Sexy Edition
With a minor lull in my flow of fresh games, I resorted to rentals which I felt was justified because I had a long weekend set up ostensibly out of necessity but the proximity to my birthday was let’s just say highly suspect. I went to the store in hopes of getting Uncharted 2 which I desperately want to play but struggle to find rationale to support either a purchase or even a trade at 1,000 Goozex points since I suspect it is similar to the original which is to say maybe nine hours long and possessing little to no replay outside the multiplayer which I doubt I’d ever even attempt. Sadly they didn’t have a copy of Uncharted 2 so I settled on Bayonetta.
Listen, no one can reasonably accuse me of being blindly devoted or even especially enticed by products coming out of Japan. Like any nerd there are bits of Japanese culture that have trickled down to me that I have found exceptional like Cowboy Bebop or Unagi, but I’m hardly the guy wearing the Bubblegum Crisis T-shirt and importing copies of Final Fantasy XIII demos so I can play them “as they were meant to be heard.” However, I am a gamer with a respect for the culture of games so when the notoriously stingy reviewers at Japanese video game rag Famitsu give a game 10/10, I make a mental note.
If you want to skip a long diatribe about Bayonetta, let me summarize it for you here at the top: The only thing Famitsu giving the game 10 out of 10 signifies is that those magazine writers and editors are absolutely nuts. Really just complete loons. Not only because they put Bayonetta on par with what they consider to be the best games of all time but because they clearly experienced the same game I did and didn’t even dock half a point for having the most stupidly inane and incomprehensible storyline ever presented from one human to another in any medium which I can only interpret to mean they—Lord have mercy—must have actually liked the plot of Bayonetta.
Let me try and outline Bayonetta’s “story” and be aware that I wish I could say this was spoiler-free but I honestly couldn’t tell you which parts of the story are significant enough to qualify as spoliers, so you’ll have to trust that no matter what I say, you will be surprised by the story, though probably not in the way you might appreciate: A woman awakens after a 500 year long sleep at the bottom of a lake at which point she may or may not have killed a young boy named Luka’s father in front of his eyes. She spends what I presume to be roughly 25 years making alleged mafia ties and cozies up to an arms dealer who may or may not be a demon with a penchant for breaking the fourth wall while the young boy grows up to be a journalist of some sort. After an encounter with a woman who seems to be nearly as combat-capable as she, our heroine sets off on a journey to find something or find herself or… well, it’s never entirely clear. But she does wind up in a city that may or may not be the center of the universe as far as the cosmic powers are concerned and we learn that Bayonetta may or may not be the last of a line of witches who may or may not have been responsible for the steady decline of society for the last 500 years. Using the investigative subtlety of a molotov cocktail she fights hordes of creatures who may or may not be angels from heaven but whom also may or may not be paradoxically devious and vile. Anyway she comes across a little girl who may or may not be her daughter and/or may or may not be herself in a younger incarnation and they eventually wind up confronting the CEO of a company—that may or may not be a front for a private military whose funding and firepower outpaces that of the global superpowers—who may or may not be Bayonetta’s father. And then things get weird.
But okay, Bayonetta is hardly the first game to have a ridiculous plot. In a way, the ceaselessly indulgent storytelling could be viewed as a stylistic choice and honestly you can’t say the game isn’t consistently over-the-top so it’s never disingenuous. It’s certainly not my cup of tea but I’d be lying if I said it didn’t win me over a little bit by the end; after about a dozen chapters of deriding the game I started to simply shrug in bemusement at the game’s gleeful narrative excesses. “Oh, that statue/tower is actually a rocket ship? Sure, why not?” Et cetera.
Where the game stumbles is that it applies this gluttony to every aspect of the game, not just the plot. It’s like they had a design meeting toward the beginning of development and they were just brainstorming ideas and throwing them up on the whiteboard as they were shouted aloud. The problem is that at no point in the ensuing months and years did they get rid of a single idea from that board. The “no concept left behind” is present in the character design (glasses! beauty mark! ribbons! british accent! magical clothes made of hair!), in the systems (upgrades! alchemy! hidden collectables! combos! mini-games! quick time events!), in the presentation (full motion video cut scenes! slideshow/ken burns cut scenes! in-engine cut scenes! map screens! menu screens!) all the way up through the fact that the game has like 15 endings (faux ending! surprise twist ending! post fake credit-roll ending! post real credit-roll ending! unnecessarily long extraneous final dance sequence!). The quickest way to sum up Bayonetta is that it is exhausting.
And then of course there is the sex. Not that Bayonetta is ever graphic beyond the level of, say, the TBS re-runs of Sex and the City. It’s certainly saturated with innuendo, sensuality and various flavors of eroticism, but it stops short of being explicit. Bayonetta herself is a character basically defined by sex from her costume being made of her hair which is also her weapon such that she functionally disrobes in order to execute her most potent attacks through her fetishist’s checklist (I originally mistyped that “checklust” which may be more appropriate) of character design elements like the glasses and accent and ubiquitous lollipop. In between she displays a strong dominatrix vibe with her “torture attacks” and spends a lot of her time during the hyper-stylized combat doing splits and hip thrusts and deep back bends.
Leigh Alexander, the Internet’s go-to girl for thoughts on girls in gaming, wrote a piece for GamePro indicating that Bayonetta is actually an empowering character because she is a strong female figure in games that doesn’t have to surgically excise her sexuality in order to be taken seriously. I appreciate the point, because I agree that characters can be both strong females and sexy at the same time, there are good examples in other, older mediums. I’d actually venture an opinion that the strongest female characters are as complete as real life strong women are, and that by definition must include their sexuality. But this is where Bayonetta stumbles, because she isn’t a complete character in that for all her laundry list of reasons why you’re supposed to find her sexy (and I don’t think that assessment is meant to be exclusive to guys), there’s no room left in there for you to find her interesting. Among her other dimensional handicaps, she lacks any real character flaws (and no, amnesia isn’t a character flaw). When all the belt buckles and disappearing costumes subside, Bayonetta is only sex and style. She isn’t identifiable because she’s a messiah in a tight jumpsuit.
Now lest you think I hated Bayonetta, let me say that it does have some strong points. The one aspect of Bayonetta that is actually engaging is the relationship she develops with the young Cereza who thinks Bayonetta is her mother. The emergence of Bayonetta’s maternal instinct is fun to watch and is certainly fertile enough fodder for an entire plot, one that I think would have been miles and miles above the fatigue-inducing madness that they went with instead. Somehow they even managed to make the relationship feel genuine, the one human thread in the entire story—not surprisingly the only one that really works. Also the game’s stylish action is satisfying and enjoyable most of the time although on the easier levels it feels less like you’re playing the game and more like you’re merely suggesting things to it, but that worked for me because I’m fairly useless when it comes to combo-heavy action games like this. And the biggest advantage of the kitchen sink method of game design is that there is never an opportunity to get bored due to the constant adjustment of the gameplay dynamic (fight scene! exploration! puzzle section! vehicle combat! mini-game!). It took me about a dozen hours to work through the campaign and despite the tiring chore of trying to make some kind of sense out of the tale, I never felt like I was dragging my way through the game.
So I can’t say Famitsu led me astray, exactly. Sometimes it’s good to experience things you might not otherwise try. I certainly don’t think the game is in the same area code as the top echelon of games and I can’t even give it a meek “Rent This” recommendation but I wouldn’t say I’m sorry I played it. But you know, now that it’s over, I really wish Uncharted 2 had been in stock.