[Every so often, I play a game where I bleed inside from the amount of awesome that meshes with a bunch of horror stories. Bayonetta is my most recent. It's a game that I have a lot of fun with, but I also have a lot of complaints. They are as follows]


[First of all, what are your heavy and regular hits on a hack and slash? Square and Triangle? Correct, but not on this game. No, instead they decided to put heavy hit on circle, and regular on triangle, putting your 'specials' to square. Ass backwards for most people. Well, fear not! You can change the button scheme....er....did I say you could change it? What I mean was the game does NOT allow you to change it. You have to suffer through horrid controls]

[Okay, so, no individuality. It can't be all bad, right? Well, your camera follows you when you jump. I mean, it FOLLOWS you. Not a problem unless you're fighting enemies, during which, you lose sight of them and uh...what's that word? Oh yeah, the ground. So let's say you wanna clear a gap or you're fighting on rough terrain [such as lava pocket filled battlefields] you cannot see where is a good place to land]

[In this game, you are encouraged to master the battle system. Did I say encouraged? My bad. You are forced. Because if you do not master the battle system, you will not win. It doesn't help that the battle system is flawed. For instance, you might need to point left with the stick and hit triangle. This has to be done perfectly. The game even has a 'training' room during loading screens to practice your moves. I still can't hit left triangle by itself most of the time. That's pretty bad. Now, should you get hit...er....don't. In Bayonetta, you must learn to never get hit. If you don't, well, there's some enemies that can't be beaten otherwise. You see, some enemies cannot be approached [some are on fire, for example, and cause you damage on contact] or cannot simply be harmed very much, unless you dodge an attack, which slows time and allows you to damage them without harm to yourself. I played this game on normal. Not hard. Not very hard. It wasn't long into the game before I was getting killed left and right. While I don't expect normal to be a walk in the park, it shouldn't require a mastery of the battle system or require that I dodge everything]

[One final nail in the coffin is the exploration. You cannot really explore frames as often as you want, and you are often shut away from previous frames as doors close behind you and bricks seal you inside of narrow halls. You can come across 2 different paths, and if you pick the right one first, you're gonna get closed in, locking you away from whatever secret you might have found]

[For all the bad, there's some good to this game. It makes you wanna play it. The art style is very nice. The story is kinda cool, and the battle system, while highly flawed, could have been something really great, and it was unique, if nothing else. The game's cutscenes, around 1/3 of them, are not even fully animated!!! No, seriously. I can tell this was a game where SEGA's douche baggery came into play, cutting the game development time in half or something. There was a lot to this game that SCREAMS that it was unfinished work, like they suddenly stopped working and put it out. FOR FUCKS SAKE! We have ENOUGH evil companies out there. It sucks that, as of the last two years, I have had to add SEGA to that list. Fuck you SEGA, fuck you Namco Bandai, fuck you Capcom, and fuck you Activision. You guys are like poison, spreading death and disease on everything you fucking touch. Are you making a game for Activision? If you are, your game will be out within 12 months, finished or not. That's what Activision does. And with rumors going around that they bought Take Two games, there's a whole lot of great developers that will now have to scrap great games they were making, and scrap tons of ideas because they can't finish it in 12 months.]

[Overall, Bayonetta is a roller coaster that was an epic and unique design, but is missing a few feet of tracking. I have even more distrust of anything that bears the SEGA name on it. Fuck you SEGA. Fuck you] -AT9-