Bayonetta — A Trip To Sweden

It’s a fine line to straddle, the line between obscenity and audacity.  Some games operate with digital tongue firmly in cheek, while others sit there on the shelf of the gaming store shouting penis jokes with a straight face, acting as if this is the way that they’re supposed to be and don’t see why this is a problem.

A game like Bayonetta leans towards audacity, taking much refuge in it.  If not for the main character (the eponymous Bayonetta) acting like Spider-Man all the time and treating everything like it’s a set-up for another of her one-liners, the game might’ve been lumped in with more obscene and forgettable games like Dante’s Inferno.

It helps that the soundtrack deliberately evokes the feeling of a comedy anime – right down to the Jpop-style rendition of Fly Me To The Moon – rather than the epic orchestral affair of a game trying to be taken seriously.  It fits Bayonetta’s personality perfectly, and kept me interested in the game until the very end.

This is good, because the game is hard as fuck.  I don’t say something like this very often.  Usually I prefer to use hyperbole without resorting to obscenity.  I like to reserve my obscenity for when I’m legitimately cross at a game.  But I don’t know how else to describe the difficulty of Bayonetta in a way that will accurately convey the feeling of playing it.  After a prologue that took place in a cemetery, designed to allow me to get used to the controls of the game, I was forced to play a timed mission and meet difficult conditions as if I were already an expert who’d played the entire game before.  I felt like I’d been thrown into the deep end of a swimming pool after being allowed to dip my toe in the water for the first time.  Have mercy, Bayonetta!  I don’t know how to swim yet!

Naturally, I died a lot until I got the hang of killing things rapidly enough (and in a very specific way, too) for the game’s liking.  The battle system is not unlike a fighting game like Bloody Roar or Soul Calibur and requires me to memorize a list of combos.  Up until I’d played Bayonetta, I was only used to playing action RPGs with one button for Attack and possibly one other button for Attack In A Different Manner, if the developers felt like putting a second one in.  Combinations were foreign to me.  Plus, it also turned out that, unless I chose to play the game on Easy or Very Easy difficulties, I needed to master most of these combos or else I wouldn’t get anywhere.  If I just mashed attack buttons like I would in an action RPG, I was going to die quickly.

Unfortunately for me, I chose to play the game at the supposed Normal difficulty.  If this was how hard the former Clover developers wanted to make their game for the “normal” user, I was deathly afraid of even trying it on Hard or the harder-than-hard Non-Stop Infinite Climax modes.  How could the spiritual sequel of an easy game like Okami be so difficult?

In order to ease frustration and distract from loading times, the developers added a sort of practice mode, where I could try out the various combos while waiting for the game to load from the disc.  My method of getting through the game was to look through the moves and try ones that seemed like they would be effective, then I kept on performing these useful moves until I committed them to muscle memory.

And it’s for this reason that I’m going to declare the PS3 version to be the superior one.  Many of my friends who own the game have never been able to complete “normal” difficulty, and they all own the game on the Xbox 360.  I played the game on the PS3 and ended up mastering the battle system just enough to struggle through the final boss fights and finish the game on “normal”.  I know everyone else has decided that the Xbox 360 version is the best version because it has shorter load times, but it’s because of the longer load times of the PS3 that I was able to practice enough to get better at the game.

I think the reason I had the patience to wait through the load times was because I was generally impressed with the game.  Although I found it to be overly punishing and sometimes frustrating (like in the timed mission at the start of the game), there’s a difference between a game like Lunar: Dragon Song which is punishing for no reason at all and rewards the player very little for all the effort put into it, and a game like Bayonetta, which is also punishing but doesn’t pretend it isn’t, and it still offers something after each level, even if it’s just to tell me that I performed well enough to not outright fail.

Something strange happened after I got past the seventh chapter.  Once I defeated the second major boss of the game, it suddenly turned very easy and I didn’t know if the game itself was easier or if I had suddenly improved enough that I could slaughter my enemies rather than struggle to survive in the midst of a big pile of them.  Not even the third major boss gave me problems, and I was feeling rather mighty by that point.  I kept on having to check the difficulty level to make sure I hadn’t accidentally changed it.

Little did I know that the game had eased up on the pressure because the final bosses were sharpening their knives.  I suppose I shouldn’t have expected anything less from Bayonetta, a game that blindfolded me and beat on me for a while, then spoke soothing words in my ear to convince me that it was on my side and that all I had to do was be a good boy and I would be nice and comfortable for the rest of my life.  Why did I not expect the two-by-four the game was getting ready to swing at my head?

What I do know is that I feel like I learned how to play video games better by playing Bayonetta.  As difficult as it is, it’s probably one of the best action games I’ve ever had the pleasure to play, both for the game’s presentation and its tough but fair battle system.  At least, I think it is.  My Stockholm therapy sessions have been trying to convince me otherwise.