61 Frames Per Second

Nah, I’m playing. Bayonetta is totally as gratuitous as you think. Sega came to NYC today and they brought Platinum Games’ Xbox 360/PS3 debut with them. I wasn’t allowed to get my hands on the controller, only a guided playthrough of the game’s first stage, but that was enough to say that Bayonetta’s every bit as over the top as its initial trailer made it out to be. It also looks like a hell of a good time.

Games are more than their graphics, I know, but it’s impossible to discuss Bayonetta without mentioning its presentation first. Without question, it is one of the most visually impressive games of the last five years. The game periodically goes into brief, playable flashbacks showcasing a war that left the titular character comatose for decades. One of these sequences is frames around a boss fight against a towering, obese dragon with two heads and a human face protruding from its swollen belly. The scene is a riot of color. Every inch of the crumbling environment is a meticulously detailed and animated. Even though the game’s months away from its fall 2009 release, Platinum Games’ new engine runs all the action without a hitch and the camera, a notorious trouble-maker in 3D action games like Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden, follows the action without obscuring it.



The best part of the demo was that it was all play, no cutscenes, and the best way to describe the action is Devil May Cry-on-speed. It looks like Kamiya’s spent all his time since the original DMC trying to come up with new ways to make combo-driven melee-and-gun combat even more of a spectacle. In addition to the kicks, punches, and four-limbed-rapid-fire shooting, Bayonetta can pick up any weapon dropped by an enemy, and use unique attacks. It sounds pedestrian when you put it that way. It’s a different story when you pick up a trumpet and start blowing up angels with music or picking up staffs and pole dancing bad guys to death. Like I said, Bayonetta is as gratuitous as it seems. As reported, the titular character's chief weapon is her hair, and since her attire is also happens to be her hair, progressive attacks reveal more and more skin. The fighting and special one-hit kills — fill a combo meter, press a button, kick an enemy into a spectral iron maiden — are so fast, though, that you barely notice that she’s de-robed. (Let me stress: the combat is fast, faster than any other 3D action game I've seen.) The same can’t be said for the finishing moves in boss fights, since Bayonetta turns her entire outfit into an enormous hair-dragon while the camera busies itself with her body.

So it looks great and the play seems tight, but the jury’s still out on whether or not Bayonetta is a good game. Without actually playing the game, it’s impossible to say whether or not the combat is as satisfying and nuanced as Devil May Cry 3’s. (It’s even harder to make any judgments since the demo had infinite life and combo meter turned on.) I also glimpsed a stray non-action part of the level that had Bayonetta running around a city populated with ghostly NPCs. Apparently the game takes place on a dimension overlaying reality and these ghosts are how regular old people appear from there. Unfortunately I wasn’t clued in on whether or not these adventure portions had any significant presence in the game. Looks like I’m just going to have to wait ten months to find out if Bayonetta’s a great game or merely a pretty one.

Related links:

Face-Off: Bayonetta and the Merits of Exploitation
Clover Returns, Heavy as Platinum
Independent at a Price: Sega and Platinum Games