No More Heroes

No More Heroes is a 2007 action-adventure game from Grasshopper Manufacture, directed and written by Goichi Suda, better known as Suda51. Built first for the Nintendo Wii, it introduced Travis Touchdown, a broke, anime-collecting, pro-wrestling-obsessed drifter living in the No More Heroes motel in the fictional California city of Santa Destroy. Travis wins a beam katana in an online auction, kills the assassin Helter Skelter before the main story begins, and is drawn by Sylvia Christel into the United Assassins Association’s ranked killing circuit.

The game’s plot is deliberately blunt and absurd: Travis must defeat ten higher-ranked killers to become the number-one assassin. Each target is distinct, not interchangeable. Death Metal waits in a mansion; Dr. Peace performs as a corrupt police chief and lounge singer; Shinobu Jacobs attacks Travis at Santa Destroy High; Destroyman parodies superhero morality; Holly Summers turns a beach into a trap-filled battlefield; Bad Girl swings a baseball bat in a blood-soaked final stretch. Between these fights, Travis takes odd jobs such as lawn mowing, garbage collecting, gas pumping, and coconut gathering to pay entry fees for official ranking battles.

No More Heroes used the Wii Remote in ways tied directly to its fiction. Players swung, charged, and finished enemies with Travis’s beam katana, including the famously suggestive motion used to recharge its battery. Wrestling moves reflected Travis’s fandom and Suda51’s long-running interest in professional wrestling. The game also mixed open-city traversal on Travis’s Schpeltiger motorcycle with mission-based combat, creating a deliberately awkward, satirical version of the heroic sandbox fantasy.

Its style is central to its identity: cel-shaded characters, punk menus, violent comic-book framing, otaku jokes, and references to films, games, anime, and wrestling. Regional releases differed in violence, with the North American Wii version keeping heavy blood effects while some other versions used black particles instead. The game became one of Grasshopper Manufacture’s defining works and helped make Travis Touchdown Suda51’s most recognizable character.

No More Heroes later received enhanced ports under the title No More Heroes: Heroes’ Paradise, followed by Nintendo Switch and PC releases. Its success led to No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle in 2010, Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, and No More Heroes III, turning Travis’s climb through an assassin leaderboard into the foundation for Grasshopper’s most enduring series.