The No More Heroes 3 Tension Gauge is present whenever you’re in battle but what it actually does is a bit vague. While it is clear that doing more hits while avoiding damage will make the tension gauge change, it’s unclear exactly why this matters or if it is something to aim for. During our review of the game, we briefly mentioned this but we have a bit more to share with you now. Here’s everything we know on what the No More Heroes 3 Tension Gauge does.
What the No More Heroes 3 Tension Gauge Does
The tension gauge in No More Heroes 3 affects the complexity and overall damage of your light and heavy combos. Located in the bottom right of your screen, the gauge ranges from a cute yellow kitten to a red tiger. At the lowest level, Travis will perform very basic light and heavy combos. As you land more hits, tension rises, and the combos become more flashy as well as add more hits which means more damage being output per combo completed. That’s not all it does though, check below for how it can give you a gauge of your current mission ranking.
Aim For Red Tiger – Get Those Double S Ranks
While not always a one-to-one metric, we found the longer you maintain red tiger tension, the more likely you’ll receive an S rank for whichever battle you are attempting. This is primarily because to maintain an S rank, you are more than likely:
- Using lots of Death Glove abilities and Wrestling moves
- Avoiding taking damage
- Landing most of your combo attacks
Whenever we managed to double S any mission, which rewards players with increased UC and WESN, the tension gauge was always in red tiger status and we received little to no damage. Again while this isn’t a direct correlation, we found any missions we ended on the yellow cat received no ranking, so we concluded this is a great indicator of how your final rank will appear after the battle has ended.
No More Heroes 3 is available now on the Nintendo Switch. Be sure to check the rest of our No More Heroes 3 Guides while you’re here!
