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There’s a special kind of crazy that's part and parcel with certain games from the land of the rising sun, a crazy that western developers will never emulate, a certain style of presentation that warps the mind and tickles the senses. Bayonetta has the experience in spades and diamonds and while the gameplay has a lot of similarities to similar third person action games, notably its development predecessor the original Devil May Cry, it’s pretty safe to say you’ve never played a game anything like Bayonetta. While it might be an acquired taste for some it’s flashy, violent action and tongue in cheek over sexualisation will win over most gamers of both genders.
The story mixes up the relationship between heaven hell and earth with two factions, the Umbran Witches who draw their powers from Inferno and the Lumen Sages who get their powers from Paradiso, responsible for keeping the balance between these realms and earth. Unfortunately both the Witches and Sages were all but wiped out in the town of Vigrid a good five hundred years before the start of the game and the balance is looking rather uneven. Enter Bayonetta, a mysterious woman with the powers of the Umbran witches who awoke in a coffin at the bottom of a lake 20 years previously and has no memory before this time. On a tip she travels to the European town of Vigrid to find a wealthy collector of ancient items who’s looking for two gems called ‘The Eyes of the World’, which lights a spark in her amnesia stricken memory. There she battles all manner of heavenly host, meets a familiar little girl and is ineptly stalked by a journalist who’s convinced she killed his father twenty years previously.
If there were more witch's like Bayonetta the Salem Trials would have been way more entertaining
The gameplay in Bayonetta is fast and at times surprisingly challenging, even on normal level. This is mostly down to the lack of a block button. Instead players have to overcome multiple enemy attacks by tapping an evade button so Bayonetta lithely somersaults out of harms way. Timing your dodge at the last moment jumps you into ‘with time’, drenching the screen in a purple hue and slowing the enemies down to a crawl, okay yes it's actually bullet time but it's presented a lot more stylishly than all the impersonators since Max Payne. This is the time to unleash some solid combo attacks and do some real damage to your angelic opponents. Some of the more advanced enemies will require you to use witch time just to get a hit in on them and you'll spend most boss battles using witch time as often as you can. There are hundreds of possible combos that can be used in the game, often ending in an attack where a portal opens and a giant foot or fist made of hair bursts forth to do huge damage. Bayonetta’s form fitting leather outfit is actually made from her hair and flies of her body to perform the move or to summon one of several demons as a finisher against tougher enemies. In other words, the more damaging an attack you perform the more naked Bayonetta becomes.
When you get hold of the Umbran katana you'll be hard pressed to use any other weapon for the rest of the game
While gameplay is fun you’ll often descend into frantic button mashing as many of the flashier combos make it difficult to follow Bayonetta’s actual moves and there's so much action on screen it's far too easy to mistime button presses. The camera can also struggle to catch up during battles in close quarters locations, stairways in particular. The sheer number of combos and options also mean that it’s easy to mess up as holding a button a second longer than you meant to can send you on a whole other combo chain. In a stroke of genius on the developers part the loading screen between levels is a training area where you can trial all of Bayonetta’s combos which are listed to the left. It even identifies how many times you’ve used certain combos so you can experiment if a move set isn’t working for you. Be warned if you’re the type of person who relaxes during cut scenes, maybe dropping the controller to scratch an itch, as many of the cut scenes end suddenly with an attack or a quick time event. I was caught of guard several times by this mechanic.
Just one of the many degradable weapon pick ups available, no really, that's not for decoration
The game’s over all look is, in a word, stunning. Gothic European architecture is on display wherever you go and the character models look amazing, if a bit odd at times. Other than Bayonetta’s very attractive but geometrically impossible bod the design award has to go to the bad guy’s of the game. They’re a bizarre mix of fleshy Silent Hill type bodies, Renaissance marble sculptures and gaudy gold armour ground together to make something original and yet easily identifiable as angelic. If you’re trying to picture something in your head then stop, these things come in all shapes and sizes. Some are vaguely like lions with eagles heads, others look like Roman barges that fly and shoot missiles and lasers at you. They have names like Fortitude and Charity and when they speak it’s in an otherworldly sing song voice the introduction of a new enemy type is always a memorable experience in Bayonetta. As mentioned before Bayonetta herself is an attractive lady, but in some respects she’s more like an idealised nineties comic book heroine come to life with seventy percent of her body mass devoted to legs and buttocks. This body combined with hypersexualised behaviour, constantly striking overly seductive poses, sucking a lollypop and slapping her rump before killing dozens of enemies is often more strange than it is sexy. You may recall that Dante from Devil May Cry came out with some bizarre one liners during the game; well Bayonetta’s one liners, delivered with a pout and an upper crust English accent, are even more bizarre. The sexuality of Bayonetta definitely suffers a little in the translation and it will most likely amuse and annoy an equal number of gamers. It's a cheap shot to call Bayonetta's design and behaviour sexist, the character is more cartoonish in her representation as a sex symbol than she is objectified. When I think of a sexist slant on a character I think of a female character perpetually squealing and screaming, always in danger and unable to fight back for no other reason than she is a female character. Bayonetta's character is the opposite, she's the most powerful and ferocious thing in her world and her flirtations are just another weapon for mocking her enemies. Think Xena Warrior Princess if you want a comparable character.
One of the many bizarre torture fatalities, button mash for extra points and gore!
There are plenty of other idiosyncratic elements in Bayonetta, like gathering vinyl LP’s from enemies that contain the music of heaven, that can then be traded to the bartender/weapon shop owner Rodan who takes them into the Inferno to reforge them into new weapons. Or when you turn into a panther flowers spring up behind you where ever you run. Between levels extra items can be earned by playing an angel blaster target game that you can find ammo for hidden around levels. Fatality moves can be pulled when you fill a magic meter as well, these are unique for each type of enemy and they include summoning a guillotine and repeatedly kicking an angel in the ass before his head gets cut off, or summoning a giant chainsaw to cut up a weird translucent flying stingray (and you get to keep the chainsaw afterwards as a pickup weapon!). For replayability there's a score at the end of each 'verse' that ranks you based on combo level and damage taken, ranks run from stone up to platinum and the better you score the more 'halos' you get to spend in Rodan's shop on new moves, upgrades and special items. I got mostly stone playing on normal I have to confess. For desperately crap players like me you can always go back and replay levels and earn extra cash to spend in the weapon shop.
Pictures don't do this game justice, you need to see it in action, case in point the above scene that happens in a fragment of church flying through the air, the dragons are just the bosses hands
Bayonetta isn't without its low points. The first is undoubtedly the vehicle sections, there's only a few but any time Bayonetta wraps her legs around something the game takes a surprising down turn. The vehicle sections are twice as fast as the regular gameplay and twice as difficult to tell whats going on. For the most part you're just going as fast as you can, shooting as often as you can and waiting patiently for the damn vehicle section to end. While the game requires wired reflexes and an over caffeinated brain ninety percent of the time the vehicle sections can almost be completed with your eyes closed. The plot for Bayonetta is also a bit of a let down, too much of the 'mystery' is telegraphed by flashbacks to leave any real surprise and if you haven't worked out who the little girl is within five minutes you could probably watch The Sixth Sense twice and enjoy it just as much the second time. The twist and turns of the plot are usually overblown and the final payoff, while spectacular, verges a little too close to being plain silly. It's not that the plot elements are lost in translation either, it's just plain mish mash bad. Worst of all is the confusion over the weight of the story, at times there's elements of betrayal and torture, genocide and heavy religious allegories that make you think you're supposed to be concerned as to the events unfolding. But then Bayonetta pulls of a combo that turns into a disco dance complete with glamour shot or gets crushed flat like a looney tunes character, complete with slide whistle style noise and that sucks the energy right out of the Revelations heavy end of the world plot. Overall it's not the kind of storyline that has you clamouring for a sequel or even eager to give the whole single player a second bash from start to finish.
Bayonetta is a terrific entry into the third person genre and is the perfect example of an evolution of a game style rather than a sequel. It's basically a sequel to Devil May Cry in every sense except the literal one, but this means if you didn't like Devil May Cry Bayonetta isn't going to push any buttons for you either. Technically and visually it's well worth playing, it looks and sounds stunning and for the most part the game is crazy fun. But a few shortcomings keep it a step below the likes of God of War. There's definitely an audience who are going to be more than a little weirded out by Bayonetta, young men playing the game and expecting plenty of titillation will probably be creasing their brows for a different reason and enjoying the action a lot more than the T&A. But if that nippon brand of weirdness is your thing then you will want to soak yourself to the armpits in the world of Bayonetta. But your mum still won't like it.
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Comments
And why is the code xFAGe?