Bayonetta - Review
Co-Reviewed by Sam Jeffery
(for the Ps3)



I've been trying to collect quotes relating to Bayonetta and our general feelings on it as we made our playthrough of it. They seem to boil down to the general two sentiments:

"YEAAAAH I JUST HAD A HAIR-DRAGON EAT THAT BITCH"
vs.
"Why it checking my save data so that I can check my save data so I can save my game data?"

I feel like those two quotes accurately epitomize Bayonetta's general feel, or the two sides to it. Staggering technical issues drag down an otherwise overwhelmingly satisfying performance. On that end of things, the look and feel really are quite spectacular. The sound design is excellent and the visuals are usually quite breathtaking. Bayonetta seems as graceful as a butterfly, flitting about the screen ripping her enemies into red paste with the utmost fluidity. The narrative, on the other hand, is rather lacking. I say "lacking" as I tried my utmost and I couldn't even begin to catch what was going on (and I got on board and caught up with the metal gear series with metal gear solid 4, so I'm definitely what I'd call open-minded when it comes to the narrative.

Part of the problem feels like the great abundance of cutscenes in the game. These cutscenes generally aren't used for story, they're used for action. Movies of epic fight scenes fill up at least an hour of gametime that you could be spending, oh, I don't know... fighting enemies yourself? The game seems like it's afraid that you'll cramp its incredible style, and while it's right, that doesn't exactly make for a fun game.

The technical flaws of the game also drag it way down. The game loads before each level, in the middle of levels, after each level, it loads the level loading screen, it has to load each save screen and load screen, it has to stop and load each *item* when you pick something up off the ground... and the load times are all very, very long. This makes for a really jarring game experience, while you spend so much time sitting around waiting. Some load screens let you move Bayonetta around and experiment with her combos, which is actually a very clever way to make loading levels tolerable.

There are other good ideas that really almost sell this game. Almost. The combo system isn't too crazy to figure out, and any layman can experiment with the combos or mash on the loading screens and work out her attacks to do well. Its strengths are definitely in its combat and how it doesn't take itself seriously. After beating one spherical boss, Bayonetta sprouted giant hands out of her hair to finish it off that grabbed it, served it, and set it, and went to spike it. The hands missed the spike, after which they just got upset and beat the ball to a pulp. It's the tongue-in-cheek nature that makes you laugh at the absurdity of it all, and when it bothers to take that route, it's absolutely hilarious fun.

But the techincal glitches and some of the terrible design decisions just knock it down. Loading times are terrible, the quicktime events are unforgivingly unpredictable and fleeting, leading to deaths that quickly knock your rating way down, there's no story, framerate drops are very noticeable and frequent (which is aggravating in a combo-based fighting game), it made me feel rather motion-sick after a while (some spinning levels really threw me for a loop, although that may not be a bad thing), the item and upgrade systems are difficult to figure out (with no inclination to try as there's a giant loading time between each screen of the item menu)... ...really knock the experience down a couple notches.

That said, the game is damn fun. It makes me cry from its difficulty, the skip cutscene button exists and is quite usable once you give up and want to get to the action, and the characters are enjoyable. If you played/liked devil may cry, you will like this.