No More Heroes 1 and 2 will be getting fixes for their beleaguered PC ports soon, publisher XSEED has announced.
In a Steam discussion notice, XSEED's community development manager Luke Brown stated "We are very much aware of the issues affecting this title since launch, and after over a year of trying to develop patches, we can report that we have brought the effort to address these issues in-house". XSEED then apologised for the delay and lack of communication, stating it would "provide further information as soon as we are confident that we have patches in releasable shape".
Originally released for Wii in 2007 and 2010 respectively, No More Heroes is a series of oddball action-adventure games directed by Suda51, whose other work includes Killer7 and Lollipop Chainsaw. The two games were ported to PC in June last year, but the ports have been lambasted by the game's community, with complaints about broken achievements, animations, and audio. More generally, there has apparently been little effort to gear the port toward PC, with the games allegedly still bearing the credits and button layout for the Switch version of the game, upon which the PC port is based.
That Switch version was co-developed by NMH's developer Grasshopper Manufacture and Engine Software, a third-party studio which previously assisted with the well-received PC port of Killer7. Presumably, that relationship hasn't worked so well for the two No More Heroes games, and as a result XSEED has taken the decision to fix the releases internally.
As for why XSEED has taken the decision announce these upcoming patches now, it might have something to do with the fact that No More Heroes 3, the 2021 follow-up to NMH 2, launched on PC this week. This third game, which is also based on the Switch port, currently has a "very positive" rating on Steam, albeit with only 81 reviews at the time of writing.
