Webcomic / No More Heroes 3: Alternate Struggles

TAKE/SHOT/MIX/CUT

What if...The Unfought…was Fought?

No More Heroes 3: Alternate Struggles is a four-part Alternate Universe Fic comic by OroJuice and Sha-Y where Travis comes into direct and prolonged conflict with each Bait-and-Switch Boss from No More Heroes III.

Every segment is loaded with “out-of-this world black comedy, celestially sinister satire, and magnetar monstrousness in each installment worthy of the moniker GODDAMN SUPERHERO.”

As that description implies, the comics greatly expand on the powers, tactics, personalities, and sometimes backstories of these alien villains with some Medium Blending for good measure.

And of course, they provide new, entertaining, and sometimes horrific reasons for the reader/player/Travis to want them dead.

The story consists of:

• Paradox Bandit (Alternate Take): Wherein a dismissed and discarded 80s demigod “strikes back”.
• Sniping Lee (Alternate Shot): Travis learns how a celestial sniper does "target practice" and is ensnared in a terrible - and topical - trap.
• Black Night Direction (Alternate Mix): The Emperor of the Night cashes in on a crime from Travis Strikes Again and unveils a simple yet sinister battle tactic.
• Vanishing Point (Alternate Cut): The Memory Thief plucks more than he can plunder + a special guest.

These strips are posted on SpaceBattles.com and can be read in their entirety here.

Oh, and beware of spoilers for all four No More Heroes games.

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TROPES

• Action Girl: The memory of Travis’ ex-girlfriend and half-sister Jeane, who is strong enough to punch a hole clean through Vanishing Point.
• Affably Evil: Black Night Direction is unfailingly polite, never raises his voice, and only lightly rebukes Travis rather than aggressively insult him like his fellow alien villains do. However, he remains an unrepentant serial kidnapper who has a cavalier attitude towards the lives of others if he can't profit directly off of them.
• All Stories Are Real Somewhere: The events in the various Masters of Explosion media Travis enjoyed as a child are revealed to be accounts of real occurrences on a faroff planet with each new interpretation or reboot being glimpses of the latest "cycle". Consequently, given No More Heroes' own loose relationship with the fourth wall, Paradox Bandit alternates between sounding like a Mad God raging against what he sees as an unjust fate and an embittered, out-of-work actor whose character's importance has been downplayed or removed by his show's writers.
• All There in the Manual: Much of the boss fight mechanics and story beats can only be found in the accompanying commentaries.
• Anachronic Order: Played with. While the sequence of the chapters is a bit jumbled in terms of rankings (#2, #4, #8, and then #7), the progression of story beats is linear with Travis meeting the boss in the first chapter, engaging in combat in the second, hitting a Darkest Hour in the third, and depicting the end of a fight in the final one.
• And This Is for...: Although Travis is appalled at Paradox Bandit destroying Endlessia so he could remake it to his liking, he’s more concerned with how he killed his two favorite characters from Masters of Explosion.
• Ascended Extra: The core premise of the story in regards to The Unfought aliens from No More Heroes III.
• Ass Shove: Travis’ threatens doing this to Sniping Lee with the gunman’s own ammunition. And then spanking him.
• Beware the Superman: A running theme as each of the bosses (besides Paradox Bandit) as they try to live up to the superhero “hustle” of FU’s in their own warped, self-serving ways.
• Big Damn Heroes: Though he’s unable to kill him as he did in canon, Native Dancer still suddenly appears to give Travis the Death Skill chips to defeat the otherwise unassailable Black Night Direction.
• Brilliant, but Lazy: Black Night Direction's a capable combatant, but instead of killing Travis during his ambush, he just saw fit to strip the assassin of his weapons and tie him up so he could deliver him to the CIA for a bounty. This in spite of how he promised FU he would personally eliminate Travis, and how the bounty had a "dead or alive" clause, so he would've gotten paid in full anyway if he had taken the extra bit of effort needed to take his life.
• Call-Back:
  • It turns out that the CIA is still awfully sore about Travis and Badman's accidental rampage through their headquarters at the end of Travis Strikes Again, and has put a price on their heads.
  • The title and logo of the comic combines the ITC Benguiat font from Travis Strikes Again with the numbering and "Struggles" epithet from Desperate Struggle.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: The story’s logo and title cards associate each boss with a distinct color. Yellow for Paradox Bandit, Green for Sniping Lee, Dark Blue for Black Night Direction, and Red for Vanishing Point.
• Combat Breakdown: As the fight with Vanishing Point passes certain thresholds, the alien will rob Travis of more and more of his memories, altering his appearance to one of his three unlockable post-game character skins and blocking off certain abilities and interface features.
  • Phase 2: Travis is put in his purple outfit from Travis Strikes Again and loses all his Death Glove Skills besides Death Force (which resembles the Shining Chip ability from that game).
  • Phase 3: Travis is put into his form from Desperate Struggle and is deprived of his Death Glove and Jeane as a Combat Commentator. He also can no longer jump.
  • Phase 4: Travis is reduced to his aesthetic from the very first game and his Tension meter disappears, locking him into basic combos for the last phase of the battle.
• Combat Pragmatist: Three of the four “superheroes” employ strategies to delay or avoid having to battle Travis.
• Combat Tentacles: Vanishing Point.
• The Commissioner Gordon: The Colonel (a Composite Character of the trope namer and the Ultimate/MCU-version of Nick Fury acts as a liaison between FU’s forces and the CIA while looking like a darker-skinned version of the trope namer.
• The Corrupter: FU to De-Max aka Paradox Bandit.
• Dark Is Evil: Black Night Direction.
• Deadly Force Field: Parodied. Sniping Lee fires a bullet that creates one of these with the requisite circular Advancing Wall of Doom that will gradually shrink towards the center or until there’s one man left standing. Travis immediately sees through Sniping Lee’s reasons for doing this and nearly refuses to fight him out of virtue for not wanting to have anything to do with the likes of Fortnite or Player Unknowns Battlegrounds, for the sake of “relevant satire” or otherwise.
• Death from Above: Part of Black Night Direction's fighting style involves hovering high in the air and "abducting random crap and letting gravity take its course" which includes scorpions, cars, and random civilians.
• Desecrating the Dead: An obscene and cruelly humorous argument between Black Night Direction and the Colonel occurs over whether or not the former is owed the other half of his bounty for turning Travis and Badman into the CIA when he only captured Travis and the urn containing Shigeki's ashes as the Colonel considers the "Dead" of "Dead or Alive" to mean a corpse or at least a head for his superiors to seek satisfaction on.
• Evil Hero: The four Galactic Superheroes frame turning in bounties and murdering people they were going to kill regardless as capturing or punishing criminals. To them, swift mass murder can be excused as "saving" people from more prolonged unpleasant deaths regardless of context (to wit, putting those people in danger to begin with). Paradox Bandit is almost in a class of his own though, as he's assisting in so much wickedness in the hopes that he can hit the Reset Button on his own world to bring it back with him as its uncontested champion.
• Eye Lights Out: This happens to Vanishing Point when he’s killed, with the Tron Lines on his body fading into blankness as well.
• The Faceless: The original Jeane as a reference to how Travis scribbled out her face on his once cherished picture of her in light of The Reveal of the first game. This is rectified when Travis makes peace with her memory.
• Four Is Death: Sniping Lee is the 4th Ranked Galactic Superhero, he creates a lot of death and devastation in his comic (which is four pages in length), and his “Battle Royale” concludes when the contestant pool if down to four contestants (representing himself, Travis, Notorious, and Destroyman True Face) whereupon he’s killed by Notorious.
• Greater-Scope Villain: FU. Although his presence is most felt in Paradox Bandit’s chapter.
• Heel Realization: Paradox Bandit.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: This is what kills Paradox Bandit and Vanishing Point. A less lethal version of this happens to Black Night Direction when Dr. Juvenile's AI hacks into his teleportation device to rescue Travis from the CIA.
• Improbable Aiming Skills: Sniping Lee's idea of target practice involves shooting down civilian aircraft from the sky by blasting their engines and pilots, and then headshotting every single passenger in them before the planes hit the ground. Without a scope.
• In Spite of a Nail: Sniping Lee is still killed by Notorious in the exact same way as he was in the game. Not that he didn’t have it coming.
  • Vanishing Point still runs afoul of a powerful blonde woman from Travis’ past.
• Kick the Dog: In the span of four pages, Sniping Lee shoots down three passenger planes, headshots all their passengers, kills an eagle, destroys Travis’ bike, and starts picking off the 49 other contestants in his “Let It Snipe” competition.
• Laser-Guided Amnesia: Vanishing Point can inflict this on targets from miles away, gradually compromising their perceptions and emptying their heads until there’s nothing left.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: The comic liberally references events from all No More Heroes titles with Badman being killed by FU being a major plot device in Black Night Direction’s segment.
• Laughing Mad: Paradox Bandit at the end of his Face–Heel Turn massacre that darkly parodies the infamous He-Man HEYYEYAAEYAAAEYAEYAA meme.
• Leitmotif: The bosses have two each, one from Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures album and another from RED ORCA's (who provided several tracks for No More Heroes III) discography. Sniping Lee is the exception though, since he's not fought properly.
  • Paradox Bandit: New Dawn Fades and Shade Breaker.
  • Sniping Lee: Interzone and Happy WarMore (from No More Heroes 2: Desperate Struggle).
  • Black Night Direction: Shadowplay and LOBO ~howl in twilight~.
  • Vanishing Point: Insight and ILLUSIONS ~Jump over dimension~.
• Les Collaborateurs: The CIA is willing to work with FU's team (or at least, not interfere in their crimes) despite its leader killing both the President and Vice President of the United States so long as the aliens continue to do them "good turns" like capturing "persons of interest" such as Travis.
• Let's Fight Like Gentlemen: Like Mr. Blackhole and Gold Joe, Paradox Bandit has a straightforward approach to challenging Travis, which lies in stark contrast to how the other three featured aliens try to sidestep fighting him entirely.
• Light Is Not Good: Paradox Bandit. Though it used to be Light Is Good back when he was the heroic De-Max.
• Living Memory: Vanishing Point weaponizes these, calling upon solidified recollections of his opponents to attack or distract them such as summoning shades of Mr. Blackhole and Gold Joe. It ultimately transpires that his control over them isn’t absolute.
• Living Weapon: Sniping Lee reloads by literally feeding his gun ammo. His bullets might also be alive to an extent.
• Logo Joke: Each chapter features a Couch Gag with the comic’s logo (see above) in a gif animation that warps it in some way along with the name of the boss it’s about.
• Malicious Misnaming: Travis calls Black Night Direction "Fap Night Direction" when his enemy chooses to just rain down attacks from on high while remaining outside of Beam Katana range.
• Medium-Shift Gag: Used dramatically (for the most part) in Paradox Bandit’s comic and comedically in Sniping Lee’s.
• Mood Whiplash: At least once per chapter given the characters involved. Even the very last comic does this unintentionally with the dramatic reveal of Travis’ t-shirt.
• "No. Just… No" Reaction: Travis, who was raring to kill Sniping Lee at the start of their encounter, has this reaction to fighting him once he realizes why a giant shrinking energy wall has been cast over the battlefield.
• Noble Top Enforcer: Of “The Big Four”, penultimate obstacle Paradox Bandit isn’t nearly as nice as “The Demon God” Sonic Juice before him, but he’s less unrepentantly villainous than either FU or Sniping Lee.
• Omake: Sniping Lee’s comic has four of them, and it’s the only place they appear.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted. All three Jeanes either appear or are at least mentioned.
• Perception Filter: Grafting a conveniently flexible one appears to be part of Vanishing Point’s kit, as Travis fails to see anything strange as the world seems to be changing around him. These divergences range from rather organic, like seeing the grown-up Jeane as a kitten and forgetting that Georgy Bishop is dead to more selective lapses like seeing Shinobu and Bad Girl in their outfits from the first game but not reacting to them as enemies.
• The Precious, Precious Car: Having his bike blown up by Sniping Lee is what finally sends Travis over the edge to hunt his opponent in earnest.
• Product Placement: A dramatic example when Travis tells Paradox Bandit that he’ll give the new CG Masters of Explosion show on Notflix a try, and buy a toy or two if it’s any good.
• Redeeming Replacement: Travis hopes that the new CG version of De-Max will make up for what his Darker and Edgier version did while he was working for FU.
• Restart the World: Paradox Bandit's goal is to do this to the world of Masters of Explosion with FU's help in such a way that he will never be in danger of being discarded or deconstructed (or challenged or changed in any fashion) ever again.
• Rooting for the Empire: Paradox Bandit calls Travis an “edgy, little hipster” for doing this by being a fan of his Skeletor Expy…and his Orko equivalent rather than of him, the main protagonist.
• Sell-Out: Travis seems to fear that even referencing Fortnite too much will make him one of these like it did with “Craptos, Master CHUD, and the GI Jerkoffs”.
• Shout-Out:
  • Like in Travis Strikes Again, Travis wears shirts based on indie video games with each having loose thematic ties to the enemy he’s fighting at the moment. These being Forgotton Anne, West of Dead, Chicken Police, and Super Daryl Deluxe.
  • The "Masters of Explosion" logo is clearly a tweaked and recolored version of the Masters of the Universe logo.
  • The airline companies who made the planes that Sniping Lee shot down are Yotsuyama Gale and 25th Wing Airlines.
  • In addition to all the Fortnite jokes, Sniping Lee showcases the roster for his death game on a Let It Snipe Survival Board. In addition, the battle royale only has 51 contestants.
  • Jeane the Cat tries to entertain the idea that Sniping Lee's set-up might be "more of a Stephen King or D*flaming*" homage, although Travis is quick to wave off the possibility.
  • Both of Black Night Direction's strips have fancy intro cards reminiscent of the titles of the 90s Batman Film Series and Batman: The Animated Series.
  • The framing of Black Night Direction's conversation with the Colonel is lifted straight out of the first few panels of Detective Comics #27.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: Almost all the blue language in the story spills out of Travis.
• Social Media Is Bad: The American Vice President is killed by FU, who streams her death on FikFok for kicks and presumably clicks.
• Stealth Insult: Travis pointedly calls Sniping Lee's contrived lead-up to actually fight him as a "Bloodshed Royale", which, as a logo helpfully stresses at the very end of Alternate Shot, can be abbreviated to "BS Royale".
• There Was a Door: Rather than step outside his beach pillbox to do so, Sniping Lee instead fires a bullet through its ceiling when he needs to shoot it straight up into the air.
• Torso with a View: What Jeane does to Vanishing Point.
• Tranquil Fury: Travis starts out in this state during the start of Sniping Lee’s comic. It becomes regular fury as the story progresses.