Bayonetta Rocks
Ok, Bayonetta (2010, PS3 / 360) is wonderful. No matter how low your heart might sink when you realise that you’ll spend the whole game either watching cut-scenes or mashing the kick and punch buttons, the game will simply win you over with imaginative creatures and sets, and simply the best central character I have ever ‘played’.
The creatures are so wildly imaginative, the action so brutally fast-paced, and the world that you are travelling through is so damned peculiar, that the early misgivings turn into hypnotic plusses. The fact that the combat isn’t too taxing (maybe at the higher levels it is) becomes an advantage – you don’t want to spend too long getting to the next visual twist. And after many hours with the same characters they become appealing despite their lack of subtleties. Lamenting the lack of actual personalities beneath began to seem like an irrelevance – I never worried about my action-man’s humanity. Action stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Jackie Chan succeed because of their lack of depth – we’re invited to simply enjoy their physicality rather than worry about their emotional journeys.
Bayonetta the character adds extra interest because of her sexuality. The camera boldly focusses on her erogenous regions, and she’ll adopt a range of sexually-suggestive poses, sometimes in the midst of pitch battle. Too much so for some critics, but I simply don’t see how it is possible to read this as any sort of misogynist or exploitative approach. One has to wonder if the media has been looking too hard for an issue to exploit. This is a powerful, aggressive, no-nonsense female arrogantly aware of her siren status – she is designed to specifically mock us for ogling her as a sex object.
And this is a game that loves its main character. I can’t think of a more iconic, more drop-dead gorgeous, more heroic lead. Where other games create heroes, this game creates a God. She can do anything, fights enemies at a level unseen in any videogame. Actually there’s a connection with another game I really enjoyed recently – Muramasa, which also had you fighting the forces of heaven and hell with a similar level of chutzpah.
The journey itself has a weird mix – you’re never quite sure where you are, what you’re doing, and what will be around the next corner. Makes it kind of hard to explain in text, but then that’s actually a sign of how utterly unusual it is. There’s a bit of time-travel, lots of flashbacks to mysterious moments in the past that aren’t fully explained, and a bewildering amount of ‘lore’ to digest. The other confusion comes from the way the characters respond to each other – you’re never sure quite what plane of existence anyone is in, or whether they’re a human, a spirit or a god. Or whether they even see each other, or just sense them. Sometimes their lips move, sometimes they stay still. Some of the speech is Japanese with subtitles, some of it is English (absolutely brilliantly voice-acted I should add).
Did I mention the game reprises both Space Harrier and OutRun, along with reworked versions of the music from each. Awesome!
The best compliment I can pay to the game is that I can’t think of anything in any other medium that compares to it at all. Perhaps there are faint echoes of martial arts movies of the 70s and 80s – it has that same strange mix of excessive violence and mythic storytelling. It’s unlike anything I’ve ever played, though obviously it’s a spiritual successor to Devil May Cry. But it eclipses anything that has come before, and no doubt a good deal of what is to come.
