If you haven’t checked out my review of Travis Strikes Again: No More Heroes, I’ll just let you know that I absolutely fell in love with the game. Since its launch, there have been many different opinions on the base game but it mostly stems down to two groups, either you love it or hate it. Being a part of the former group, I gladly dove into the game’s newest DLC “Black Dandelion” to see if the game can continue to impress me.
Although I wasn’t sure what to expect from this new DLC, I was excited to have the opportunity to return to the game again with additional content. In Travis Strikes Again: Black Dandelion DLC players assume the role of Jacobs. During the DLC, players are allowed to play as her in all the levels that were unlocked during the base game.
Jacobs also doesn’t have the same skills as the other playable characters. Instead, the new character brings two new skills, Gekkōken-Ran and Isamiashi-Shinobu. This is where Jacobs can repeatedly strike down foes with her katana and power kick through hordes, respectively. With the addition of Shinobu Jacobs’ dialogue lines to previously beaten stages, it gave me more than enough of an excuse to try and tackle any missed S ranked levels that I missed in my initial playthrough.
With that said, I feel that the star of the DLC is found within the text adventure “Badman Strikes Back”. This is a side story that follows Badman’s lead up to the base game, Travis Strikes Again. Much like Travis Strikes Back, this text-heavy green and black retro aesthetic is an alluring way to catch players up to speed on the story.
The 20 minutes or so regale of Badman’s motivation for seeking revenge on Travis, the game’s main protagonist. These conversations and events turn out to be pretty dark and gruesome, even for No More Heroes’ standard. Badman’s story had me tag along through the dark underground of headhunters’ intense recruitment of assassins and the revenge plots that stew in the back of people’s minds.
In the end, I think that this DLC offers enough content to be worth the $5.99 price. It gave me a reason to get back into the action with new ways to approach the games difficult moments and showed me just how over-the-top Suda51’s No More Heroes world can be. Even the story segments of the game featuring Badman had me well immersed in the game’s lore and story and surprisingly, it had me wanting more.
I’m excited to see where the title goes from here and will gladly return to the game again for a new character and additional story. Although Jacobs really sets the bar for great combat within the game’s systems so I’m interested to see what they do with any other upcoming playable characters.
