Strength of characters

So the open world of No More Heroes becomes more open once you reach the ninth rank. I can now get more beam swords and upgrades, train to boost stats and get new duds. It feels like the game is slowly opening up, which is a bit weird, but I'll trust that by the time I get to the fifth or fourth rank everything unlockable by simply progressing will have been unlocked. 

For those who missed this game when it was freshly released for the Wii in 2008 (2007 in Japan), it's safe to say that it's a GTA-style game that puts lawn mowing and coconut collecting beside assassination and beam sword fighting. So it definitely does not take itself seriously. The voice acting is a curious show of this, since there's not much consistency to the game's accents. Santa Destroy must be a center that draws Aussie and Brit and Russian alike. 

Not that the game suffers for that variety in voices. For the most part, games like this tend to bore me since it's usually just the same thing repeated over and over: Find contact, take mission, kill target. Recent GTA games and others in the genre supposedly deviate from this, and do it through the same means as No More Heroes. That is, they include a broad array of characters (or at least a few that you can really get into - some that literati might call "three-dimensional"). 

Dr. Peace, assassin number 9, was more or less a country song stereotype, so he doesn't quite qualify as truly three-dimensional, but if each assassin gets successively more interesting (along with more difficult), then No More Heroes could become a game to remember.