Bayonetta 

You know what the scariest thing in the world is? The mind of a Japanese games designer. Look at the Katamari series, Devil May Cry, hell, even Mario is screwed up if you think about it for long enough. But today, let’s focus specifically on Devil May Cry, and it’s brand of bizarre, over-the-top fighting against demons and devils and so on. If you think about it for even one moment you’ll realize that it makes absolutely no sense. Still, someone must like it, since Bayonetta has been made and is on it’s way.I honestly don’t know what I can say about this game. The opening cutscene makes absolutely no sense, and tries to employ some strange grindhouse technique to make it seem movie-like. Thankfully that’s left out of the game itself, but what is left in there is just… Alright. Imagine in your mind the top half of a clock tower falling by a cliff. Stood on the clock face is a woman dressed in a one-piece leather outfit that has zips all over it. Her stiletto heels have guns attached to the end of them, and there’s a gun in each of her hands. All around her, winged demons with halos come down to try and kill her, and giant monsters swoop and dive. That is the opening level of Bayonetta. Fighting monsters on top of a falling clock tower.

If that sound’s your kind of thing, stick around; you’ll love what’s coming up. You have three buttons to attack with, a light attack, heavy attack and your guns, and you mix them up to create interesting combos to defeat the monsters. Or, if you’re me, you hammer wildly on them until nothing is left alive. As you kill enemies, they drop “halos”, which seem to be the in-game currency. You also build up a rage meter of sorts, which, when filled up, can be used to take out an enemy with a “torture attack”. This kills your enemy in a weird and mildly interesting way, using some medieval torture device, the most frequent of which is the iron maiden (cue Bill and Ted air guitaring).

So after about five minutes of falling and fighting, the lead woman (who I can only assume is called Bayonetta) wakes up on a train. Oh no, it was all just a dream! Great story writing there. You arrive in a nice looking town, so now would be a good time to talk about the graphics. The environments certainly look pretty, with lots of bloom and bright colours to make everything stand out. The characters are just ever so slightly blocky, which is mildly annoying, but not exactly a deal breaker. And the blood that explodes out of enemies when you kill them looks nice, but there’s no blood left behind, so you quickly forgot you even killed something.

Anyway, this town appears to be populated entirely by ghosts, which makes no sense. You can shoot them (come on, everyone does it!), but they just look shocked and run away. Eventually you end up fighting, which is then followed by a mid level boss fight. At the end of said boss battle, you experience the first “climax attack” of the game. In this, Bayonetta’s clothes evaporate from her body, leaving behind tiny chains to cover her extremities, and become a giant monster from hell that bites into the boss and causes it to explode. Does this make sense? No. But really, I think we left making sense back at the opening cutscene.

Another strange thing about this game is the soundtrack. It’s mostly populated with J-pop, although it has an almost jazz edge to it, two genres which, trust me, don’t work together. Aside from that, the voice acting is hammy, the sound effects are pretty standard affair, and there’s nothing else to talk about.
Bayonetta is one of the strangest games you will play in your lifetime (unless you import games from Japan, of course). It’s actually quite off-putting at first, and I myself felt an instant un-interest in it when I was playing. And yet… something about it is drawing me back. Like, maybe if I play it some more then I could work out what it’s all about. Or maybe I just want to hammer buttons and watch things explode in showers of blood.

The Bayonetta demo is available now, but the full game doesn’t hit stores until January 5th.

Thought it made sense really? Loved every second of it? Let us know in the comments!.