i'm resurrecting this topic as i have just finished No More Heroes and i want to talk about it and i hate starting new threads unnecessarily.  there's also some very good points made in this thread already.

so No More Heroes.  so bugs, i here you say, why wait for two years to play the damn thing since you bought it at launch?  Well, the answer is i have a huge pile of a backlog and when buying games they often get lost in the mess for months or years before getting played, and sadly a lot of them never do.  also, and i realise that this may be a slightly twisted aspect of my personality, i try to "save" not just games but other things which i anticipated greatly and which i think i will enjoy immensely, for later.

anyway so i decided it was finally time to play No More Heroes so that i am ready for the release of desperate struggle which i will hopefully have my hands on in 2-3 weeks (volcano dust willing).

my overall impression of the game can be summed up by ... oh my word! i fuckin' loved it.  first of all i loved suda 51's style and attitude which just permeates throughout the game.  i loved the "el topo" like last man standing assassins contest which is the meat of the game.  travis touchdown ... oh where to begin?  i just think he is the perfect lead for the game and will always be one of my all-time favourite game characters.

the fighting:  the fighting i thought was great and hugely satisfying.  even though essentially for me there was little besides pressing A repeatedly and then swinging the remote for a finishing move, especially when fighting grunts. (i hardly ever bothered with deliberately choosing high or low strikes)  i loved how travis's style progresses, not just as you learn new moves (form ryu, tapes or the pub guy) but also as you get the new katanas.  when holding the five-beam sword travis pretty much baseball-bats his enemies with as much force as he can and little finesse.  then when you get the final green-beam katana he does all kinds of crazy samurai moves leaping and twisting all over the place.

the ranked fights:  i loved every single one of them!  well maybe except for the one which doesn't actually happen.  most of them are essentially identical even though the bosses look very different.  essentially their patterns are easy to read and to dodge and a lot of the time the biggest challenge is staying on your toes for the duration of the fight (which can be too long sometimes) and not getting impatient as the window during which you can do damage can sometimes be very small.  i think with the exception of the "old hag" (which i thought was suda's kojima tribute) and to a lesser extent "holly summers" (which was the only one i died at) everyone else (including henry) can be killed with essentially the same strategy ie staying away and/or dodging until they do their big strike and hit them immediately after that as they let their guard down.

the open world stuff:  honestly, i didn't mind it as much as i feared given what i had heard about it from others.  in fact i enjoyed most of the part-time jobs and assassination jobs.  i thought money could be made very fast and very easy so anyone who wanted to progress fast needn't really spent too long wondering aimlessly in santa destroy if they just wanted to do the ranked fights in quick succession.  personally i enjoyed buying all that was available at any given time at the clothes shop (and changing my look for every new ranked fight) and i wanted all the sword upgrades so i did spend a good bit of time driving around doing assassination missions.  also i knew how outspoken suda has been about his love for GTA, so i thought that this was his little tribute to that (even though as others have said this isn't meant to be an open-world or sandbox game at all).

the plot: or as robio said "what little of it there is" is fun, anarchic, postmodern and full of satire.  in other words, all things i expected from suda 51 after killer7 except slightly less cryptic .  i'm certainly anxious to see how the story moves along in desperate struggle.  i feel already very sad though knowing suda has said that travis's story ends with desperate struggle and that any other no more hero games he makes will be about someone else

i started playing the game again in "bitter" difficulty immediately and have finished the first through ranked fights.  i don't know though if i should play the whole game again through or maybe start something else.  ... maybe madworld?  that's another one i've been "saving" (i went as far as the first castle level)

thanks to anyone who read this and sorry if it was overlong