ver many years of gaming I’ve lost patience with design philosophy that dictates punishing a player for turning on a game. You know what I’m talking about. Giving players boring, meaningless tasks to unlock miniscule rewards. Making boss fights needlessly long to try the player’s patience. Obscuring the story behind a confusing script. No More Heroes embraces these ideas to their fullest extent, going out of its way to push away all but the most fervent players.

The combat system in No More Heroes has a lot of promise. The combination of button pressing and motion controls is visceral, bloody, and fun at first. Unfortunately, beyond the boss fights, the complexity of the lightsaber-esque fighting never elevates past button mashing. The stylized graphics of the game certainly evoke memories of 8-bit goodness, but they also suffer from frequent pop-up and lack any real texture work. The flow of gameplay is also crippled by some odd decisions – why is there no retry option after a failed side mission? Why does the boring gas pumping minigame net more money than some of the more exciting assassination quests?

Then there’s the issue of the subject matter. Protagonist Travis Touchdown is a sociopath, killing largely for pleasure’s sake, but we never really get to explore why he is the way he is. There’s also a sick fascination with linking love and sex with extreme violence – Travis at one point waits to confess his love to a woman only after she’s blown her own head off with a grenade. In short, there are some things here designed from the ground up to shock and offend.

No More Heroes certainly gets a nod for being wildly different. It’s a unique take on open world play, and its almost nihilistic fixation on violence for the sake of violence has a satirical and darkly comedic edge. Unfortunately, the repetition and lack of substance behind the flash left me cold.