Suda51 says No More Heroes is “Z*lda itself” and Shadows of the Damned is “Mar*o and Princess P*ach, but in He*l” 

NetEase Games and Grasshopper Manufacture released Shadows of the Damned: Hella Remastered on October 31 for the PC (Steam), PS5/PS4, Xbox Series X❘S/Xbox One and Nintendo Switch. With the game’s penchant for violence and Johnson jokes, you’d hardly think to compare it to the family-friendly tale of a certain plumber and his pink-clad princess, but Suda51 says that the basic dynamics at play are the same. 

Explaining Shadows of the Damned’s concept in an interview with AUTOMATON, Goichi Suda mentions that the basic premise of the game was to give players the experience of a road movie through Hell. However, as far as storylines go, “to put things simply, the princess gets kidnapped by the bad guy, and the hero sets off to save her – it’s a textbook plot.”  

Shadows of the Damned has a special place in Suda’s heart for being his first love story. In order to meaningfully portray Garcia’s descent into Hell to save his girlfriend Paula, he knew he had to focus on their relationship. However, the creator playfully comments that, “the structure and dynamics are basically the same as that of Mar*o, Princess P**ch and B**ser. You can think of the game like “Mar*o, but in He*l.” 

And that’s not the only unexpected comparison Suda makes either. Grasshopper Manufacture’s head told us that The Legend of Zelda has had the biggest influence over his games so far, but we couldn’t help but point out that we couldn’t see much of Zelda in them. In response, Suda told that his 2007 hack-and-slash No More Heroes “is Zelda itself.”  

He goes on to elaborate: “If you take Zelda, El Topo, and Jackass and mash them together, you get No More Heroes. You have a main field and dungeons, right? No More Heroes has dungeons for each assassin, and the structure itself is basically that of Zelda’s. When I was making No More Heroes, I really wanted to make ‘Z*lda, but in a world of a*sassins.’ That’s how the game came to be.”