It’s much harder to like something when you know it is over-rated. True, I was never impressed with Bayonetta to begin with. The only thing they really had to show was an out-of-proportions female lead where every movement, gesture and word was sexual innuendo. It was stupid, childish and just another example of why our entertainment medium cannot be taken seriously. In film, critics will praise works such as The Hurt Locker, District 9 and Precious. In video games, we make a big deal out of shallow blockbusters similar to Transformers or, if we’re lucky, Avatar.

Bayonetta is another perfect example of that. Nothing more than a three star game, it now sits at an 89% on GameRankings.com and a 90 on Metacritic. So maybe I am merely being too harsh? After all, if it’s designed well then who cares. After all, games are certainly about fun first, right?

Well that’s the problem. Even in terms of gameplay it’s not really anything special. In fact, the game tends to down right piss the player off unless they are a masochist or eat, breath and sleep these sorts of action games. Maybe it’s the education in a mature industry such as software and web design speaking, but when you intentionally make the “normal” difficulty setting of your game a pain in the ass even for experienced gamers, well, you’re doing it wrong.

I want to touch on that later. The first thing I want to discuss is Bayonetta herself. I find it amusing that so many have declared her a “strong female character” including a few female gaming friends of mine. Well, this is certainly an industry where any hint of personality in a female gaming character is certainly going to seem as such. However, Bayonetta is only slightly more three-dimensional than, say, Lara Croft. She is 2.5D, if you will.

One moment our seven or eight foot tall heroin will be moving and speaking like a stripper that has misplaced her pole. She is nothing but sexuality and desire in what sort of resembles a human being. The difference, of course, is she doesn’t come off as a whore. See, there’s a difference between a girl that’s willing to give it up to anyone and a woman that recognizes her own sexual appeal and even desires. It’s a mentality that emerged very strongly in the 60’s, and Bayonetta is a walking representation of it. Her sexuality is power and she recognizes it. However, she also recognizes that it is fun.

This aspect of Bayonetta is executed brilliantly. She isn’t a sexual object, she is empowered through her sexuality. It is just as much a female empowerment fantasy as it is a male sexual fantasy. After all, to say that no man wouldn’t want to be Marcus Fenix, Duke Nukem or Chris Redfield is laughable. The fantasies just play out in different manners. Yet in the end, they are all incredibly shallow characters and thus lack any real depth. Even Frank West from Dead Rising has more personality than any of the above male protagonists. He’s covered wars, y’know.

This is where things start to grow a bit bi-polar for Bayonetta. While being a sexual and empowering fantasy for both genders, the developers also try to make her into a deep character. She has a troubled and serious past, though none of it really makes any sense until the end (if it ever makes sense at all). This is perhaps the greatest flaw. Any chance the story has to insert some depth they shove more questions in instead. Questions that are dismissed by Bayonetta in favor of a spoken line of innuendo and erotic poses before she starts firing her guns off.

The closest they come to establishing her as a genuine human being and a strong woman is the moment she becomes a maternal figure. A child begins following her around and calling her “mom”. Here is a moment where Bayonetta could gain an identity similarly to how James Cameron helped deepen the character Ripley in his film Aliens. Men not only lack the capability of bearing children, but they lack the same instincts that women do. This is why you’re very likely to not only see women naturally taking the role of a guardian of other children, but why you’ll see that extend to animals and pets.

Here is a moment for something interesting to be done and explored with the character of Bayonetta, especially since it clashes with the sexually empowered lifestyle of a healthy young single woman. On top of that, while there are plenty of games with fathers searching for their children it is much less common to play the game from the perspective of a mother (no, Cooking Mama doesn’t count in this regard). This would be a perfect moment to address that stage of life where we are self-serving human beings that one day become sacrificing adults caring for a young life.

Yet for as long as the cut-scenes of this game are Bayonetta never manages to touch on anything interesting. She merely begins by being annoyed by the child, reluctantly guarding over her until an explanation or alternate guardian can be found. Over time Bayonetta predictably begins to care for her, then…the game ends and if you’re lucky you have an understanding of the relationship between the two. Hint: it’s nothing significant.

The one thing that could have made Bayonetta an interesting character is treated as some sort of nonsensical plot device. At best it imitates depth, and seems to have tricked many into believing it, but all we have is a single and sexual woman whose greatest impulses are to flirt and shoot things forced into being a surrogate mother, only she learns to love the child anyway.

Christ, even Ultraviolet tried to be more interesting than that. Then again, if that were a video game I’m sure it would have rated about an 85% to 90% on GameRankings and MetaCritic, so I guess we’re just further proving how ridiculous and childish this industry is.

Yet it would be delightful if the actual plot to Bayonetta were as simple and shallow as its lead protagonist. You’ll spend the entire game wondering what the Hell is going on without explanation, and by time it’s all revealed there’s a good chance it will still be completely and utterly confusing. It is convoluted to the point of being meaningless.

In order to tell a compelling story the most essential ingredients are the emotions of the audience. A good writer must be capable of manipulating the audience’s emotions into caring about what is going on. This means not only an attachment to the lead character, but all the characters in between. A dislike or even hatred for the villain is typical, but a sort of sick admiration works even better. Most of all, however, we must care about what is at risk.

In Bayonetta, all we know is our lead character is doing…something for her own gain. Or so it seems. At some point I imagine it becomes for the greater good. All I know is the country she is in hates witches, which happens to be what she is, and there are angelic demon things trying to kill her. This is all the information you are given and no other explanation is offered until the very end. That is when we finally discover our villain, his ultimate purpose and just what is at stake.

Imagine if, in Men in Black, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones just went after aliens that wanted to do nothing but kill the heroes. Then in the final ten minutes they confront the cockroach, the mastermind behind it all, that holds the mysterious MacGuffin that some third party needs or else they’ll blow up the Earth. Of course, we didn’t know the Earth was going to be blown up until now, but hey, that’s what is at stake!

That’d be an awfully shitty movie. It’s a good thing Men in Black had competent writers that knew how to introduce characters you cared about as well as establish the conflict at the start. In the first ten minutes we see some humanoid freak saying “your world is going to end” and shout “he’s coming!”. In the next scene a UFO crashes on a farm where some unseen beast slaughters the human there mercilessly. Mixed in all this are our amusing heroes that we are attached to because they make us laugh and clearly caught up in plights of their own that must be overcome.

Men in Black is also far from being an artistic or critically-acclaimed movie, and yet it can get the basics down perfectly fine.

The first thing established in a good story is who, what, where and why, and if you’re a good enough writer you can leave the when out of it until later. Bayonetta establishes that our protagonist is a sexual femme fatale working with a gangster that sounds like Joe Pesci to kill angels or something. She is then given a “lead” of some sort to go into some country for some reason. Ten to twelve hours later we discover who our villain is and the horrible things that he wants to do.

It’s nonsensical, it’s convoluted and it is executed completely out of order. The only reason to really plow through this game is if you are enamored by the incredibly frustrating gameplay.

Of course, the game can always be easier if you turn the difficulty down. Yet when you say “normal difficulty”, it should imply “this mode is challenging enough for players of varying experiences”. After all, “hard mode” is typically what you choose if you are highly experienced with action games of this sort.

Except you cannot play Hard mode in Bayonetta until you’ve unlocked it by completing it on Normal.

This is what I like to call “false advertisement”. The difficulties that should be labeled Easy, Normal and Hard are instead labeled Very Easy, Easy and Normal. Having played games for twenty years of my life I’m used to selecting Normal by this point and being able to go through with a decent enough challenge. Yet when the designers of this game wrote “Normal” they meant “Normal if you’ve played these sorts of games so obsessively you can use one hand to control Bayonetta and the other to pleasure yourself during the cut-scenes”.

Now, those of you that know me also know that I love me some Ninja Gaiden 2. I think that is the best action game made within this genre. However, I still find that game at fault for doing the same thing. It’s like there is an elite audience that wears difficulties with pride. It’s like how Pick Up Artists collect phone numbers and put them on display as trophies. “What? You had to switch it to easy? Well you’re just not hardcore enough!” My favorite are the sort of players that bring up games like Super Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts and start rambling on about how games are too easy today, if anything.

I understand the sentiment. When I pick up a game like Gears of War, Call of Duty or Halo, my first act is to set it on the hard mode. I’ve played enough shooters that the normal difficulties are just too easy for me. Yet at the same time, I also know those games are also balanced well enough that the normal difficulties aren’t for experienced players such as myself. They are for more relaxed or inexperienced players that want to just play through while still facing some level of challenge.

Bayonetta is another one of those games that throws the concept out the window. Unless you’ve played games like God of War, Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden on their hard modes multiple times over mastering every combination and special ability, then prepare for Bayonetta to kill you. Prepare to be forced into buying healing items until you’re poor while all the “so bad ass it makes the game easier” items and weaponry remain in their impossibly expensive cabinets locked away from your unworthy paws.

Of course, one of the reasons I can also give a game like Ninja Gaiden 2 slack is why it is so difficult. See, some games like to use cheap tactics in order to make a fake sort of difficulty. In shooters it’ll usually be every enemy in the area knowing your precise location as soon as you enter a room, or simply making the A.I. fantastic at nailing headshots. In Bayonetta it is by granting the foes temporary immunity to your strikes. Sure you will still do damage, but they won’t recoil. Instead they’ll just execute their attack in the middle of your combo. Try as you might, however, the timing is so precise to roll out of the way and into safety that you’ll probably just watch half of your health bar disappear.

Ninja Gaiden 2 was always fair in this regard. See, the big issue in that game was how outnumbered you were. Enemies didn’t wait to attack you one at a time, either. It was hard because you had to know how to keep moving while striking your foes down. However, no foe would simply ignore the damage they were taking so they could open up a can of whoop ass on you. Bayonetta does this constantly, even with the weak foes.

As a result, the best option is to stick to short attack combinations so you can always be prepared to dodge and evade. This means most of the combinations in the game are absolutely worthless unless you can manage to slow down time temporarily. However, the number of short combos is incredibly limited. You’ll start finding yourself repeating the same one or two moves over and over again. What is worse, enemies that may have given you trouble when you were trying to chain together long attack strings will now be a cake walk once you’re mashing the same combo over and over again.

Yes, Bayonetta punishes the player for trying to be good at it and rewards them for being a button masher. This is everyone’s favorite action game of the year so far.

I am tempted to hate Bayonetta simply because of how much everyone else seems to love it. The game is anything but stellar, and yet its ratings suggest it is one of the most well designed games of the generation. At least, such as a 90% should rate. After all, if we equate that to a five star system like Hollywood then it’s a 4.5 our of 5 stars. Yet Bayonetta is not designed that well, nor is the character that worthy of praise.

It’s almost a really bad and shameful joke, but the real punchline is on how much this industry has hailed it as a masterpiece. Is it any wonder that Ebert doesn’t think games are art when a game like this is one of our critically acclaimed best sellers?

Continue to Positive Impressions

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