Headscratchers / No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle

• Margaret pretty obviously wrote her song about Travis. When did she write and record it? Was it in the couple of days it took Travis to climb the ranks again? Did she know about Travis' battles three years previously? Did Alice tell her about him? How does she know so much about him, since nearly everyone who runs into him gets sliced in half?
  • Magic.
  • Remember how insanely long the parking lot fight is before her? Maybe she already had some info on Travis and when she got word he'd showed up she sent out tons and tons of mooks to keep him distracted so she could write the song.
  • She likely had the tune down, as her Protoman whistle shows. She probably just came up with it on the spot. He was also something of a legend in town,so she had likely heard of this Otaku Assassin.
  • My only, not problem, but confusion was about Margaret.... Why a supermarket? It seems like such a random place to fight her. Every other boss is fought either somewhere they hang out a lot, or where they happened to be at the time, or a place that they probably agreed to meet beforehand, and even then, those do make sense. Margaret's arena is the only one that doesn't seem to have anything to do with who she is. Yeah, you get the sky-consuming moon at the time, but couldn't that be done with any rooftop?
  • Not many rooftops have a rotating sign that you can easily snipe from, and I have the European version with the o-tuned version of her song, so I always just assumed it was she was using the supermarket's Tannoy system to sing her song at Travis.
  • Alternatively, the song may be about him because he's the only one it was played for.
  • Let us not forget that the Ranked fights are all broadcasted for everyone in Santa Destroy. The previous games were also televised, which is the reason as to why both assassination and laser-based weaponry became such a big hit. Assassins would know quite a bit about Travis solely just by watching TV, which is how Kimmy developed an unhealthy obsession with "Travis the Great". Taking into account just how colourful all these killers are, Margaret is most likely a very talented song artist, which could me that while 'Philistine' keeps to the same rhythm and melody, she changes the lyrics to fit the assassin she is currently facing!
  • Is it really out of the question that she didn't write the song about Travis specifically and she just really hates Otaku in general?
• The assassin rankings were already pretty bizarre for the first game, but Desperate Struggle's cross the line into absurdity. How have people like Matt Helms not been overtaken by Charlie MacDonald yet?
  • Maybe he was going to go after Matt, but Travis came after him before he could? I can see your point though, Charlie probably would have been able to take on any other opponent in the UAA and win(Well, except for the #1 Ranked) just due to the fact that he can crush them with his mecha. Travis only stood a chance because he also had a mecha.
  • To get to Matt Helms' battle, Travis had to go through an Akashic Point. Now I don't know how they work, but I'm pretty sure you can't take a giant mecha through there; it seems to big. Without that mecha, I don't think Charlie and his cheerleaders were strong enough to fight Matt Helms by themselves (even with their number superiority).
  • It's actually quite simple: once you have a rank, you can only advance by defeating the assassin's above you. Who was above Charlie? His groupies. He didn't want to kill the rest of his team, so he was stuck where he was.
    • Actually, his groupies are number 50-26. He's 25.
    • Well, if what Alice tells you before you fight her applies to almost all the ranked assassins you fight, maybe Charlie really didn't care about advancing up the ranks anymore, despite his upbeat attitude. He just wanted a way out like everyone else.
    • I figured that being undead, Matt Helms may have been actually killed by some specially prepared bullet of Sylvia rather than by conventional means.
    • Didn't Sylvia say something about that you can't kill what's already dead? I think she just shot Matt Helms in the head with a ordinary gun just to prevent him from harming Travis.
    • I thought the line was a throwaway gag to zombie films (i.e. Dawn of the Dead)
    • You see Matt get up and run away laughing like a maniac after Sylvia shoots him, so the bullet definitely didn't take him down. Right afterwards though, Sylvia's goons burn down the house Matt was haunting. With his connection to this world (the house he was abandoned in to die) gone, he may have passed on to the afterlife.
  • I figured the assassins have fallen into despondency within the 3 year time skip after realizing how hard the bloodlust has grabbed them. They then lost all ambition and stopped caring about the ranks, sating their bloodlust on assassinations.
    • Basically this. Which is pretty much what's happening in the first game, too. Remember that the UAA is a scam, and although it may have gotten a lot bigger and more powerful in the 3 years between the games, it's still not necessarily something that the people who get in necessarily want to be in once they realize how pointless it all is. Also, a lot of them seemed to have joined for the sake of fighting Travis, and once they realized he wasn't there anymore, they stopped caring. In both games, the rankings are in a lulled state when Travis isn't involved.
  • I suppose you have to go into each fight on your own to advance. And Charlie can't form his Mecha without his cheerleaders, so he'd just lose.
  • In the first NMH, Henry cleaves Dr. Letz Shake in half, despite the fact that the late Doctor was easily more than 3x his size. I'm sure plenty of the other assassins in the organization could have taken out Charlie. If you can't really imagine how that would happen in an anime style like the game is based off of, you could always think of them bringing down the mech Shadow of the Colossus style.
• Henry claims to have killed three ranked fighters for you, but the only numbers between Ryuji and Margaret are five and six.
  • The wiki reasons one of them wasn't ranked.
  • That was probably more to show off three assassins that had to be cut for time (killer baseball player, killer taxi driver, assassin with killer dogs).
  • Or, perhaps two of the assassins shared a rank? (New Destroyman was technically 2 people, or just two halves of the same person; maybe two of them were fraternal twins and shared some sort of mental link with their personalities? Considering the game in question, it's not that far out of the realm of possibility.)
  • Then there's the other explanation, that the third of the three ranked killers was one from below, like Kimmy. This turns into Fridge Horror when you realise that means Kimmy's been beaten, and in turn likely killed.
    • Well, not too much. I mean, yeah, Travis let her live, but she was still trying to kill you. Anyway, when you also consider that you never hear from her again and how she's an optional boss fight that you can actually miss if you don't fight her by a certain point, her being killed off is sounding more likely.
    • Yeah, the theory of Henry killing Kimmy is pretty much Jossed: Henry distinctly named the three assassins he killed (Scott Gardner, Gregg Cantrell, and Massimo Bellini), and had photos of all three, ruling out the possibility that any of them were Kimmy.
    • That doesn't mean that she's still alive. It just means that she's not one of the three assassins Henry killed to help Travis move up in the ranks. What I was actually saying is that she could've been killed at any point by potentially anyone after you beat her/you miss your opportunity to fight her since she's never heard from again. Also, you misunderstood what the person I was responding to said: They suggested that Kimmy was possibly killed by the person ranked beneath her and Henry killed her killer, not that Henry killed Kimmy.
• If Captain Vladamir has been lost in space since the cold war space race, how did he become the rank three assassin in the past 3 years?
  • I figure he was just chillin' all crazy-like in that field when the former third-ranked assassin wandered into it and got wiped out by his routine beamspam. The UAA decided that since he'd killed the third-ranked assassin he should be given their position, and he ended up keeping it since it's kind of hard to fight a space program.
    • That sounded like half a Bel Air.
  • He could communicate with the Killsat. Easy way to commit assassinations and take out other assassins.
  • I thought WordOfGod was that Vladmir had been on Earth all this time, but a series of organizations had been taking control of the Killsat for decades and sending him false sensory information about being lost on a series of alien worlds with hostile environments so he never took his space suit helmet off to see the truth with his own eyes. The Killsat controllers would pretend to be sentient non-human inhabitants of the world he was on, feeding him simplistic imperialist oppressor vs. oppressed revolutionary stories that would trick him into doing whatever they wanted, mostly assassinating the controller's enemies.
• Three things. One: Why is Kimmy Howell described as "all-American" in Sylvia's letter if she clearly speaks with a British accent? Two: Why do all the assassins in Desperate Struggle have such lame, run-of-the-mill names? Seriously, we used to have badass names like Death Metal, Destroyman, and Dr. Peace, and now... Nathan Copeland and Charlie McDonald. Yeah. Third: Has anyone noticed that Travis never washes his hands after "dropping a nice save"? Hygiene-impaired slob indeed!
  • 1.I'm all American but I have a slight accent due to the people around me. Besides she was probably referring to her fangirlish yandere personality with that.
  • 2.Suda just kinda rushed the entire game. Really sad.
    • Rushed? I know he cut out the three Henry fights after his nightmare, but... well, for a rushed game, this was spectacular!
    • Yeah the game was spectacular but he did cut out ALOT. Those three fights, the city map, almost none of the assassins had the characterization they had in the first game, 12 goddamn assassins that were killed by Dr. Letz Shake, he added about 12-15 more cheerleaders in the Charlie fight so you lose even more total fights...So Yeah
    • Taking into account Letz Shake from the first game, it's entirely possible he always planned to cut a lot of fights.
    • Suda said from the very beginning that despite starting off rank 51, there wouldn't actually be anywhere near 51 boss fights in the game, so people had better not get their hopes up. The only obviously cut material are the 3 Henry bosses in which Henry was supposed to have his own sidestory like Shinobu. And the city was always planned to be a menu since so many people hated navigating the city from the first game.
    • And lastly, in-universe, the UAA had become more of an organized blood sport. Code names were no longer needed with the combatents being showcased and treated like gladiators, and the organization had them register their real names. Hence, the run-of-the-mill names were intentional, to show not only had things changed dramatically, but to start showing that these assasains are human too. Note that some like Destroyman and Dr Letz Shake kept the codenames, but became radically altered to the point of not being really human anymore. It's actually symbolic, and is likely more realistic.
    • Also a nitpick, but "Suda" did not rush the game. Suda basically oversaw the development and little else. He is not all of Grasshopper.
  • It's possibly lampshading it. The thing that makes Kimmy "All American" is her inanity, childishness, and netspeak, not where she's born. Actual nationality doesn't define "American" anymore, only stereotypical behavior.
  • You gotta kinda look at this game differently when looking at the names. In the first game, there were only eleven assassins. Because of this (also because it was a sham) Sylvia probably wanted all the assassins who going to be fighting the idiot who joined the ranks have really awesome names, like wrestlers. However, in the second game, Sylvia claims that the UAA has become mainstream, therefore a completely real sport, so if anyone was going to join they would have very average names because they were regular people (kinda) who decided to join.
• Suda said this would be the last game in the series starring Travis, but Desperate Struggle's ending felt to me more like the ending of the Empire Strikes Back. Yes, Batz is dead, but the UAA is still active and Travis basically declared war on them at the end of DS, so . . .
  • Here's my idea for two different ways for how the third game could go. One: In order to take down the UAA, Travis gathers a bunch of assassins by sending Henry and Shinobu to fight and see who's strong enough to join, don't kill them unless they suck. When somebody joins, they can be playable, so at the end of the game you have nine or ten playable characters. Maybe they could even do a Mass Effect and have missions to upgrade the characters. Then the last boss is a huge boss rush where you have to play as each unlocked character in their own boss battle. They would all have to have different abilities too. Henry and Shinobu we know, but another could focus on gunplay, one could be a martial-arts fighter with plasma gloves that kill people, another is a big black guy with a hammer with a jetpack on the back so he can throw it, one is an android that uses buzzsaw arms, or there's a magical girl with a stripperiffic outfit, or a chain-smoking Gambit-expy; anyway this is the more RPG route that I envision, and at the end you control Travis again and take on a dark clone of him or something. That ending kind of sucks, and I realize as I said that this rips off Mass Effect some, but I think playing someone who doesn't use a sword would be neat.
    • Two: The game would focus on Kimmie Howell, who didn't listen to Travis and is now searching for Travis after he has faded into obscurity again, killing whoever gives her information because she can. Travis meanwhile has decided to kill every assassin that exists in order to deter more from rising up so the UAA doesn't rise again. This would keep the same style as the first game. The second option is more likely, and its all just WMG, and the first idea is fanwank, so, yeah...
  • As for me, if they don't reuse Travis again, I'd love for the third game to be a Lovely Angels / Buddy Cop Show deconstruction starring Shinobu and Kimmy as some sort of sword-wielding Thelma and Louise / Odd Couple.
  • Here's how I think the third game should go...*ahem* After the events of NMH2, Travis and Sylvia get married (not before a quick divorce from Henry however. Things begin going swimmingly for Travis as he's living the life of his dreams. Unfortunately, things quickly go bad as Sylvia divorces Travis and takes all the money he had earned (from assassination gigs or some other jobs). Essentially defeated, Travis says "F*ck this!" And moves away from Santa Destroy with what little dignity he has left. Wanting to be as far away from Sylvia as possible he moves to a city in Florida known as Dieami (clever ain't I?). There he meets a teenager known as Cyrus Summers, who is the local punching bag. Offering to teach him a few tricks, Travis takes him under his wing. Cut to a celebratory party for Cyrus' awesome training, some crazy b*tch walks in and demands to fight Travis. Travis being to drunk, hands his katana to Cyrus, to which he promptly accepts and kills her dead. But it looks like this was an elaborate ruse to trick by Sylvia to get Cyrus to join the UAA, which now has a whopping 600 combatants. Travis forbids it, but Cyrus wants to do it, resulting in an action packed romp around the US. Off-ing assassins wherever they go, with the occasional help of Shinobu, Henry, a mysterious girl at the rank of 5, and even Travis himself. NO MORE HEROES 3: A KILLERS NATION. And yes, I have put way too much thought into this.
    • Ok, can I just ask if I can write this as a story? Because this sounds FUCKING AWESOME!
  • I'm pretty sure it's stated Jasper Batt Jr. funded the UAA in Desperate Struggle. With him dead, no one's funding it anymore. All the assassins are dead too save for Travis. With nothing left to support the UAA, it fell apart after the events of the game. Why do you think Sylvia was working at a whore house during the 'phone' segments? She even talks about how she lost everything in those segments. Clearly she lost her job at the UAA and had to get by with a job like that. Travis was searching for her for who knows how long, and finally found her to get her out of that mess in the last segment.
• How the hell did Captain Vladimir get to be the Rank 3 assassin if he's hasn't even been on earth for the past couple decades? Same with Cloe Walsh, who has been imprisoned for an unknown amount of time, and Matt Helms, who can't leave the house he haunts. We get that they're all Akashic Points, but some logic would be nice.
  • Vladimir has had theories put forward above. The Akashic Point bosses... well, maybe the UAA simply sought out new assassins on their own with the old rankings gone.
• In the sequel, Travis instantly jumps ranks by killing the 25th ranked assassin. Why didn't he just killer higher ranked assassins from the very beginning—killing the 3rd ranked assassin instead of the starting with the 11th, and so on?
  • You misunderstood. Travis didn't just kill the 25th ranked assassin, all those cheerleaders were also ranked assassins. He killed the 25th ranked assassin and the 26th-49th ranked assassins all in one go.
    • I get it now. Thanks for clearing that up!
• If the UAA was a scam, why is it treated like a real thing in the second game?
  • Because it wasn't.
    • More accurately, it apparently got a lot of attention between the three year Time Skip between games, and was thus turned into a legitimate "sport".
• Why was Sylvia stuck in a phone sex place?
  • Presumably, either the UAA fell to bits, and she lost her job, or the UAA sacked her before she could help Travis destroy the UAA. And since nobody else was going to be stupid enough to fall for her old cons, there was only one profession she could be gainfully employed...
• What does The No More Hero mean? At the very least, shouldn't Travis be the "No More" Hero?
  • That's what they are saying.
• Travis didn't like the UAA anymore and knew where the guy who killed Bishop was. Why did he bother continuing through the ranks? Why didn't he go straight for the guy?
  • Well, since Jasper Batt Jr. was the #1 Assassin, jumping through the ranking battle hoops was pretty much the only way to get to him "legally". Simply charging in would force one not to just face Batt and his cronies, but also the UAA preventing you from "cheating". If you thought Jasper was That One Boss before, then having the full might of the UAA to bear would literally make the fight unwinnable.
• Since Sylvia wasn't asking for entry fees anymore, how was the UAA funded this time?
  • The assassin fights are televised, so either advertising or pay-per-view. This is stated outright in the game.
• How did Shinobu go from wanting to kill Travis to wanting to sleep with Travis?
  • Probably because Travis spared her life in NMH, and she wanted to reciprocate the favor... granted, I think jumping to sleeping with him may be TOO much of a reciprocation, but I could definitely see the two being Honorable Opponents since their first fight.
    • She developed a crush on him in the first game (you can tell by how she reacts when he holds her right before he does a wrestling move on her). Between the games she trains in Asia, falling deeper in love with her memories of Travis and then she comes back and puts her plan into action. Considering that she tells him she'll do “anything” for him, including sex and killing more people, she certainly is deeply in love with him, or at least what he used to be.
• I'm glad he stopped, but based on his tastes in anime, I don't get why Travis backed off from Shinobu.
  • If you're referring to age, Shinobu is 21 in this game.
    • It's pretty obvious from the get-go that he finds Shinobu's sudden hero worship of him kind of disturbing (probably since their first meeting was her mistaking him for the guy who killed her dad and him cutting off her arm).
    • That and Travis might be a bit of a masochist. I mean, he has the hots for/falls in love with Sylvia but Sylvia treats him horribly; calling him names, berating him and conning him out of his money (at least in the first game). Then Shinobu comes along and Travis is not use to girls actually falling for him and willing to do anything for him that he doesn't know what to do. So he pushes her away.
  • Travis met Shinobu when she was still in school. He may like skeevy anime, but that's a bit too creepy for him.
• Why was there only one battle to challenge Travis? What was the point of that? Was it just something that was supposed to happen more but got cut?
  • Say it with me: bonus boss.
• What was that garbage Travis collects in the garbage collecting minigame? Pizza boxes?
• When Henry killed assassins 7, 6, and 5, shouldn't he have become the number 5 assassin instead of Travis? Don't say that it doesn't matter because he wasn't listed; Travis wasn't with the UAA when he killed Helter Skelter, but he still jumped to rank 11 anyway.
  • First off, Henry only killed 5, 6, and some other assassin, not 7. There was a third assassin for some reason; possibly one who was ranked beneath Travis or shared a rank with another assassin. Ryuji was 7. Secondly, like with Shinobu, Henry killed the assassins for Travis. Also, unlike Travis, they weren't trying to join the ranks. Lastly, how do you know that Helter Skelter, at the time, wasn't the lowest ranked assassin? Remember, the UAA wasn't anywhere near as popular in the first game as it is in Desperate Struggle. Plus, Sylvia specifically requires Travis to cut through the ranks in order, though I will admit that the UAA's pretty damn inconsistent about their rules and this fact is even brought up in the game.
    • Most likely, the UAA just plays fast and loose with its rules to ensure there are as many good matches as possible; if one of Travis' friends are put in a position above him, he might decide his vengeance isn't worth killing someone close to him, and Travis is probably a crowd favorite, what with being the former champion making a comeback and all. Plus, Jasper Batt Jr. wants revenge, so he's probably got no problem pulling strings to make sure he gets as many chances to off Travis as possible.
• How could Alice have been working for the UAA for so long that she got sick of it and wanted out if they'd only been started up in the intervening three years? Had Sylvia just been scamming her for that long, or is she just impatient?
  • Killing people for about three years straight and constantly fearing for your own life as other assassins breathe down your neck does things to you. She just wanted to end the madness of the assassin's life she was living. The fights being broadcasted on TV as pure entertainment for others made Alice feel even more dehumanized.
• Was Jasper Batt Jr.'s final form a mech suit or actually him in a monstrous form? The way his expression was frozen, the laser beams from his mouth and his flight make it look like it was a machine he was operating, but the pages here seem to talk like that inorganic-looking thing was Jasper himself. What was it?
  • Jasper himself inflates into a gigantic parade mascot character, rather than controlling a mech. This was probably the reason as to why Henry left the fight, as he has 'standards'. Seeing as though Jasper's second form involved him teleporting and summoning batarangs from a room-wide hammer space, the lasers are going to be much more easier to understand compared to the second form. Although since he had lasers in the room during his first form, it wouldn't be a surprise if Jasper's inflated form came equipped with your standard laser blasters!
• Part way in the game, Shinobu takes over for Travis in the next two following rounds. Tagging in a completely different assassin, who has just finished the asian rankings and is not even officially part of the one in Santa Destroy, sounds completely against the rules, but since the rulebook is just an excuse for story development, lets just put that to the side. If any of the assassins successfully killed Shinobu, what does this entail? Would that assassin get a guaranteed match with Travis whenever they so wanted, or would Shinobu be technically the person filling in the Assassin Rank and they simply overtake them on the board?