Auteur theory, for all its convenience as an artistic and cultural shorthand, has some flaws.

The idea that any one given person behind a creative work informs the entirety of the project may not be fully accurate in many (if not all) cases, but it also tends to affect discussions of someone’s greater bodies of work.

For an immediate and relevant example, let’s take Hideo Kojima. Due to the fact he’s mostly famous for the Metal Gear/Metal Gear Solid series, a lot of people out there don’t like Metal Gear and, as a result, are not interested in his older works like Snatcher. In their minds, they’ve already got an idea of what a ‘Hideo Kojima game’ is and have decided, rightly or wrongly, that his other games will be more of the same no matter the genre or the series.

This brings us to our subject today: Suda51. More specifically, his most recent game, Travis Strikes Again. Travis Strikes Again has a lot of weight to carry on its shoulders, both as an interquel set in the No More Heroes universe designed to specifically try to drum up interest in a potential new entry in the series, and a 20th anniversary celebration for his studio, Grasshopper Manufacture.

For reasons we’ll get into more later, this game absolutely succeeds at being both of those things. This is, however, where it might start to lose the more casual fans. The game is so packed with references both in plot and in gameplay to the previous No More Heroes games and other works in the Grasshopper canon, that it’s likely going to be difficult for anyone not already familiar with (or at least interested in) these works to really care what’s going on.

This has always been a problem with Grasshopper since their games are universally so weird and insular, but with Travis Strikes Again making this idea more or less the point of the game, you know it’s going to double down on the various insanities.

And I love it as a result.

Travis Strikes Again, in keeping with a long-standing No More Heroes tradition, is several games in one. I’m using this phrase as literally as possible in this case, as the game’s central conceit is that Travis and his new nemesis Badman, the father of a slain boss in a previous game, are getting sucked into prototype video game cartridges made for a rare console. This allows for the game to explore a number of different eras and styles of gaming, including “weird PS1 adventure games” and “garish vector-based racers”, even if the basic moment-to-moment combat feels like a version of Geometry Wars where you have a sword and cuss a lot.

But it’s in this exploration of games that things get weird. Various characters from recent indie/retro-styled games will appear at various points for basically no reason other than the fact Suda51 likes them. Between levels, you’ll get to explore a text-based PC88 styled adventure game that fills out the story of what Travis got up to after the previous game and why he lives in a trailer playing the world’s rarest (and deadliest) video games, featuring tons of references to both other Grasshopper Manufacture titles and references to Suda51’s career as a whole.

Lost yet? You will be, even if you understand all the references (and as someone who has yet to play The 25th Ward but would very much like to, I know some of it was lost even on me). The entire game feels like the sort of thing would have played on Xbox Live Arcade in the previous console generation to promote a bigger game that just came out, which is fitting – the combat is fun but sort of repetitive, there’s a shocking lack of voice acting compared to other No More Heroes games, and while there’s a substantial amount of side content in the perfectly Suda51-esque form of ramen reviews and fictitious game magazine reviews of the level you’re about to enter, the whole thing can feel a little slight.

For Grasshopper fans, or anyone who doesn’t mind mostly-mindless button-mashing, Travis Strikes Again is an easy game to love. The combat is Zen-like and repetitive but not to a fault, the plot is absurd and only makes sense if you pay attention to the supplemental material (such as the surprising revelations about Travis’ life that are characteristically glossed over and ignored), and a lot more work went into the world-building than the moment to moment gameplay.

But if you already like Grasshopper, that’s what you’re here for. You played Killer7 for the amazing art style and bonkers plot, not the fact it’s basically a light-gun game without a light-gun. You played Shadows of the Damned for the grotesque character designs and alternatingly puerile and abstract moments of humor, not for the fact it was one more over-the-shoulder shooter spawned in the decade following Resident Evil 4.

So with that in mind, I would say that Travis Strikes Again both succeeds and fails at everything it wants to do. As a charming, quirky, sometimes-repetitive-but-always-entertaining recollection of a dormant series and the brains responsible for it, it does exactly what it needs to do: provide hours of laughs and callbacks couched in one of the best hack-and-slashes not released in 2011. But as a way to get people excited about No More Heroes, it’s absolutely preaching to the choir, and these people – people who are exactly like me, and if you’re reading this we may already be friends – were excited about No More Heroes from the get-go.

Everyone else is going to recognize it as violent, juvenile, cartoonish nonsense and pass on it just like they always have.

Their loss.

Share this: Twitter

Facebook

Like this: Like Loading... Related

| |