I finished Bayonetta over this past weekend and I have to admit I did so more out of the Bayonetta’s attractiveness than it was a real desire to continue to play the game.
(To my credit, I was rewarded with a couple minutes of Bayonetta pole dancing during the closing credits so I didn’t feel really cheated for having spent a couple hours playing through to the end.)
After I was done and getting it ready to go back to Gamefly, the unhappiness that I felt growing over the last half of the game really began to crystallize in my mind: there was a lot of the game that just wasn’t fun and that’s how I’ve always felt with just about any game that I’ve played that’s originated from Japan.
To be clear, it’s not that I’m saying the Japanese are bad game designers at all – I believe that it’s just that they design games for their own enjoyment and not necessarily that of the gamer. With Japanese games, I’ve often felt that the designers were more focused on achieving their design goals and whether or not the player found the final product fun was a secondary or tertiary concern.
While I can appreciate such a rarified worldview and admire such single-mindedness on a certain level, it doesn’t make for an enjoyable game if what you find fun doesn’t mesh with the designer’s point of view.
The vehicle-based instances in the game – the motorcycle and rocket sequences sprinkled throughout – brought the game to a screeching halt for me. Just not fun.
Having bosses that were basically unbeatable – Jeanne, take a bow – without turning the difficulty down to Easy just aren’t fun.
Horribly placed save points that force you to play through ten minutes of a boring rocket sequence just so you can bang your head against trying to beat Jeanne for the umpteenth time just aren’t fun.
Bayonetta’s a fun game for awhile and then becomes a slog through game design that seems to exist only to frustrate. I’m not going to stomp my feet and say that I, as the gamer, should be catered to, but I can tell when a designer is expecting me to find their game fun just because they’re the ones who designed it. It’s not going to happen.
In spite of all this, one of my initial thoughts about Bayonetta remains unchanged – she is a seriously, seriously bangable hottie.
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