This has been the only game that has pulled me from Bayonetta for the past month, though I'm not quite sure why. I played the first No More Heroes back when it came out, and I'm remembering what I liked and what I hated about it with this playthrough. So far I've just put in an hour and here's my preliminary impressions for the port:
+ The button mapping is more challenging than the Wii waggle. Mapping high/low strike and high/low bash to four separate buttons makes things more difficult. It may be more clumsy, but I require more time to figure it out.
+ HD upscaling looks marginally better. Much more vibrant.
+ Shaking the Dualshock is an adequate substitute for previous sword recharge button.
- Job minigames still suck, grabbing coconuts is just "mash O" then "mash X" for three minutes. NES games had more depth than this. All of them.
- Motorcycle can be touchy, most of the time I'm jumping my bike within a second of pressing R2 to drive. I crashed in the motel parking lot. I'm probably just missing something here.
- Santa Destroy is as boring and desolate as ever. NMH2 was right to get rid of this supposed introspective commentary on open world video games. Pseudo-art nonsense.
- Enemy AI is as dull as ever. Even the first boss had like, three attack patterns with a seemingly bottomless life bar.
- The demo had like, five different difficulty levels available while the retail copy stuck me with two. What. The. Fuck?
Basically, NMH: Heroes' Paradise strikes me as a prime parallel to MMA's Dan Hardy: an attractive punk rock demeanor attached to an overrated legacy. All bark, no bite. I'll be playing it on aesthetic appeal alone, switching back and forth from Bayonetta when I want to engage in something more substantive.
I hope I'll be more engaged when the bosses become more difficult. Truth be told, I wasn't expecting the combat to be any more engaging with a Dualshock - I don't know how applicable this is to the Move controls.
