About 4 hours into No More Heroes 2, one realizes that this is more than a game, it's a parody of gaming itself. It's not quite as blatant as last summer's Matt Hazard game, but it's there, and it's hilarious.
Again, the player is thrust into the persona of Travis Touchdown, former reigning champion of the United Assassins' Association and resident of Santa Destroy California. However, it's three years later, Travis has lost his rank, and his best friend from the first game and he's ready to do some killing.
The game plays like the original. The player tilts the remote up or down for either high or low attacks. The A button is then pressed to swing the beam katana. This is nice because the player is not left swinging the Wii remote around the with reckless abandon, breaking furniture and maiming spouses. The B button kicks and initiates grappling moves. The analog stick on the nunchuck guides Travis and the Z button locks on to enemies. It's easily the smoothest, most accurately controlled game for Wii.
There are some fundamental difference between NMH 1 and 2. The driving segments are gone now, replaced with a might handy map that lets Travis skip to places of interest. This works very well, as the actual driving in the first one never really contributed to the plot (except for a few key missions) and just took time away from fighting. The job missions are back, but this time, they're all played as 8-bit video games. (The sound of Travis blowing into a cartridge can be heard before Travis starts one of these missions). As you climb the ladder of the U.A.A. again, this time you can be challenged from below. This brings a really interesting dynamic to the game. In the first of these fights, you face off against a school girl who has a crush on Travis. I don't want to give too much away, but it involved deadly bubbles, a two sided beam katana that shoots out of a recorder, and some really really really bad poetry. Needless to say, while making the plot slightly more serious, the game still keeps its sense of humor in tact.
The video game parodies itself and the genre constantly. Aside from the 8-bit mini games, giant chainsaw wielding guys ask "Trouble in your digital world?" sympathetically before taking a big swing at Travis. Travis himself can play a video game on his TV called Bizarre Jerry 5 where scantily dressed anime girls shoot at aliens 1942 style. There's an intro movie for Bizarre Jerry that intentionally makes no sense whatsoever, and by doing this delivers a lot of laughs. In his first interaction with Sylvia (his "love" interest from the first game), Travis and she argue about plot and continuity. Travis of course wants the audience to know what's gone on over the last three years, while Sylvia maintains that most of the audience is playing this as a stand alone game and could care less about what happened in the first game. One thing is certain though, in the three years since NMH 1, Travis's cat Jeanne has gotten fat. Morbidly obese fat. There are a series of mini games that help the cat exercise and lose weight. Could this be a dig at the Wii fit?
No More Heroes 2 does comedy well but also, strangely enough, walks the tightrope into dramatic territory. Moody cinematics of Sylvia explaining the plot between missions set a great tone for game. The music in these scenes recall shades of Angelo Badalamenti's dark score from the old TV show Twin Peaks. Travis conveys his feelings of loss in a quote the both sums up his dark emotions and the silliness of the whole affair: "Everyone deals with grief differently, Some people fuck at funerals, I cut heads off."
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