Here's a look at the talent behind No More Heroes 3 with Suda51

No matter how you look at it, besides its rewarding combat and its crazy situations, what renders No More Heroes 3 unique is the distinctive combination of different art and music throughout the game. Asked about this, creator, producer, director, and scenario writer Goichi "Suda51" Suda wanted to give a shout-out to the rest of the small but heavily talented team at Grasshopper Manufacture, to emphasise this is more than an "game d'auteur".

Here we list some of the more prominent names and roles according to Suda's overview during our interview, with people who have been there even since the times of Flower, Sun and Rain, Killer7 and the first No More Heroes:

In terms of programmers, "[Toru] Hironaka is basically the leader of the development team and also, in a way, he is one of the leaders of Grasshopper itself. I would say he's probably the top boss fight developer in the world. He's been on the team since NMH 1, he's done most of the whole of the boss fights ever since then and the stuff this guy comes up is amazing". The other highlighted coder is Takumi Yamada, who has been with GhM "pretty sure since Killer7, but he's been around for most of the whole No More Heroes series as well. He works on most of the effects. When it comes to SFX this guy is basically a genius. (...) For example on Killer7 when you slice a guy up and the blood kind of splatters on the UI, the funky particle stuff was all Yamada himself. These two make up the core of the programming team and are ridiculously great".

"As for graphics, we've got a guy named [Kunihiko] Taniwaki, and he's responsible for putting together what you could call the general vibe you get from the world of No More Heroes, the feelings it brings up inside you when you look at the different screens, that's all thanks to this guy. He's also been with us since around Killer7, for which I believe he was responsible for about 80% of the characters. He actually left Grasshopper for a while to do his own thing for about 10-12 years and he ended up coming back to work on Travis Strikes Again".

"When it comes to sound, for NMH3 there are two main guys that I've been working with in particular. One is a guy named [Jun] Fukuda who is a composer who's been working on sound and music. He's an external guy and then there's a guy named Nobuaki Kaneko. He's a pretty famous, well-known drummer in Japan, he acts as a composer in the game and he's also a well-respected character actor, pretty talented with everything he does", Suda51 compliments as he recalls he's been working remotely during the pandemic. "It's kind of amazing how I can tell this guy 'this is the kind of music I want for this scene or for this part of the game' and he's basically 'ok I got you'. He can just feel the sound that I want to hear".

"There's lot other people on the team, all extremely crucial to the game and GhM in general. And I can't forget to mention Ren Yamazaki. He's been acting pretty much as my right-hand man, if not maybe like my equal as far as directing this game goes. He's been working externally for a while, but he's been right here by my side for TSA and NMH3 taking care of a lot of the directorial duties. I've been working with him since way back in the day, ever since Flower, Sun and Rain actually. He's an amazing director, he does really cool stuff and I'm really happy to report that from September 1st he's going to be officially rejoining Grasshopper as a full-time member, so we're really excited about that".

To learn more about No More Heroes 3 game credits, take a look at the screenshots, as the game's episodes are introduced with a TV-like credits role.