Anyone that has followed me for a while will know I have an undying love for Suda51 games, stemming from Killer7 back in the ‘good ol’ Nintendo Gamecube days.
Critically, most of his games don’t fare well, neither do they sell in huge numbers – I also believe most of them polarise the gaming community into a Marmite style love/hate situation. However for me, I see them as a love letter to gaming’s past, a look back at what made gaming fun in the first place, with a quirky ‘Japanese’ twist. Put a Cheerleader with a chainsaw, a bounty hunter with a robotic arm, or a gun called Boner in a game, and I’m there…
My most favourite game by Suda51, and one which sits in to my top 5 (when I have to rack my brains to put together the impossible list) is No More Heroes. Originally released on the Nintendo Wii & later on PS3 with the subtitle Heroes Paradise; with additional content & beautiful HD visuals, it’s a game that loves just being a game. At the time No More Heroes received mainly mediocre reviews, but I knew I would love it and knew that it was a game I HAD to Platinum – hence why I ploughed 30+ hours in to it!
Set in the fictional city of Santa Destroy, a coastal US city, with a subway system, a baseball stadium and a minefield… The story’s main protagonist, Travis Touchdown, has a mission to hunt down & kill the top 10 bounty hunters in, well Santa Destroy. Additionally you could, if you wanted, collect 99 t-shirts & kill 5100 enemies for a couple of trophies.
No More Heroes is basically just great boss battles with filler in-between. However it walked a perfect line between a relaxing collect-a-thon and a violent, button mashing combat game. The story is typically Suda51… mental!!! The boss battles themselves varied and with a cast of characters full of charm, likability and few clothes.
As I mentioned before, it’s a marmite game, but one I would be happy to Platinum again if Grasshopper ever wanted to indulge me with a super-HD, 4K PlayStation re-re-release, maybe with an ‘extra-very sweet’ mode, although how much that would leave to the imagination I don’t know…
Are there any games, that although most view as rubbish, you really enjoy?