still won't like it. I'm alive still. So you better like it. It hurts.