No More Heroes 3: Murder and Miike

No More Heroes 3 is back. By God we might just see the end of this series this year. I very much appreciate this game's determination to keep getting weirder the closer it gets to the end. Most games would be wrapping things up at this point, but No More Heroes is a series that likes to keep throwing new weird shit at you until the very last post game cutscene. 

In this one episode alone, in the span of about 20 minutes, about 3 or 4 totally unexpected insane things happen out of absolutely nowhere. It just doesn't let up. You can tell Suda is just relentlessly cramming every possible rad thing he can pull out of his soul into this one, just in case he doesn't get to make any more of these. 

This one has it all. First a classic late game confrontation with Travis's pointlessly antagonistic brother who for reasons deemed unimportant has a completely different look and voice from the previous games, who quickly gets chopped into pieces and then immediately comes back totally fine with zero explanation to cut Travis's fucking head off during a game freezing toilet glitch. 

Then we do a post-death gamer inception sequence game within a fever dream within a game that is a fever dream, wherein Travis's 16 bit console hero Deathman shows up to kindly double-kill him back to life. Also, i forgot to mention this all starts with another lengthy discussion on the films of Takeshi Miike between Travis and bishop, most of which i cut because the only commentary would have been me chuckling boyishly, but these conversations do turn out to be important because... well... you see the title and thumbnail. 

If this game even had a 4th wall to begin with it was already thoroughly smashed to pieces Kool-Aid Man style by the time Travis started yelling at the developers for letting the toilet screen glitch, but after spending the entire game geeking out about Miike flicks an entirely new 5th wall is erected just so that it too can be destroyed by Travis begging Miike himself to direct a live action No More Heroes movie.

Then there's another wonderful little feel good Rocky tribute, this time with Travis's allies lending some late game motivation and moral support, and then out of nowhere there's just a bunch of Yoshi noises. Oh wait, that wasn't the game, it was me. I can't even tell anymore where No More Heroes ends and I begin. I am No More Heroes. This series speaks to me, and if you don't one day see me playing Travis in a Miike directed No More Heroes film, you'll know that somewhere, somewhen, we've gotten lost in an inferior timeline again.