No More Heroes devs reflect on the game’s creation
In an issue published towards the end of last year, EDGE included an article that provided insight into the development of No More Heroes (see what was said about the series’ future here). That piece has now been published online in full. Creator Suda51, battle programmer Toru Hironaka, and senior character artist Takashi Kasahara shared the No More Heroes commentary.
We’ve rounded up some of the interesting comments from EDGE’s article below. You’ll also find a few pieces of art. For the full piece, head on over to GamesRadar.
On Travis…
“I wanted Travis to be like a big schoolboy who sometimes jokes around and is sometimes deeply serious, and who loves to fight. Travis is a little similar to me. If I had been an American otaku, what kind of life would I have led? Of course, I’d have been a top-ranked assassin. He’s a very human character, and one that fits within an action game.” – Suda
On its creation…
– No More Heroes was conceived in early 2005
– The idea came about before the Wii’s unveiling
– Originally planned for the Xbox 360
– This changed when the team saw the Wii remote, which “seemed perfect for the beam katana”
On how it was difficult making the fight system…
“We didn’t know how to program for the Wii controller yet, and making it slash the way we wanted was extremely challenging. It took a long time to make it feel satisfying.” – Hironaka
“We found that attacking with only motion control was exhausting, so that’s when we added the use of the A button. We made about four or five iterations before we nailed the combat.” – Suda
On the limitation of how weapons run on batteries…
“I owned a flashlight that you could shake to recharge its battery. I thought a motion like that would suit the Wii Remote, and it also looks like, uh… That kind of motion is very Travis.” – Suda
On how Travis doesn’t actually fight Letz Shake…
“The development schedule was looking tight, and there were so many boss battles already, so I decided to write the Letz Shake fight out of the script.” – Suda
On Sylvia…
– Originally planned on having Sylvia kill Travis
– She would have shot him after the final ranked match
“Sylvia knows she’s sexy and she uses it as a weapon. She was an easy character to model because her personality was so strong. It wasn’t my intention when I made her, but early in development someone commented that she reminded them of Scarlett Johansson.” – Kasahara
On the visuals…
“Since it was a game about an assassin, we wanted to reference Killer7, which also used cel-shading. But it wouldn’t be interesting if it looked exactly the same, so we made it look grittier.” – Kasahara
On the open world…
“I wanted to do more, but we didn’t have time and the budget wasn’t that big. That was the limit of what we could do.” – Suda
“During the fight sections, you tense up and have to be alert, so in the open-world section you can take it easy. Travis doesn’t just fight; he also has to live his life… If you have to work a job, it makes you look forward to the fights even more.” – Suda
On the game’s reception…
“It reviewed better than we’d expected, which made us very happy. We thought the game was fun to play with the Wii Remote, but we weren’t sure how the public would take to it. It’s such a strange game, and Travis is an idiot, so I wondered how it would fare overseas. But in the end the reaction was even better in the US and Europe than in Japan.” – Suda
