If I could sum up the premise of this game in one sentence it would be: What would you do if you had a REAL lightsaber?

The story, if you don't know goes like this: Travis Touchdown is an otaku (japanese fanboy) who lives alone in a Motel. One day he won a 'Beam Katana' in an Ebay auction. Later, after meeting some blonde chick in a bar, he decides he needs to become the top ranked assassin in the world! That's it, the game starts as you enter the #10 ranked Assassin's house.

So, what's good about the game? Alot!

The controls are both innovative and intuitive. Taking full advantage of the Wii's functionality without bashing you over the head with it.  For example, swinging your Beam Katana simply uses the B button, but high and low attacks are determined by the Wii Remotes position. You can pick up the controls in minutes and quickly start blasting your way through tons of enemies.

The graphics are decent but also heavily stylized. There's some intense shading that goes on in this game which gives it an obviously Cowboy Bebop inspired style.  Many of the graphical touches are intentionally "Old-School". Big, blocky sprites are all over the place (though mostly part of your heads up display. The game keeps pace at 60 frames per second with only some noticeable slowdown if you kill 5-6 enemies at once.

The gameplay is some of the most frantic I've played in a long time. Stringing together 9-10 hits in a row, tombstone-piledrive-stabbing, and exploding an enemy in a shower of blood and coins all happens in a span of about 3 seconds. The over-the-top violence is thoroughly entertaining. When you get tired of cutting people's heads off, you can learn new pro-wrestling moves, by either finding notes from your former mentor OR renting wrestling tapes. You can buy or find (by dumpster diving, no less) new clothes, train with your mentor (Thunder Ryu is his name), upgrade your Beam Katana(I just got the metal detector put in mine, so I can find buried coins on the beach), do side jobs (coconut collecting! Lawnmowing! and of course assassinating!) and a ton of other things around Santa Destroy.

So, whats bad? So far...only one thing and it's a very VERY minor thing.

Even though the game has a Grand Theft Auto like presentation, besides the aforementioned shops and side missions, there is not much to do around Santa Destroy. Hunting down collectibles is about it. So yeah, the town map is really just there as a simple bridge between the REAL game rather than being a part of the fun itself. There's some cool sights around town (try to spot all the pro-wrestling themed shops and restaurants, my favorite's Burger Suplex), but not enough interaction.

So yeah, At about 5 Hours into it, I'm having an awesome time. This game has my highest recommendation for any Wii game to date. This game to me is the Wii's proof of concept: a solid, hardcore, innovative, interesting and above all else FUN game that would not be possible on different hardware.

Picked this game up the other day, I concur with everything you've said about it.

Yeah...it's awesomely fun.

I'm working through it a secod time now on Bitter mode.

I'm still playing through it first time through (just lack of time).

I regret that the world didn't have more things to do.  It's a huge place and feels vastly empty.  They need a lot more independent side things to do, which would turn this into truly an epic game.  

As it sits what you can do is extremely fun for the main missions.  The core killing is indeed a blast but some of the grinding you have to do, especially at the beginning to earn enough money to go for you next kill are dumb - case in point the first mission of running around fetching coconuts.  

What I really congratulate the designers on is how well they maintained the style of the game.  They didn't falter from that exploitation style blood and gore feel at all.  This is a game that would fit perfectly in the realm of Hevy Metal.  Full props on style.

They also (and I'm most grateful for this) kept the control scheme manageable.  This game would have been ruined if you had to swing the wand around to try and match sword blow for sword blow.  That's just been shown - so far - in to many games that it doesn't work well.   Instead the control scheme is simple to use, but works well and more importantly still feels good and gives you a sense of belonging on the Wii.