Bayonetta: Heaven's Hubris

[High Priest Mikhal]

Bayonetta (PS3) 4/5 Stars

The Good: Simple controls, easy learning curve, interesting backstory, great graphics and sound, unique weapons and combat system, can make your own recovery/boosting items, every item has a story and combinations of equipped items unlock all new moves
The Bad: Essentially Devil May Cry remade, items cost too much at Hell's Gate, Bayonetta's stances and moves are just plain gratuitous, Angel Shootout mini-game requires precise timing
The Ugly: Unlockables either cost a fortune in halos (an in-built cheat involving phones) or require utter mastery of the game

The Trinity of Reality (the Mortal world, Paradiso, and Inferno) has always been watched over by two groups: the Lumen Sages and the Umbran Witches--light and darkness in balance. Yet a witch born of a union between a Lumen Sage and an Umbran Witch throws the Balance into total chaos. A war breaks out and both sides are annihilated--or so was thought. After centuries asleep under a lake, Bayonetta awakes with no memory of her past or even her true name, the last of both the Lumen Sages and the Umbran Witches. Or is she?

Imagine Devil May Cry (the first game) with a buxom, British female protagonist and you have Bayonetta. In fact the same person who first created Devil May Cry created this game, so the similarities are to be expected. Despite being decried as a Devil May Cry-clone, Bayonetta is an all new game that explores what happens when the lines between good and evil blur and one morphs into the other. No undead or demons this time, just the forces of Heaven (Paradiso), who look and act less like the Christian ideal of angels as beatific and beneficient beings and more like the unknowable and monstrous things that fit better with the idea of beings that defy human comprehension.

Be warned that this is rated "M" for good reasons. Language and violence are just the start; Bayonetta's "clothing" (and this is even explained in the research you find in-game!) is her hair! Certain moves and actions will invoke her hair to leave her body and expose her partially nude body. Nothing is actually shown, though, and it's not much more than what you'd see on basic cable shows. Other than her fetish for lollipops and her often provocative poses (complete with the game seeming to snap a picture, still frame, black shutter, and shutter sound all) the worst thing for some is the idea of beating up on angels. Angels that look distinctly Lovecraftian and are desperately trying to kill you, but still angels.

To unlock moves, you have to buy 97% of them and that gets costly. The prices for alternate costumes, accessories, copies of certain weapons so you can dual-wield them, and (if you go that route) the cheats to unlock a variety of (VERY) powerful weapons, alt characters, and unique alt costumes requires a ton of halos--the game's currency. Expect to farm for halos a lot.

[HuManBing]

My roommate got this game. While I'd be working on job stuff in the living room, he'd be playing this in the dining room, so I managed to absorb a fair bit by osmosis.

The game strikes me as being a fairly typical Japanese game based very loosely on European folklore: that is to say, everything is exaggerated to the nth degree, whether it's the heroine's bodily proportions, to the cod-Latin "sounds cool, makes no sense" linguistic derivations, to the "style-over-substance" moveset. Most of the time I was facing away from the screen, so I'm not sure about the context, but Bayonetta apparently features a fair bit of sequences where the music turns into something very redolent of a jazzy Las Vegas showgirl revue. Rather typically for pretty much every Japanese-made game set ostensibly in Europe, they get almost every cultural reference completely wrong. Business as usual then.

In case it's not immediately obvious, the game takes a fair bit of aesthetic liberties with the Middle Ages witchcraft motif. The usual young adolescent male demographic that this game is pitched at probably won't notice or care. If your primary interest is Gothic Ravenloft-related gameplay, though, give this one a miss.

Oh, the game also has angels too, presumably because they're edgy. Only they're the bad guys and they really look like demons in a twist of added irony, making them super edgy. If this strikes you as strongly redolent of some really bad Hollywood movie recently released, you're not alone.

[High Priest Mikhal]

Rather typically for pretty much every Japanese-made game set ostensibly in Europe, they get almost every cultural reference completely wrong. Business as usual then.

Business as usual for any country, actually. If it's not within their immediate purview, most producers of anything don't care enough to write things that are accurate--half-@$$ed attempts yes, but not much more than that.

Oh, great! Now the image of a pot and kettle are back in my mind AGAIN!! What is up with that?

[HuManBing]

Very true, very true Mikhal. One of the very few games that actually treats the issue of a foreign nation in a fairly mature and considerate way is Fallout 3, and that's all the more impressive because the Chinese are clearly the bad guys of the game (or at least one among many).

They're portrayed as a serious military rival, with a powerful land army and very accurately-represented Maoist-era Communist propaganda. They took the time to research what the actual Chinese words would be, and they got a voice actor to voice them (a little inexpertly, but still impressive).

There's even a few motifs in-game that show the designers were aware of the potential for racist tension. One of the computers in the U.S. President's Metro tunnels tells of a janitor who's sick of cleaning up all the spraypainted anti-Chinese racial epithets aboveground.

At one point there's a giant robot that still thinks it's fighting the Communist Chinese. It will recite phrases like "Freedom is non-negotiable" and "Communist China will fall!". The irony is, at that point in the game, you're fighting against the last remnants of the U.S. government... and the robot is helping you in your battle - essentially accomplishing the exact same goal as the Communist Chinese were trying to achieve.


Far Cry 2 also treats ethnicities in a surprisingly evenhanded fashion. In the game, you're in a failed state in central Africa, caught between two rival warring factions and trailing an ex-CIA arms dealer. As the game progresses, each faction shows some valid political goal, but ruthless practical methods of achieving that goal. Also, you'll find white mercenaries gunning it out alongside local African-born militias, and the lines between hero and villain become very blurred.

[High Priest Mikhal]

And sometimes accuracy gets thrown out the door because someone makes an issue out of something that wasn't one to begin with--at least among those with an ounce of common sense. Resident Evil 5, anyone?

extreme political correctness adj. 1. a way of making something an issue where there wasn't one to begin with; 2. a method of making sure no one has any fun