Tiamatini

Not so very long ago, I tried out and reviewed the Demo for Bayonetta, and quite frankly, I loved it.  The game had promise, an advanced hack and slash is what sprung to mind, and while the fighting style was a little too Street Fighter-esque for it to be ideal, I didn’t think this detracted from the game’s overall appeal.

Well, I have since purchased said game and begun to play the full version, and having reached almost the middle of the game, I thought I’d explain why, right now, I feel I was not entirely correct.  I have said elsewhere online that I now have very mixed feelings about this game, having been full of joy and expectation as I gingerly hurried home through the ice and snow, clutching it in my mitten clad hands on Saturday.  Read on to see why Bayonetta, for me at least, has failed to deliver in its entirety.

The game starts off pretty much as you’d expect, there’s an extra little bit, then the scene you played for the demo, then you carry on after the demo - no big shockers there.  What is strange is that all the little extra bits that hint at it being more than just a hack and slash never come to fruition.  The signs you can read are meaningless, the people you can see are uninteractable (they pass this off as a good thing since “they can’t bother you”, but you also can’t advance the story of what’s gone on here in Vigrid either, frustrating at times…) the path purely linear – that is one thing I can say for it, there is no way to go wrong, you can only ever go the right way.  There are tiny side paths from time to time that hide witches “resting places”, but otherwise nothing.  Certainly there is an achievement for finding the witches’ resting places, but as a gamer who doesn’t go achievement hunting, that doesn’t really bother me all that much.  What is useful are the witch heart parts some of them contain which extend your vitality – an absolute necessity if you want to survive any of the boss battles at all.  Ever.  The extra little bits you can do seem to be there for no reason other than to mislead hopeful gamers such as myself into believing that this game will in fact be something more than a basic (albeit very good looking) hack and slash.

You can play on ‘Normal’, Easy (Automatic), or Very Easy (Automatic) – the problem is that Easy offers no degree of challenge at all, really, none, a very small child could do it, but ‘Normal’ results in many many deaths – sadly, my own.  I have been told this is because I can’t use the controls properly (wait, you mean those buttons aren’t just there to look pretty?!  Damn!) and am unable to execute any sort of combo attacks.  I will happily admit that hack and slash games are not my forte, I don’t even enjoy most of them and tend to avoid them, but Bayonetta looked different (as you may have gathered) and besides: I am using combos, I am using wicked weave combos, I am using witch time, I am using the lollipops to protect/heal/strengthen me, I am aiming for, and hitting(!), the right bits but I am still dying, often.  Way more often than I have ever died in any other game on any difficulty setting – and this is ‘Normal’?!!?  I jump, I fly, I turn into a jaguar and a butterfly, I use torture attacks, I punish, my hair transforms into fists and boots and birds and yet still, I die.  There is very little tactical thinking involved, and that’s where my problem lies with straight forward hack and slash games.  There is no pattern to the enemies, there is no way to plan out what you’re going to do, it’s a case of thinking on the spot and not panic button mashing because you’re up against a big ass stone/iron/magical ball that can crush you in a single bounce…  I admit there is a certain amount of satisfaction in defeating enemies that you think are going to crush you in a single step, and no matter anything else the game looks fantastic, but there needs to be something in between “So insanely easy a small child could do it” and “Prepare to die” settings.  Some of us are not unleashing the 15 year old boy within and prefer our fight scenes to be more brain less brawn. 

I appreciate that this clearly just isn’t what the game is about, and it obviously just isn’t the game for me, but I was really disappointed by that.  I was so looking forward to Bayonetta, and I so wanted it to deliver on all it could have been, and it just hasn’t, at least, not for me.  Maybe it will.  Maybe by the end of it I’ll be bouncing up and down and screaming about how much I love this game, but for now, I’m teetering on the fence.

I’m not saying the game is bad.  It isn’t.  There are elements of it that are very good in fact, (a lot of the cinematics are fantastic) but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t at least a little bit disappointed by it.  The demo promised more intelligent fighting. It hinted at the ability to strategise and plan and a level of depth which just isn’t there.  Yes, there are a lot of combos available – whoopee - it’s still just hitting the Yand B buttons in order, whatever fancy name you give it. 

I’m reserving final judgement however - maybe I’ll go home tonight and realise a key point I’ve been missing which will unlock this whole new side of Bayonetta to me, and give me the same level of satisfaction that others seem to feel with it.  After all, I know someone who was raving about how great it is (though that someone is a big SFIV fan and therefore likes this sort of game) and it’d be nice to really enjoy it, or at least feel satisfied by it having anticipated it for so long.  But for the time being, I miss thinking, I miss planning, I miss the challenge of something other than how quickly I can hit buttons to execute combos.  Clearly what I’m really missing is my inner 15 year old boy…