No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle opens with a man’s head in a paper bag. That is not a metaphor. Bishop, the best friend of series protagonist Travis Touchdown, is killed by a group of criminals, and his severed head is thrown through Travis’s window the same night. It is a blunt, ugly inciting incident, and it tells you exactly what kind of game Grasshopper Manufacture made: one that would rather hit you in the face than explain itself.
The sequel to 2007’s No More Heroes arrived on the Wii, with ports later reaching PC and Nintendo Switch. It is a hack-and-slash and beat-’em-up game with adventure and comedy running through it, played in third person and built for a single player. It scores 7.9 out of 10.
Trailer, via Nintendo of America.
Travis Touchdown and the UAA rankings
The premise picks up three years after Travis became the top assassin in the United Assassins Association and walked away. He has returned to Santa Destroy. He fights Skelter Helter, who wants revenge for the death of his older brother Helter Skelter before the first game. Travis wins, and Sylvia Christel tells him he has taken Helter’s place as the 51st best assassin. She offers him a “five-course meal” if he climbs the ranks again and reclaims Rank 1.
Skelter Helter, nearly dead, interrupts to warn that he and his co-conspirators will still have their revenge, then dies for good. That night, Bishop is killed. Travis asks Sylvia for help finding who ordered it, and she names Jasper Batt Jr., CEO of Pizza Bat and the first-ranked assassin. In the first game, Travis stopped three separate Pizza Bat attempts to expand into Santa Destroy by assassinating its CEOs. In the three years since, with Travis gone, Pizza Bat opened a headquarters in Santa Destroy and bought out practically every business in town. Travis resolves to climb the ranks for a chance at revenge.
That structure is the whole engine of the game, and it is a better one than the original had. The first No More Heroes made you pay an entry fee to enter ranked battles, which meant grinding for cash before every boss. Desperate Struggle cuts the fee entirely and removes the overworld, letting the player move through the game faster. The ranked fights come at you with less friction. It is the right call.
Two swords, four beam katanas
Combat keeps the wrestling moves and deathblows of the first game. The real change is the arsenal: four beam katanas that Travis can switch between in the middle of a battle, each with different properties. The Peony is large and heavy with a wide range. The Rose Nasty is a pair of beam katanas Travis dual-wields, which is where the marketing promise of wielding two swords actually lands.
There are two sections where Shinobu and Henry are playable, and both differ from Travis. Shinobu can jump, and her section has platforming elements. Henry can dash quickly in all directions using the B button on the Wii remote. A Deathmatch mode lets you replay any boss once the game is finished.
The minigames used to earn money and grow stronger are 8-bit style games across genres:
- action
- puzzle
- racing
That is a strange, funny choice, and it fits a game that never takes its own violence seriously for long.
Jasper Batt Jr. and the boss fights
The boss roster is the game’s loudest argument for itself. Travis defeats Rank 50 rap star and religious fanatic Nathan Copeland. He then meets Rank 25 football star Charlie MacDonald and his cheerleaders, who transform into a giant mech called the Santa Death Para. The game promises bigger-than-ever boss battles and multiple bosses at once, and the material backs that up.
The story is told through cutscenes following Travis, broken up by scenes of a woman at a peep show dictating events to a silent, unknown observer. That framing device is the most interesting thing Desperate Struggle does with narrative, and it is also the thing it trusts least. It sits there, strange and unresolved, while the game gets on with the stabbing.
The publisher’s own copy pitched the game this way:
The follow-up to the popular No More Heroes will offer fans infectious, fun gameplay that allows you to wield not just one, but two swords and face multiple bosses simultaneously in bigger-than-ever boss battles.
It is worth noting what this game is not. Desperate Struggle was the only entry in the series without Goichi Suda as lead director. He moved to executive director, and Nobutaka Ichiki took over. That fact gets raised often as a caveat. It should not be. The game is tighter than its predecessor, and the removal of the entry fee and overworld is the clearest evidence that someone was thinking about pacing rather than ritual.
Two sequels followed: Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes in 2019 and No More Heroes III in 2021. A port developed by Engine Software came to Nintendo Switch in 2020, then to Amazon Luna and Microsoft Windows in 2021. The series kept going, and it kept the punk anime otaku and pro wrestling obsession at its center.
What Desperate Struggle gets right
The comedy and the action are not in tension here. They are the same thing. A cheerleader squad turning into a mech, an 8-bit racing game funding your next assassination, a man’s head in a paper bag — this is a game with a consistent sensibility, and it commits to it without winking.
The weakness is that the revenge plot does not carry much weight. Jasper Batt Jr. is a corporate villain with a grudge by proxy, and the game is more interested in the fight than in the man. Travis climbing from 51st to first is a good ladder. It is not a good story. The peep show framing device suggests the game knows this and wants to say something about how the tale gets told, but it never finishes the thought.
Critics considered Desperate Struggle superior to the original, and that holds up. It is faster, it is funnier, and it respects the player’s time in a way the first game did not. The 7.9 out of 10 is a fair score for a game that is excellent at what it does and slightly unsure of what it is about.
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