Okay, I am fully aware of what that title sounds like so I better address this particular issue right out of the gate. No, this is not going to be one of those reviews that tears Bayonetta 2 to pieces for oversexualization and attempting to appeal to 13-year old boys. For the record nothing in Bayonetta 2 was that gross in my opinion, quite frankly everything that was happening on the screen was too incomprehensible for me to gage how much the camera was or wasn't fixated on her butt.
In all honesty I don't feel like its my place personally to weigh in too strongly either way on the "is Bayonetta sexist?" conversation. This is more of a damning critique of the industry as a whole than a defence of Bayonetta herself; but the fact that she's interesting enough for feminists to have such a lengthy dialogue about in the first place is a step up over most leading female characters in videogames. Don't get me wrong, that's kind of sad, but if you're going to get mad about treatment of female characters in videogames Bayonetta is nowhere near the best place to start that particular rampage.
Other than the fact I don't feel particularly qualified, I am glossing over the sexuality element of Bayonetta 2 for another reason. It's been talked about at length in a lot of reviews, and 'm really impressed about that and happy that more critics are taking their jobs a little more seriously. Having said that, I almost feel a little...betrayed by the critical reception of this game. Not necessarily because most critics disagree with me (although they do) but there's this kind of assumption that Bayonetta 2 does action perfectly, so they gloss over THAT to talk about there's multiple costumes and you can dress as Samus now or whatever.
It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out why everyone loves these games so much. It's got a LOT of graphics, and the amount of stuff going on in terms of screen-filling bosses and scenery and just general HECK YEA on the screen running at a perfect 60 frames per second in Bayonetta 2 is nothing short of incredible. Bayonetta has a really solid feel to her when she's on the ground and makes it fun to give that old analog stick a twirl every now and then. The combat is made of an incredibly simple two button system (with a third button for guns/extra weapons), there's a lot of finesse built into it in terms of the ridiculous amount of moves you have and the combo potential but at the same time you can pretty much just chimp out on your buttons and still kill all the dudes just fine. There's also a single-button dodge move, which is a lot more self-explanatory than say, the parry system from Metal Gear Rising and literally anyone can get used to it pretty quickly. On top of that, all the big fights end in huge beautifully animated climaxes where Bayonetta uses her hair to drag demons out of Hell to rip the boss monstrosities to pieces (or whatever, this is probably inaccurate but I don't care).
In short, Bayonetta 2 feels great, it looks great, it rewards and encourages the player to master its combat while being easy and accessible enough so basically any noob can get through the core experience. It's big and beautiful enough to be a fun one-time romp for the more casual player and deep enough to ooze replay value out of perfectionists. In terms of rating the action by itself, this is definitely Platinum Games' best so far.
So why am I not feeling blown away by any of it?
I guess as far as the action is concerned, there's a lot of little reasons for that. The game is still stuck in the over-decade-old-now "corridors and locked circular rooms" design of Devil May Cry. Not that there's necessarily anything wrong with this if the fighting is the main event of your game, but with Bayonetta 2 there's still not really a lot of spatial awareness required for the fighting. It doesn't matter where you are or where your enemies are, the ONLY challenge in terms of "not dying" is being able to use the dodge, if an enemy does an attack and you hit that dodge button, nothing else matters, you go into the "Witch Time" slow-mo and get a couple of free seconds to pound on dudes. There is something about this that makes the game seem a little more brainless to me, when the game doesn't care about where I am or what I'm doing really and will constantly reward me for being to time one button press I feel like it's more okay to not really try. I mean, I'm not dying, I'm killing all the guys, I'm fairly consistently getting Gold and sometimes even Platinum medals for what I'm doing, why not just keep on facerolling on my buttons there?
The dodge mechanic in general is what I find the most interesting about all this, at least in terms of why people LOVE this game so much. Because I noticed a lot in the second half of the game where I actually kind of knew what I was doing, the dodge move is really deceptively forgiving. In the tutorial the game informs you that you only go into "Witch Time" if you dodge at the last possible moment, and I think this is a deliberate lie to make the player feel more badass. Don't get me wrong Bayonetta 2, I know I'm awesome and everything, but there is NO WAY I am dodging at the "last possible moment" 90% of the time, half the time when I don't know what the enemy I'm fighting even is I'm just hitting it at random and getting similar results. Also I noticed that the game still actives Witch Time even if the attack you're "dodging" was going to miss you anyway, this includes projectiles and other-obviously-visible-super-easy to avoid stuff. Most of the time, there's going to be a cluster of attacks on screen, either from a boss going crazy or just a gang of regular (okay this game doesn't really do "regular", but common) enemies, and if you just happen to smash that dodge button next to one of them the game will reward you for it and call you AWESOME as it does that.
One last little moan on this, you know the part where I said the dodge mechanic is the ONLY skill to the combat as far as "not dying" is concerned? (Disclaimer: There is a lot more going on in the combat other than "not dying") Well that makes it all the more annoying when you can't dodge certain enemies because they're just a bizarre mesh of stuff that you don't know where they start or end or what their idea of an "attack" would even be. I think I died about six times during my first playthrough, and I'm going to say 3 of those where because I got curb-stomped by a visually confusing overdesigned pile of crap. I think it says a lot about this game (or maybe more about my own personal tastes in general) that for all the visually stunning theme park ride-esque screen-filling rollercoaster battles in Bayonetta 2, my personal two favourite fights were against a humanoid Sage who is the same size as you.
Running through the game and mostly ignoring stuff like the challenge rooms took me about 10 hours, and do you know what makes up 2 out of those 10 hours? CUTSCENES.
NO. STOP. Do not run to the comments section, or scream at me on Twitter that "the cutscenes don't matter" or "they're supposed to be dumb" or "don't you know you can skip them IDIOT?!" I know all these things, but I just don't care. Listen up jerks, 2 hours is about the length of feature length film, that's a feature length films worth of dialogue and storyboards someone had to come up with. They took work, a LOT of work, they're the glue which is the only hope this game has of giving its endless parade of locked rooms where you fight huge monsters any context whatsoever. Their inclusion and their quantity were both directorial decisions, they are a key part of the presentation and the experience the designers wanted you to have. Insisting that they should be ignored or forgiven because you can skip them is not just a cop-out, to the people at Platinum it's flat out insulting.
Maybe not as insulting as this though; they suck. And let's be clear here; I'm talking power surge at the Dyson factory levels of sucking. Even for videogames, no back up on that, even for Japanese 3D Action Games Translated into English these are embarrassingly awful. For example, in the opening cutscene, Bayonetta is hanging out with her comic relief fat Italian stereotype (who appears to yell "FUGGEDABOUTIT" at complete random) and shenanigans occur where she wrecks his Christmas shopping. In response to dropping a whole batch of stuff the Italian stereotype says "Ugh, this is why I can't have good things!"
Wait, hold the phone. "This is why I can't have....good things?" Okay granted, this isn't necessarily grammatically incorrect or anything, but it's instantly jarring to the brains of anyone who speaks English as a first language because no-one says that ever. I don't expect that the original Japanese script is a work of art or anything, but at this point of the game I was already in dread that maybe this entire game had been translated in a day, perhaps by someone who majored in hieroglyphics or something. But I kid you not, twice in the next 15 minutes the same character actually says "This is why I can't have nice things."
So what happened here? Did the script editor seriously not notice the obvious "good things" error in translation on the first line? Did he/she not care? Was he/she just embarrassed that the same terrible line appears three times in the span of 15 minutes and just changed one of them at the last minute even though it sounds wrong? Didn't the voice actor stop in the booth and ask "wait...good things? What?" You may be thinking this is a bizarre and insignificant little nitpick to dedicate two entire paragraphs too, but I think it's the best way to communicate how awful these scenes are because there is no way I can provide any kind of summarisation of how stupid the story is without playing the game four more times and melting my brain into soup. I also hate how all the characters are potty-mouthed for no reason whatsoever. If you can't write anything good or don't even want to try, at least go for a campy sense of light-heartedness like God Hand did, don't just riddle the script with curses in an attempt to make the game appear more mature. If there's anything worse than bad writing, it's a 13 year olds attempt at good writing.
Also for whatever reason half the cutscenes in the game aren't even animated properly, they're just kind of awkward still while the camera pans around the character models as they talk dribble. I don't know if they ran out of time or money, or just felt that these scenes were SO IMPORTANT that they had to appear in the game in some form even if they couldn't do them properly. I refuse to believe it was any kind of artistic decision though, they just look dumb when they're juxtaposed against the proper cutscenes and balls out insanity of the core gameplay, and they attempt to do slapstick humour in them. SLAPSTICK. IN A GOD-DAMNED SLIDESHOW. You can't do that!
Chances are if you love the Bayonetta games, or are a fan of Platinum Games in general, you don't care about any of this, but I care! You know why I care? Because this game is GORGEOUS; it's got at least 1000 of those ps and it's running at a solid 60 frames per second and almost every location is jaw droppingly beautiful. I want to like the characters! I want to know what all these places are, why we're there and care about what happens next. I want to understand what I'm fighting and why, and I want to have some kind of context and investment in the gigantic boss battles so I feel twice as awesome when I beat them. Instead, as beautiful as it is, without the context or any effort to offer some I see the game for what is actually is; a bunch of corridors and locked rooms in random locations. It doesn't HAVE to be like this!
Ultimately, making your story and world "intentionally awful" or "ironic" or "lol so dumb" or whatever your choice of phrase for this particular thing is just shielding yourself from criticism and more importantly; shielding the player from getting sucked into your game. By the second half of the game I wasn't just rolling my eyes at the cutscenes, I was actively starting to hate them for being so bad, and for making this beautiful world inaccessible to me.
Making the world inaccessible does have negative gameplay effects too. Earlier on I was humblebragging about how more often than not I would get Gold medals or higher for combat sections, but I rarely got ratings this high for the level overall. Why? Because there are optional combat scenes that are off the beaten path, and if you miss them you'll have a blank space in your end of level rating and it'll screw the whole thing up. Okay, these are there to add replay value and appeal to hardcore players without forcing them upon the casual player who just wants to get to the end of the game, got it. But honestly, what kind of action game design is this? This is the kind of game steaming with invisible walls and perceived linearity, but you actively punish me for not bumbling around this wasteland to randomly get attacked by angels for the sake of "perfecting" the level?
This is the kind of thing I am sick of, every single one of these god-damned character action games does something like this. In Devil May Cry 4 I was smashing pews and chairs one at a time for Devil Blood because the game would yell at me if I didn't find enough orbs, in Metal Gear Rising they crowbarred in some bonus backtracking, and now in Bayonetta 2 I am supposed to be randomly running around in wastelands just waiting to get attacked and checking every nook and cranny while praying to god that I don't accidentally miss one. Knock it off with the kleptomania nonsense already! Why even have "hidden" battles when you already have entirely optional and extensive challenge rooms, as well as multiple difficulty settings? Don't get me wrong, this is a problem with the genre in general and not a stab at Bayonetta 2, and even though it's nowhere near as bad as that pew-smashing garbage in Devil May Cry 4 it's almost more annoying here because the action is some of the best out there. Your game is really fun! Have fun with the fact that your game is fun!
This is what I was referring to about action games needing to grow up. Why is it constantly assumed that if I want to play an action game then I'm some dumb jerk who wants it to come packaged in some fifth-rate anime dribble with some gift-wrapping of superfluous design to go with it. Is Bayonetta 2 top of its class in the 3D character action genre right now? Absolutely. Have 3D character action games hit their potential? NOT EVEN SORT OF, and it still feels like we're glued to the shortcomings the first Devil May Cry game made 13 years old and I am so tired of it. Can we please just have one action game that is kind of not dumb? Or at the very least coherent?
Consider this more of a stance of "we can do so much better" on action games in general rather than a critical slaughtering of Bayonetta 2. I had fun with Bayonetta 2, I'll probably boot it up again some time in the future and have some more fun with it, and if you've got a Wii U then OF COURSE it comes recommended! I mean why do you even have one of those if you're not going to buy this game? My point is not to knock Bayonetta 2 and I'm not saying it's not a good game, it just bugs me this sort of thing is confused for a masterpiece just because it looks and feels nice, no other genre in videogames has standards this low (other than the WWE games maybe)! I still say the game is not better than God Hand or Spartan Total Warrior, two imperfect wonderful games steaming with good ideas and solutions to a lot of what I've complained about in this piece...that were completely ignored by almost everyone...
*sigh*
