I love crazy games — you know, those ones that are filled with bizarre shit that doesn’t make any sense. Think Noby Noby Boy. What the hell is Boy? Why’s he eating everything and then pooping it out?
Or how about the classic BurgerTime? What’s going on in this one, and how come Peter Pepper is in a mortal struggle with human-sized pickles and eggs (or is it the other way around), all while trampling ginormous all-beef patties?
It’s this line of thought that makes me think Bayonetta will be great.
Now, I haven’t even had hands-on time with the game yet. My hectic E3 schedule gave me precious little time on the show floor proper, but by all accounts — from Michael Donahoe and plenty others — it’s shaping up to be a solid character-based stylized action game.
Instead, I’m basing my opinions on the demo presented to us by one of the game’s producers and Director Hideki Kamiya. On one hand, it looks like an impressive mix of shooting and melee action, a la the Devil May Cry games (which Kamiya helmed before moving over to PlatinumGames).
But from watching the demo, checking out videos, and reading my seemingly confusing notes, this game just seems effed up. For example: From what I saw, out leading lass Bayonetta: grabs a giant spiked wheel out of the sky and smashes an enemy with it, accents many attacks with her hair, which sometimes transforms into a demon, uses butterfly wings to assist on double jumps, and finishes off some enemies with specialized torture moves — we saw her putting enemies in a guillotine-out-of-thin-air and a torture rack.
Also of note: Combos end with a portal opening and a giant fist or foot coming out of it to deliver the final blow. You beat up angels at times, and halos act as the game’s currency. One of the main enemies looks like Mike Tyson. You use a lips-shaped lock-on cursor. Some attacks are measured in gigatons (!)…. All that from just a couple videos and demos.
When I wasn’t scratching my head thinking about how these things all fit together, I was getting exhausted just writing them down. But back to my point: I love that Bayonetta is doing this. Why? It could be because Kamiya has already proven he can make a great game (not to mention ace our 5 Hit Points test) and is now in an “Aw, screw it” mode, just putting in a bunch of random crap for us to sort out. I mean, will the story even try to make sense of all of it?
Pulling back to a classic example, years ago we came across a pudgy plumber in a world where mushrooms make you grow double in size, pipes warp you across worlds, stars make you invincible, and coins rest in the clouds — and thought nothing of it. If you eliminate any drug-based possibilities, this makes no sense — yet we wouldn’t want Super Mario Bros. any other way.
That’s why I hope Bayonetta is more bizarre than business-as-usual. We have plenty of great action games, and tons of games use a real-world (or fictional-but-logical-world) setting to great effect. But the beauty of games is that they don’t have to abide by these rules. In the current generation of consoles, where realism is often stressed, it seems we get away from the whimsical, random eccentricities that led to such insanity as the Daytona car as a playable character in Fighting Vipers or the Eggplant Wizard in Kid Icarus. Hell, Katamari Damacy refuses any sort of classification, but it remains one of my favorite PS2 games. And I’m sure you all can come up with hundreds of more examples — it’s not hard.
If Bayonetta creates a whole new gaming vocabulary for us — where it makes sense in its world and only its world — I’m all for it. What may seem strange now will undoubtedly be a fond touchstone in a few short years.