This book was included with the Collector’s Edition of NO MORE HEROES published by Limited Run Games. It includes an interview with SUDA51 by Jeremy Parish, an analysis of the game by Destructoid journalist Jonathan Holmes, and artwork for the game, much of it translated into English for the first time.
No More Interviews
Why are there No More Heroes?
Is Travis a model citizen?
What media diet powers the world’s top assassins?
And how did an underpowered game console shape the evolution of Grasshopper Manufacture‘s most enduring hit?
We sat down with No More Heroes Executive Director Goichi Suda (SUDA51) to discuss the origins of the game… and more.
Looking back to the first game Grasshopper and Limited Run published together, The Silver Case HD. The original Silver Case and No More Heroes were separated by nearly a decade—how would you say that you and Grasshopper grew as both game designers and as storytellers between those two games?
Over those 10 years, there were one or two ways in particular Grasshopper and I grew as game creators. The Silver Case is more of an adventure title, whereas No More Heroes is a full-on action title. In those 10 years, I had my own plan for growth in my head. It was intentional that we moved from adventure titles towards full action.
During that time, we worked on a few other titles with a bunch of other people, and I really feel my development plan pretty much went as I’d hoped. One of the biggest things that helped both me and Grasshopper as a company grow and become the developers we are now was working with Capcom and Shinji Mikami on Killer7, which was a really big turning point for us.
You’ve talked a lot about the various inspirations behind elements of the No More Heroes games—everything from the characters to the setting—but I’m curious what inspired its vibe. Things like the way it blends intense violence and mundane daily life, or slapstick with brutal story twists.
As far as No More Heroes is concerned, and I guess this reflects on my work in general, the things that I took the most inspiration were (the TV series) Jackass, the movie El Topo, and the filmography of Charles Bronson. I really like Bronson’s films! One of my life goals is to see every one of them before I die.
So, No More Heroes has the sort of mix of the low-stress downtime, slapstick comedy, violence and mundane daily life—all this stuff. Not just a mix of the parts of life, I guess you could say, but a mix of different forms of entertainment as well. I pretty much just took a bunch of stuff from all the different forms of entertainment and pop culture that I enjoy and stuck them all together in a game, which is how No More Heroes came together. Everything is slapped together in a seemingly haphazard, but actually pretty calculated, way like that.
What do you mean when you say it’s calculated? Especially in terms of the game design.
When I say calculated, I mean it was all inside my head before we started making the game. I took a whole bunch of stuff that I like and wanted to bring together. But it wasn’t just stuff that I liked personally, but also stuff that I felt would go well in this sort of game. Things that would work well together with the scenarios and the various characters and the narrative. The game itself is a big mix of stuff.
The most calculated part of the game was definitely the ranked battles. There are 10 ranked battles that Travis has to fight through, each with a particular enemy. Each enemy has specific elements of the different types of entertainment and pop culture I was inspired by. I thought hard about each one of those ranked battles: “OK, this character, here is their basic setting. OK, this is something from outside the game that I think would fit well here.”
For example, with the fight with the android magician, Harvey, was sort of based on David Copperfield. With the fight with Holly Summers, I took elements of the movie El Topo and incorporated them into there. It wasn’t just a case of “OK, hey. Let’s mix all this stuff together and just kind of see what comes out.” It may seem like a random mix of things, I guess, if you just kind of wrote it out on a list, but when actually incorporating it into the game, I made sure that each element of these different types of entertainment—games, films, stuff like that—everything was put exactly in the place that would fit best in the game, instead of just tossing it all in together. And one of the areas where I think the game came together best was with this huge mix of ideas that gelled really well.
As a protagonist, Travis Touchdown is as unusual as the game. He’s obsessed with pop media and loves cute characters, but at the same time he seems to have no real reluctance to kill people. I feel like Travis would be a villain in any other game—he could almost be seen as a sociopath.
Yeah, it’s clear that Travis does have some sociopathic tendencies to him, which was somewhat intentional. At the same time, he’s not supposed to be portrayed as a full-on psychopath or anything like that. He definitely does have a really strong and very personal sense of justice, which is particular to Travis himself. He doesn’t really express it, though, right?
Travis himself doesn’t really get into this deeply in the game, and he might not just full-on come out and say it, but he really cares a lot about his town, about the people who live there. He feels Santa Destroy is his own personal base, or maybe a sanctuary, I guess you could say. And you know, the [United Assassins Association] and the ranked battles—as far as Travis is concerned, these are a bunch of dudes who were coming into his town and messing stuff up. As far as Travis is concerned, that’s not cool, and he feels like he needs to do something about it. These guys are trying to screw up his town, and they’re messing with the people there.
So as far as Travis‘s choices are concerned, the only thing he can really do is eliminate these dudes. So while he does have these sort of sociopathic tendencies and elements to him, he wasn’t specifically meant to be portrayed as a full-on sociopath or as a reflection on, you know, sociopathic conditions. I guess that’s a half-and-half answer. Basically, he’s portrayed the way he’s portrayed on purpose, but he does have things besides himself that he cares about, even if he may not freely admit it.
At the same time, No More Heroes in general—and Travis in particular—they’re the kind of game and the kind of character that players don’t really need to think too deeply about.
At the time No More Heroes debuted, Nintendo platforms were still seen as highly restrictive in terms of content, more kid-oriented than the competition. Was creating an ultra-violent game with such dark story themes for Wii seen as a risk? If so, do you feel that risk paid off?
Actually, I’ve never really felt or had the image of Nintendo as being specifically family-friendly or more restrictive in terms of content, more kid-oriented. Maybe it’s because I’ve been in the industry for so long… this probably happens to most people, if not everyone, but that sort of sense gets a bit blunted.
Personally, I’ve been playing Nintendo games ever since way, way back in the day, when Nintendo games first became a thing. I have always felt about Nintendo that more than them being specifically family-friendly, or restrictive of content, or more kid-oriented, I’ve always felt they were more the sort of company that would both make and also publish the type of games that you wouldn’t see on other platforms, regardless of dark themes, violence, or whatever. Obviously, they have stuff like the various Mario games and a lot of games from third parties as well that would definitely be considered more family-friendly, more safe for kids.
But I’ve never really personally had that strong of an image of Nintendo being more restrictive than anywhere. Because of that, I never really considered it much of a risk to put No More Heroes on the Wii. It was more of an opportunity to put out the sort of game that we might not have been able to put out on another platform with a different company. Rather than having an image of Nintendo as restrictive and family-friendly thing, it’s always been more of a feeling of, I guess you could say, anything goes with Nintendo, for me.
Do you feel like something was lost in moving the game to systems that don’t have motion controls? Or do you feel there are ways to make up for the loss of that sort of physical, visceral interaction?
Yeah, we’ve ported the No More Heroes series over to a few other platforms. Since there are no other platforms that have the exact same controls as the Wii’s motion control, there is something that gets a little bit lost in translation, I guess you could say. What we have to do there is, basically, we have no choice but to rely as much as possible on the D-pad and traditional controls. But I do think that with the Switch, we’ve been able to bring the controls back a lot closer to the way they were originally planned for the Wii versions. If possible, I’d definitely like people to play the game on either Wii or Switch, because that’s really the way the games were intended to be played from the start.
Even looking back at games like Fire ProWrestling and The Silver Case, your writing often grapples with morality. How does No More Heroes reflect that trend—your personal philosophy as a writer?
The Silver Case and Killer7 were games that had a lot of text stuffed into them, especially The Silver Case. Almost to the breaking point. I wanted to do something that went against that with No More Heroes. I mean, No More Heroes from the very start was going to be an action game. But at the same time, I had a lot of things I wanted to say in the game—a lot of things to express. But due to various constraints, such as budgeting and tech constraints and stuff like that, we had to take certain shortcuts.
For example, with cutscenes, we were only able to do about 60 minutes of those altogether. If you’ve got 60 minutes of cutscenes, there’s really only a certain amount of dialogue you’re going to be able to stuff into that. Even without the text, you know, there are other ways of expressing things. But there’s only going to be a certain amount of communication, that you’re going to be able to stuff into the scenes. And so instead of doing something like an adventure game, especially something like The Silver Case, a text-heavy adventure game where basically as long as you make sure the player doesn’t get sick of it, you can pretty much write indefinitely, you know? As much text as you want can go into the game. But here we had to think of different ways to express the themes and ideas that I wanted to express, not just through text but visually as well.
One of the things I wanted to do with my text-heavy games was, put simply, use this huge deluge of words to build the psychological profile of these characters and the world they inhabit. Since we weren’t able to do that for No More Heroes, we decided to use visuals and the gameplay itself to take the place of that text. While we were making the game, the best ways for me to express the things I wanted to express and the methods we’d use to make up for the constraints we were confronted with presented themselves naturally. I’d think, “I want to express this, but I can’t stuff an hour of text in here. OK. I’m going to, say, put it into this battle. I’m going to have the visuals go like this.” And so it was really… how do I put this? Not a coincidence, but it really just sort of happened to come together the way it did, and once I sat down and went through the entire final product, I was happy see that it worked out exactly the way I wanted, and I was able to express what I wanted to express.
Notes
- Death Blow Icons would like to give special thanks to Jonathan Holmes for confirming the interview in the book was conducted by Jeremy Parish. While Holmes was credited for his segment in the book, Parish was not.
- killer7 was mentioned more than once but was printed with capitalization each time.
- In the interview portion, SUDA51 referred to Harvey Moiseiwitsch Volodarrskii as an android. This was the first time Volodarrskii was described in this way.