When Bayonetta was first announced, everyone instantly had an opinion about it. You either thought it was going to suck or be totally fucking awesome and anyone who argued with you was WRONG. This is generally how the internet always works, but in retrospect it’s almost hilarious how quickly and easily we were all polarized. If I didn’t know better, I’d say the game was a social experiment in mob mentality. So, when it all comes down to it, who was right? The people who said it would suck? The people who said it was splendiforous? Well… I guess both were right…

Bayonetta, prior to release, was like unto a thing in a box. You don’t know what the thing is, but there is the tiniest of holes, and through that hole you can make out the outline. Well, the outline of Bayonetta was Devil May Cry 3, but replace everything boy band sexy with Playboy sexy. When you don’t have the full picture, it’s easy to jump to conclusions, which is what everyone did. People were rightly worried that the oversexualization would ruin the entire game, and others were rightly optimistic in thinking the gameplay would justify it even if it was.

Bayonetta is certainly oversexualized. I was actually looking forward to that aspect of it, not because I’m pervy, but because it looked funny to me. I watch a lot of anime, and anime is riddled with fanservice. In fact, one might say it is starting to be ruled by it. There are shows that literally sell themselves entirely on the fanservice, like the two-dimensional prostitutes that they are. Queen’s Blade, Witchblade, and Kanokon are the first examples that come to mind. Bayonetta can only have wet dreams of being as sexualized as Witchblade. I like titties, but I don’t like shows that don’t respect me, so I avoid most ero-anime. The thing that separates Bayonetta from the generic smut I’ve listed is that Bayonetta is self-aware.

When making Devil May Cry 3, Capcom had a stunning revelation from God. They are fucking atrocious at writing plot and dialogue. They are almost Nomura bad, and that is puppy starving to death all alone in an alley with nobody to love and care for it levels of depressing. Anyways, when DMC3 came around, they decided that the best way to solve this problem was to embrace it. They didn’t know how to write, but they did know how to have fun, and when they have fun with it, we do too. Everything Dante did was ‘too cool’. It was all so cool that it wasn’t remotely cool, just laughable, but the developers were trying to make us laugh, so it worked. DMC3 didn’t have a bad plot, and part of the reason for this is that anytime the plot was bad, you got the impression it was on purpose. During the rare instances when it took itself seriously, it was refreshing compared to the rocket-riding mayhem you’d been through before, and it was fairly well done, especially compared with a lot of other Capcom products.

Bayonetta doesn’t really understand that. Bayonetta wants to be too sexy so that you laugh at it, but then it also wants to be too sexy so that you play it for that cheap, carnal attraction. I started to worry about this when I saw some of the costumes you could get in the game, which included a Japanese gym class outfit, a cheerleader costume, and even one of a skimpily dressed Halloween witch. Once you start including fetish fuel as an option that you have to use the in game currency to obtain, I really start to doubt that you’re just making fun of oversexification. I like breasts. Really, I do. They aren’t my favoritest thing in the world, but they aren’t bad. Still, trying to get me interested in a game on account of them is just low, and I lose a lot of respect for anything that plays that card. Then again, I’m probably just butthurt that games don’t want to cater to my demographic with some cute, scantily clad, crossdressing boys… Where was I?

Before anyone can call me on “Not getting it”, let me tell you that I was more than willing to meet the game halfway and say maybe that was also trying to be silly, but then the ending credits happened. That is straight up selling sex in the ending credits. Looking at it from absolutely any other perspective that bit has nothing going for it, except maybe the music. It’s boring, repetitive, and just drags on. So far, I’ve yet to see a game from Clover/PlatinumGames that reaches the bar God Hand set for after credits awesomeness. Okay, but maybe I’m just missing something, right? Well… How about this? Yeah, fuck you Bayonetta. You can have a classy sounding song playing in the background, but you’re still being a dirty pirate hooker.

The only female character that didn’t get sexualized in this game is Cereza, the obligatory loli character. (I’ll save you all some traumatizing Google searches by letting you know that loli is most commonly used as a slang term that anime fans use to refer to underage girls) Generally when I find out that something from Japan is going to have a preteen girl as a character, I have a reaction, and I will share that reaction with you now. There is a simple, obvious reason for this. Japan likes naked little girls. I don’t know what the fuck it is, but amongst fans of anime culture in Japan and the US some have an obsession with lolis in general. Anime and Japanese video games like to cater to these people. I honestly don’t know why. I don’t want a screen full of preteen cameltoe, thank you very much.

Yet Cereza, despite my well-founded fears, is easily the best character in the game. She doesn’t go through a lot of growth as it progresses, but you can sympathize with how she feels and she acts like an actual little kid, and I think this is the first time I’ve ever seen a game pull that off. Even Persona 4, a game I love and adore, couldn’t decide if Nanako was six or twelve it seemed at times. Cereza gives funny responses to things people say, and part of the reason they’re so funny is that that is exactly what a child her age would say. THIS IS GOOD WRITING. HAVE MORE OF THIS PLEASE. She also changes Bayonetta’s personality from vaguely sexy bitch to someone learning to be a mother and makes her actually likable as opposed to just funny. The game’s cutscenes are at their best when someone is either talking to Cereza or trying to protect her.

I say they’re at their best, but what I really mean is that they’re actually good. When Bayonetta is posing or talking smack, it’s fine, but when anyone opens their mouth for a reason other than to make Cereza more adorable, the cutscenes become awful. It’s not just that they suffer from Metal Gear Solid style EXPOSITION TIME plot dumps of atrocious length. Every character who is not Bayonetta or Cereza suffers from a condition I like to call OBTUSE FUCKING RIDDLE SPEAK. Nobody can say anything in a clear cut manner, and more often then not, I was left wondering what in the ass they were talking about after they just spent ten minutes, allegedely, explaining something to me. When I don’t know what the fuck is going on because you can’t be bothered to have your villain explain things with coherent dialogue, your cutscenes can fuck right off. They drag on forever because nobody can shut they’re goddamn mouth, and yet nothing is any more clear after they’ve finished talking than it was before.

Even worse, at the end we get a plot twist that might maybe have theoretically worked if we lived in a universe where Nomura wasn’t making video games, but we do so it doesn’t. Even if we did, that nobody can explain it in English just throws it out the third story window of the Mindscrew Ending building and leaves it bleeding to death on Goddammit Kamiya street. It’s a Nomura twist, but done even worse than Nomura ever has. I did not think this was possible, and that it is has caused me to lose a little more faith in the world.

There is a theory, in certain groups, that the game actually does explain this properly. You see, as you progress through Bayonetta, you can collect books. These books will explain some part of the world of Bayonetta in greater detail. It is possible that one such book explains the plot twist near the end, or gives it better context. However, this is a video game, not a book. Reading should not be a part of the necessary curriculum. I’m not saying you can’t have optional books to read with fun facts, but when I start to wonder, “Is any of this explained in the books I’ve collected?” when there are multiple cutscenes that are supposed to be making sense of all this, there is a serious problem. I read the first three books I collected, got bored as hell of doing it, and never read them again, only collecting them on the off-chance that I’d get an achievement. *Library of Alexandria – 800 Points*

One thing the game does do well in cutscenes, and occasionally in gameplay, is references. The first action cutscene has a transformation scene that I can only assume is a throwback to the opening credits to Cutie Honey, and then a J-Pop rendition of Fly Me To The Moon starts playing. Now, I could be seeing things where they aren’t. After all, a J-Pop version of Fly Me To The Moon doesn’t have to equate to Evangelion reference, but I’d have a hard time believing that they used that song, a song that equals Evangelion in the minds of anime fans everywhere, without knowing that that would be most any player’s first thought. Of course, all you people who aren’t into anime for whatever reason don’t have to feel left out. There are many a referential laugh to be had for you as well. The final boss has a move ripped right out of God Hand, the game’s weapon/upgrade salesman quotes Resident Evil 4 and alludes to MadWorld, and Bayonetta may or may not have said “Henshin-a-Go-Go, baby!” Maybe I’m just a cheap date when it comes to homages, but I think so long as you have some experience with their previous games, you can have a good chuckle at them.

But I can only talk about the cutscenes for so long before I start to rival the game’s verboseness. The main selling point of the game is the combat. The combat is both disappointing and better than I had hoped. However, I started focusing on the negative, so let’s carry on with that before we get into the nitty gritty. The worst part of the gameplay, by far, is the random Quicktime Events. I’m not talking about the button mashy finishers, as those are fun. What I’m talking about is that in many a boss fight the game will arbitrarily throw “Press X Now” at you, and if you fuck it up you’ll either take a lot of damage, in the case of one fight near the end, or you’ll just straight up die. Dying in this game is far more forgiving in Devil May Cry, as there are checkpoints, something even DMC3 was in dire need of. Hell, the checkpoints pretty much start you at the beginning of the QTE. Not a bad deal right?

Kinda. One, it’s an unpredictable reflex test in a genre about learning to predict and read moves, meaning it’s the exact opposite of the sort of thing the game should be throwing at you. Secondly, when you die, the game doesn’t just rewind Ninja Blade style. Oh no. You have to sit through a loading screen. The sad fact is that Bayonetta has long load times. These are, in my experience, made barely noticeable by the fact that you can just dick around and practice moves during them, and it’s certainly funner than the Assassin’s Creed equivalent, but this doesn’t apply when you’re killed by a QTE. When you’re killed by a QTE you’re pulled out of an otherwise immersive experience by a fat, Italian mobster, and sitting there and waiting until you can try a QTE again is painful in a very literal sense. These don’t just show up during cutscenes either, so you can’t assume watching and waiting for them then will keep you safe.

This is only a third of the problem with the boss fights. The thing is, the bosses are boring. I’m not talking about the fights themselves. I’m talking about the actual characters that you fight as bosses. DMC3 is a great example, where you’ve got Agni and Rudra, whose argument seems ripped straight out of Monty Python, and God Hand has some even better ones. The bosses in these games have personality. Bayonetta decided that it would rather violently remove any personality from your opponents, and replace it with an unhealthy desire to tell you the plot in the most dry, boring manner possible. By the end of God Hand, I felt kinda guilty about killing Elvis, because, as pathetic as he was, he was pretty likable and he made me laugh. I couldn’t care less about who I’m fighting or why, and while that fits Bayonetta’s personality, it clashes with mine. I need to feel invested in the experience in some way other than “I’M GONNA SWORD THE BAD DUDES.”

The saddest part about Bayonetta is that, like MadWorld before it, it gutted most of the difficulty. I have to actually unlock a difficulty level that challenges me in a genre built on having its way with you as painfully as possible. Hell, the boss fights are the easiest parts of the game. Not only are their multiple checkpoints during the boss fights, because they switched out DMC style bosses for massive GoW break-em-apart bosses, but the only boss fights I had to retry were the first one, one that kept killing me with a cheap QTE move, and the final boss because it had a OHKO move that you have no way of knowing what to do the first time around. Sorry, Bayonetta, but DMC and God Hand violated me without resorting to cheating. A boss fight without challenge in a genre like this leaves me with blue balls, and just bored in general. I had regular enemies give me more of a challenge than most of the bosses. What the hell.

I really miss the fancy, big-lettered style ranking in the top right corner that was in the DMC games. DMC encouraged you to experiment with it’s handful of combos using that ranking, because it would go down if you kept spamming the same combo ad nauseum. Bayonetta added enough combos to fill a fighting game roster, but no reason to not use the same two or three over and over and over again. Nine time out of ten, my combo would be the default one for mashing the punch button like a monkey on heroine. In fact, the only reason I changed from that combo was that I felt I was less of a person for using it so frequently, and that I might be excommunicated from the Church of Gamer if I didn’t experiment. It’s rewarding to experiment with combos in this game, but it doesn’t do enough to encourage you to do so.

So what’s the actual fighting like, then? It’s an evolution of DMC’s, I think is the best way to put it. The camera is still dodgy because, like all action games, it’s being piloted by Spazzy McSeizure, but a tap of the right bumper locks onto enemies, though Bayonetta will target on her own if you don’t tell her to, and it’s certainly a much more forgiving targeting system than that in DMC3. DMC3′s targeting system had only goal at all times, to aim at anything but what you wanted to. Before DMC3, the idea of wishing bodily harm upon a circle was unheard of.

Dodging is just a tap of the right trigger and whatever direction you want to escape to. Since gamers are used to abusing the right trigger, and Bayonetta is a dodge-heavy game, it makes sense to be there. If you wait to dodge until the very last moment, Witch Time will activate, where everything goes slow, you can attack enemies that are on fire without taking damage, and I have flashbacks to Viewtiful Joe. It’s a good way of getting you to actually think about when to dodge, instead of just dodging whenever an enemy might maybe be attacking.

A complaint I will lodge against the dodge function is that you can’t spam the dodge move. Being able to spam dodge isn’t really a game breaker, since you still need to have some sense of timing to get the advantage, and constantly dodging doesn’t kill enemies. Putting a cap on it doesn’t make sense. It’s especially sad to me, because my counter-attack against a psychotic camera is to spam dodge until I can see what the hell I’m fighting. In God Hand, if you couldn’t see enemies, but knew they were there, you backflipped your ass to safety, because otherwise they would tear you apart.

Complimenting the legion of combos available are a couple new types of moves. First up are your hair attacks. Yes, hair attacks. For the unitiated, Bayonetta’s clothes are made out of her hair, and she can use her hair to summon demons, or created a giant fist or boot. These are Wicked Weaves. Wicked Weaves come in two flavors. They show up in regular combat as the aforementioned fists and boots, and just do regular attack damage, and are a great way to conclude a combo.

Their other role is that of God of War style finishers. The main difference between these finishers and God of War finishers is that God of War has you playing Simon Says, but Bayonetta just yells “MASH X MUTHA FUCKA!” in a loud, hair metal voice. The ones for the weaker enemies can only be done by filling the magic meter, which climbs as you do damage, and sinks as you take damage. Once full, you can do a torture attack. With boss fights, it’s much more straightforward, and all you need do is damage them to near death to get the prompt. They’re stylish, pretty, and net you extra currency to buy upgrades, costumes, and items with.

In case the game wasn’t ridiculous enough already, Bayonetta can perform a special attack called a Bullet Climax, which isn’t quite as horrible as what you’re expecting. To put it simply, just rotate the thumbstick, hold either punch or kick, depending on whether Bayonetta has her guns equipped to her hands and/or feet, and then mash that same button once Bullet Climax initiates. The camera goes into an over-the-shoulder, or over-the-ass as the case may be, perspective where Bayonetta stops moving and the thumbstick moves her aiming reticule. Keep mashing the attack button, and watch the enemies eat lead. It may have been put in for silly fanservice, but it’s actually quite effective when trying to take out flying enemies.

In the realm of not-combat additions to DMC’s gameplay, we have the moonwalk and transformation mechanics. When I say moonwalk, I, unfortunately, am not talking about a gameplay mechanic where you Michael Jackson your way to safety. (It is my secret hope that Michael Jackson is a playable character in Bayonetta 2) I call it moonwalking because I can’t remember what the game calls it, and it boils down to being able to walk on any surface, be it wall or ceiling, so long as the moon is shining, something the game will make sure to let you know so you don’t sit there for half an hour trying to figure out how to get to the next area. It looks cool, it’s fun as shit, and during the one time the game let me do it during a boss fight it was cool enough that I forgave the drunken camera for pointing at anything but the boss.

Transforming is just what it sounds like. About halfway into the game, you gain the ability to transform into a panther by double-tapping the dodge button. There isn’t even an annoying time limit. Panther form is great for getting through areas quicker than Sonic, and leaping over long, otherwise unpassable gaps. Battle oriented transformations can also be unlocked, and seem largely oriented towards helping you avoid damage.

The only problem with these two mechanics is that they leave you wanting more. Bayonetta is built such that you could get some really good puzzle platforming on, but instead these merely serve as a means to get from Point A to Point B on the game’s soul-crushingly linear path. Backtracking may have been a bit annoying in DMC3, but there is something to be said for going off the rails from time to time. This game rarely gives you any room to explore, and there’s actually a good reason to, other than the possible platforming beauty.

In DMC and GoW type games, you get your weapons by defeating bosses, or so I assume having never played God of War. This is not the case in Bayonetta. Bayonetta gives you records or record pieces when you find a hidden treasure chest or defeat a mob of enemies. Once you have a complete record, take it to the demonic salesman, and he’ll go fetch you a new weapon from Hell itself. I’m still not sure how I feel about this, though I’m leaning on disdain with a dash of irritation. It adds replay value to the game and the missions, which is good, but it’s so easy to miss a lot of the record pieces, even when you’re looking for them, that you can end up beating the game with only the two record unlocked weapons the game straight-up gives you. I only ended up finding one more than what it put in my lap, and there are at least eight, if memory serves. They can’t really benefit the experience if you don’t have them, and I’m just not sure I want to dick around replaying the same mission again and again until I find the last obscure record piece to get a weapon I may or may not like.

One good idea Bayonetta had was to break up the combat with mini-games, I just wish they’d been good mini-games. Angel Attack, a shoot the moving targets game between chapters, is pretty good, and you can’t really fail it. You can use the points from doing that to get items to use in the next chapter, or convert the points to currency. Sadly, the two other “Let’s change up the gameplay so the player doesn’t get bored” moments trip over their own shoelaces. You get a motorcycle bit ripped straight out of MadWorld, but without the adrenaline pumping music and chainsawing that made MadWorld’s motorcycling fun. In comparison, Bayonetta’s is just clunky and boring. You also get a Star Fox rail shooter, which is fun, but should have ended after the first checkpoint during it, because Star Fox did it better, and Star Fox isn’t even the best example.

Musically, the game is solid. It’s nothing special when compared with soundtracks the like of Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy X, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t Youtube a couple of songs up from time to time. It is a bit of a let down after the musical perfection that was MadWorld, which may have been my favorite soundtrack of 2009 were it not for Brutal Legend. (Brutal Legend cheated though) Sadly, the best song on Bayonetta is Fly Me To The Moon, but it has to compete with Utada’s cover of the same song and, well, Bayonetta didn’t really have a chance to begin with.

How Bayonetta looks may actually be the best thing about it. Everything about Bayonetta’s appearance, and I’m talking both about the character and the game, conveys elegance. The graphics are great, and the combat flows at an almost constant sixty frames per second. Everything has a nice Old Europe meets New Europe style about it that I have to love, making me want to check out the streets of Paris or Venice. Hell, the bosses were boring as hell to fight, but they were a perfect mesh of monster and angel, and not bad to look at at all. The thing that really takes the cake about Bayonetta’s looks is Paradiso. Paradiso is Bayonetta’s version of Heaven, and it looks it. Flowers, trees, and marble ruins as far as the eye can see, and water fountains for no other reason than that they look pretty. It’s one of the few cases where I can say a video game actually captured beauty. Being in Paradiso is like living inside a painting.

Bayonetta is a great game, but it suffers from what it has to compete with. DMC3 and God Hand are far better, and it’s made me understand something about Clover/PlatinumGames. They’re a fairly average company. They release two of my favorite games of all time when they were Clover, but even then, Viewtiful Joe wasn’t nearly as good as what I expected of them. MadWorld and Bayonetta have both failed to impress me to the degree I expected as well. They may have some of the best games ever under their belt, and some of the best game directors, but the end products don’t live up to the hype.

One thing I want to clarify about the score is why it doesn’t score lower. I have nitpicked the gameplay to hell. Even after all my complaints and looking for flaws, it’s still one of the funnest action games I’ve ever played, and that gameplay makes up, mostly, for my complaints against the cutscenes and plot. The other reason I have to give it the score that I do is just how much there was to say about it. There is a lot to this game, and for every thing you can think of to complain about, there are probably at least five that were interesting, if not simply great. Hell, I’m sure many people could think of a ridiculous number of things I’ve forgotten to mention. It’s critically flawed on a number of levels, but in the end it comes out on top as a game more than worth playing, especially if you can get past, or even somehow enjoy, the fanservice and plot.

Three Cerezas Out of Five