Given the nature of No More Heroes, I'm not sure whether my altered perspective detracted from my experience or enhanced it. I'm going to go with enhanced because as I read over my notes from that meeting all I see are good things written around giant smiling cats I don't remember drawing. It must've stuck some kind of chord.

The thing I feel bad about, though, is not knowing how to say "stress fracture" in Japanese. Suda 51 was kind enough to inquire why I was limping at the end of the appointment and the best I could do was "It's a little broken." Which I think freaked him out because either something is broken or it isn't right?

What Is It?
No More Heroes 2 is the sequel to Wii game No More Heroes in which players take the role of Travis Touchdown and go about laser-swording various enemies to death for cash and stuff. The third person action adventure game is broken up quite nicely with some motorcycle segments and 2D mini-games. The major appeal comes from the game's insane brand of mature humor, which targets a very niche and dedicated audience of Wii owners.

In NMH2, Travis is dragged back into a tournament-style chain of fights once again as part of a revenge quest. Many character favorites from the first game return and you actually get to play as other characters besides Travis, like the sexy Shinobu.

What We Saw
I shared a playthrough appointment with some journos from 1UP where we passed the controller around for a series of mini games, a section in Travis's apartment, part of a Shinobu level and the first level of the game where Travis fights Skelter, brother to some dude you killed in the first game (which I confess I never beat).

How Far Along Is It?
Near final. The game is due out January 27th.

What Needs Improvement?
If You Can't Stand The Crazy, Get Out Of The Game: No More Heroes 2, like its predecessor, is weird, violent and totally proud of both. The narrative is bizarre, the action is gory and the mix of gameplay types between story missions and side missions can leave you reeling. Do not ride this ride if you have a heart condition, a poor sense of humor or a weak grasp of Suda 51's brand of insanity.

Camera Is A Little Bit Too Crazy: I noticed during Shinobu's level that the camera would sometimes have trouble keeping up with her during sharp turns in narrow corridors. Shinobu seems to move a lot faster than Travis, so I could see this becoming a real problem if you're racing through the level, slicing up a storm.

It's No Longer "Open" World: If you liked the open world of the previous game (although some people found it small), you're going to be disappointed to hear that NMH2 sticks to a map system instead. The map system marks where story and side missions are in town and when you select one, you teleport there. To me, it didn't make the world feel small or anything (and given my drugged state, I actually really appreciate the hand-holding with regards to knowing where the next story mission is), but I can think of a few people who wanted more open world, not less.

Shinobu's High Heels: Just watching her sprint in those thigh-high puppies made me want to cry, imagining my poor ankle going through the same motions.

What Should Stay The Same?

Still Endearingly Crass (And Violent): "Tone it down" is not in Suda 51's vocabulary — not even in its Japanese equivalent meaning. From the fourth-wall-breaking narration where Sophie dismisses the need to catch the audience up on the plot of the first game to chopping off people's heads in slow motion with buckets of blood flecking the screen, NMH2 is every bit as inappropriate and violent as the first game. And I don't think the fans would want it any other way.

Still Pretty Easy To Pick Up: There are some updates to gameplay that make bosses more complicated to beat and the training gym mini-games are notoriously difficult. But other than that, it's not hard to master the sword fighting moves or the procedure for charging up your weapon. Newcomers won't be lost.

Fashion Statements Are An Option: You can take Tavis clothes shopping and customize a great deal about his outfit — right down to some shades straight out of the 80s. But what I found really cool is how developer Grasshopper Manufacture gave a nod to Japanese fans by holding a shirt design contest. You can find the winning entries on the racks at the clothing store.

OMG Kitty~! My favorite thing next to the anime video game you can play in Travis's apartment is Travis's cat, Jean. At the end of the first game, she appears to have let herself go and is now a big ball of cat blubber. A mini-game lets you train her with "cat exercises" and arrange her diet so that she loses weight over time. The cat exercises were pretty hilarious — one of them involves Travis hoisting her up over his head, which probably benefits his weight loss more than hers. So adorable! And probably the reason I drew giant smiling cats all over my notes.

Final Thoughts
Now that my ankle is mostly better and I no longer am under the effects of painkillers, I realize how ridiculous the cat thing is. My cat would kick my ass if I tried to lift her over my head under the pretense of trying to make her lose weight.

Also, here's some news you can use:
—There are about 10 hours of gameplay total (side missions and all).
—No save data from the first game carries over or has any impact on the game.
—It doesn't use Wii MotionPlus.
—The motorcycle returns in some side missions.
—Suda 51 had nothing to say either about the ports of the first game to the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360, or about his ongoing project with EA.

The folks over at Ubisoft were kind enough to cut together a very special video for Kotaku to share with you. It distills the very essence of No More Heroes 2 into a single, steamy... weird clip lasting all of 32 seconds. For some guys, that leaves even enough time to cuddle afterward.

Enjoy!

And that's about all we know at this stage, other than a supposed title, No More Heroes: Heroes Paradise.

But we can't say that No More Heroes making the high-definition transition from the Wii to the PS3/360 is much of a surprise. Grasshopper lead Goichi Suda has previously expressed his interest in bringing Travis Touchdown and crew to other consoles.

And, considering Suda's interest in Project Natal—and presumably Sony's PS3 motion controller—the No More Heroes franchise seems like a no-brainer kind of port.

Or maybe Suda and crew were motivated by No More Heroes' Japanese publisher Marvelous Entertainment, which has expressed its disappointment with domestic sales on Nintendo's console, hinting at the possibility of up-res ports of its moderately selling Wii games.

We'll know for sure later this week, when Famitsu would likely reveal more.

UPDATE - The game is indeed in the latest issue of Famitsu, which reveals that it's due out in Japan on February 25. Some new stuff being added for the platform jump include Japanese voice-acting and a game mode where the ladies aren't wearing too many clothes.

You can check out some images from the game below.

"It's not just that," Suda explains. "I wanted to revisit Travis Touchdown. I wanted to write the continuation of his story." NMH lead hero Travis Touchdown is joined by more characters and boss battles this go round in No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle. The title has been in development for about a year and a half and is shooting for an early 2010 release.

"Right now, I don't think I'll make another one, though," says Suda. "This game does wrap up Travis' story nicely." But so many movies are in trilogies — a point that movie buff Suda is quick to concede.

With the advent of Sony's new wand-like motion controls, it would not be a stretch to see something like No More Heroes ported over to the PS3. "I'm not playing platform favorites," says Suda. "For me, No More Heroes is about two handed controls — the way you play. But I do very much think of the game as being a Wii title."

No More Heroes designer Goichi Suda is already making off-handed remarks about his desire to see NMH hero Travis Touchdown in the next Smash Bros.. Suda tells Nintendo Power:

I love him (Travis), and I want him to be a huge star. That's why I'm working very hard to make this game as interesting as possible. Maybe in the future, we can see him fighting alongside Link in the next Smash Bros. [laughs] That would be great.

Yes, yes it would.

Suda 51 wants Travis Touchdown in next Smash Bros. game [Nintendo Dpad via IncGamer]

Alex Ward, head of Burnout developers Criterion, has said "Suda-51 came here for the day a few weeks ago. He's a hardcore Burnout fan. I checked the servers - over 700hrs play."

700 hours? Hey, Suda: get back to work!

[CrashAlex @ Twitter, via VG247]

The "middle audience".

Here, let's let Suda explain. "Well, there are a lot of core gamers, and a lot of lighter users playing on platforms such as the DS - but there's nothing in-between," he said. "I think it's going to be very important for games to be created for that middle audience, and that will help bring the market back on-track. "

This sounds like he's talking about the hard casual players. So, yeah, it could happen.

"Middle audience" to spur Japanese market revival [Games Industry]

Marvelous publishes Grasshopper's games in Japan, and the exec says this about that mysterious PS3 title: "If we do that [game] we might go bankrupt," Wada joked to game site Siliconera. "We are making it, but if we make everything then it's a little too risky."

Taking risks is good. Taking risks that bankrupt your company? Less so.

Marvelous Entertainment Publishing A PS3 Game Made By Grasshopper Manufacture [Siliconera]

Sadly, those ideas don't seem like they'll make it into the follow up to Wii adventure No More Heroes. And the Grasshopper Manufacturer CEO wouldn't tell us what those ideas were. But considering Desperate Struggle's focus on revenge and Wii Remote swordfighting, one would think monitoring a player's pulse would be regularly up.

Vitality Sensor use in Suda's upcoming game probably won't happen, but Wii MotionPlus support might. Suda says Grasshopper is "going to definitely try to use" the peripheral for No More Heroes: Desperate Struggle, one of the few properties the developer has worked on that's spawned a sequel.

If they can figure out how to dual-wield beam katanas with one-to-one motion tracking, we could have something interesting on our hands. Just not our fingers.

The game once again stars beam katana assassin Travis Touchdown and Japanese Ukrainian co-hort Sylvia Christel. There's a new character — a hip-hop killer named Nathan Copeland who is ranked 50th by the United Assassins Association. He carries a shape-shifting boom box.

In Desperate Struggle, Travis learns the art of dual beam katana wielding. Details are currently scant about how this translates into gameplay. Expect more details at E3 — hopefully!

Oh. One more thing. The game's developer, Grasshopper Manufacturer, appears to be taking applications for in-game t-shirt designs.

The Nordic Game Conference pulls devs and industry pundits from all over Europe for their speakers list. As the event has grown in scope and size, they've started scheduling speakers from North America and Japan. Last year, the conference guested ICO and Shadow of the Colossus dev Fumito Ueda.

From the press release:

"Having Keiji Inafune and Goichi Suda join Nordic Game this year highlights the strong and growing relationship between the Japanese and Nordic games communities" said Tom Felices, executive director of the event, "and will offer attendees a unique opportunity to meet two of the most exciting game creators today".

The Japanese duo joins a roster that is guaranteed to draw the attention of the industry around the world: Tom Edwards, Englobe (US), Lars Gustavsson, EA DICE (SWE) and Ryan Schneider, Insomniac Games (US), as well as speakers from Media Molecule (UK) and Grin (SWE) are among the industry heavyweights appearing at Nordic Game 2009.

Nordic Game 2009 kicks off in Malmö, Sweden May 19. Check out the official site for more info.

Suda tells the Official Nintendo Magazine that the main character of No More Heroes, originally planned as an Xbox 360 title, was inspired by a pants down sit down session.

"I actually came up with the initial idea for a game featuring a [Johnny] Knoxville-style character whilst on the toilet," Suda says. "I decided to use that inspiration as the save game mechanic." Knoxville's penchant for Jackass toilet humor, we assume, was Suda's muse, as it later also fostered inspiration for one of the game's more memorable marketing campaigns.

The Making Of No More Heroes [ONM UK]

I went into my interview with the two Japanese developers with a bunch of questions I knew I couldn’t ask; I lived in Japan long enough to learn that the direct approach is usually not the best. The questions I did ask, though, had some fun answers:

“What do you think of MadWorld?” I shot this one off at Suda directly and he didn’t even wait for the translator. His face lit up and he exclaimed something about how cool it looked – like Sin City. And something about how he had a similar idea, but my Japanese ain’t that great, so I had to wait for the translator to explain that Suda had a similar idea for a futuristic game that now he couldn’t do because it would look too much like MadWorld.

Mikami didn’t seem as thrilled. He’s an “external board member” at Platinum Games, so he probably knows all the guys on MadWorld’s dev team and wouldn’t want to comment on anything of theirs that could be secret. Mikami is the man for horror, though, and that’s how this odd partnership came about.

Suda 51 makes his games with a story first and fits them to genre later. His newest idea (the mysterious new project to be published by EA) seemed to fit well with the horror genre and so he took it to Mikami.

Now we get into globalization business talk. Skip this paragraph if you don’t give a damn. The Japanese gaming industry is mostly closed off from Western gaming; at least, they’re not as chummy as the US gaming industry is with the European industry. The tendency for independent developers in Japan is to find a big studio with a Western presence (Capcom, Sega, etc.) and work through them. But every independent developer is always afraid of having their idea screwed with in the name of brand marketing, and in Japan, the eternal “We’ll think about it” runaround keeps games from getting made for years at a time. Not so with EA. Mikami and Suda pitched their idea and received an instant “When can we start?” which lead to GHM’s new partnership with EA. So while it might look weird on paper to see Mikami paired with Suda and GHM paired with EA – it all makes sense in the global view of gaming politics.

Mikami especially wants to give Japanese developers the chance to go global; and Suda says collaboration is the future of gaming. There are a lot of rock star developers in Japan (Kojima, Miyamoto, Itagaki, etc.) that want to take their ideas to a worldwide audience and that’s always good for the market.

Or at least it’s good for me – I heart Japanese games.

I also heart horror games, so this is going to be an amazing year for me – Left 4 Dead, Resident Evil 5, Dead Space… That’s an awful lot of horror games on the market already.

What do Suda and Mikami think about the possibility of too many horror games? Not much, really. They like horror too – and more horror can only be good. Bear in mind though, that Suda is an action man first and foremost. So whatever we see from the dream team is going to be a blend of action horror; with Suda as the action and Mikami as the horror. We will not see Resident Evil: The No More Heroes Experience, and we probably won’t see Killer 7 Part 2: Electric Boogaloo.

The last thing we talked about in that awkward interview of my lousy Japanese, their lousy English and the translator trying to keep up (don’t you just love language barriers?) was the concept of developing games for multiple platforms. Like Epic Games, GHM doesn’t believe in making a game and then trying to squeeze it onto a system in a watered-down form to fit the audience; but they are determined to bring their game to as many people as possible.

The number one challenge, Suda says, is developing for the Wii. Its audience is less cut-and-dried than the 360/PS3/PC crowd (what with the inclusion of old people, young people and casual gamers) and what appeals to Wii people might not appeal to 360/PS3/PC people. He just has to have faith that his idea is good enough on its own to bring in the fans and not worry so much about maxing out an audience on a specific console.

I’ve got to say I was feeling pretty good about the mystery project when I was ushered out of the door. It normally irks me when a studio gives the “we can’t tell you” spiel, but Suda 51 and Shinji Mikami are guys who know what they’re doing. And hopefully EA trusts them to make an awesome game as much as I do; but then, if they didn’t, they wouldn’t have made them partners, right?

Commenting on its imminent release, Goichi Suda, aka Suda51 commented, “It’s great news that European gamers are getting to play Flower, Sun and Rain. All of my creative work involves a touch of the bizarre and unexpected and this game is no different!”

There's a trailer for the game coming out on Friday. Hopefully these latest screenshots will tide fans over until then.

CLASSIC SUDA51 TITLE HEADS WEST FOR THE FIRST TIME EVER

Revered Japanese title finally gets a European release as Suda51 updates his PlayStation 2 masterpiece; Trailer to be unveiled on August 1st 2008

Luton – July 30th 2008 – Rising Star Games will be keeping both Suda51 and mystery fans happy this autumn with the long-awaited release of Flower, Sun and Rain.

Written and directed by the infamous games creator, this Nintendo DS™ exclusive is the first chance western gamers have had to experience one of Suda51’s earliest creations and offers an insight into the evolution of his unique style following the huge successes of Killer7 and No More Heroes.

Flower, Sun and Rain is an intriguing mystery adventure very much in the vein of Groundhog Day. You play a detective charged with locating and defusing a bomb by solving thought-provoking puzzles with a wealth of bizarre outcomes. Solving the mystery of what is happening to him and his surroundings is necessary before he eventually goes insane.

Originally released on the Sony PlayStation®2, Flower, Sun and Rain was never available outside of Japan and has been high on wish lists of every Suda51 fan since Killer7 was unleashed on the western market in 2005. This updated Nintendo DS version features all the creative quirks that made the original a hit and uniquely utilises the touch screen to solve mysteries, offering players a more intimate experience.

Commenting on its imminent release, Goichi Suda, aka Suda51 commented, “It’s great news that European gamers are getting to play Flower, Sun and Rain. All of my creative work involves a touch of the bizarre and unexpected and this game is no different!”

Flower, Sun and Rain will be released throughout Europe from mid-October 2008.

Gamasutra has a great interview up with Masafumi Takada, best known for his work on the Grasshopper Manufacture games killer7 and No More Heroes and contributor on projects ranging from Super Smash Bros. Brawl to Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles. The interview covers a ton of ground, from what it's like to work with Goichi Suda to Takada's work on Samurai Champloo to his theory on composing for games:

Music is really tied to your experiences and memories, similar to how your sense of smell is. If you hear music that you've heard before, it should bring memories from that previous time rushing back. So the game is of course a virtual world, where there are naturally things that don't have any relation to reality.

But perhaps these experiences could happen to you in the future. The music will be tied to these potential future experiences. So I want to create music that will tie you to, and remind you of, the virtual world, but also come back to you in the real world, and create future memories. The soundtrack should recall your old memories, but also help forge new ones.

After you've played the game, when you listen to just the music, I want players to be able to remember the feelings they had at that time, and their feelings of that era.

I, like most people, have an unholy mix of music on my 'favorites' list on my iPod; it's always nice to have some of my favorite gaming tracks sandwiched between diverse music and have those tracks stand out in a good way ('Really? That's from a video game?' is a reasonably common refrain from non-gamer passengers in my car). We do get so attached to music, and I'm so attached to music from some of my favorite games — to think of it as something that should be part of the memory process and not merely unobtrusive background is something that's not new, but important to remember. Somewhat lengthy interview that's certainly worth perusing.

Masafumi Takada: Grasshopper's Musical Craftsman [Gamasutra]

Zero Punctuation: No More Heroes [The Escapist]

... With all this high regard would come pretentiousness, and everybody would be too scared to admit that they didn't particularly like - or even understand - Konami's latest FPS based on the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, or Square Enix's RPG adaptation of Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, in the same way that nobody in the art community will admit that, really, Damien Hirst's stuff is a load of bobbins.

His suggestion on what to do with Finnegan's Wake is brilliant. I'm not sure the world is quite ready for a Dostoevsky-Squeenix mash-up, but it would make for some interesting reviews to be sure.

Blogs
The Ryan Lambie column: the dawn of literary videogames [Den of Geek]

I want to make a Super Mario game for adults...Maybe Mario could wear an Italian suit and have a machine gun...But Nintendo probably wouldn't like that idea.

With a gun.

Suda wants to make 'Mario with guns' [CVG][image]

This originality will always remain, but I also want us to challenge ourselves by working at making realistic visuals as well. The next title will have a very different style, but keep the Grasshopper feeling at the same time... The Xbox 360. Definitely, I want to develop on this platform. It is really easy to work with. It is also quite popular outside Japan on markets that I would like to aim at. Specifically, I think of the American market as the Major League — I would like to go there and be successful.