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You may have heard from your local gaming blog (or Nick's post) that No More Heroes is being ported to HD consoles in the near future. While this is certainly good news for the potential future platforms of the franchise, I'm worried this might end up backfiring.
While No More Heroes is a game I love and a game that works great on the Wii, it was full of problems that need to be addressed before this game is brought to an even larger audience. These are problems that people forgave for the hardware shortcomings of the Wii, but are problems that will be magnified (almost literally) on the PS3 of Xbox 360. If No More Heroes is critically panned when brought to these other systems, I fear Wii may stay a sole platform for the franchise.
Without the charm of the Wiimote functionality (phone calls, combat finishers, wrestling moves, jerking the wiimote, etc) the game will be left with little more than shallow combat, a frighteningly empty world, terrible vehicle collision and controls, benign mini games, and all of this repeated for hours. Sure the story, characters, and music will still be undoubtedly rad; but is it really enough?
What would I do if I was planning this port?
1. Fill up the world. The developers can use the hardware jump to make the world feel more alive. The world in No More Heroes wasn't just bad because it was empty -- it was bad because you couldn't really interact with what little that was actually there. And because the player had to drive back and forth constantly throughout the game to get from one mission to the next, the whole experience became tedious and frustrating.
2. Kill the loading. This may seem insignificant, but because everything you actually do in the game is separated with loading, the actually gameplay feels completely removed from the rest of the empty world. If Rockstar and Volition can do it in much bigger worlds with plenty to do in them, then I don't see why No More Heroes shouldn't be able to do this on the HD consoles.
3. More blood. Like way more. The coins, electricity, and whatever the fuck comes out of the enemies when you killed them were cool and all, but the most stylish moments in No More Heroes came during the bloody deathblows at the end of boss fights. It's this over-the-top style which made the game memorable. Blood splatter that stays in the environment ala Ninja Gaiden 2 would be great. More electricity and coins are fine too I guess.
4. Camera and controls. This one is a no brainer(red squiggly line says this is not a world... lame). Again, iffy camera is something that players let slide on the Wii due to the lack of a second analog stick. But when I think of the areas you navigated when heading towards a boss, I recall many narrow passage ways. This can (and will) lead to horrible disorientation if they do not find a way to make the camera work in this type of environment. As far as controls go -- fix the fucking driving controls and vehicle physics. Dodging with the dpad was awful too. How are they going to do the high/low stance changes? Hrm...
5. Introduce new, meatier mini-games. Picking up coconuts? Really? The mini-games in NMH were quirky and all, but most were mind numbingly boring. They need to find a way to keep the charm, but kill the tedium. More combat focused ways of earning money would be welcome for sure.
Suda has his work cut out for him. I just hope he doesn't get lazy about it.
Comments
15 years ago
everything you said is 100% true.
the main meat of the story shouldn't change, but be more fleshed out and the city should feel more alive. they may take a few notes from no more heroes 2 and add them to the port.
i imagine westling moves will be performed as quick time event or possibly the motions with the wiimote and nunchuck will be assigned to the control sticks so left with wii mote and right with nunchuck are just left with right stick and right with left stick. kind of loses its flair but would work.
i can see them using 6 axis for the ps3 with the stances but for 360, who knows.
id imagine they would change high and low to styles or something that can be switched with a button press, like high is changed to fast and low is changed to power or something. this would make comboing from high to low tougher but then again, if they improve combat as a whole, this may not be needed. meh, maybe just have 3 attack buttons. 1 for low attacks, 1 for high attacks, and 1 for kicks/punches/westling moves.
The AI for enemies is a must to be improved. not that they were dumb or anything but there were instances where they just used cheap tricks on the player that made it impossible to beat without having to rely on your own cheap tricks.
though if they were gonna add in new content for this, i would hope that they would include defending missions. something i felt they missed out on were just having the uaa assassins to kill in the story. i thought it would of been cool if they had people lower in rank of you coming after you to kill you. id would make sense for silvia to con as many people as possible.
nothing else is really worth mentioning
15 years ago
Oh shit, lower ranked assassins stopping you on the way to missions trying to defeat you! That would be baddass.
15 years ago
I think there are many ways to improvise those features that were on the Wii (like the charge-by-jerking or the phone calls). Hopefully they improve on how the game feels, since there's some parts that has that jankey-ness in it plus on its performance with a bunch of enemies on the screen.
15 years ago
I believe one and five on your list are intentional design points. They both reinforce the satire of the story line, so I hope they won't be changing. But two through four will most likely happen, well, aside from the no loading, I would guess the loading will still be there but shorter.
15 years ago
Oh oh! I got a good one.
What did the sailor say when he heard that No More Heroes was moving to PS3/360?
Hard to port!
Eh? Eh?
15 years ago
ZCalliber that was just sad but good try though.
15 years ago
If the port at least uses the Sixaxis motion controls then I will try it out on the PS3. I just can't see myself playing this game without motion controls (which I would normally hate). If the PS3 version has sixaxis controls then I'll play it on PS3 and if it doesn't then hopefully I'll get a Wii soon enough to be able to try this game.