Vegieza’s Virtual Vices: Bayonetta
16 02 2010Oy! It’s Vegieza coming back straight from seeing what June is like on Jupiter and Mars to bring you a review of Bayonetta. From the director of Devil May Cry, this game is even more ridiculous. Just listen to this: The two clans of light and dark, The Lumen Sages and Umbra Witches, had a schism and disappeared from the Earth after Europe’s Witch Hunts. You play a resurrected witch named Bayonetta. Her clothing is made of hair, she wields a gun on each hand and each foot, and battles upside-down crotch baby-faced dragon armed Angels. Or a tube-fingered thing. Or the 12th Colossus from Shadow of the Colossus. Or spear-wielding tribal seagulls. Or God. All of those things. While riding a missile.
Pros:
Ridiculously Over-the-Top At All Times. All of the aforementioned Catholic stuff. This game probably has won an award for having half of the top 20 most outlandish moments in gaming. I don’t want to tell you anymore. You just have to play it to understand.
It has huge bosses. Do you know the final Colossus in Shadow of the Colossus (one of the best games of all time)? Every boss is 10 times bigger than that. The boss fights are so big that they are their own level, and they’ll take like 10 minutes or more to beat. Destroying one just feels so monumental, yet so easy at the same time.
There are references to other video games… ALL THE TIME. You have to be very attentive to catch the references, though. Being a Capcom game, most of the references to other games are other Capcom games, but there are exceptions. References include, but are not limited to: Resident Evil, Okami, God Hand, Viewtiful Joe, Devil May Cry (of course)……… God of War, Halo, Metroid, and SATURDAY NIGHT LIVE.
It has great replayability. It is a relatively difficult game, but with practice you become an unstoppable force. And there are multiple difficulties beyond that. There are challenge rooms hidden all over the place, as well as journal entries, tombs, records (to get new weapons), and 50 birds to collect across the difficulties. There are even making-of videos, 3-D model and artwork galleries, and tons of accessories, weapons, outfits, and extra abilities. Each weapon has it’s own set of combos, and you can wear a different weapon for each hand and foot to make tons of combinations and you also have the ability to pick up enemies’ weapons and use them until they break. There are lost chapters and bosses, special ways to get hidden weapons, medals for every chapter, those achievement things, and unlockable characters to play as. It’s a very customizable hack-and-slash with lots of things to collect.
Gameplay is Vary Veried… err, Very Varied. It’s not just room after room of: “Oh, now I have to fight those same enemies, but there’s a couple more of them and they’re slightly more powerful.” They change it up a lot. The game forces you to battle differently sometimes. Sometimes it’s just hack-and-slash, but then sometimes there’s a puzzle or some strategy. Sometimes you’re playing a minigame the entire level. Sometimes you’re freezing time on the top of a currently-crashing-into-the-interstate cargo plane so that you can put some sort of winged Mayan albatross into a guillotine while sucking on a lollipop. Or whatever they make you do. At least you’re wearing magical ice skates while you do it.
Cons:
There is a steep difficulty curve. Except for Very Easy and Easy, which I’ll get to in a sec. Until you get the hang of dodging like every second and know when an enemy is going to attack you even if it’s off-screen, you will die a lot. And your chapter score will be crappy. You don’t want that, as they give you the Joe Pesci award. Also, the only mini-boss is a cross between Henry from No More Heroes and Sephiroth from Kingdom Hearts. And you fight this person a lot more than once.
It may be too Japanese for some. This game is so Japanese it’s… I really need to not use the word “ridiculous” anymore. If it’s not blaring “Fly Me to the Moon” in the background, it’s something you’d hear in every j-rpg or anything from over there. The amount of camp and style it displays is also very anime-esque. For every person I know that doesn’t like this game, it was for this reason mainly. On top of that, the Easy and Very Easy difficulty levels are apparently made so you can play the game with only one hand. you just have to push two of the buttons and the game does all of the combos for you. Well, I guess at least they’re thinking about the tough lives one-handed people lead…
Mostly Text-told story. In order to not be utterly confused all of the time, you must also read all of the journals and stuff that you collect. This shouldn’t be necessary. They should provide enough story in the cutscenes in order for the player to get it. I knew what was going on because I read the journals.
The Achievements/Trophies are gonna take a while. The game creates this thing called the “101 Umbran Tears of Blood” (a pretty neat idea), which is basically all of the (I think) 51 birds you collect and the 50 achievements combined into one total. It’s actually incorporated into the story that all of these tears were intentionally scattered around. Anyways, you have to beat this game on hard, an even higher difficulty than hard, and collect tons of things in the game to get all of the achievements/trophies. It would take multiple, multiple play-throughs.
The PS3 Version sucks. Don’t get it. Before the recent patch the PS3 version of this game got stuck on the loading screen. It did it when you go to the pause menu, when you unpause, when you pause during a cutscene (and unpause), and when you do anything or think about anything. We’re talking a good 5 second pause. Still, the framerate constantly drops and there is a lot of screen tearing, even during cutscenes. These are not good things.
Well, that’s about it. This has been Vegieza. I have a fever, and the only cure is killing more Angels.
Categories : Vegieza's Virtual Vices, Video Games










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