YMMV / No More Heroes III

• Alternate Character Interpretation: Did Travis really fall for the Destroyman drone's trick out of stupidity, or was he fully aware of what would happen but went along with it due to his awareness that the boss fight wouldn't begin if he didn't?
• Awesome Music:
  • The music that plays upon completing a fight begins with an intense guitar riff that celebrates the player's victory.
  • ITADAKIMASU, is just an awesome, ultra catchy techno rap song, and it's in the Sushi Shop menu of all things!
  • B's Theme is a relaxing upbeat song that notably plays when Travis and Bishop talk about Miike from his couch and sometimes are joined by other characters.
  • Musical Chair is a lo-fi rap song about Musical Chairs that didn't have to be that awesome from its subject matter used in the Musical Chairs minigame.
  • The "Credits" song that plays at the end of every boss fight, "Night in Prague" which harkens back to '70s anime and has different renditions depending on the boss.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: At the end of the Midori Midorikawa fight, Kamui has an entire monologue about seeking the truth that seems more like a thinly-veiled talk to the viewers to play the game where he comes from to understand what the hell is going on.
• Breather Level: After two emotionally and physically-draining Ranking encounters, the Rank 5 level and its boss fight with Midori Midorikawa, while generally nightmarish in presentation for the most part, are a relative break. The level's enemies are some Bones, and the somewhat tricky fight with Midori is manageable with the introduction of Full Green mode. Plus, it ends with Travis getting to spare a girl again, thanks to some timely intervention from Kamui.
• Complete Monster: Damon Ricotello is a former game designer and CEO of Utopina who previously beat his co-worker Dr. Juvenile to near death to seize control over the video game Serious Moonlight because he didn't want his work going to waste. A petty businessman who remade Santa Destroy to his liking with hopes of ruling the world, Damon summons his childhood friend Prince FU and his Galactic Assassins to Earth to take revenge on Travis Touchdown for beating him into submission. While supposedly uneasy over FU's plans of Earth's destruction, Damon lets it all slide, willing to put the entire world at risk just as long as Travis is killed. Once Travis makes his way to FU and defeats him, Damon kills FU in his child form, coldly dismissing him as nothing more than a tool before attempting to kill Travis himself.
• Continuity Lock-Out:
  • The game does little to get new players to the series up to speed on prior events and characters despite referring back to them rather frequently. Overall, the game is considered to be more for the long-time fans of the series rather than newcomers. Made worse with the game's PS4/5 and Xbox ports, since none of the other games in the series ^note  with the exception of Travis Strikes Again being on PS4, itself similarly having a Continuity Lock-Out problem have been made available on said platforms, so only Switch and PC players have access to the full No More Heroes experience.
  • And even some long time fans might be scratching their heads at a few references to other Marvelous and Suda51 games like The Silver Case and Daemon X Machina if they've never played those.
  • Even for players who obsessively follow Suda51's work and the plot of the previous games, there's also a lot that happens in the game with no explanation, making it feel like there are potentially many other untold adventures that were simply skipped.
• Crosses the Line Twice: Bad Girl suffering an emotional breakdown over her father's grisly death? Tragic. Travis' repeated, bumbling attempts to cheer her up by recommending various anime to watch? Oddly hilarious.
• Evil Is Cool: FU already got this reaction when he was first shown off in "The Return" thanks to his memorable design and bombastic personality. It remains the case in the full release where he's generally considered a highlight thanks to his hammy arrogance and unpredictably violent antics.
• Fanfic Fuel:
  • What happened between the end of Travis Strikes Again and the beginning of III given that we are never given answers as to how Travis has a neckbrace and a radically different appearance, his toku-inspired armor, how he and Bad Man made amends, or why Naomi is now a cherry tree.
  • What type of adventures will Travis face at the end of the game that involves an intergalactic war and Henry turning evil?
• Franchise Original Sin: III has been criticized for having four out of ten boss fights pull a Bait-and-Switch Boss. Yet this isn’t new for the franchise: the original pulled this with Letz Shake and Dark Star, while Desperate Struggle had over half of the fifty rank fights be dealt with anti-climatically. However, those unfought bosses in the previous games weren't given much in the way of story buildup or promotion like the Galactic Superhero Rankings were, leaving fans not feeling cheated as a result.
• Goddamned Bats:
  • Chestholes fill the same niche as the gun mooks from the first two games by being long-range attackers, and are just as annoying. They have barely more health than Bones and are just as common, but they are often paired in groups, whether with themselves or other stronger enemies. If you leave them alone to focus on the stronger and more aggressive enemies, they'll take potshots at you from afar. Try to focus on them, they'll teleport to another part of the arena after taking enough damage. They also have a nasty habit of letting out a minefield attack that might hit you while you're wailing on them.
  • Diversities don't seem very aggressive, but can be annoying for different reasons. They tend to interrupt your attack strings with a shield before launching it at you, and have a lot of health for one of the more common enemies in the game. And don't be fooled if you think you can just save them for last and focus on the more aggressive enemies accompanying them, because if you leave them alone, they may either ram into you or fire a sticky bomb that will explode after a few seconds. If fighting multiple Diversities at a time, it's best to try to keep them separated.
• Goddamned Boss: The challenge of Sonic Juice's battle mainly comes from having the thickest defense in the entire game, so the only reliable ways to cause any significant amount of damage are to pull off a Perfect Dodge and/or trigger Full Armor mode (which usually comes up in the Death Reel after you do the former), all while he does widely-reaching attacks to keep you from getting close. Also, it's played for laughs with the JRPG phase, having only a few options that actually work against him (cast Thunder and then attack).
• Good Bad Bugs: Charging up Travis' Charged Attack while the Death Rain skill is active adds the damage multiplier from the yet-to-be-used Spin Attack into each shot, doubling or tripling the damage they do depending on the current charge level: this can be further enhanced by using Death Slow to prevent the enemy from moving away and ensuring most of them hit.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Travis Touchdown says he's not into RPGs like Final Fantasy, instead claiming he likes action games way more. Final Fantasy XVI ended up being a Stylish Action game with RPG elements, and with PlatinumGames assisting development, to boot.
• I Knew It!: Due to the game's premise of fighting superheroes, it was considered by a lot of fans to be a matter of time before Destroyman would come back from the dead, yet again.
• Just Here for Godzilla: A lot of Toku fans picked up the game due to the numerous references, especially with the blatant namedrop for Kamen Rider Zi-O and the Death Glove Chips named after heroes from the Ultra Series.
• Magnificent Bastard: Native Dancer, in actuality Scott Touchdown, Travis's future grandson, is a ninja working with his mother and uncle to stop Henry Cooldown. Tasked with providing Travis with the skills needed to take Henry down, Native Dancer takes the opportunity to personally fight Travis himself, jeopardizing the mission in the process. Killing Travis's opponent Black Night Direction so that he'll have no choice but to fight him, Native Dancer uses his ninjitstu techniques to provide Travis with the remaining Death Glove Skill moves, keeping personal information to himself unless he bests Travis. Later assisting Travis in the takedown of FU, Native Dancer proves his skills when he massacres King Jess-Baptise V's entire army before they take over the Earth.
• Moral Event Horizon: There's hardly anything established about Paradox Bandit's relationship with FU that FU killing him for oversleeping might not count as this, but FU definitely crosses it by murdering his supposedly most trusted friend and advisor, Sonic Juice, in cold blood just because Sonic Juice decided to retreat after losing to Travis, which firmly cements that FU's perception of friendship is shallow at best. Notably, Travis actually expresses legitimate shock when he witnesses it.
• Most Wonderful Sound: The riff that plays when dealing the final blow in a battle.
• Player Punch:
  • The game pulls no punches as, after defeating Mr. Blackhole, FU comes and effortlessly defeats Travis and his friends. Topping off the Curb-Stomp Battle, however, is FU's killing of Badman, who had gone from being a bitter rival in the beginning of Travis Strikes Again to an unlikely ally and friend. The poor guy only gets one line of dialogue (telling FU "BACK OFF, FUCKING PUNK!") before he gets his skull crushed like a grape! Bad Girl's subsequent Heroic BSoD doesn't make it any less harrowing.
  • The death of Sonic Juice may be one of these. He's one of the more affable and reasonable of the villains, with a memorable design and boss battle. He explicitly states that he doesn't agree with FU and is only working for him out of fear and obligation. Watching FU kill one of the most chill bosses yet, especially while the poor guy's back is turned, feels unfair and it only motivates the player to stop FU even more.
• Scrappy Mechanic: A minor one. The charge attack being locked behind skill points. In all the previous games, it was a default move the player would start out with. While it does not take too long to unlock, it's a weird design decision.
• Special Effect Failure: Like many games built on Unreal Engine 4, No More Heroes III saves resources by loading low-res versions of character models and textures from afar. However, quick camera cuts can sometimes expose these low-res characters before their high-res assets have properly loaded in, and the change can be quite jarring.
• Spiritual Adaptation: With its Medium Blending stylization, a self-aware and satirical meta tone that almost never takes itself too seriously while simultaneously having dark undertones, being an over the top Affectionate Parody that takes as many pot shots as it spends genuinely loving its medium while having a massive amount of shout-outs is basically the closest thing to a The Amazing World of Gumball video game. In addition, with its themes and multiple references to superhero and Toku films, this is another game, that's going to be close as we can get to another Viewtiful Joe.
• Tainted by the Preview: The framerate in the open world segments has been very divisive among the fanbase, being mentioned in almost every discussion of the game. Even after clarifying that most previews came from old builds and later footage showing improved framerate, it became the most common complaint leading to release, dividing the fans between those who don't really care (or argue that it's par on the course for the franchise) and those who wish for ports outside the limitations of the Nintendo Switch (which eventually were released in October 2022).
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: As a result of time and budget constraints, several characters were kept from being as fully-realized as Suda himself wanted them to be, and quite a few players noticed:
  • Despite their buildup, only six of the ten Galactic Ranking Superheroes have boss fights, with the other four getting axed off before they can even fight Travis. While there are boss fights with other characters that act as substitutes, some have voiced disappointment in not being able to see what kind of gimmicks these unfought aliens could've brought to the table, especially since two of them are part of "the big four" implying they're on a completely different level than the other superheroes and could rival FU.
  • Despite Travis Strikes Again setting up the trio of Badman, Bad Girl and Shinobu as important characters for this entry, all three are taken out barely an hour into the game by the Big Bad: Badman is killed outright in his first and only appearance while Bad Girl and Shinobu are benched until near the very end of the story.
  • The non-fictional version of Mr. Doppelganger makes his appearance here, but he only acts as a NPC for a side quest and isn't fought even once, only rewarding you with a measly 5000 UTC and the default shirt from Travis Strikes Again (which you'll already have received if you have a save file from that game) once you find his true self.
  • Midori Midorikawa is a Canon Immigrant from The Twenty Fifth Ward but little is known about her and she doesn't join in with Kamui, her boyfriend to fight off FU. Doesn't help that budget cuts meant that the storyline of Travis learning she's the daughter of Fleming would never come to light.
• Ugly Cute: Midori Midorikawa's hands are living beings with their own faces and arms, which should come off as horrifying. Then it turns out they have the voices and mentality of innocent young children and all three treat each other as a happy, loving family, completely flipping the script and becoming absolutely adorable instead. It hurts even more when you can hear the little guys crying for their mommy and Midori is ready to accept her death.
• Unexpected Character:
  • While Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes brought back a few characters from The 25th Ward, Midori Midorikawa returning after previously being in the Red, Blue and Green short stories is surprising. What's even more surprising is that 1) she's directly involved with this game's plot and 2) that she's a member of FU's crew despite being Ambiguously Human. And then it's revealed that Kamui is her boyfriend and he also appears to stop Travis from murdering her.
  • Notorious, too. For fans of Fire Pro Wrestling and Suda’s previous works in that series, seeing him is a pleasant surprise.
  • Did anyone expect to see the Arsenal Rollout Model aid Travis during his fight against Damon at the end of game?

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