To any of my longstanding readers, you’ve probably become quite aware that stylish action games and Devil May Cry are something like my bread and butter. While Hideki Kamiya left right after the first and therefore didn’t create the absolutely fantastic Devil May Cry 3, he practically invented the genre so I naturally owed him some fellatio. Viewtiful Joe left me a little confused, since it looked more like something the team behind Alien Homonid would create as their very first game, but nonetheless I was ready for his next big project.

So it can be understood that when it comes to Bayonetta, I was all in favor of him doing whatever the fuck he wanted with some new intellectual property and his trademark sense of style. I suppose that’s why completely fucking hating it puts me in a little bit of a strange position. The same man who singlehandedly created the entire stylish action genre made this awful, malformed monstrosity? I can’t wrap my head around the concept without a turban.

Bayonetta starts off on a high note, by which I mean ‘took a hit of acid and I’m so high right now.’ You take control of Bayonetta, clothed from head to toe in a bodysuit made from her own hair and legs that take up over fifty percent of her body (her ass taking up another ten), fights along side Carmen Sandiego on a falling chunk of a clock tower while a bad James Earl Jones impressionist drones about the backstory of the world. It completely fails as a storytelling medium because there’s no tutorial and you’re too busy mashing the controller to pay attention to the forced exposition, and it fails as a game because the constantly shaky cam and frenetic special effects orgasm makes it impossible to pay attention. You do not push a small boy into a pool and after he flounders to the shore then begin teaching him how to swim!

The next scene comes along to just attempt to kill any enthusiasm I ever had about this game, like a dark and terrible cloud of rain on my metaphorical video game beach.

There’s a short Joe Pesci clone, who’s entire purpose in this game is to ramble plot exposition in a textbook example of As You Know Bob, and he works alongside Bayonetta. She says a small prayer to a dead man while in a nun robe, then when a group of angel winged warriors come to the ground she begins to kick the shit out of them, and this starts what is commonly known as So Bad It’s Horrible.

You’re familiar with Planet Terror, right? A movie that bold-facedly grabs everything stupid as fuck about the entire medium, writes it to be really bad, and then plays up all the tropes and gimmicks for sheer hilarity. And it made it absolutely perfect. A better comparison, since I’ve stated in my WET review that movies and games are like bricks and oranges, is House of the Dead: Overkill, which is pretty much the same, right down to the grindhouse feel.

Kamiya was really shooting for that, but he couldn’t have missed the mark harder if he was shooting in the wrong direction, and the mark was in Africa. Everything about Bayonetta’s cutscenes and story is absolutely fucking painful, in an eye-bleedingly, embarrassing kind of way. The voice acting is hammier than any Nintendo fanmovie, the cutscene direction is beyond ridiculous, and every aspect of cheesecake is dialed up beyond even eleven.

DMC3′s cutscenes were at least entertaining, as every secondary character had at least one or two kickass action scenes, but action aside it was still grounded in reality. Dante had like fifty, but they weren’t very long and each one was at least cool to watch. The voice acting wasn’t too great, but the story was at least interesting and the characters at least had some development and growth.

Bayonetta’s so happy to be here every single aspect is overdone to the point of sheer, pure awful. The action scenes were cool, I’ll admit, but the blatant attempt to stuff sex into all of it made it downright horrendous. During the opening cutscene Bayonetta starts fighting angels, and a few get some lucky hits, cutting at her clothing on her thighs and breasts, none of which even so much as draw a drop of blood. She moans with each hit, and just after this throws her head back and sheds the robe, revealing all of her Barbie-doll anatomy before her hair grows and covers her back up. Noncon informs me this is a reference to an anime Cutie Honey, but what kind of excuse is that? I wouldn’t care if she had an alternate costume that was from Fight Club, it’d still be stupid as shit.

If my description sounds kind of dry, it’s because the entire thing sounds like the mad ramblings of Rush Limbaugh. What’s there to say? It’s just purely awful, and no measure of referential jokes, dick analogies, or swears can make it sound like anything other than pure, undiluted, solidified stupid.

You might think the sexual innuendo and suggestive (explicit) actions would end relatively soon, but they don’t. After the tutorial mission, in a bar scene with Ving Rhames laying down even more exposition via As You Know Bob about this world’s universe he gives her a quartet of new guns. She then puts them on in the most over-the-top, extravagant, pointless fashion, complete with throwing guns in the air, flipping and jumping, stylistic acrobatics letting them click into place. The whole time the camera pans and zooms and focuses on her ripe bouncing jubblies or her spread legs, repeatedly putting on her crotch in center of camera.

I read in an article that Hideki Kamiya designed Bayonetta to be his vision of the ideal woman.

REALLY, KAMIYA? Gosh! I just had absolutely no idea!

This is not the only time it happens, and it gets face-palmingly embarrassing. I have many reasons why this bothers me so much, and I will take time to explain them to those mouth-breathing idiots who think I’m being some kind of sexist or think every woman should be as much of a sexually repressed virgin as I am.

Firstly, I have no problem with women being or dressing attractive. Trish from the first game had that right mix of being hot without shoving it in everyone’s face, even though her top looked like a torn corset and she apparently was poured into her jeans. She didn’t turn every third word into an innuendo, for starters, and the camera didn’t pan repeatedly to lingeringly gaze into her cleavage.

Secondly, let’s assume Bayonetta is using her body to her advantage. Don’t you think she’d have a problem giving absolutely everyone in the room a free show any time she bent to pick up a quarter? I’m all for women being strong characters, so it’s a little bit of an undercut to have Bayonetta be so strong-willed and tough while simultaneously the camera pans around every curve of her body, getting the perfect angle when she spreads her legs or does a handstand. It’s like Frank Miller was the art direction. “Oh yeah, let’s give it a nice close up on Bayonetta’s crotch. It’ll drive them wild.”

As a bit of a sidenote, the alternate costumes in this game are just embarrassing. One’s a Japanese schoolgirl PE outfit, one’s a cheerleader outfit complete with pom-poms, and another is some kind of kunoichi Gothic skirt with a thong. I can understand the alternate costumes having fun with it but…come on!

Thirdly, did he think this would actually appeal to us? It’s just embarrassing, like Vamp in Metal Gear Solid 2′s homoerotic tongue caressing Raiden’s pale skin. This is the kind of game that makes me feel like I’m supposed to have the covers pulled up over my head and the door locked alone in the middle of the night just to play it. Either that or Kamiya built this game for his personal weekly-spank time.

Fourth, the obvious defense is no doubt that Bayonetta’s sexuality is a testament to her strong character, something several gaming journalists have echoed. I don’t mean to be confrontational, but what the fuck is wrong with you?

I was an English major so I’ll have to convert to different lettering for a moment. Subpoint A; Bayonetta is a horribly, horribly written game. It is second only to the second Mortal Kombat movie in the vein of trading between fighting and exposition, with very little in between. The characters all act erratically with no explanation to their actions or behavior, and the game often spends several minutes dumping plot on your head they either already told you or you could have figured out on your own. It’s downright insulting how stupid they assume the player is. At least in Metal Gear Solid you had Snake, reinstating every damn every noun and verb like he was hard of hearing, but it could be excused for either some odd Japanese manner of speaking or even Solid Snake being brick stupid. There is absolutely no such excuse here.

For example there’s this talk throughout the game about how there’s good sides and evil sides, the Witches and the Sages, and how they fought a war against one another over items called the Eyes of the World. Frequently people pop up and talk about how they’re seeking the Left Eye, but nobody mentions what they are or where they came from, or why they have such magnificent power. Then, at the end of the game, it became the big reveal that Bayonetta is the Left Eye, for reasons completely undisclosed while Balder, the big villain we’ve never met before, is the Right Eye. I’m sure lots of these points were clarified in the fetchable books throughout the game, but throwing dictionaries at you to replace crafted dialog was a terrible idea in Mass Effect, and switching game genres does not fix the problem.

One of the terrible characters is Luka, a full-time journalist and part-time Bayonetta Stalker, who hates our bitchy protagonist for killing his father years ago, as opposed to all the other reasons you should hate her. He spends the entire game chasing down Bayonetta on a laid-back spree of revenge, frequently stopping to gab incessantly about the power of the truth and his revenge scheme to expose her to the world, I guess, I don’t know, it’s all done in more terrible exposition. But about halfway along the plot he seems to just not care anymore, traveling along with Bayonetta for nearly no reason, losing all of his enmity against her in favor of plot-convenient partnership while dragging along the little girl too because she told him to.

While I do appreciate the opportunity to flip the tiresome tripe of Spawn on its head, that is to say having a man with demon powers somehow being able to top all the demons with one hand tied behind his back, the fact that you use your dark powers to kill Angels with absolutely no context makes me wonder exactly who I’m supposed to be rooting for. Bayonetta seems too carefree to note that she’s working on the bad side killing Angels and enjoying it just a little bit too much. Maybe she gets off on beating good guys to death, it’d be characteristically consistent at least.

The writing’s truly godawfulness came to an absolute head with, and this was the person that featured primarily in my revenge fantasies featuring many of this game’s Climax attacks, Jeanne, the formerly mentioned Carmen Sandiego. She spends the entire game pushing a mysterious agenda, working for the Angels and fighting you, occasionally getting bored and leaving for no reason. By the time you finally kill her she explains that you were previously friends and she was testing you. Only that’s a lie! It turns out Balder mind-controlled her. But she wasn’t really dead after all, and comes back to save you! But then she dies again. But no wait she’s back again to save you one last time! Then in the end sequence both of you die, and when Joe Pesci, Ving Rhames, and Creepy McStalkerton hold a funeral for you – because, hell, I don’t know, Bayonetta thought it’d be funny – it turns out both of them were alive!

The only halfway decent parts are with the little girl Cereza, who’s lines not only sound like something a real human being would say but actually added to the story nicely. The rest of it is As You Know Bob plot dumps, gunfights with Jeanne Sandiego, and controllable gameplay with absolutely no other category. Balder does deserve a special mention for talking for literally five minutes and not explaining a single fucking thing, despite even Bayonetta herself telling him to stop talking in riddles.

Subpoint B, even according to the game’s writing Bayonetta is not a good character. She is a bitch, second only to Rubi in terms of utterly unlikable protagonists. She kicks around all the characters she meets along the way, treating them more like puppets than people. The game seems to go about this with a lazzie-faire attitude, suggesting she might break out of her bitch exterior but by the utterly inexplicable end of the game she has not changed at all, and the even intriguing idea of her being a mother was shot and killed in its infancy by Balder. Have I mentioned Balder killed this game’s story? Bayonetta practically sprung out of Russ Meyer’s head fully formed like Athena, her whole body perfectly formed and ready to stomp her stilettos right into the creator’s dick, much to his (ahem) “horror.”

Throwing this out there, but a good example of a strong character female who still manages to kick ass in an over-the-top way? Lady from DMC3. I know I keep sucking that same dick, but Lady managed to be cute instead of sexy in creative ways, and she even had lots of her own kickass fight scenes. Sure, she started out as a Deathly Serious Action Girl, but she was more of a flawed bitch than anything, angry at the world for what it did to her childhood. Most of her anger was clumsily directed, trying to insult and blow off Dante at every possible turn just because she irrationally hated him. By the time she got over her anger issues, she even was a little flirtatious with Dante at the end. Thank god Devil May Cry 4 came along and drove a truck over her character, giving her cleavage-exposing tanktop and even higher-geared bootyshorts than before.

I’ll tell you what this game is; Barb Wire. You know, that fucking horrible Pamela Anderson movie that was just a re-tread of Casablanca but with tits? That’s exactly what it is – sex marketed so terribly it goes beyond the traditional spectrum next to Plan 9 From Outer Space and plummets just to second-rate pornography dialog strung together with used dental floss, and the Matrix’s lobby scene occasionally spliced in.

The one thing I need to get out of the way is some of the things I like about the game’s visuals, because yes they exist. For one thing, while the visual appearance of Bayonetta is quite unrealistic and therefore easy to make jokes about, I don’t see what it is about her bodyshape that’s sexist. After all Bayonetta herself is incredibly sexist in a hundred other ways, pointing about the fact that she’s two cup sizes and a red glittering dress away from Jessica Rabbit seems redundant.

Just look at it as a visual comparison – someone as ridiculous as half of comic book superheroes or Duke Nukem or even Resident Evil 5′s Chris Redfield, as obscenely muscled as Governator Schwarznegger in unrealistic, absurd ideals that we as common men could never aspire to. So Bayonetta manages to have an unrealistic, rather stretched-out woman with perfectly formed breasts, overlong legs and arms and what men whom actually have sex call ‘an ass you could bounce a quarter off of’ and the reflex is to cry sexism?

Bayonetta’s femininity and sexiness, just from still images, seems to carry a lot of weight in elegance. Butterfly cutouts appear everywhere during her melee attacks, her double-jump makes stylish wings, and you can even see her shadow always forming the outline of a butterfly. Some of the smaller touches actually lend her to being a very feminine character; blowing a kiss to break the seal on a door or the lipstick print as a targeting system, just as an example. The dark hair and glasses are part of what does it for me, really – they carry the conserved sexy librarian look while giving her a touch of mystery, some womanhood that’s more than, well, her womanhood.

The kind of genuine sexism in reference to women’s bodies is shaping them like bowling balls tied to a broom, like any Itigaki game. From Ninja Gaiden to Dead or Alive, every single woman either has perfectly formed jiggly knockers or breasts so enormous you’d think Kasumi doubled as an adult film star on the sidelines. Bayonetta’s design, by itself, is the preferable alternative, giving us a girl who uses all of her sexuality rather than just the funbags.

But as I’ve said it’s the execution that makes me want to dig my own eyeballs out with a spork. From the beginning to end Bayonetta’s always in a compromising position that the cameraman makes quick work of, including at the end where – no joke – she literally pole-dances over the ending credits. Bayonetta is a whore; sex obsessed and little else, like any woman in anything Frank Miller ever touched. A side note is one time where Bayonetta strikes a pose and yells, “Let’s rock, baby!” Referential? Absolutely. Out of character even according to the terrible writing? God yes.

If you wish to prove me wrong, just pull a lever in the game at some point. First Bayonetta grips it and arches her back, giving you more time to ogle her posterior, then pulls it back while bending in the opposite direction, head flung back as she rubs up against it erotically, even going so far as to throw her leg around the phallic pole.

Yeah. That’s real fucking woman-empowering. If soaking in RE5′s Jill Valentine and her bodysuit-clad ass out of the corner of your eye is a normal game, this is the equivalent of having a weekend with two ‘frat bros’ on the beach who can’t shut up about each hooter that walks near them. (I joke, really, about Bayonetta’s knockers; most of the cutscenes make Kamiya look more like an ass man).

But even if every character was a 15^th century Puritan, wrapped in three tailor’s worth of clothing and not so much as uttering the word ‘naughty,’ the cutscenes would still be killed by how godawful they’re directed.

Every single character in this game is directed like they’re in some kind of music video, constantly posing and strutting for the camera. In the intro Bayonetta herself walks forward and stops to turn towards the camera, striking a pose with a cheesy lensflare before the game’s logo pops up, giving me the awful achy feeling of dread in my stomach. I tried to force myself through the cutscenes but after an agonizing moment where Luka turns and looks at a woman, complete with posing, camera zooms, dramatic head turns, and taking an agonizing two minutes to pull his hood off I declared that I was beneath this game and dropped my controller.

They lessened after this point, but I think Kamiya thought it needed more awful, so after the credits there’s a five minute sequence where Bayonetta dances. Not even in a sexy way, not poledancing and with no dramatic camera angles. She’s just dancing, like you’d see professional stage performers do, about as titillating as watching the pink Power Ranger do the macarena. No point, no purpose, not entertaining, and no reason. (She poledances over the end credits, instead.)

Bizarrely, many of the cutscenes are just moving still images for absolutely no reason, like the director moved the video camera over the negative slides while the audio track played. Fuck, I don’t know, Kamiya wills it I guess.

Oh yeah. And there’s quicktime events. What do I have to do to get people to stop this shit?

So four entire pages of bitching about the story, and not a squeak about gameplay. I’ll be completely honest here, this gameplay isn’t bad by any stretch of the means. It’s actually quite good, and I’ll tell you why.

The big thing about Devil May Cry’s innovation is the standard affair of mixing melee and ranged attacks, but the mix still was kept on other sides of the controller, each button to a different function. Kamiya improved upon Devil May Cry’s formula by letting all the buttons have a big sloppy orgy. You can hold X to rapid fire rather than the constant jackhammer mashing of Ebony and Ivory, sure, but with the melee attack buttons at pretty much any point you can press and hold the button to start shooting, creating some really creative combo potentials. Even the dodge button gets in on the fun with an upgrade, making Bayonetta breakdance while she shoots randomly. There’s also an extremely extensive weapons selection, giving you two playstyles and two sets of weapons each, both hands and feet.

Yes, Bayonetta has guns on her feet. It sounds stupid as shit but since we’re breaking the laws of physics nobody’s going to get butthurt. And it works pretty well to punch and kick your way into a combo, only to hold your leg out for a second as Bayonetta’s high heels eject a shotgun shell into an angel’s face.

It’s worth noting that, despite it being a stylish action game by the man who created the first game and the entire genre, there’s very little that feels like a Devil May Cry rehash. You can uppercut to keep aloft with bullets but I guarantee that’ll only occur to you later as you’re too busy pummeling people with the extensive combo system – most of the heel- and fist-firing is done only because they’re too far away or someone just behind them happens to be popping up. It’s actually fun!

I have complaints about the basic system though, because I hate everything. The combos become different by method of mixing Y and B of punches and kicks, which is standard, but there’s also a system when you delay attacking for a moment to let Bayonetta stop, giving you a new, different combo. You’d think this would lend itself to more options in combat but it’s just overwhelming instead. Soon enough you just let out a sigh and say, “Fuck it,” and just start hammering on the buttons at near random.

It worked in Devil May Cry because there was exactly one melee button and it had a cap of four swings. When you mix in two buttons and delaying between attacks the combos become exceedingly difficult to remember, because a split-second pause between mashing of the Y button can completely change your combo system and everything is trying to kill you. Plus they all die the same and the basic punch/kick mixup combo is deep enough to get a good rating on any level.

I had originally filled this space with complaints about the combos being entirely too long considering the enemies are incredibly fucking fast, but in rushes a game review to spoil my fun. Apparently there’s a dodge buffer, something that allows you to combo, do a quick dodge, then continue your combo where you left off. Well, alright then, Kamiya, that’s a nice mechanic, it would have done well to tell me about it.

Actually, on that subject, one of my biggest complaints is the weapons – in Devil May Cry and God of War the weaponry is given to you for beating bosses and getting to certain points in the game. In this, you have to go on aggravating fetch-quests to be able to find the little records or record fragments the black dude takes and turns into weapons, and they’re all extremely hard because you have no idea where to look. This isn’t a first person shooter or anything, where there can only be so many nooks and crannies and the guns are disposable; several of the hiding spots are intentionally deceiving you, behind waterfalls or foliage. Even if you find them you have to jump through arbitrary combat-challenge hoops to get them, which again wouldn’t be so bad if we weren’t dealing with the weaponry. I thought we perfected this – health ups, magic boosters, consumable items, not mandatory weapons in combat games!

I do like the Witch Time though. Use the dodge mechanic to avoid an attack, good for you, that’s a basic function of the game. But dodge in just the right timing and you get bullet time, giving you the ability to pound away on an enemy while they float in slowed-down time. Not a new concept, but the presentation keeps it interesting and does add more emphasis on high-risk high-reward gameplay.

The big gimmick that made all the fat pubescent nerds run to buy three copies is the feature of Bayonetta’s hair. It’s actually a demon, one she can shed to manifest as a demon in extravagant ways. This is usually just the big finisher for bosses, and are called “Climaxes.” As if we didn’t need to feel skeazy enough that Bayonetta’s getting PG-13 naked on screen, swirls of hair carefully covering up naughty bits, but now when the camera focusing on the demon we’re questioning what exactly she’s doing off-screen.

It’s pretty much just a mini-QTE to finish the fight, but instead of “Press X or Die” it’s just a button-masher that rewards you if you do better, and the boss dies regardless, so a point for them in that aspect. She also gets PG-13 naked for the big combo finishers, teasingly concealed by a bikini if you ever complete a combo and summon a giant fist or foot to end the combo, which is also effective.

The big finisher for most of the common enemies is the Torture Attacks, big finishers that kill with medieval torture and execution devices, such as pulled via a collar through a ring until crushed, rolling a spiked wheel over their bodies, crushing them with a giant set of stone hands, splitting them in half via a spring-loaded axe, kicking them into an Iron Maiden, or – god help me – ‘Punishing’ them via Bayonetta exclaiming “You’ve been naughty!” and spanking them with your gun while you mash the punch button.

Yes, clearly this is Hideki Kamiya’s ideal woman. An unrealistically proportioned, cold-hearted, dominatrix bitch in black leather two feet taller than him who puts him through medieval torture devices and vigorous spanking.

From this point on I’m pretty much going to be nitpicking to death.

The action is generally pretty fun but sometimes all the tiny touches such as how Bayonetta apparently farts butterflies with each strike start to compound on each other, and it can get a bit confusing. The camera also can be a pain, having no sense of panoramic view and instead targeting clips off anyone behind or to the side. At least in Devil May Cry it mounts itself on the wall occasionally, and this Ninja Gaiden 2-esque bullshit is obsolete. Checkpoints in the game are frequent and merciful, and many appear halfway through bosses, which is good as most of them are really hard at times and just arduously long at others. The last boss, especially, has an obscene amount of health.

I did find it funny going in knowing that Kamiya made this game – twice out of fucking nowhere the game shifts gears, putting you into a first-person perspective between levels for the Angel Attack game, or the delightfully Star Fox level that lasts about ten minutes longer than it took to stop being enjoyable. This is clearly the guy who made Devil May Cry and stuffed a plane shooter before the end credits cause he felt like it.

Before anything else I must insist that Bayonetta is by no means a bad game. Beating people to death is just as fun as you can imagine and the stylish action combat is as arousingly slick as…uh, okay I’ll leave that one alone. But I’m opposed to it because games with severe story deficiencies need to be mocked, and this one deserves all the ire I can muster for it’s downright painful cutscenes and plot or face-covering cheesecake. This is why I spent four pages talking about story and embarrassing sexual content before getting to a grudging admittance that the gameplay, while flawed, is the best part.

I can’t help being biased, here we are, years after Devil May Cry 3′s flawed yet shining brush against perfection spoiled me and I had hoped we could return to its mastery, since the idiots at Capcom seem to be falling back into old habits and are now fumbling with the DMC license. But no, Sega’s Bayonetta experiments and creates interesting new territory, but I’ll still prefer Dante’s Awakening in all its last-gen stretched-resolution pants-kickingly difficult glory. At least when I get to some story points Dante won’t dress in a speedo and wave his little devil around while Samuel L Jackson says, “YOUR FAMILY WAS KILLED BY DEMONS, THAT MUST SUCK EH?”

2/5 Demon Dog Things