Whatever Happened to All the Heroines? An Analysis of the Gender Themes in No More Heroes for the Nintendo Wii

Videogames are both praised and criticized as escapist fantasies and some games proudly and unapologetically embrace this role, offering little more than interactive “run-and-gun” brutality. Other games strive for something more, attempting to weave a narrative through this new medium. It is rare, though, that a game actively engages with these two paradigms, reconciling the needs and standards of both into a single cohesive story. This is what makes designer Suda 51’s No More Heroes so interesting: it is not simply an escapist fantasy, but rather the story of a man whose reality becomes so intolerable that he consciously chooses to forsake it and himself in favor of such a fantasy. The trauma of Travis Touchdown is of such a personal nature – one mired in a reciprocating cycle of gender-based violence – that he opts to run from it rather than face it and immerse himself in the detached, emotionless virtual reality of the “hack-n-slash” action game.

Of course, at the outset, the player does not know any of this. In the game’s opening scene, Travis lays out a simple rationale for his actions: he is currently the eleventh best assassin in North America and he wants “to be number one,” so he decides to kill the ten people ranked above him “and aim for the top.” As he says: “how’s that, short and simple enough for you?” In this brief exposition, Travis describes the world in which he wishes to forget himself: nothing deep, nothing complicated. He just wants to “let the bloodshed begin.” He does this to entice the player with promises of action and excitement, saying “you there holding the Wii Remote right now… just press the A button.” In so doing, Travis breaks the fourth wall, exposes his previous narration as a direct address to the player and thus creates a discrepancy between that player and the onscreen avatar.

Most videogames have a tacit fusion of the player and the avatar. To use a classic example, when one plays a Mario game, one becomes Mario from the instant one turns on the console. That is to say, the diegetic gamespace – anything within the interactive context of the game world or its narrative – never acknowledges the player by anything other than his actions through Mario, save for an initial tutorial segment where the game teaches the player how to control the avatar and thus unites them within the gamespace through the controller. In No More Heroes, though, the player is acknowledged within the diegtic space of the narrative by its protagonist and avatar, the purpose of which is to point out that Travis is willingly choosing this path. He tells the player to push the A button, which is the primary button of control in the game. In combat, it swings Travis’s sword. In exploration, it activates other random actions, such as picking up objects, accelerating Travis’ motorcycle and initiating dialogue. When Travis tells the player to “press the A button,” he is knowingly submitting his will to that of the player and resigning himself to the role of the avatar.

This conjoining is not complete at the end of the first scene, however. In the level that follows it, there is a transition where Travis comfortably settles himself into his fantasy. This becomes apparent in his battle with Death Metal, the rank ten assassin, which is also the first boss fight of the game. What makes this fight different from the others that follow it is that Travis soliloquizes – either to himself or to the player – while the fight takes places. That is to say, the narrative and game – usually segregated into cutscene or level – are merged. So, while the player fights Death Metal through Travis, Travis relates a great deal of muddled information. Most importantly, he talks about a “sense of doom” that is “deeper than [his] instincts” for bloodshed and senseless violence and it is “taunting” him. Here, he alludes to the conflict from which he is running and the trauma that he is trying to forget. To this end, he seeks a mysterious “paradise.” He uses this word frequently throughout the game. It is his goal, but the nature of it is elusive. When he first encounters Death Metal, in the cutscene preceding the fight, he claims “this is paradise, the place where dreams are fulfilled.” By “this,” he means the game. Travis, having just hacked his way through a swarm of nameless goons under the control of the player, has experienced the guiltless, detached thrill of videogame violence. Much as the player feels no remorse for these actions because the goons in question are just pixels on a screen, a simulation, Travis too can partake of this guiltlessness because he is not in control of his actions. He is simply a vessel for the player. In this paradise, violence is depersonalized and thus meaningless. At Death Metal’s mansion, Travis discovers the release he seeks from his life and in Death Metal himself, who Travis views as his “future self”, he has the image of all he wishes to be: a part of this generalized remorseless violent game. Therefore, it is important to note that it is Travis, not the player, who kills Death Metal. The death occurs during a cutscene, when Travis is in control. In so doing, he usurps Death Metal’s place in the game by becoming the rank ten assassin and secures his fantasy’s hold over him.

Now, it would be best to discuss the reason that Travis seeks shelter in this fantasy, a past trauma the game does its best to hide from the player. Most of the backstory is revealed in a single cutscene where the dialogue is sped-up so as to be incomprehensible. Yet if one listens carefully or slows down this fast-forward scene (as was done by mrharvest in the video above), one can find that the character in question, Jeane, is actually revealing a great deal about Travis’ incentive to escape his reality. In it, Jeane – who is previously introduced as Travis’ ex-girlfriend – reveals that she is also his half-sister. Their father repeatedly molested her and – through this act of sexual violence – set in motion the cyclical gender conflict that is the root cause of Travis’ woes.

To take revenge on her father, Jeane starts dating his son, Travis, and then murders both of her boyfriend’s parents in front of him. Here, as the masculine lashed out against the feminine, the feminine retaliates against another masculine figure, Travis, who was at the time innocent. Yet as Travis later tells his sister, “vengeance begets vengeance” and so, rather than continue this cycle, he opts to run straight into the game’s opening cutscene, which, in fact, depicts him on his motorcycle, effectively running away.

The fantasy world does not stay secure, however, as a discrepancy remains between the genders. This initially becomes apparent when Travis faces Shinobu, his first female opponent. Shinobu acts as a parallel to Travis, as she is locked in her own vengeful circle. Apparently, someone murdered her father, “sliced him in two.” Upon seeing Travis’ weapon, she assumes this person to be him and then the fight begins. This fight is notable because he does not kill her. The actual gameplay portion occurs as usual and the player is still required to defeat her, but when the cutscene takes over and it becomes Travis’ burden to finish the job, he relents. The reason is not revealed here, but instead during the fight with his next female opponent, Holly Summers, who discerns correctly that Travis “can’t kill a woman.” The reason for this is never explicitly stated, but looking at the backstory that has not yet been revealed to the player, it can be seen that even in the safety of his fantasy world, Travis is still running, still refusing to take part in the frictional gender relations that would consume him.

This is futile, though, because even his battles with male opponents are instigated through feminine influences. For example, his Beam Katanas – his weapon of choice – are purchased from a Doctor Naomi. Most typically, though, the feminine encourages Travis to violence through Sylvia. She acts as his liaison to the assassin organization that determines these ranks and she sets up his fights and convinces him to continue through the promise that he can “do [her] if [he reaches] number one.” At the end of the game, it is revealed she met Travis shortly after Jeane murdered his parents. She found him drinking himself into a stupor and impotently whining about how “that bitch stole everything.” Sylvia then tells him she “can help [him] get even.”

She thus becomes the architect of the game world and it is her presence that helps sustain it. This is exemplified by the rank four battle against Harvey Volodarskii, where Travis’ fantasy is at its strongest. Sylvia is more prominent here than in any other level, even sitting in the audience to watch Travis’ fight. This level is structured as a date between Travis and Sylvia, thus bringing Travis closer to his sexual wish fulfillment. In fact, after the fight, the scene depicts he and Sylvia kissing, suggesting that the former’s wish has actually been fulfilled. The truly interesting thing about this level, though, is that Travis becomes so immersed in his fantasy game world that he actually becomes another videogame character – his favorite character, as indicated by the large statue in his motel room: the Pure White Giant Glastonbury. On the way to the battle with Harvey, the player takes control of the Glastonbury character in a different style of game. No More Heroes is typically a 3D action game, where the player uses various sword swipes to eliminate foes. The Glastonbury game is a 2D shooter, where enemies descend from the top of the screen and the player is tasked with shooting them before they make contact. In short, they are vastly different genres of game and yet the Glastonbury game is a mandatory prerequisite for progressing through the level. It is interesting, then, that the point where Travis’ fantasy reaches its peak is the same point where Sylvia’s sexual manipulation comes to its closest fruition.

Another notable example of Sylvia’s control over Travis’ fantasy is when she is seen to actively reaffirm it and strengthen its hold on him during the fifth rank battle against Letz Shake. From its outset, this fight establishes itself as atypical, as Travis follows a trail of blood to its beginning, where he finds the corpse of an anonymous woman, perhaps a reference to his dead mother or a grim intimation to the violence he is meant to inflict. When Travis and the player enter Letz Shake’s level, they chase a strange man down a long hallway that leads to a generic desert region outside of the game hub of Santa Destroy. This fictional city acts as the nexus of all points in the gamespace; it is from here that all of the levels are activated. In the limits of Santa Destroy and especially within the walls of its most distinctive landmark and his home base, the No More Heroes Motel, Travis is securely lodged within his fantasy. This is signified by the fact that the player almost always controls Travis in this hub. There are no cutscenes – save one early moment with Sylvia when this hub is introduced to the player – and all dialogue occurs without voices through quick bits of text that the player progresses with the all-important A button. In Santa Destroy, Travis is reduced purely to avatar, always in the player’s control, but whenever he strays from Santa Destroy, his reality intrudes, as it does with Letz Shake.

It is in these outer environs that Travis confronts Letz Shake himself, but unlike the other assassins, there is no fight; the player never takes over. Instead, that mysterious figure from before appears and kills the assassin, denying Travis the cathartic reaffirmation of his fantasy violence. He cannot, after all, submit himself to the role of avatar if the player never takes control. Now, drawn away from the hub of his fantasy world and without the support of the player, he is forced to face an unknown figure. This man’s name is Henry and his significance will be discussed in greater detail later. All that matters here is that, as he is not a ranked assassin, he is not part of the No More Heroes context as Sylvia constructed it. He is a disruption of the fantasy diegesis, as he proved by breaking the rules and killing Travis’ opponent for him.

This is where Sylvia comes in. Before Travis engages Henry, the camera focuses squarely on her, as she blows a whistle. When it zooms back out, Henry is gone and Travis is dragged back into his fantasy game, as he is awarded the title of fifth rank and returned to Santa Destroy. Even though he did not defeat the assassin, Sylvia still grants him the prize and keeps Travis within his role.

So, in rank five, Travis’ fantasy is disrupted, but reaffirmed by Sylvia’s whistle. He quickly forgets all about Henry after he is awarded the rank and presented with the next match-up. In rank four, Sylvia has a stronger presence than in any other fight and Travis becomes so entrenched in the videogame aesthetic as to be replaced by his favorite videogame character. Thus Sylvia is not only his greatest impetus to act in this world, but also the strongest buttress to keep it intact. From the beginning then, the fantasy world that Travis thought was going to facilitate his escape from the cycle of vengeance was designed to train him and coax his return to it.

This then is the true significance of Holly Summers because not only does she discern Travis’ inhibition, she helps to alleviate it. She chastises him, saying that “assassins must die when they lose” and then she kills herself, for which Travis feels profound guilt, apologizing to her and saying that he “never meant to shame” her. After this, Travis exhibits no qualms in killing women. The explanation can be seen in an examination of his relationship with Holly. When he first meets her, Travis demonstrates the same immature mindset, the childish merger of violent instinct with sex drive, that he always has, saying “I could steal a kiss before I steal your life.” Holly’s appearance invites this sort of reaction, as she is standing on a beach in a small bikini, but also has a grenade launcher in place of one of her legs. She is thus the embodiment of sex and violence. As their interaction continues, though, Travis’ demeanor matures and he begins to express sincere remorse, going so far as to bury Holly himself. This is an experience that the player shares as he helps Travis carry Holly’s body to her grave. The significance of this is that Travis’ guiltless fantasy is disrupted and part of his reality – a reality defined by a pattern of gender conflict – intrudes upon it, thus allowing Travis the leeway necessary to complete Sylvia’s game. In feeling guilt for Holly, he disperses the detached thrill of videogame violence and lets his reality in, but in so doing he invites the underlying conflict of that reality to shape his fantasy.

This becomes important when Travis reaches the rank three battle against Speed Buster. This begins a straight string of female opponents, each of whom tear away at Travis’ fantasy and bring him closer to the reality he is avoiding. Speed Buster’s fight actually takes place outside of Travis’ fantasy realm of Santa Destroy and in the ruins of a place called Speed City. The significance of which is, of course, that Travis is pulled away from the hub of his delusion and into its less stable periphery, once again. Here, he discovers the reenactment of his trauma, as Speed Buster kills Thunder Ryu, a father figure of sorts. Ryu is first introduced in the Santa Destroy hub as a trainer, who teaches Travis how to wield his Beam Katana. He acts as a positive father figure, emulating the “hardworking family man” image Travis had of his real father. Yet still there was a semi-sexual intimation during their interactions, as Ryu would constantly entreat Travis to remove his clothes and “stick [his] butt out” and he would constantly remark about how he likes “THAT, right?” Ryu here is actually referring to a fighting stance he is teaching Travis, but the way the dialogue is presented, it becomes sexually suggestive, and thus hints to the negative aspects of Travis’ real father.

In Speed Buster’s battle with Thunder Ryu – the exact reason for which is never explained – Travis is forced to watch the primal scene of his current existence, one forged not through the deep affection between a man and a woman, but through bitter hatred. In this instant, Travis unknowingly relives the death of his father at the hands of a woman and is motivated for revenge. Even his cat, whose name is Jeane, is inexplicably present for the show.

As for Speed Buster herself, she is a crotchety old feminist. Unlike Shinobu and Holly, who were young and attractive figures, Speed Buster is as desexualized as possible, with liver spots and moles and an excess of girth. She also exhibits no love for the other sex, coming onto the scene muttering about how “freaking’ ignorant” men are. Her attitude highlights the animosity between the genders and sets up the fight, which is largely a phallic competition.

The best example of this is Speed Buster’s weapon: a long cannon, so large that it negates her ability to move. Also of note, the cannon’s barrel emerges from a hub that "transforms from an egg to a chick to a chicken," but the head formation has a large red comb, very much like a rooster’s. Another common word for rooster – i.e. “cock – is also a word commonly associated with the penis, thus adding to the phallic nature of Speed Buster’s power. Travis also has his, notably smaller, phallic weapon in the Beam Katana that Thunder Ryu taught him to use. In fact, as Ryu dies, he screams to Travis: “master your katana and the power will be yours.” Essentially, the control of the phallus is passed from father to son, who then must secure it for the masculine. This is the nature of the Speed Buster fight. Rather than challenge her directly, as with the other assassins, Travis and the player must evade her cannon fire and slice down a telephone pole, which crushes her weapon. Once this happens, once the phallus is removed from her control, Speed Buster becomes a much more docile figure, calling Thunder Ryu “a good man” and even kissing Travis on the cheek before he kills her. Travis, having finally overcome his inhibition with killing women, then inherits Thunder Ryu’s katana, again playing into the aforementioned theme of the son inheriting the phallus.

The next battle with Bad Girl is immediately interesting because Sylvia is absent. She had previously been the primary facilitator of Travis’ fantasy and she is now not around to do so. As a result, the Bad Girl fight is much more realistic than previous encounters. First, she lacks the over-the-top weaponry of her predecessors. No giant cannons, laser swords or earthquake machines, she simply has a wooden bat. More to the point, though, she is one of the only assassins to actually exact a physical toll on Travis. In previous encounters, Travis has demonstrated remarkable resilience. He has survived grenades, giant laser beams, an untold number of bullets and numerous other assaults in the cutscenes. Removed completely from the necessities of gameplay, Travis has emerged from all of these attacks in the purely narrative space, on his own, without a scratch. His fantasy is so strong as to protect him from all harm. He can only be hurt like any other videogame character: through gameplay, but even should he die he is promptly resurrected. Yet with Bad Girl, who does little more than hit him with a bat, he becomes fatigued, nearly passing out from exhaustion after the fight. In fact, Travis does not fully win this battle. Even as he has Bad Girl impaled on his sword, she still continues beating him until he admits defeat. She then dies knowing she won. Even though Travis kills his opponent, he still concedes the victory.

Bad Girl represents the underlying bedrock of Travis’ fantasy. Her first onscreen appearance depicts her fatally bludgeoning a series of men in leather outfits and ball gags as they stream down a conveyor belt. This again ties into the notion of a gender conflict as Bad Girl’s victims are all men and their attire is reminiscent of a “sex and mutilation” fetish, once again merging violence and sexuality. Yet it goes deeper than that as Bad Girl strips away all of the romanticism of the assassin and reveals the “perverted killing maniac” beneath. As she says, “in essence, they’re the same.” She represents the reality beneath the fantasy, a notion further supported by the location of her fight.

Travis and the player fight Bad Girl in a secret room beneath the Santa Destroy baseball field, directly under the location of a previous ranked fight. When Travis faces the rank nine assassin, Doctor Peace, on that baseball field, the latter tells a story about how he was estranged from his daughter, Jennifer, but they were recently reunited and that meeting went poorly. Doctor Peace is another father figure in this game and his story about a daughter – whose name is quite similar to Jeane – correlates to Travis’ backstory, which also contains a father-daughter reunion that does not go well. Of course, Travis never realizes this. The close proximity of these two figures – Doctor Peace, the singing assassin, and Bad Girl, the manic sadist – represents Travis’ status within his own fantasy. Early in the game, when he fights Doctor Peace, he sees only the superficial level. Even as his opponent tells him “the atmosphere was a façade,” indicating a duality between perception and actuality, Travis does not see it. But when he returns to this battleground, he descends beneath the surface. He sees deeper than the romantic singing assassin to the serial killer within: a young blonde girl, who looks remarkably like the sister whose violent retribution instigated all of this.

Travis, his fantasy now shaken and still lacking the reaffirmation that Sylvia often provides, proceeds into the final battle against Dark Star. Like Letz Shake before, Travis ventures outside his fantasy hub and into a desert region, removing himself from the security of the game world and into and extraneous zone. Also like Letz Shake, he is denied the catharsis of defeating his opponent. Rather, Dark Star is murdered by Jeane, mirroring her previous assassination of her and Travis’ shared father. This is because, before he falls, Dark Star claims to be that father and in so doing triggers Travis’ latent memories of his parents’ murder. It remains unclear, though, whether Dark Star was in earnest. On the one hand, from a causal standpoint, it makes no sense for him to be Travis’ father, as that man is dead. On the other hand, Dark Star does possess the knowledge of that incident and does accurately instill that memory in Travis. It can be surmised, then, that Dark Star is the focal point of liminality, the dead center middle ground between Travis’ fantasy and his reality. This point is further enhanced by the setting, as the desert region is outside the diegetic gamespace proper (i.e. Santa Destroy), but is still clearly within it. It is part of the game, yet aside from it at the same time. Travis progresses through the game to reach Dark Star, who then figuratively steps aside to reveal Jeane, who exists outside the game (as she is not one of the ten ranked assassins), but is still part of it because she initiated it.

At this point, Travis’ fantasy is now entirely dispelled, which is signified as he and Jeane frequently break the fourth wall for the first time since that opening scene. They talk about “the age rating for this game” or the game possibly getting “delayed.” They acknowledge that they are just figures in a videogame and further this point by drawing the distinction between player and avatar again. As mentioned, after that opening scene, the only separation between Travis and the player was in the separation between cutscene and gameplay. Yet in the aforementioned fast-forward scene where Jeane reveals the backstory, this distinction is created within a cutscene. This is because while the scene plays, the player cannot understand the dialogue – even the subtitles shut off – and the high-pitched voices, combined with Travis’ facial expressions make the scene quite comical. Yet Travis understands what Jeane is saying and remarks on it after the speed returns to normal. Judging from his expressions, he does not find it funny. Now there is a near total separation of player and avatar.

They exist together only briefly to defeat Jeane in the boss battle, but even then there is a notable distinction because – like Shinobu and Holly beforehand – while the player defeats his opponent, Travis does not finish the job. What makes this more significant than the previous altercations, though, is that Travis actually loses. He may not have killed Holly and Shinobu, but they were clearly out of the game by the time the cutscene started. Jeane on the other hand actually wins. Even after the player drains all of her health, she keeps fighting him, thus tying into the discrepancy between player and avatar and the removal of the escapist fantasy. The player can no longer lead the avatar to victory through the same previously established conditions; the game changed the rules. The fight only ends once Jeane’s health is gone and another condition is met, specifically a weapons lock. Normally when this happens, the player twirls the Wii Remote rapidly in a circle until the hold is broken, but because he and Travis are no longer perfectly merged, this cannot succeed. Jeane inevitably wins this lock and then the cutscene begins, which depicts Jeane shoving her fist into Travis’ chest.

Travis is only victorious when Shinobu intercedes and gives him the opportunity to recover and kill Jeane. Shinobu, once trapped in her own vengeful circle, returns to save Travis and in so doing liberates them both from their cycles of gender violence. Essentially, the cycle of violence is only broken when the two genders cooperate. This is further exhibited in Jeane’s demeanor as she is slain. Much like Speed Buster before her, she holds no grudge against her vanquisher, but rather peacefully accepts her demise, saying she has “had enough.” Thus Travis’ role in his repetitious cycle is both fulfilled – he kills Jeane – and broken – Shinobu helps him – but the game is not yet over and Sylvia’s intentions have yet to be revealed.

These are demonstrated most clearly through Henry. After Jeane is defeated, the player follows Travis back to the No More Heroes Motel, where one of two endings plays. The first depicts Travis being assaulted by an unknown ranked assassin, who, much like himself, is trying to advance his position. The only notable thing about this scene is that this assassin attacks Travis in the bathroom. Bathrooms act as save points and thus are by definition safe places. Yet Travis is attacked and, based on this ending alone, presumably killed at the save point. This just emphasizes that the player and the avatar are no longer merged and, since a videogame cannot function without this merger, the game ends.

Yet if the player has met certain conditions, he has the option to view the “real ending,” where Henry slays the unknown assassin and then he and Travis battle in the parking lot. This is the last time the player has any control and, much like the fight with Jeane, his actions have little impact on the story. This time it is because the player loses control of Travis before the fight ends. When the cutscene begins, Travis and Henry are still fighting and continue to do so until the credits roll. The game ends in the middle of the boss fight and then all that remains is the narrative. This is emphasized even further when Henry refers to both Travis “and the player”.

It is here that Henry reveals himself as Travis’ “twin brother” and that Sylvia is his wife, his “spouse [and] soul mate.” Concerning the first revelation, it is hard to fathom in a strictly causal sense the logistics of how Henry could be Travis’ brother. Henry’s accent clearly indicates they were raised separately and no mechanism is ever proffered to explain this. Yet thinking allegorically, this could simply mean that Henry and Travis are equals, but on opposite sides of some spectrum, which would explain why their duel cannot end; two equal forces cannot overpower each other. Returning then to our discussion of gender themes, Henry and Travis can be viewed as embodiments of two traditional forms of masculinity, a fact supported by them each wielding Beam Katanas, the phallic nature of which has been previously established.

Beginning with Travis, he is rude, crude and violent. He makes frequent use of profanity and he is shown to be an avid viewer of pornography. He dresses in ramshackle attire – torn jeans, tinted sunglasses and a leather jacket. Add to that his violent predispositions and his preference for driving a motorcycle, he very much takes on all the attributes of the “bad boy” cliché. That is to say, he is a possessive, assertive and dominant male figure and it was the excitement of this “world of drama and passion” that attracted Sylvia; it made her “feel truly alive for the first time.” Yet ultimately, Travis proves inadequate in this role, as Sylvia leaves him, denouncing him as “a dopey otaku assassin, the bottom of the barrel.” She tells him this shortly before he meets Dark Star, as his connection to the player becomes increasingly tenuous. Now, as he fights Henry without the player, Travis is just that: a dopey geek, who bought a lightsaber “from an internet auction” and strives vainly to live up to a masculine ideal: the bad boy, the rebel without a cause.

Henry is a different matter. His hair is neat and tidy, he wears a gray flannel suit and tie and even his Beam Katana possesses a smoother, more elegant quality. He looks more like a businessman than a street punk and so he represents the opposite masculine ideal: the family man, the provider. Yet like Travis he falls short in this role because his “income wasn’t enough” for Sylvia. So, Henry is just another male character striving to live up to a masculine ideal and falling short by the standards set by the feminine. Neither ideal could woo the feminine figure through its own merits, so the two male figures are set against each other to eliminate the competitor.

This is Sylvia’s intention, the whole point of her game – as No More Heroes is very much Sylvia’s game. She staged the series of events that allowed Travis to complete his role in the progression of masculine-feminine violence. She maintained his delusion and coerced him, through her femininity, to complete his task. She is even there to watch as he finishes Jeane. This then freed him to battle Henry. With the genders no longer locked in their reciprocating circuit of violence, the masculine is set against itself. Travis and Henry ultimately cannot defeat each other because they are equals, but also because they are impotent figures in this narrative now. Travis’ power came from the player, but the player was cut off mid-conflict and Henry never had a player. Travis and Henry realize this as they flee from the No More Heroes Motel, symbolically from No More Heroes the game, knowing they cannot find resolution there. They race onward in search of a new “exit they call paradise,” a new narrative to free them from this new conflict. They are locked in a battle that never ends, the last scene depicting a still image of them frozen forever in conflict, as Sylvia and a reborn Jeane look on. This is because No More Heroes was constructed by Sylvia to resolve an intergender conflict, not an intragender power struggle. The masculine is left to battle itself, as the feminine is free of patriarchal dominance.

This also ties in to the game’s title, as Hero is a traditionally masculine term, one that connotes the superiority of a member of that gender. By trapping the masculine in an eternal struggle with itself, Sylvia made room for a world with no more heroes, but heroines instead.

http://www.anders-fischer.net/essays/whatever-happened-to-the-heroines/

No More Heroes. San Francisco: Ubisoft, Inc, 2006.

"Jeane's Shocking Revelation." No More Heroes. January 21, 2009. December 24, 2007. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A22Nkt_fDBc

(Special thanks to mrharvest, who posted and slowed the video.)