No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle New Impressions

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A couple of weeks ago, Ubisoft and director Goichi Suda gave the press an extended look at No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle (more extended than the PAX demo, at least) and presented a lot of cool stuff in action: new combat abilities, the goofy 2D minigames, and playing as Shinobu, for starters. Those parts are definitely fun, and they'll all be talked about in this preview, but for me personally, those weren't the most interesting. Rather, what surprised me the most about Despserate Struggle is the fact that you can't explore Santa Destroy, the city the game's set in, on your own anymore. In game terms, the city's been reduced to a menu screen, where you select missions, boss stages, stores, etc. on a regular list with a map as the background.
It's not something you expect a sequel to do. Had this been a normal chain of events, the first No More Heroes would have the simpler city traversal, and the sequel would go into full-on open-world mode. Surely, polishing up the city could have been a more attractive proposition after (presumably) being given a bigger budget, but on the other hand, Santa Destroy felt pretty dead in the original, so it's possible that the developers at Grasshopper went down the easy path rather than playing the odds with gamers, focusing instead on what the game was really known for: its action and ludicrous story.


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