Shih Tzu (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} shihtzu) wrote,@ 2008-03-02 23:45:00 |
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A Day With Suda 51
For the first time in several months, I actually played a video game all the way through! This has not happened since Professor Layton and the Curious Village. Total time: 24:01.
That means that No More Heroes was roughly 12 hours of a fun, stylish, well-designed swordfighting action game with the most entertainingly incoherent storyline I've seen in years, and 12 hours of having to run around doing a bunch of dumb crap in an authentically ugly recreation of southern California urban blight. It's like Shadow of the Colossus (of all things) with an empty and hideous cityscape instead of an empty and meditative landscape serving to pad the time in between the awesome set pieces.
Would I recommend it? I cannot stress enough how lame the open-world segments are, but once I got over that disappointment and decided to blow through them as fast as possible to get to the parts that have, you know, actual content, things turned into a crazy good time. The actual slicing-dudes-up business is simple but satisfying, while the boss battles each have their own creative twist that requires more considered strategy. The plot, even by video game standards, is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, but what stylish, stylish fury, and what ludicrous, ludicrous nothing.
It's a flawed game. I found little (and big) things to hate and missed opportunities everywhere. And yet, every time I embarked on a new ranked assassination mission, I got this grin on my face, because the game is so damn messed up that I honestly had no clue what new weirdass stunt it was going to pull. As they say, there is good art and there is good trash, and if a game is not going to be art, then let it, like this one, be trash of the highest order.
For the first time in several months, I actually played a video game all the way through! This has not happened since Professor Layton and the Curious Village. Total time: 24:01.
That means that No More Heroes was roughly 12 hours of a fun, stylish, well-designed swordfighting action game with the most entertainingly incoherent storyline I've seen in years, and 12 hours of having to run around doing a bunch of dumb crap in an authentically ugly recreation of southern California urban blight. It's like Shadow of the Colossus (of all things) with an empty and hideous cityscape instead of an empty and meditative landscape serving to pad the time in between the awesome set pieces.
Would I recommend it? I cannot stress enough how lame the open-world segments are, but once I got over that disappointment and decided to blow through them as fast as possible to get to the parts that have, you know, actual content, things turned into a crazy good time. The actual slicing-dudes-up business is simple but satisfying, while the boss battles each have their own creative twist that requires more considered strategy. The plot, even by video game standards, is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, but what stylish, stylish fury, and what ludicrous, ludicrous nothing.
It's a flawed game. I found little (and big) things to hate and missed opportunities everywhere. And yet, every time I embarked on a new ranked assassination mission, I got this grin on my face, because the game is so damn messed up that I honestly had no clue what new weirdass stunt it was going to pull. As they say, there is good art and there is good trash, and if a game is not going to be art, then let it, like this one, be trash of the highest order.
