Finally ! Finally, we find the adventures of Travis Touchdown, back on the American console of Microsoft since No More Heroes: Paradise, adaptation of the 1st opus of the Wii. Was the wait worth it? Certainly yes for fans of Suda 51 and all pop culture, for others…
Above all, No More Heroes and its hero Travis Touchdown are inseparable from its creator Suda 51 and its studio Grasshopper Manufacture (Lollipop Chainsaw, Sine Mora or Shadow of the Damned). If we were to transpose Suda 51 into the cinema, it would be equivalent to a Tarantino or a Robert Rodriguez for this love for pop culture, the 7th art, aesthetics, with a low-fronted humor as yours truly is used to regularly flood you. Which therefore explains this aura that Suda has on the entire world video game community and not just in Japan.
No more guesswork, let’s move on to No More Heroes III. Travis Touchdown, an Otaku with a hooligan tendency with his perfecto worthy of Renaud (era “Laisse concrete”, not the current era “Laisse Ricard”) buys a lightsaber on eBay and becomes an assassin. For this, he must climb the steps of the hierarchy of assassination until he becomes the number 1 killer. Here, he will have to do better: become the No. 1 assassin in the universe.
The story begins with a child who finds an alien and collects it. They befriend and the little boy helps the ET to get home, without a phone. The extra-terrestrial promises to return in 20 years. Our young boy grows up and becomes a CEO of a large company that has control over political decisions and connections with various governments. Our extra-terrestrial, Jess Baptiste 6th of the name, returns as agreed and oh devil, he is no longer so Kawaï and has decided to destroy the universe accompanied by these 10 interstellar killers.
You guessed it easily: who is going to do all the work? Travis of course, finally Touchdown. Silvia Krystel, the perverts will have recognized the reference, will allow her this time to finish Top 1 of interstellar killers. The game is in the form of an open world. Chapters like a Netflix series with credits reminiscent of both the Japanese version of cartoons from our childhood and the Grinhouse side of Death Boulevard or Planet Terror.
The game abounds with winks, I repeat it once more, of WTF elements that no video game at present can match. To have the right to fight one of our opponents present in the ranking of our video game-style Kill Bill, you will have 3 imperative fights and side missions in order to earn money and deserve your “entrance fee” to face. your rival of the moment: mow the lawn, unclog toilets, pick up garbage, enforce road safety like Taito’s Chase HQ game… which prevents monotony and brings a smile to the debility of these jobs or as the game calls them: volunteer but paid.
The game is therefore fun, we have fun with all the decorum but even if it is optimized for Xbox Series X|S… the game is really pitiful from a video game/technical aspect. An empty open world, I had delays in the appearance of textures, visually it seems that the game has remained in 2010, HD and more. We meet 3 people in their open world, it’s like the allocation of Riggs’ tests for a remake of an Atari game. The open world is clearly not at the level of a game from Rockstar, Ubisoft or CD Projekt. But devilishly bloody with this side off the beaten track by Western AAA. So for neophytes, lovers of Godard’s cinema, of a literature licked and dubbed by the café de flore, of modern games both in terms of their graphics and their gameplay… go your way. If, like me, you grew up in a world with anime, Takashi Miike’s cinema for example, where the humorous side of bof and old school video games are your thing… you’ll be asking for more and worshiping the director Suda Goichi.