I completed this today, it was good if a bit limited in scope. If Suda had enough dough to have proper character interaction cutscenes and not just text on generic backgrounds, that would've great. Gameplay got somewhat repetitive and grindy, but the fundamentals are good and asking for more usage.
The most interesting thing about the plot is the implications it has in connection with Killer7. The bug enemies struck me as immediately similar to the Heaven Smile in their designs, balances, approaches and features, including suicide enemies, static spawners and small enemies that you can kill quickly for a big reward.
Once I read K's fax about the DDMk2 brainwashing subjects so they see normal people as "bugs", I immediately knew there would be a level with this as a device, which was confirmed on entering the CIA. After I finished playing, I ruminated on this and realised that this could easily account for the appearance of the Heaven Smiles themselves. The inhuman, polygonal, ghoulish and bugged-out and starkly-coloured appearance all adds up. The first Smiles encountered in missions 00 and 01, Angel and Sunset, look just like normal humans until they suddenly "reveal" that they are smiles. How much is this actually just in the mind of Garcian Smith, who evidently extensively hallucinates himself as seven other assassins regularly and has total repression of many critical childhood memories? Ditto how the smiles are invisible until an area is scanned. Perhaps the smiles are just normal people, and scanning reveals them to be operatives of the Heaven Smile organisation, thereby making them look monstrous.
Normal people do not matter to the Killer7 and can be ignored, so they are literally invisible. The implication is that, much like Travis and Badman rampaging through the CIA killing all the personnel without necessarily realising it, Garcian Smith is killing endless normal people, perhaps while innocents are running around screaming in a panic, for the entirety of Killer7. Perhaps this is why entire cities, huge amusement complexes, apartment facilities, major political offices, all appear to be completely deserted besides the Smiles that the "Vision Ring" reveals. The VR is worn on the hand, much like the glove for the Death Drive. VR = Virtual Reality = Vision Ring.
The CIA are far from good guys in TSA, and the Heaven Smile operatives are fanatic suicide bombers and bio-terrorists in Killer7, so they're hardly sympathetic victims. But the extent to which the player characters may be massacring their way through droves of normal people in both games, perhaps taking out innocent passersby or at least sending them flying in panic, is cleverly understated by this revealing plot trait.
That's my major thoughts on the ramifications of TSA. For the most part, the game is very fun but probably completely inaccessible for anyone who is not already a fan of Suda51. That's great in my books because I enjoy niche titles with specific interests and hate LCD dilution, but the game is also very dependent on its contemporaries for content. No More Heroes 1 is a much richer game in its own native context, while TSA is only similarly rich because it draws from so many sources. In all I really want and look forward to a new NMH 3, and appreciate this title in the interim.
Post favourite bosses and chipsets, theme tunes and levels, and discuss Suda51-y goodness.
my first thought was Suda's interpretation of detaching themselves from reality to fulfill some purpose or accomplish something you wouldn't think of doing otherwise as ridiculous to have a sudden crossover of the Smiths and Travis either fighting each other or somehow teaming together to cause chaos to everything around them, I wouldn't mind seeing it happen to see where Suda takes it and see if he somehow ties it to Kill The Past like how TSA does it with Travis refusing the paradise offered to him after he was searching for it from the beginning of 1
I concur that it could be very exciting, but the VR angle may work better for it. If there's one big thing that distinguishes the world and reality of Killer7 very very starkly from No More Heroes, it's the tone. Even when it's being humourous, Killer7 is always dreadfully dark and the severity of its tone always rings loud and clear in every scene, with whatever humour serving to underscore this with irony.
No More Heroes by contrast has a tongue that never leaves its cheek. Even when its ramifications are deep, which is often, the game is fun in a morbid fashion and never takes its own contrived settings too seriously. This is a distinction that would be best handled by the interface of VR, and therefore reality "crossover". The K7 are so murky and devilish compared to anything in NMH, even the Death Drive's purpose for creating delusional clone soldiers and colonising Mars, it would require such a device to make them existing in the same universe copacetic (to apply copacetic unusually).
Christian Morales
I dont think Suda planned for the Labo VR device to work with NMH3 but that'd be something if it somehow did (nvm that having a Labo VR may be uncomfortable to use for a period of time since its sticking your face into a somewhat heavy tablet and not a phone but thats going off topic). It'd be interesting to see how serious NMH3 is if any comparing the ending of 1 & 2 to how TSA ends (1 ends with a cliffhanger with the sudden appearance of his cool twin foil right after the revealation and death of Jeanne, 2 ends with that ridiculous final boss and Travis gets the girl, TSA ends with him slaughtering the CIA, killing Dr. Juvenile who he respected, rejecting Paradise & that solemn credits song)
I hadn't even thought about the Labo VR, mostly because I don't think about trash and that's kinda what the Labo is in a nutshell, a total unfeasible gimmick for actual gameplay. In fact I'd called the entire Labo series the physical incarnation of Nintendo's negative tendency to make shit gimmicks and bolt them onto ancient tired gameplay rather than actual development, as has been its wont for the last fifteen years.
But that's just Nintendo. If they bothered to renovate and make the Labo VR not shit, or just bit the bullet and made a proper VR headset or a third party compatible, then actual VR in ur VR-themed video game could be a cool thing.
>killing Juvenile That's one of those clever ones to me, I reckon this is likely a red herring. Travis doesn't seem to know he's butchering real CIA personnel, and maybe he's wrong about White Sheepman being Juvenile as well. Juvenile's persona certainly seems distinctive from that of WSM. And if anyone could make an extra copy of herself to control from a distance, it's Juvenile. I reckon that even if she is dead, we've got a lot more to see of her in NMH 3, whether it includes more "Sudaverse" content or stands on its own.
I forget why exactly he goes along with using the fake death ball unless it was covered in the fax or it was to finish what he started or somehow meet with Juvenile. In a way, I'm glad Suda expressed himself throughout TSA with tidbits of how he felt about games, especially with Shadows of the Damned and how its development was handled (Travis beating up that one guy to near-death that's supposedly the EA CEO, you can tell Suda was real mad about it but at the same time at least he reconciled and was ok with how SotD turned out despite going through development hell with EA).
On another note, I'm glad Badman was able to finish what he started as well even if the outcome didn't turn out as well as he hoped (Bad Girl essentially was a different person now) and that he can move on from that obsession that started his hunt for Travis in the first place.
>pic God that makes my blood boil, I hate the extent to which our seats of creative power in the west have been corroded with this lazy, inglorious mentality. It must be such a culture shock to anyone, even Japs who are a first world nation, to encounter the real obstacles to getting good works enacted in our nations.
This and the fact that the characters of Badman, the douche CEO guy that Travis pulps (who is going to come back no doubt, as a perhaps less comedic Jasper Batt Jr.) and Juvenile's fate are all about to stir up such real emotions are a testament to TSA's ultimate success as a stopover title in the series. It's even got me interested in playing SotD, which I had not no desire to look into beforehand.
(I spent about five minutes in a vivid daydream about an NMH crossover with Batman, what with all the characters associated with the word Bat in the series. You could have "Batgirl vs Bat (Bad) Girl" for instance, or Batman vs Pizza Batt Man. Seeing how a guy as commited to NOT killing as Batman would handle the hyperviolence of an NMH game cast would make a riveting contrast)
Aaron Clark
I didn't really think about the Batman idea but that is something to point out. Also, Suda didn't exactly attract attention when he first started out NMH in Japan so him going with western publishers was something he had to compromise to see his works manifest. Still, being able to get your works out there yet having to compromise so much must be painful. And when was the last time there was a Suda entry as 'big' as TSA or something NMH related? It's been a long while, with Grasshopper publishing small to medium games here and there with Let it Die coming to mind as recent. Maybe there will be some theme of compromise put into place there somewhere in NMH3 or some other game amidst all the killing and murder in style. It's only getting crazier with the latest TSB scenario showing that Travis is attracting alot of attention to himself to the point that he warns his family about it (also poor Henry)
No More Heroes was my favorite new franchise of the Wii era. I would have bought a Switch for this if it was a main game. The game itself isnt terrible, but from everything I seen, I can wait.
Liam Butler
Yeah he absolutely had to work with the west, since we seem to be the audience that fully gets what Suda is shooting at in his works, but damn if Japan's restrictive culture is a frying pan then the hell of Western soulless corporate drive is the fire. Think of Microsoft's obsession with designing every game as an "X Killer", like it has to be presentable as the "Smash Bros Killer" or "FIFA Killer" or whatever or they won't fund it. Or the shit that goes down at Valve these days, how Gaben is just a money-obsessed lazy smug whatsit who gets credit for game design choices he actively obstructs. Guys like Suda can carve through that somehow, even if they have to escape senile types like Miyamoto in their own homeland.
>Travis's family This is a theme I've seen develop in a BIG way in TSA. Almost every major character is referred to in the context of their family. Dr. Juvenile's upbringing, her real and foster father Winter and Doppelganger are all examined greatly. Electro Triple Star's sole tether to humanity is his wife and daughters, which causes him to go haywire once that's severed. Ulvarian is the union of the Brian Busters, father and son. Only 8 Hearts and Silver Face aren't deployed in a familial context. Now we know Travis has not one but two children and is a 37 year old father, it puts a lot of his life in a new context - namely that he HAS one, because arguably a 27 year old otaku in a motel room buying a lightsabre off ebay isn't really.
I'm almost positive that Suda must have become a dad himself incidentally. This is a trend I've noticed among creators, and Japanese perhaps more so than others, that their becoming a father colours their vision and becomes a theme in their works.
Daniel Rivera
I was like this as well, I was underwhelmed from what I saw at first (especially since I reckoned that Dr. Peace was Bad Girl's dad, and thought Badman look a bit... classless, although he does fit really). I bought it on a whim a week or so ago and finished it today, it's honestly pretty good. But have you played Killer7? It's not gameplay or plot critical, but if you've played K7 or any other Suda title you'll appreciate TSA a lot. It's an ode to the entire "universe".
Joshua Walker
not sure if Travis's son not being much of a presence compared to his daughter is significant, I need to play through as Bad Girl one time to see if anything interesting pops up - I hadn't thought of the family theme as much as I've been more focused on how Travis changed as a person the past few years
It's almost definitely significant; I've only just got that the "purple loved one" must refer to Hunter. ("Hunter Touchdown" is a marvelously overboard name". Bad Girl mostly just screams "kill" in her dialogues, there's not much more to it, though Eight Hearts does have some changed dialogue when fighting her. She's a great fighter though so play through her anyway, her fiery bat is cracking to use.
Liam Cooper
I hope Golden Dragon GP gets a Labo VR patch just for giggles
It's all up in the air, but the pasta you share doesn't really comment on anything relative to SotD for what it's worth. It's an excellent observation of the parrelels in Travis's life. Namely, Travis was mostly picking off old veteran career killers in NMH 1, people who had been like himself when they were younger. Shinobu was an exception who he wouldn't kill, and was able to comfortable excuse as he wasn't aroused by her. Holly Summers hit the spot since she was hot and not old, and Travis couldn't do it so Summers had to off herself.
Now it's Travis who is the reclusive master, steadily approaching middle age and retreating into video games. We love Travis and are invested in his arc and story, so we have these ersatzes of legendary old video game characters from the 1980s who have become lost in stagnant old games and are now the new final bosses or villains. All of them are tragic, even Doppleganger who is deliberately made to seem awful due to the real life connection with Juvenile. Note the name: Juvenile, the young brilliant wunderkind who is now an older woman. Maybe that's why the White Sheepman avatar is used for the final fight: Juvenile only looked like she does in the panels when she was younger, and woudn't be engaging to fight as a granny nowadays.
When Travis confronts John Winter, who ultimately should be some kind of enemy in the conflict, Travis is actually happy to let him be, sit and enjoy a coffee with him on Mars before getting his head whipped off. He no longer feels the need to challenge and usurp other, older "legends" (the term he hates), since he now is one. The flipside is that Death Metal Jr. is now after his head, and with that all manner of new annoying upstarts with the same horny drive to claim heads that pushed him out of his 27 year old complacency in NMH 1. Mayhaps that's the trick to the structure of NMH 3, Travis isn't greedily mulching ranks but rather stemming the tide of youngsters.
I honestly still wonder what is up with the "hidden characters" thing. You don't get any "characters", in any sense of the word, for finding the secrets. Some health and cash/exp/1up and Sylvia pops up on screen and flies off. Why is it called "hidden characters" when it isn't? Still cool to get new faxes but it feels like there's more.
Nathan Anderson
I wish you could talk to badgirl in the hub at least when she is human
Aiden Gutierrez
Mmm, or at least look at her and the others. Lack of camera control has its perks in the gameplay sections, but it has its drops elsewhere. (it also makes the fight against Smoking King a bit ridic)
Adrian Gutierrez
HOLY MOTHER OF REDDIT SPACING, BATMAN!
Juan Sanders
Yeha, it's a really weird feeling having something incomplete.
Did you all catch the TSA reference in Kurayami Dance?
