BAYONETTA (2009)
Developer: PlatinumGames / Team Little Angels
Producer: Yusuke Hashimoto
Writer/Director: Hideki KamiyaHideki Kamiya returned to the hack-n-slash genre with his Platinum Games debut, Bayonetta. He played DMC4 as research to see how far his series had come. He wanted to create a spiritual successor to DMC that pushed the genre’s boundaries, and that’s exactly what he did with his new Team Little Angels — though he chose to push them in some questionable ways. In order to take things more over the top, he decided to make a ‘sexy’ game starring an unnaturally long-legged witch with a British accent named Bayonetta. Bayonetta is the last surviving shapeshifting Umbra witch and the child of an illicit union between witch and sage. She spends her life fighting angels in order to prevent them from dragging her to the underworld while she searches a European city called Vigrid for the other half of her pendant. If all of this sounds almost exactly like the setup for Devil May Cry reframed with a female cast, it’s because that’s exactly what it is, only with more ridiculous outfits. Bayonetta ’wears’ full tight leather garb (which is just her hair magically formed into an outfit, so she’s technically naked all the time) and platform shoes with guns strapped to them, while contorting her hair into a weird birthday hat looking thing with streamers. The game is as ridiculous as you’d expect based on that description — even the music contributes to the absurdity of it all, as it often has a low quality muzak feel that’s quite sarcastic and funny.
The game is once again based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, with the different realms now explicitly named Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. In keeping with the theme, the levels are now called ‘Chapters’ and are subdivided into parts called ‘Verses’ — but don’t let the verses fool you, as each Chapter still needs to be completed in a single sitting. Bayonetta’s home base (the store) is a bar called The Gates of Hell, with its name displayed in the same sort of pink neon sign as that of Dante’s shop, Devil May Cry. The game is much more cutscene heavy than the PS2 DMC trilogy, though many of this cutscenes are rendered cheaply as stylized mostly still frames with film reel bars and voiceovers. I’m not sure if this was done for budget reasons, stylization, or both, but it does make the game feel a little bit underfunded and unfinished. It also gives it a somewhat slower feel than the DMC games at times, and that slower feel is at odds with the game’s increased ridiculousness. Unlike in DMC, the game also uses readable books to tell its story, and a lot of major plot points are revealed solely in the readables.
The basic gameplay mechanics are the same as those DMC, with a couple small improvements and changes which make a big difference. Gunplay and melee combat are far better integrated that they ever were in DMC — since Bayonetta has guns strapped to her feet, holding either of the melee buttons unleashes a torrent of bullets in combination with a melee attack. There are also WAY more combos in this game than there ever were in DMC. All of the starting combos use the same two buttons, which means you’re arguably better off button mashing and dodging than trying to memorize them all. Once you start unlocking more combos later on, a bit of memorization becomes necessary, but I found myself forgetting combos all the time — there were just too many. The loading screens allow you to try different combos, but they went by so fast that I didn’t have time to try anything, even on the highest settings.
The biggest change in gameplay is that the game places a huge emphasis on dodging, which I also didn’t manage to master — the game is so visually busy that I frequently missed when attacks were coming. Because of the tricky dodging and combo overload, I was still really bad at this game after completing it, which took nearly 15hrs. I got the lowest possible rating on all but 3 missions. Nonetheless, I enjoyed some aspects of these new mechanics. Dodging at the last second enables ‘witch time’ (bullet time), much like the quicksilver style from DMC. Witch time also allows Bayonetta to run on walls and ceilings when the moon is out, and having a fight on all available surfaces in this kind of action game is an absolute blast.
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There are also new finishing moves here, which involve Bayonetta summoning demons using her hair (including a spider demon which looks suspiciously like the first boss in DMC) — and this is where things get really controversial. Her outfits have a strange tendency to magically vanish from her body while she summons demons, with her flowing hair conveniently covering only her nipples and crotch. This gets especially weird when she’s using it against her dad. The male gaze in this game is the most extreme I’ve encountered in any game I’ve played, to the extent that playing it actually made me uncomfortable. She is framed in the most objectifying ways possible by the camera (read: lots of shots of ass-in-leather). The developers wanted to show off her body as much as possible — she even does a pole dance over the ending credits, followed by a silly dance sequence which ends with her mostly nude. Nintendo even hired a playboy bunny to cosplay Bayonetta as promotion for the sequel. The producers like to try and justify all this by pointing to the fact that the protagonist was designed by a woman, but this is a ridiculous defense. If there’s any doubt as to the intentions of this character, Kamiya has made it clear by saying things like ‘to one woman, all other women are enemies… …women are scary’ and that the character represents ‘what everybody in the team wants in a girl’. Gross.
The game is also plagued by quicktime events during cutscenes which come out of nowhere, as in RE4. Granted, if you die, it will respawn you right before the event you missed, but dying hurts your rating. To get a good rating, you need to die less than 5x per level, but good luck with that on your first runthrough. As always, you’re also penalized for using items. The items work a lot like those in DMC, only instead of stars, they’re lollipops — awkward! Enemies drop gold rings instead of red orbs, and you can get extra gold rings to buy more items and upgrades by playing an arcade shooter minigame at the end of each chapter. To gain new weapons, you have to find vinyl records in the environment and bring them to Rodin, the bartender at The Gates of Hell. It’s not explained how he makes weapons by obtaining records then going into the inferno, but he comes out awfully bloody. He also offers some really major upgrades from the start that are so expensive that you probably won’t be able to purchase them until you beat the game and enter hard mode. On that note, beating hard mode unlocks a ‘Dante Must Die’ style mode called ‘∞Climax’, in which witch time is disabled and enemies are much stronger, and that’s it for extra content.
The level design is more of a linear traversal, a la DMC2. I don’t enjoy this approach as much as DMC/DMC3’s more hub-oriented system, and while it’s far better executed than in DMC2, I must admit that it ended up being rather tedious for me at times, as the environments were VERY linear and the atmosphere lacked DMC’s gothic appeal. Each mission also tended to go on for too long, with too many consecutive difficult battles, which made the need to complete them in a single sitting irritating much of the time. As such, the game itself is also too long. The gameplay diversifies a bit in the second half with some vehicle segments (two motorcycle bits and a rocket ride), but these also overstay their welcome. There’s some creative reuse of levels in Paradiso, but it doesn’t hide the fact that there’s a bit too much recycling here — both the level content and the story are stretched thin across the first 2/3 of the game. The final act is better on both fronts, but still tries to cram in too many reprised battles to fill time.
The story pacing could have used a lot of work, with the main villain only being revealed at the very end. The mysteries were dragged out for quite a while, but their reveals came as no surprise by the time they finally happened. The story doesn’t end up making a whole lot sense at all, but I can’t deny that many aspects of it are creative and weird on a level far beyond most of what I’ve reviewed in this thread. There’s an implication here that the witches who serve demons are all women, while the sages who serve angels are men. This may initially seem like more sexism, but the way the game treats it is unusual. In this world, demons don’t seem to be bad and angels don’t seem to be good — the traditional view is presented as a human misconception, with the true importance lying in the balance between the two. Angels look like monsters here, and their designs are rather interesting, often combining babyfaced statues and gems with sharp teeth and claws. Ultimately, the villain in this game is a man who works for angels, while the heroes are two women who summon demons. In that sense, the story is a nice change of pace. It also deals with motherhood in an interesting and bizarre way, and I enjoyed the level where you have to carry a small child and defend her against attacks.
The 4k visuals of the PC port were nice, but the port itself is a bit funny — it took a bit of doing to get it running properly. I had to change it to borderless mode to avoid white screens of death, and then it muted itself. It also started the game with the UI turned off, which didn’t go so well. Once I got it working, the port ran quite well for a while, but then lagged quite a bit in the second half, which is bad news for such a fast paced game. I also encountered a repeated major crash in one area. All of these issues appear to be very common for this port.
Rating: 6.8/10 quadruped shark angel things — The combination of the game’s sexism, linear level design, poor story pacing, quicktime events, combat that wasn’t my speed, and wonky port made it a less enjoyable experience than DMC for me, despite some creative and novel touches.
[Originally posted in 2019]
