In 2001, Director Hideki Kamiya put together Devil May Cry, an action game that has been endlessly copied, innovated upon, ripped off, and sequelized. By his own admission, his current project Bayonetta will "blow the doors off the action genre." By my admission I absolutely believe him. Bayonetta is a no-apologies game so reeking with style and flair I think I can still smell it on me!
I hesitate to use Devil May Cry as a reference with which to explain the game, so much has been layered upon its primitive stick-figure. But that's the core of it. Honestly I don't really find it necessary to explain what exactly you do in the game, because it's how it happens that is so exciting. Let me go ahead and get this out of the way first: you might have read a portion of an interview a while back detailing the amount of time the developers spent modeling Bayonetta's ass, and a cursory examination of the game will reveal that their efforts were not in vain. (To this writer, it appears that plenty of time has been spent modeling the rest of her, too.)
God, how do I even give a description of this game a cohesive narrative? Clad in what looks like vinyl, but which is actually your own evil hair, you beat the shit out of henchmen like at a beat-'em-up ballet. Occasionally you will dodge an attack at just the right moment, which causes the whole game to go into "witch time," a blue-tinged hell buffet where every enemy is a full pan of mac and cheese and you are the scoop, plunging deep in slow-motion. Did I mention you have four guns named Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme, and they are mounted on your hands and feet? You can rotate the stick and hold your kick button to deliver an attack that is literally called "bullet climax," which sticks your painstakingly rendered posterior up in the air while you do the splits and blow the hell from enemies surrounding you. Sometimes, a particularly successful combo or string of attacks will cause the demonic hair that makes up your skintight outfit to lift itself off you, leaving you half naked while the hair thrusts itself from a temporal portal and obliterates whatever you were attacking.
I'm not sure how, but every now and then when you're attacking stuff you pull off a "torture attack" and a historical device of torture materializes around your current target, during which you have to hammer the attack button to increase the "gigaton power" of the device. I personally saw foes brutally expire in both iron maidens and guillotines, which honestly and ironically seemed tame compared to the horrific punishment I was already routinely administering. Did I mention everything runs at sixty goddamned frames-per-second without dropping anything?
Between sessions of systematic elimination there is a minimal amount of running from point A to point B, but I didn't have to screw around with finding keys or anything dumb like that. One door opened after I punched and kicked it a lot. At the end, there's a huge boss that you tear the shit out of till it's a crumpled husk of a beast, then once you've all but ruined this chump, all your hair-clothes strip off, morph into a ravenous tooth-bearing witch-beast, arc high into the air, and chomp the shit out of the boss while you hammer the button to pump up the gigaton power (I reached 600 gigatons, whatever the hell that means), sending geysers of blood everywhere. Once you're done you get a few T and A shots beneath the anime-transformish swirls of your hair returning to again cover your body.
Fuck!
I hesitate to use Devil May Cry as a reference with which to explain the game, so much has been layered upon its primitive stick-figure. But that's the core of it. Honestly I don't really find it necessary to explain what exactly you do in the game, because it's how it happens that is so exciting. Let me go ahead and get this out of the way first: you might have read a portion of an interview a while back detailing the amount of time the developers spent modeling Bayonetta's ass, and a cursory examination of the game will reveal that their efforts were not in vain. (To this writer, it appears that plenty of time has been spent modeling the rest of her, too.)
God, how do I even give a description of this game a cohesive narrative? Clad in what looks like vinyl, but which is actually your own evil hair, you beat the shit out of henchmen like at a beat-'em-up ballet. Occasionally you will dodge an attack at just the right moment, which causes the whole game to go into "witch time," a blue-tinged hell buffet where every enemy is a full pan of mac and cheese and you are the scoop, plunging deep in slow-motion. Did I mention you have four guns named Parsley, Sage, Rosemary, and Thyme, and they are mounted on your hands and feet? You can rotate the stick and hold your kick button to deliver an attack that is literally called "bullet climax," which sticks your painstakingly rendered posterior up in the air while you do the splits and blow the hell from enemies surrounding you. Sometimes, a particularly successful combo or string of attacks will cause the demonic hair that makes up your skintight outfit to lift itself off you, leaving you half naked while the hair thrusts itself from a temporal portal and obliterates whatever you were attacking.
I'm not sure how, but every now and then when you're attacking stuff you pull off a "torture attack" and a historical device of torture materializes around your current target, during which you have to hammer the attack button to increase the "gigaton power" of the device. I personally saw foes brutally expire in both iron maidens and guillotines, which honestly and ironically seemed tame compared to the horrific punishment I was already routinely administering. Did I mention everything runs at sixty goddamned frames-per-second without dropping anything?
Between sessions of systematic elimination there is a minimal amount of running from point A to point B, but I didn't have to screw around with finding keys or anything dumb like that. One door opened after I punched and kicked it a lot. At the end, there's a huge boss that you tear the shit out of till it's a crumpled husk of a beast, then once you've all but ruined this chump, all your hair-clothes strip off, morph into a ravenous tooth-bearing witch-beast, arc high into the air, and chomp the shit out of the boss while you hammer the button to pump up the gigaton power (I reached 600 gigatons, whatever the hell that means), sending geysers of blood everywhere. Once you're done you get a few T and A shots beneath the anime-transformish swirls of your hair returning to again cover your body.
Fuck!