(This review is based on the original Xbox 360 version of this game)

We're a little bit past October now, so what better a time then to look book a game that came out roughly ten years ago? A late October release for the Xbox 360, Bayonetta — by PlatinumGames — was conceptualized by Hideki Kamiya, the brains behind Resident Evil 2, Devil May Cry 1, Viewtiful Joe and Okami.

By homaging the beat 'em ups of the past and transporting Final Fight and Streets of Rage style gameplay to clustered Resident Evil-like environments with fixed camera angles, the original Devil May Cry revolutionized the 3D action genre by balancing fast combat with crazy combination sequences and twitch dodging maneuvers . For better or worse, it paved the way for games like God of War, Darksiders and Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.

But most importantly, Devil May Cry set the stage for Kamiya's Capcom peers to follow in his footsteps and attempt to expand in Devil May Cry 2, 3 and 4 all of which were made without his involvement. Devil May Cry 2 is generally pretty bad, and 4 is a pretty heavily flawed game that nontheless I go back to often, but 3 was a friggin' masterpiece. Devil May Cry 1 set new standards, DMC3 raised the ceiling and now, 4 years later, it was time for the guy who reinvented the 3D action game wheel to show people how it's done again... with Bayonetta. (And even by Kamiya's own admission, he drew a certain degree of inspiration from DMC4.)

Story

So Bayonetta is an Umbra Witch who's on a quest to recover her lost memories and spill angel blood along the way. She does all sorts of hocus pocus with her hair which is also her clothing. Along the way, she gets some help from Rodin, her weapons dealer, Enzo, a Joe Pesci-soundalike and Jeanne who may or may not be her life-partner. And there’s also a bunch of sexual innuendos, partial nudity, cursing and violence.

Gameplay

Thrusting you into the action, a new save file starts off with an exposition dump that you can battle your way through. There's no health bar, so aside from being slowed down, there are no real consequences for being hit here; just try and get a feel for the game.

There's plenty of opportunities to get a feel of Bayonetta's physics and combat system: you can train on the loading screen.

Bayonetta has two melee attacks: punch and kick and her guns. The weapons equipped to her hands and/or her feet combined with the games' combo system all lead to some very nutty attack sequences. For instance, putting the shotgun as Bayonetta's kick attack gives you a shotgun stiletto.

Bayonetta -- both the game and the character -- has a lot of parallels to Devil May Cry and Dante. The war between the angels and the witches is similar to the conflict between humans and demons in the DMC games. Like him, she fights with an assortment of melee weapons and firearms and also has extended combo sequences as Dante does. She has a few dodge maneuvers and overall isn't afraid to be showy. Almost as if they both know that they're characters in a video game and want the player to have as much fun as they are at any given time.

But overall, Bayonetta feels like a much more refined game than Devil May Cry, especially in terms of the camera placement and control, and the overall responsiveness of the character. She can transverse walls in a fashion that throws the rules of gravity out the window and turn into a bird and a panther. Cool! Not to mention unlike Dante, sometimes Bayo can pick up temporary weapons such as angel trumpets that shoot out lasers, similar to the katanas and pipes that Cody, Guy and Haggar could pick up in Final Fight. Nonetheless, like Kamiya's previous work, Bayonetta is pretty darn difficult. I assure you that if you're new to the game, you'll be reminded of a shadow remaining cast.

By using the Right Trigger (Default controls on the Xbox 360 version), Bayo performs a dodge maneuver. By pressing it at the absolute last moment as a counterattack against an enemy attack, a projectile or some other impending doom that will deal damage, we entire Witch Time: a John Woo- like state of distorted reality when time slows down. The Witch Time is key to taking down the colossal bosses Bayonetta must conquer and for solving puzzles. Witch Time is the big stand-out mechanic that prevents the game from being mindless. In other 3D action games, sometimes the puzzles seem to exist for the sake of padding out the game. That's I felt about the red orb puzzles during the early portions of DMC1, and it's even worse with the sandblock moving nonsense in God of War. But Bayonetta's puzzles that involve distorting the flow of time are a surprisingly headdy diversion from thrashing bad guys.

Visuals

The cutscenes involving Bayonetta’s past have a bunch of sepia tones to invoke the feeling of an old photograph. That was a nice touch, but aside from that it clearly looked like a game of the time. I’d say the game looked better than Devil May Cry 4 which was it’s action game peer and rival at the time.

Audio

The main battle theme is nice and bouncy. Great to fight and dance to. Several stages have ethereal ambient textures to their music. The sound effects are all fine. The voice acting is great all-around; I love Bayonetta’s British accent!

Replayability

An 8-10 hour campaign gives the game some longevity without making it drag on forever. That’s a good length for a twitchy action game of this type. A good part of the challenge from second and third runs can come from wanting to get better score rankings on stages. (The game has a DMC-esque performance ranking at the end of levels.)

What It Could Have Done Better

My gripes with the game are minor compared to how satisfying it is to play it but here they are:

The cutscenes generally look beautiful.... except for the ones that have a filter on them to make them look like a filmstrip. Those cutscenes are not properly lip-synced like the other ones are. It doesn't look stylish, and even if it somehow did, it doesn't thematically fit with the game. it comes off as lazy. The worst ones are when the cinematic freezes on a character with their mouth open. Oh, it looks so bad! It looks like a turkey looking up collecting water and drowning in its own mouth. I might be more forgiving if all of the game's cinemas were done like that because at least they would have been done consistently.

Some of the finisher moves require mashing buttons and sticks and this can unnecessarily wear out your gamepad buttons and sticks. Unfortunately those segments would set a bad precedent for PlatinumGames as they would go down the well of button mashy shenanigans for finishing attacks and dizzies in Metal Gear Rising, (my only real complaint with that otherwise great game!)

The PS3 version of Bayonetta was outsourced to a different dev team (Nex Entertainment). As a result of being poorly reverse-engineered from the 360 version, it's a monstrosity with long loading times, screen tearing, framedrops, and missing animation. Avoid it at all costs. The Wii U version is as fun as the 360 version and even has some cute outfits to dress Bayo up in: Peach, Daisy, Link and Samus.

The nudity and sexual themes might freak some of the puritans out.

Verdict

Bayonetta came out after Devil May Cry 4 and by some miracles of heaven and hell, was able to surpass the series that it's derived from. It was one of the best original action games the Xbox 360 had to offer and contributed a new fun character to video game culture. Bayonetta is hyperfast, violent, crass, immature, a truly great game… and a lot of fun.

(Me and my brother discuss the game here.)