Killer7 SINdicate

[Iwazaru]

Generic? How dare you!

[redrum]

[Iwazaru]

LOL! This is spot on :mrgreen:

[CENSORED]

Game is complete dogshit outside the boss fights btw
I was going to write up something more but I'm gonna get drunk instead bye

[AngelheadedHipster]

Finished 3 yesterday. It have very complicated feelings about it. On one hand, it jumps the shark hard and feels like a middle finger to anyone who actually took the No More Heroes series seriously. On the other hand, that's obviously the joke.

It's probably the most spiteful game I've played since Metal Gear Solid V. It's a very mean spirited parody of... well, a lot of things, really, but most notably the series itself, modern media and the culture surrounding it and I gotta respect its commitment to it. Characters are flanderized into pop culture reference spouting shadows of their former selves, fan favourites like Shinobu and Bad Girl are sidelined for most of the game, people from other games show up without context, only to deliver their catch phrases, none of TSA's suggestion of the series getting more serious and introspective are paid off and dropped in favour of references to a continuity we never actually get to see, Buckaroo Banzai style, and it all culminates in empty spectacle not even trying to make sense.

It's a lot to take in and I'm not sure how I feel about it, fluctuating between "I'm kinda offended" and "Well, that's the point, isn't it?". On a meta level it's a biting satire on shared universes, nerd culture and the associated consumerism, crossover events, media being stuck on endless sequels, reboots, remakes and spinoffs. If the original NMH's credo was "Punk's not dead" then NMH3's is "Pop is dead.".

I get it. I respect it. But I really think Suda should make something more serious next.

[Iwazaru]

Interesting take. I still doubt i would like NMH3 much, but it may have more to it indeed.

[Jack]

The impression that I get from hardcore NMH fans, is that they think of NMH as the videogame version of Deadpool, and that you're not supposed to take it seriously ever. It's just fun. (Or what they claim is fun.) So basically it's a bunch of random memes & nonsense, that's supposedly punk coz some corporation pushed the Deadpool character as punk? ... wot? lel

Finished 3 yesterday. It have very complicated feelings about it. On one hand, it jumps the shark hard and feels like a middle finger to anyone who actually took the No More Heroes series seriously. On the other hand, that's obviously the joke.

It's probably the most spiteful game I've played since Metal Gear Solid V. It's a very mean spirited parody of... well, a lot of things, really, but most notably the series itself, modern media and the culture surrounding it and I gotta respect its commitment to it. Characters are flanderized into pop culture reference spouting shadows of their former selves, fan favourites like Shinobu and Bad Girl are sidelined for most of the game, people from other games show up without context, only to deliver their catch phrases, none of TSA's suggestion of the series getting more serious and introspective are paid off and dropped in favour of references to a continuity we never actually get to see, Buckaroo Banzai style, and it all culminates in empty spectacle not even trying to make sense.

Why should any of that matter so long as the game is good?
Judging from that thread,
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=8&start=365
it seems as though NMH3 is at least ok, because at the bare-minimum, it's playable. Which is more than what I could say for 5 frames per second Deadly Premonition 2 lol. Oddly enough, people seemed way more hype for DP2 when it released than they are with NMH3. NMH3 had a lot of hype behind it last year, but by the time it came out, nobody gave a shit about it any more.

I personally never cared, because I think all games that focus on meta-commentary while being the same exact type of game that it's lampooning, are nothing but a complete waste of time. Unless the actual gameplay happens to be good. Which from what I've seen from playhroughs so far, NMH3 is nothing but a bunch of repetitive mini-games, boss fights, a lot of cutscenes with extremely pretentious dialogue (Who the hell did the dialogue for Killer7, coz i remember k7's dialogue being funny as fuck while stating truths. "What is the President of the United States? How the fuck should I know? I'm Japanese" "Ahh the secret to 100 percent success with woman" "Women are all the same! *Shoots his own head off*') & big barren openworld, which actually is empty unlike with BOTW. Funny though, coz I would argue that BOTW is big & empty but it clearly isn't when contrasted with NMH3.

Unlike with DP2, I might actually get NMH3 some day when it's only $20. DP2 failed so hard that it's one of the only Nintendo exclusives I know of that can be bought for $15-20 new.

It's a lot to take in and I'm not sure how I feel about it, fluctuating between "I'm kinda offended" and "Well, that's the point, isn't it?". On a meta level it's a biting satire on shared universes, nerd culture and the associated consumerism, crossover events, media being stuck on endless sequels, reboots, remakes and spinoffs. If the original NMH's credo was "Punk's not dead" then NMH3's is "Pop is dead.".

Does any of it matter if the game sucks? Killer7 was at least decent, an easy 7 out of 10 but damn near every other game that I played from him have all managed to be much worse. I don't count his adventure games since those types of games should only be graded for their writing & presentation, which are all fairly decent.

I don't think that Suda's adv games are anywhere near as good as DanganRonpa, but the two series do speak about somewhat similar societal issues. The difference is in terms of scale. KTP games were talking about society on a global level, or at least the local & civic up until FSR which was much more global in terms of scale.

I get it. I respect it. But I really think Suda should make something more serious next.

People have been wanting him to do something more serious since NMH1 lol. Shoot around the net I still see the same excuses being made for him since NMH1. "GHM is a small company. You can't expect the same quality from them as an AAA company!" Meanwhile From Software exists and they were as small as GHM is now back when they made Demon's Souls. What's the excuse for that?
Edit: Demon's Souls had a staff of 44 people. NMH3 has a staff of about 80, lol.

I don't blame Suda for not even bothering. Look at Killer7. Most people outside of Japan still don't understand it. (Most people in Japan don't even care coz they don't play Suda games, AYY LMAO!) Killer7 is actually talking about the same crap that I keep whining about at that thread.
viewtopic.php?f=3&t=43&start=150
I do it even more than usual now after Afghanistan fell, coz I see a similar scenario happening with the Rising Sun, if Japan doesn't get its balls back.

At the center of K7's plot is actually Article 9. I don't recall if they ever specifically mention Japan's Article 9 of the constitution but it's obvious that the entire story revolves around it because the conflict is centered around the USA choosing not to abide by Article 9 which kicks off the plot after chapter 2.

K7 the game seems to be of the opinion that the USA would just pull an Afghanistan and leave Japan for dead.
So the main dilemma of the game is a MKultra agent called the Killer7, but we have no idea who he is an agent for. Is the K7 American, Japanese or the Asian Powers? No matter which ending you choose, K7 always ends with the Asian Powers (AKA China) prospering in the end, in a never-ending battle of geopolitical influence for control of the status quo.

Not to get political, but I actually thought that K7's plot (which is highly influenced by real world Asian geopolitics), was already solved by Trump & Shinzo Abe back 2016-2019. Then when Biden became the most popular POTUS in history, what I saw was a quick & sudden shift in Asian geopolitical influence which reverted China back to the power that it was during the Obama era.
When K7 was made during Bush era (LOL Katrina!) 2nd term, China was still just a power that was slowly regaining its influence within the Asian region. The China that K7 depicted didn't actually exist yet.
We just all saw it coming a mile a way if the USA continued to act as incompetent as they do in the Killer7 game.

That's what drove my interest into the Suda games, but K7 was really the only one that speculated about a realistic scenario which wasn't real yet, but it did eventually become a reality by the end of Obama's first term.
Trump was actually trying to pull North Korea under the USA's wing, North Korea itself is a satellite state of China.
That's how geopolitics works, the more land mass you attain, the more power that you assert so long as you have enough population to build & maintain that land mass.
Fucking ignore google though. I just searched it up, and they immediately try to claim that both Koreas aren't satellite states, when I know for a fact that they are coz I grew up in Japan during my teen years. I saw first hand how much the Koreans (no matter which Korea they came from.) hate the USA.

Korea was tributary state to China for centuries, they still have more cultural affinity with China than the USA. Japan has always been a rare case of a country that doesn't really belong with Asians, because they've always been hated by everyone else in Asia, AYY LMAO!

That Coburn Elementary bullshit in Killer7 actually came from North Korean schools in Japan where they do actually raise kids to eventually try & infiltrate the Japanese government. These schools aren't part of the Japanese government at all. I explained it in further detail at the other forum but I can't be arsed to reiterate or find the posts. I could go on forever just listing off all of the things that make Killer7 such a deeper game than any other 3d game that Suda has made.

I haven't played k7 in nearly 15 years though. So it's not like I remember everything, but I do recall quite a bit coz that's how impressed I was with K7's politics. You really don't see that type of depth coming from any game.
Especially those propaganda type of games like Spec-Ops The Line where they accuse you of being desensitized to violence while being a FPS at the same time. Criticisms such as those, hold hollow to me. It's kinda like the movie Cuties, where it's allegedly meant to show the horrors of oversexuality and its negatives after-affects it may have on children while at the same time coming off as pedo-porn. It looks more like an excuse to exercise in said degeneracy rather than a rebuttal of it. What argument is being made, when all you're doing is showing the acts in full display, but then add in a voice or message of discontent after the act has been done & caught on film.

That just reminds me of Catholics buying their sins away through the Catholic church or Protestants who don't do anything Christian at all except believe in Jezzzus Christ. It shows inconsistencies of morals and lack of conviction of said morals. it looks more like a wolf in sheep's clothing.

[CENSORED]

One thing that nobody ever stated about this game before release and what most shills won't tell you to this day, is that the game has no actual stages you go through. You just grind through arena fights in square rooms on the open world, until you have done enough of them to go fight the next boss.
It's honestly a soul crushing slog and it ruins the game for me, despite the fact that gameplay wise, it's easily the best of the three, in the sense that you have to put some thought into combat instead of just mashing A like the wii games (though it's nowhere near the level of complexity of dedicated action games.) I'm not bringing up TSA because any comparison with that game is sort of embarassing for NMH3

It's a shame that this combat is used for nothing but fighting wave after wave of the same six or seven enemy types, who are all introduced in the first chapter and just get bumped up HP and attack as you keep going. They don't even mix up the waves that much, they're mostly always the same, you'll never see a new moveset from a normal enemy after the first chapter of the game. I know I praised the game for actually having good performance, but that was achieved by limiting all combat sequences to UE test rooms. The bosses are pretty good though, not as good as TSA but it might be fun to try and no damage them. Thankfully the game allows you to replay the boss fights whenever you want so you never have to deal with the shitty overworld ever again after you finish the game.

The minigames suck dick. They are completely optional though, and actually useless because every activity just gives you money and EXP, which are so plentiful you have enough for two playthroughs by the end of your first one.
The open world also sucks, because it lacks the one function that it had in NMH1, which was to contextualize your activities. You'd buy clothes in the clothes shop, get odd jobs at the job center, train at the gym, get assassination gigs at a front store, etc.
In NMH3, you just get t-shirts and odd jobs from random NPCs on the map who speak nonsense, and you enter battles by clicking on random icons on the map, which teleport you in UE test rooms that either don't belong on the map at all, or are in places that would make no sense for you to be teleported on.

As per the narrative:

It's a lot to take in and I'm not sure how I feel about it, fluctuating between "I'm kinda offended" and "Well, that's the point, isn't it?". On a meta level it's a biting satire on shared universes, nerd culture and the associated consumerism, crossover events, media being stuck on endless sequels, reboots, remakes and spinoffs. If the original NMH's credo was "Punk's not dead" then NMH3's is "Pop is dead.".

I think you are projecting your own taste, and seeing satire instead of pastiche. In which case I compliment your taste for disliking dogshit. Suda absolutely loves that stuff though, he spends all day tweeting about it. There's definetly an element of parody in this, but it's more of a well intentioned, fanboy-ish wink than any sort of scathing critique.
For your theory to be true, then Suda would have to be faking his entire public persona in anticipation for this game being "shitty on purpose", which I don't think is the case.
I see why you'd think that, because NMH3's narrative is dogshit, while Suda prooved that he can still write in his old style with the brand new 25th ward chapters, and with parts of TSA.

This is a game made for the fans though, and as Jack pointed out, No More Heroes fans mostly like it for the deadpool-like humor, fourth wall breaks and pop culture references, hence why the game is full of them. It's not a personal project at all.
https://www.polygon.com/e3/2019/7/4/186 ... -interview
Even the shitty overworld was only brought back, because of fan demand. I don't think fans wanted it to replace actual levels though lol.

The narrative of No More Heroes III is basically Ranko Tsukigime stretched for 10 hours instead of one. Hell even the ending is nearly a one by one recreation.

The same animation studio, which also worked on pop team epic, worked on both games.
I think it's a pastiche of anime/tokusatsu/capeshit tropes where yeah they're definetly making fun of them, but not in a mean spirited way.
The ending to NMH1 was a lot more spiteful, considering it was straight up telling you that gaming narratives are retarded.


As per why the writing changed so dramatically from TSA. I believe there might be a few different reasons, other than having shitty writing on purpose.
For once, as a fanservice game, this was aiming for mass appeal and possibly make the company some money. (The No More Heroes rights are reverting back to Marvellous after the release of NMH3. So the new GHM needed it to be at least mildly successful because they're not gonna get another chance for a while, and No More Heroes is their only decently known IP they actually have access to.)

TSA was a much smaller game, and a very personal project where they could afford to allocate budget and time on more important things, because of its low-detail gfx and lack of voice acting. When you have to direct full cutscenes with voice acting, you don't have nearly as much freedom in moving stuff around.

Secondly, there is evidence that the game has been rewritten since the initial trailers.
For example, this trailer acts as the intro for the game:

But the superhero thing is never once brought up, in any of the in-engine cutscenes. The aliens never pretend to be superheroes, never consider themselves superheroes so this line ends up being complete nonsense. Though it was extremely prominent in the marketing.

The only superheroes that show up in the game are a non-character named Notorious (who also appeared in TSA but they're pretending he didn't, and he now has a completely different personality) and Destroyman. They dump some backstory on Destroyman on how he has been scamming money out of various world militaries to mass produce himself and take over the world, which really has nothing to do with anything.

I don't think this is some clever subversion trick where they sweep the chair from under you. There is no subversion, the superhero aspect is simply never brought up at any point ever again after the animated cutscene, which makes me think they probably wrote it out at some point, but they didn't bother to have the anime intro altered.

Secondly, the various areas of the map are very different from one another, but it's never brought up in the story even once.
https://nmh3.com/freemap/
Even the official website mentions them, except for Neo Brazil which is also the smallest area in the game.
Damon has a comment at the start of the game, on how "this city was built without permission", and then it's never brought up again.

It's hinted at that the NPCs roaming around are just androids controlled by a central AI but again, nothing comes of it.
Most of the map isn't even unlocked once you finish the game:

All the red areas remain closed. Some people think it's for future DLC, but I doubt this game will be getting any DLC.

The game even opens on the question of Deathman's identity, which seems like a cool little mistery but it's also never brought up again. Although Deathman later brings travis back to life.

Travis waking up with a neck brace is never brought up again either. It's not a callback to TSA because this game takes place four years later.
Again, these don't seem like clever subversions to me. It is the sign of a script that was heavily rewritten. Hell this cutscene with Sylvia in Kurumizawa's beach space is not even in the final game at all.

It seemed to imply that Sylvia is trying to awaken Travis to some sort of crazy bloodlust, and that would tie it together with the Destroymen cutscene where she is the one who can activate them at will, but that's ignored in the finished game by claiming that it was all Destroyman's doing.

EDIT: Every time I think about it I remember something new lol. In this opening cutscene, the narrator mentions that Fu's nine aliens are dispatched "five on earth, two in the sky, one on the moon and one in space"

That's simply not true in-game, you just get teleported to the same spaceship before every fight, except for three fights that happen to take place in locations on the overworld. Though even that's debatable considering Rank 5 asks you to go to a concert venue, while the interaction point is actually in front of a 50s diner, because they just couldn't model the concert venue lol. The fights don't even take place in Utopiland like the intro seems to imply.
My point in all of this, is that early & pre-rendered cutscenes all seem to tell a different plot than what the rest of the game went with. I believe some fuckery happened when they realized the game couldn't handle actual levels, and rewrites had to happen to wrap up what they had.

Henry's fight is the only part of the plot I liked, because it seemed to hint at some interesting stuff, more interesting than anything that was going on in the game lol.

Henry has a bunch of spares like Sumio Kodai, Uehara from 25W or Shiroyabu. He seems to imply that he and possibly Travis and Jeane were Shelter Children, since they were kidnapped and mindwiped.
The gore also looks disturbing, instead of being treated as a joke like in NMH2 and the rest of NMH3. This whole sequence is the closest the series has been to the first game, since the first game. Too bad it amounts to nothing but another Takashi Miike cameo. I'm sure this is gonna lead to a bunch of theories on how the rest of the game is Travis' death dream or something, but I don't think it's the case, I think the writing is just bad kek.

Henry was actually the Harman Smith looking guy in the VN sections. He even kills himself just to avoid walking all the way to the hotel.

It's both funny and disturbing. The whole Henry sequence seems straight out of a different game, one I'd rather be playing.

The crossover stuff is played out as a joke.

Midorikawa and Kamui (The same Kamui from TSA, who is the same Kamui from 25w. He looks younger, probably because of his silver eye.) just recite the beginning and the end of the RGB comic respectively. Kamui is using similar powers as Kurumizawa which I guess is interesting. All the youtubers that were hyping up No More Heroes 3 as the culmination of 20 years of Suda games should apologise lol. I knew that people who played through his entire catalogue just for NMH3, were setting themselves up for disappointment. At least they got to play through better games though.

All in all I don't understand reference humor at all. The game is set up as a homage to Kamen Rider and tokusatsu in general and being a big fan of that stuff, you'd think it was right up my alley. More like up my ASS. I don't understand what's so funny about bringing up Rocky out of nowhere, or that the ending is a reference to DBZ's Cell saga, or that the mech from Daemon X Machina shows up. I don't understand it at all, but there's several pieces of media based entirely on this premise (Scott Pilgrim, Deadpool, Rick and Morty, the Big Bang Theory etc.) so I guess other people out there find it hilarious. TSA had some of that and I didn't care for it then (LOL IS THAT EPONA!! THE HORSE FROM LEGEND OF ZELDA GET IT) but it had a lot more going on than just that. NMH3 is just reference after reference after reference, and it keeps dumping characters like a rhinoceros dumping ass in hopes one of them will get a spin-off that isn't owned by Marvellous. Suda already talked about a Shinobu spin-off.
https://gamerant.com/no-more-heroes-4-s ... -spin-off/
The game even ends in a Smash Bros fight.


Also I cannot possibly bring myself to give a fuck about this stuff anymore. Yes I thought TSA was all right and it has grown on me more and more as time passed, but other than that, GHM's entire catalogue after the original NMH has been a mix of mediocrity and diarrhea and that was 14 years ago. We got four fucking travis games, and only two silver case games. I really need to get my head out of my ass and work on the website more, so I can go on to obsess over something different than some games from two decades ago lol.

So basically it's a bunch of random memes & nonsense, that's supposedly punk coz some corporation pushed the Deadpool character as punk? ... wot? lel

That's exactly what NMH3 feels like. Some corporation-mandated faux "punk". The underground feeling from Suda's older releases, that was at least partially brought back in TSA, is completely gone. NMH3 is the equivalent of buying pre-ripped jeans to appear rebellious, when those pre-ripped jeans are produced by a multimillion dollar company that probably has child slaves and sells organs to the side lol.

it seems as though NMH3 is at least ok, because at the bare-minimum, it's playable. Which is more than what I could say for 5 frames per second Deadly Premonition 2 lol.

Yeah it's much better than DP2 in that it's playable. I don't know why you'd want to play it though. The boss fights are cool, but the rest of the game is an AIDS inducing grind against the same enemy waves, and that's if you skip the optional part of the game, which amounts to even more enemy waves, and god awful minigames, which as opposed to NMH1 (which only had you play each minigame once and they were all functional and short) you get six to nine versions of each and they don't really work that well. The bike missions especially feel like they're glitched, or at least they don't properly explain how the fuck you're meant to play them.

[AngelheadedHipster]

snip

It's a long post, so excuse me for not replying to it point by point.

I can see looking at NMH3 and considering it an example of indulging in low brow nerdy shit, rather than making fun of it and I am wondering on whether I am wrong in assuming it's meant to be satirical. But when I compare it to No More Heroes 2, which jumped the shark on accident, simply on the virtue of being written and directed by hacks who didn't have a good enough grasp on the originals tone to make a faithful sequel to it, I get the impression that NMH3 know when it's jumping the shark. Maybe I just have a sort of positive bias here, but I simply can't see the writer on Killer 7, Silver Case and Flower, Sun and Rain making something like NMH3 in earnest, unless he somehow had the personalities of Seltzer and Friedberg awaken in him between TSA and NMH3. Elements like Kamui having appearances, simply for the sake of non sequitur cameos , just makes little sense to me otherwise, as it's a joke that would be lost on anyone not familiar with his larger body of work, while feeling like it's made on the expense of people who are familiar with it. It's not that I think Suda would never write something bad on accident. I have some major issues with parts of 25th Ward, for example. But I don't see him writing something as unambitious as No More Heroes 3 is on face value. Towards the ending, when it goes from an over the top alien battle, to a mech battle, to a Smash Bros. battle, to a chibi style cutscene with Travis' time travelling grandson, I just don't feel the player was meant to view all of that as anything other than fucking retarded.

Maybe I'm just missing some context here. I have absolutely no personal experience with Sentai or Tokosatsu stuff, which No More Heroes 3 might be a tribute to so maybe that's just going over my head. I don't follow Suda on social media so I don't know his actual relationship to the type of media NMH3 is referencing. I know he posted a picture with a plastic figure from Rick and Morty once which, personally, I think is mostly a painfully unfunny show, but I never took that as a sign that Suda has genuinely bad taste. I mean, Flower, Sun and Rain was a very comedic game and a lot of the humor in that actually worked for me. So, you know, he can actually do comedy without reverting to 00s spoof movie humor like NMH3 did.

Interestingly enough, I assumed weird, unexplained elements like Travis' neck brace at the beginning, the fact that all the pedestrians might be Androids, whatever the hell is going on with Henry, Jeane suddenly talking like a black guy and Naomi having turned into a tree, Mr. Blackhole talking about having gathered data from Travis and so on as a sign that there is some layer beneath the face value plot that the player is left in the dark about, rather than a sign of the game being rewritten. Which might be overly optimistic, but I wouldn't really put it past Suda. I mean, 25th Ward and to a lesser extent even Silver Case often deliberately withheld context from the player so he wouldn't quite be able to figure out what's going on and I assumed that NMH3 was doing something similar. Specifically, I assumed the game was suggesting that the events we're seeing are some kind of simulation.

Anyway, that what I took away from it. I always considered the No More Heroes series, overall, as among Suda's lesser works and I assumed he wouldn't make it the focus of his return to the director's chair unless he had a really good reason to. I wasn't aware that the No More Heroes series had a fanbase seperate from the greater Kill the Past fanbase, I thought most people who've played it were people who got into Suda after Killer 7. Either way, looking at Suda's core output (i.e. the games where he's credited as both writer and director rather than the ones between NMH1 and TSA on which he had some meme producer or "concept by" credit) if NMH3 is really meant to be taken at face value, there'd be a huge gap in quality between it and the rest of his work.

[CENSORED]

Maybe I just have a sort of positive bias here, but I simply can't see the writer on Killer 7, Silver Case and Flower, Sun and Rain making something like NMH3 in earnest, unless he somehow had the personalities of Seltzer and Friedberg awaken in him between TSA and NMH3.

Don't get me wrong, I get your point. If you take the Suda-written games (Moonlight Syndrome, TSC, FSR, 25W, Killer7, NMH and TSA) there is a certain continuity of style there, that is completely lacking from NMH3 which makes you think it's a self deprecating parody of itself. (Basically like the new Evangelion movie.)

I would agree with you, if this were a novel, or a one man production where the writer's will is absolute. Videogame production is a bit more complicated though. A million different things might have happened, that resulted in the game being so unbelievably bad.

This interview sheds a bit more light on what might have happened with the production.

I missed it originally, because the interviewers look like mutant men soy golems, and their soulless dead eyes freak me the fuck out. Unfortunately I have to look at the screen to read the subtitles lol.

For once, GHM only had the No More Heroes brand on lease for five years. TSA took three years to develop, and it was not a "high fidelity" open world game. It barely had any voice acting & scripted cutscenes too. Which means they only had two years to develop NMH3, 18 months of which were spent in lockdown. Which probably explains why they didn't have time to develop anything but the world map, some testing rooms and the boss fights.

The interview also explains the weird ass "goddamn superhero" concept that is never brought up again in-game. Apparently the original plan (to which the animated intro likely dates back to) was that FU and his cronies would have posed as heroes of justice while actually taking over the world, and Travis would have found out somehow and he'd have to face them alone. This was scrapped, because Suda realized there are a lot of popular stories out already about superheroes being bastards. (Probably referring to the boys tv show.)

The interview makes it sound like the idea was scrapped early on, but you can actually see the seeds of that idea in the DLC for TSA.

Where Notorious and Mr. Blackhole are completely different characters, compared to their subsequent appearence in NMH3. Hell Notorious shows up specifically to take Travis out as a villain in TSA. His appearence in 3 is just a Rocky joke where he fellates Travis on being the best videogame character there ever was lol.

I understand now why TSA's DLC was retconned, considering the entire theme of the game changed.
I think they should have gone with the original plan regardless. They knew they only had the IP for five years, completely changing the theme of the game was not a good idea, regardless of being called a The Boys rip-off. With a 2 year dev cycle, global lockdowns, and a complete script rewrite, it's no wonder the game's story is basically a bunch of random shit tying together what they could finish.

Here's some more evidence the game's story was altered during production.
https://www.gameinformer.com/e3-2019/20 ... heroes-iii

There's not a lot that I can really comment on just yet about the characters and Sylvia in particular, but one thing I can say about Sylvia is that her relationship to Travis and her general role in the game is going to be really directly tied to the main story and all the events of the game. She's going to basically play a really big role in the game's story. This time unlike the previous games, she doesn't actually have anything to do with the whole assassins thing, she's in a completely different position, has a completely different role. But again, she's going to be a really integral part of the story.

In some of the DLC for TSA, it actually touches on it a bit, on Sylvia, what she's beein doing in the time since the events of No More Heroes 2. Some of the stuff that kind of clears up in TSA is that she's sort of gotten away from the whole like world of assassins and everything, and has become a world-famous YouTube influencer. That doesn't have necessarily a whole lot to do with what's coming up in the next game, but it's just kind of a taste of how she as a character has kind of changed since then, and is going to be changing for the next game.

In the finished game, her role is exactly the same as NMH1&2 lol. Plus she barely figures in the story at all.
It would explain why this scene I posted before was completely abstent in the finished game.

It was obviously a tie-in with the 25th ward comic, and Kurumizawa's Union.
https://www.paradisehotel51.com/sin/202 ... een-manga/

I also found another scene that seemed to indicate something deeper was going on, but is never built up upon.

Here Sylvia is talking to someone in the car, telling them to stay at the ready but it never really figures into anything.

It would go on to explain why the cameos in the finished game, are so insubstantial.

Elements like Kamui having appearances, simply for the sake of non sequitur cameos , just makes little sense to me otherwise, as it's a joke that would be lost on anyone not familiar with his larger body of work, while feeling like it's made on the expense of people who are familiar with it.

Which is basically what you're saying here. In reality they were probably meant to have a bigger role, that was scrapped during the rushed production.

Towards the ending, when it goes from an over the top alien battle, to a mech battle, to a Smash Bros. battle, to a chibi style cutscene with Travis' time travelling grandson, I just don't feel the player was meant to view all of that as anything other than fucking retarded.

You're giving gamers too much credit. Me and Jack were shittalking gamers 12 fucking years ago, but with time, they've only gotten worse. When they see a smash stage as the final showdown, they don't see it as retarded. They clap and cheer because they recognize it.

I CLAPPED I CLAPPED! I CLAPPED WHEN I SAW SMASH!!!
Look at this guy's reactions.

He audibly cheers at anything. It's fucking scary how braindead these people act. They even pretend one of them was too stupid to immediately spot the fakeout trailer back during E3. At least I hope they are pretending, because you had to be a subhuman not to spot it immediately. (Or not be familiar with No More Heroes at all, which would make you an alpha gigachad. That's not what they're going for though, they claim to be fans.) It was as obvious as the phantom pain fake out.

these guys literally clap and cheer, you can't make this shit up. They all look older than me too. Cake is a fucking teenager and he's way more well adjusted than most gamers. As it was stated in interviews, NMH3 is a game made for the fans. When they say "the fans", they refer to people like this, not the odd twelve thousand people who also played the silver case. (Which is even less for the 25th ward. Though the switch release hopefully spread the game around a bit more.)


I agree with you that the ending is god awful. It's so fucking bad, it's like something out of a doug walker the nostalgia critic skit.

Where he gets pissed at movie directors who are literal millionaires, and in order to cope with it he gets his friends to play them in skits where he portrays himself as smarter & more cultured than them lol.
Damon Riccitiello is based on a real person, John Riccitiello from EA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Riccitiello
Whom Suda is pissed at for meddling in the development of Kurayami, to the point where it turned into Shadows of the Damned. Which I understand (up to a point, considering GHM is not blameless in that debocle. EA was only allowed to interfere according to their contract if the game's development was going nowhere after several years.) but we wasted an entire game worth of plot on his seething, when the point was already made more succintly in TSA.

Instead of whatever the fuck was going on in 3.

Yes I get it. He turns into the aliens from They Live because big gaming corporations are soulless. Fantastic point to make, if this weren't an open world grinding game built in Unreal Engine, jerking off pop culture. That describes some of the most mainstream shit ever made, it's not "punk" or underground at all.

Maybe I'm just missing some context here. I have absolutely no personal experience with Sentai or Tokosatsu stuff, which No More Heroes 3 might be a tribute to so maybe that's just going over my head.

Nah you're not missing anything. I'm a big Tokusatsu nerd and this game does nothing for me.
Naomi being a tree is apparently a reference to Gingaman. Someone pointed out it's also a visual pun on skill trees.
https://risingsuntoku.wordpress.com/201 ... f-revival/
Travis' henshin is a reference to Kamen Rider and so on. The episodic structure of the game is a callback to monster of the week shows too.
Some people think that the ending is a reference to Kamen Rider Kiva, but I actually think it's probably riffing on the beginning of the Cell saga from DBZ. The whole game seems to be based around the Cell game.

Trunks comes back from the future to prevent goku's death and just randomly happens to kill the previous villain & his father in the process, who also happen to be conquering space aliens like in NMH3. In NMH3, it's travis' kids coming back from the future to prevent his death, and they randomly happen to kill off FU's father in the process.

Looking around myself, I realize I'm a fucking loser whose house is chock full of dumb ass videogames, movies, comics and so on and so forth. I'm such a fucking loser, I even have a favourite magical girl. Yes that's right, I am that fucking dumb.

Hell I'm even a big fan of Takashi Miike. On all accounts this kind of game is made for me, but I get absolutely nothing out of it.
For once, it doesen't really capture the essence of the true Otaku at all. It did on some level in NMH1 because Travis was some deranged fuck who excised himself from reality, and killed random people for money. Being an otaku was a character trait for him in that game, rather than a selling point for the whole setting. No More Heroes 3's brand of "nerd culture" is not underground at all. It's a pre-faded captain america t-shirt you buy at target. The references aren't even that deep, they just namedrop shit but it's not like Travis ever makes a joke that requires you to have watched a specific episode of any tokusatsu show to get.
Stuff like Evangelion, which is a staple of modern otaku culture despite being a critique of the otaku lifestyle, requires you to be familiar with specific Ultraman episodes to even begin to understand some of the background elements.

NMH1 at least required you to be familiar with certain japanese subcultures. Compared to that, nothing in NMH3 really requires you to have any knowledge in the shit they keep spouting. They just namedrop a bunch of movies and shows and concepts with the same level of understanding that you'd get from just googling them once.

Secondly, I guess that if I want to watch Kamen Rider or Cutie Honey or a Miike movie I'll just do that, instead of constantly signalling that I like those things to everyone. Most people didn't even know until I brought it up in the thread. THough we did have a Miike thread on the old forums, like 12 years ago back when people gave a shit.

Interestingly enough, I assumed weird, unexplained elements like Travis' neck brace at the beginning, the fact that all the pedestrians might be Androids, whatever the hell is going on with Henry, Jeane suddenly talking like a black guy and Naomi having turned into a tree, Mr. Blackhole talking about having gathered data from Travis and so on as a sign that there is some layer beneath the face value plot that the player is left in the dark about, rather than a sign of the game being rewritten. Which might be overly optimistic, but I wouldn't really put it past Suda. I mean, 25th Ward and to a lesser extent even Silver Case often deliberately withheld context from the player so he wouldn't quite be able to figure out what's going on and I assumed that NMH3 was doing something similar. Specifically, I assumed the game was suggesting that the events we're seeing are some kind of simulation.

That is an interesting take, though it's not really supported by anything in-game unfortunately. That's like me rationalizing No More Heroes 2 having giant mechs and random shit as Sylvia embellishing the story as she was retelling it. I never even brought it up anywhere on the website, because that's just headcanon. 3 doubles down on all the stupid shit that was introduced in 2, they even explain why the mech is absent in-universe.
I personally see all those elements as remnants of an older script. I see NMH3 as a half finished game (that's generous. They only finished the world map and boss fights lol.) with a random-ass plot that was whipped up last minute to kinda tie it all together. The difference between the early cutscenes, promotional marketing & what was stated in interviews compared to the finished game seems to support that view.
(The interview I linked to earlier also indicated that Nobutaka Ichiki, director of 2, would come back to co-direct 3 as well, but he's not actually credited as such. Only Ren Yamazaki and Suda51 are credited as directors. Which again reinforces the idea that it was a messy production.)
It actually reminds me of the interviews for Killer is Dead, where they described a game with a completely different plot.
https://archive.is/uim8X
In short, it's just another nothing game much like most of GHM's catalog, that isn't visual novels. The only "good" (as in interesting, well written and with a mixture of nice gfx, good art direction and good music, so good for GHM standards lol.) grasshopper action games are Killer7, NMH1 and TSA. While I do agree with you that NMH3 is a complete stylistic departure if you only take Suda written games into account, once you look at GHM's entire catalogue of games, you'll see that it's not much better or worse than most of what they did post-2007. Hell as I mentioned before, Ranko Tsukigime has pretty much the same "sense of humor", with the ending being a near recreation.

At most, I can say the game has a motif about memories.

The game starts with Travis being unable to remember who Deathman was at the end of his game, and some of FU's chats with his cronies (which are some of the only decently written parts of the game) have something to do with memories.





When he's talking to Sonic Juice, he even mentions FU is "a victim too", indicating that there might have been something more to it
When FU kills Sonic Juice, he says he has "forgotten about all that stuff"

Chapter 3 is called "Memory"

Henry goes off on how his memories, and possibly Damon's, Travis' and Jeane's too were altered (I can't find the VN segments online, that's when he asks Damon wether or not he is sure that his memories are really his.)


It doesen't really go anywhere though, it doesen't go beyond mentioning memories a lot. It's not even relevant to the plot at any point. A generous (keyword generous) reading of the game might be that amerilard pop culture is collectively erasing everyone's history. After all Henry gets MKUltra'd by watching Thor, lol. Maybe that was the idea in the original script, where FU and company would act as a stand in for american superheroes. It doesen't really come off in the finished game though. This is the only thing I can find that even resembles a theme and even that's stretching it way too far. Trying to garner any message from this is an excercise in projection in my opinion