No More Heroes

The anarchic Japanese vision of America that gave us videogaming's Don Quixote

- By Jon Bailes

Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes’ most famous story, is one of the great works of meta-fiction. Often called the first modern novel, it’s as much about writing stories and how we absorb them as it is about a muddle-brained minor noble mistaking windmills for giants. The titular protagonist reads so many chivalry tales that he begins to fancy himself a knight errant, complete with steed, squire and an imagined love, Dulcinea, to whom he will dedicate his deeds. But while we're invited to laugh at this warped worldview and the scrapes it lands him in, the humour is also reflected back at us, the reader.

This story, we're told, is based on a found manuscript of firsthand accounts. But there's a logical flaw here: if that's the case, who actually witnessed the Don’s exploits and wrote them down? Why isn’t that person in the story too? Catch yourself trying to join the dots and you'll see that you've fallen into a trap. What kind of fool takes fiction so literally? How easy it is to become a Don Quixote.

Travis Touchdown is our Don Quixote. True, unlike Cervantes’ masterwork, few would claim that the game he stars in is the greatest work of its medium, but No More Heroes is equally tricksy. This is a grimy, post-industrial remix of Don Quixote that uses interactivity to pull us even deeper into its meta-conspiracy. Here, the spell of the chivalric novel is replaced by that of modern escapist pursuits – videogames, anime, wrestling, pornography – yet Travis's obsessions are no less fevered than Don Quixote’s own. Nor is the ease with which he gets sucked into a parallel life.

We're no longer in Imperial Spain here, as