No More Heroes 2 Reviews Make Me Too Excited

Though I don’t regret picking up Mass Effect 2 this week, some reviews of No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle are making me second-guess which game I should’ve played first. It seems designer Goichi Suda is madly brilliant as ever with NMH2, digging further into questions of what it means to be a gamer and a game developer, while giving Wii owners the beam katana-fueled bloodbath that they so rarely get to enjoy. Here’s what Destructoid’s Jonathan Holmes wrote after a marathon play session:

The thing about Suda’s games is that there is always that question — “Is that a mistake, or is it a comment on gaming/society/meaning of life?” It’s an impossible question to answer, and one that invigorates Suda’s fans as much as it infuriates his detractors. That’s the thing about No More Heroes 2 that will probably puzzle people on both sides of that divide the most: the game is really low on anything that could be interpreted as a mistake.

Indeed, the first game was criticized for sending players on mindless money hunts between missions, always connected by boring bike rides around the game’s lifeless sandbox world. You could interpret this as commentary — sandboxes are often lifeless, you need to work before you can play — but that didn’t satisfy critics who demand non-stop fun, even if it meant sacrificing metaphor. No More Heroes 2, it seems, has responded and addressed those criticisms. Bike riding and money-making are optional, and chores have been recast in 8-bit form, but the game’s message remains, as GameSpy’s Brian Altano calls NMH2 “a brilliantly twisted love letter to the videogame medium, scrawled in blood and pixels.”

1UP’s Ray Barnholt takes a more pragmatic approach: ”By being the high-quality, consistently enjoyable action game it wanted to be the first time around, Desperate Struggle is now a must-buy, and at the very least, finally makes the series deserving of the evangelism surrounding it.” I’m already converted.