Ya boi Hideki Kamiya is back at it again breathing new life into the spectacle fighter genre he started with the Devil May Cry series. Bayonetta follows the adventures of Cereza, a member of the Umbra Witches, as she battles an ambitious order of angels using stiletto mounted guns, kinky magic, and demons summoned using her hair.
The premise is of course bonkers but Kamiya is not known for subtlety and things only escalate from there. The game is outrageous from start to finish with musical numbers, gratuitous sexualisation, torturing foes with kink equipment, and tongue in cheek flirtations throughout. Without a doubt the game ends up being far more sexploitation than representation but we're not here to discuss feminism.
Gameplay offers a plethora of A and B combos, weakened foes can be pulled into button mashing events that torture and execute them, and dodging attacks rewards you with 'witch time', a mode that slows everything down and multiplies your combo. Your performance is scored with a letter grade at the end of each stage so you're encouraged to experiment and engage with all the mechanics. The boss fights are the biggest shows the game has to put on with all of the usual gameplay turned up to eleven none of which bored me, but there are long slogs of angels to carve through between them.
The storyline is confusingly intricate and sets the tone with anime tropes a-plenty but the pacing can be all over the place. You start with a musical number, arena fight, a comic book intro, and then dive into the main story. It makes for a bumpy introduction but after that it starts to gain some consistency.
This is a game with spectacle at its core, it's eager to entertain but combat can get samey and beyond the sexualisation the game doesn't have much substance. Making an angel orgasm to death gets a bit tedious after the first few times. Overall you're in for quite a ride but, like your sexuality, unless you're pushing yourself to experiment you might end up stuck in tedious repetition with nothing encouraging you to try anything else.
The premise is of course bonkers but Kamiya is not known for subtlety and things only escalate from there. The game is outrageous from start to finish with musical numbers, gratuitous sexualisation, torturing foes with kink equipment, and tongue in cheek flirtations throughout. Without a doubt the game ends up being far more sexploitation than representation but we're not here to discuss feminism.
Gameplay offers a plethora of A and B combos, weakened foes can be pulled into button mashing events that torture and execute them, and dodging attacks rewards you with 'witch time', a mode that slows everything down and multiplies your combo. Your performance is scored with a letter grade at the end of each stage so you're encouraged to experiment and engage with all the mechanics. The boss fights are the biggest shows the game has to put on with all of the usual gameplay turned up to eleven none of which bored me, but there are long slogs of angels to carve through between them.
The storyline is confusingly intricate and sets the tone with anime tropes a-plenty but the pacing can be all over the place. You start with a musical number, arena fight, a comic book intro, and then dive into the main story. It makes for a bumpy introduction but after that it starts to gain some consistency.
This is a game with spectacle at its core, it's eager to entertain but combat can get samey and beyond the sexualisation the game doesn't have much substance. Making an angel orgasm to death gets a bit tedious after the first few times. Overall you're in for quite a ride but, like your sexuality, unless you're pushing yourself to experiment you might end up stuck in tedious repetition with nothing encouraging you to try anything else.