Just because you can make a game harder, doesn’t mean you should.
The very first major fight of Bayonetta – not the introductory one in the graveyard, but the one featured in the demos — is incredible. You simultaneously fight many enemies of varying size, strength, and attack speed. As a good deal of these enemies don’t have very much HP, the battle has an immensely satisfying rhythm to it: you use area attacks or brutal directed assaults to kill one or two guys, quickly dodge an attack from a larger guy (hopefully activating witch time), and eventually work your way up to the most powerful dude in the room.
The moment-to-moment gameplay is satisfying not just because of the ridiculous attack animations, but thanks to the fact that you’re given the opportunity to lace together brilliant and brutal combos with some degree of relative ease. The demo fight is easy, yes, but it’s also flashy and well-paced and smooth. At one point, I chained together three kills in ten seconds, the last of which was a torture kill. Magnificent.
A few hours later, however, things get less awesome.
From what I can tell (again, I haven’t completely finished yet), Bayonetta quickly replaces “kill a shitload of fairly weak dudes while trying to keep an eye out for their attacks” with “kill two or three really powerful dudes whose attacks are so quick as to require constant spamming of the dodge button, lest your combo be interrupted.” I’m sick of fighting those little lion-angel things, and those assholes with the electric gloves. Unlike the grunt angels, they’re just not individually satisfying to kill; they take too much damage, deliver too much damage (especially for a game where healing items must be purchased before a mission), and attack far too fast.
The defensive, ready-for-a-condescending-retort-from-a-guy-who-completed-Demon’s-Souls-three-times blogger in me wants to say that it’s not simply a matter of the game becoming too hard to be fun; it’s a matter of the game doing everything it can to prevent you from experiencing its best aspects. The difficulty wasn’t what made Bayonetta so incredibly alluring in that first hour — it was the comboing, and the constant enemy death, and the fluidity of her attacks. In its attempt to keep the game varied and challenging, Bayonetta obliterates the player’s ability to do the very things that make the game fun.
And yeah, I could change the game to the “press Y to win everything” mode, but that would suck all enjoyability out of completing the combos in the first place. It would also, undeniably, be pussy shit.
I am the first commenter to your blog. I think. That somehow makes me special.
Bayonetta is definitely hard, but I like to see it as something that simply needs practice and refining. You’ll collect weapons later on that diversify the combos you can put into your attacks, making the game much more fun.
I’m not that great at games myself. I have Demon’s Souls, and it sits on my shelf, constantly intimidating me. But I still have to give these difficult games the time I think it deserves.
Testing testing, one two.
I am the first commenter to swear on heyash.com right about….
Nah. That ain’t classy. Wait, what am I talking about? You just ended an article with “pussy shit”. For that, I commend you.
Journalize away, my friend. And let Papa Burch do some writing!
If you spend some time dodging them you learn to anticipate their movements. The game certainly gives you a load of tools to dispatch your enemies, but you have to use them all too. You need to use witch time, you need to use torture attacks, and you need to use magic attacks; and you can concoct your own healing items. All Japanese beat ‘em ups are like this. Just like bullet hell-games, they want you to learn patterns. Here, the patterns are enemy behavior. I mean, the game actually wants you to play through levels without being touched a single time. Kamiya himself has a blog post on IGN where he pimps shots of ‘pure platinum’ scores from the demo. They didn’t make this game with their top-tier fanboys in mind. There’s a long, long learning curve, so that there’s always room for you to get better, but you need to get into the right mind-set, and not fall for the mindless mashing as soon as you see an opening. If it’s just about the enemies having too much health and dealing too much damage, then why don’t you play on easy?
Ninja Gaiden, Devil May Cry, they all follow the same Japanese eat-your-quarters philosophy. They give you a gameplay experience than is pretty different from western games, and I think that fills a niche. A friend of mine calls them “archaic”, and I suppose there’s something to that. Japanese games are always getting shit about how they’ve stagnated, but at least you always have a range of games alternative to what you usually play. You get a real challenge, and real satisfaction. I’m kinda tired of the hand-holding of western-world games. God of War’s mashy controls really don’t give you the feeling of being a badass if you ask me. The link between beating your enemies and pushing buttons seems to arbitrary. I mean, come on, the game lets you kill an enemy with a grab attack, and you just end up not using it because it gets too easy, and boring. So you make the game harder than it is by not using it. There’s something wrong with that. I think that’s why I think God of War is such an overrated game. It’s mainly production values that are lauded, and not the core gameplay. Western games are too into production values and art design. They want to deliver so much spectacle. They forget that the gamer is the one who’s supposed to be awesome, not the game itself. I don’t want to go, ‘wow, that looks cool’, I want to go ‘wow, I can’t believe I managed that’. That’s why so many Capcom games give you detailed stats of your performance, while the end of stage 5 in whichever western game just reads ‘stage 6′ or ‘the end’.
In the end, the Japanese beat ‘em up is a genre unto itself. I don’t think anyone should be surprised by the punishing difficulty. You’re supposed to overcome it, and then feel like a master when you constantly get better and eventually start to run circles around your opponents; and it’s not because the game lets you, it’s because you’re such a fucking badass!
Well hello Burches, and congrats on getting the site up. Now I suppose a glorious new era has arrived or something. Let’s get to it.
And Ashly better write stuff on here as well, or I will be oh so disappointed.
I can’t help but think this blog space is just another extension of rev ranting or the Doctor Who circle jerk. That was my mean part, we’re online after all.
The relevant crap I should say about your post here:
I never thought it was fun to kill anything at the end stages of any video game. I feel like devs basically shit on all the fun by the time they have to make the last two hours of a game. Seriously, play any beat-em-up, any Zelda, any hack n’ slash, shmup, or RPG; and realize that its not fun anymore, its just unnecessarily and/or irritatingly difficult to make you feel like your balls just jumped a burning hurdle. I feel like at the end of damn-near any adventure, no ones happy anymore and here’s a big 5-form changing octopus to make us feel like we accomplished something epic.
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Just wanted to say HeLLo to your new blog!
You can turn off the auto-combo on easy mode. It is an accessory that is equipped.
I was doing well in this game until I came across two sets of those fire/lightning claw dudes on a staircase. Now, I only beat Demon’s Souls once but I just can’t get past this part in the game. I’m about to plug back in here and have another go, but last night I felt like a retard for not being able to get past it.
I honestly could not agree more with this blog post. I must’ve played the demo at least ten times over, it was that fun. all the parts where you didn’t have to fight more than one really heavily armoured enemy at a time or have to play through a platforming section entirely in the cat form where great fun; easily some of the most fun I’ve had in gaming in a while in fact.
if there’s more of these posts on here then I will definitely be returning. :] is ash posting though? that could be really interesting.
It took me like 10 seconds to read and understand your title font.
Yeah, Jim has that effect on people’s impressions of Bayonetta-related news.
Pussy shit, Anthony. Pussy shit.
By the way, I was the first to comment a month ago when I secretly discovered the URL to this blog and commented on the first Word Press entry.
Likewise, I found the URL to the Word Press blog a while ago, but didn’t say anything. I liked the original site, too.
But seriously, great article, and loving the new site.
Congrats on the site being up.
I will say that the upgrades you’re later able to buy, I think after Chapter 5, do go some ways to alleviate a lot of frustration. The bat one specifically. Witch time does become harder to pull off because it does tend to be a complete game changer, so being activated with a high degree of success is a little too overpowering.
That said I’d have to agree with the need for more periods where you fight a large array of weaker enemies before tackling larger one larger foe. The game doesn’t often let you think to yourself ‘Ah, these guys again’, rather it constantly introduces newer bastards that you simply don’t know how to fight yet and will therefore beat your ass until you somehow learn them. Seriously, those lions can go eat a dick.
Congrats on the site though. Can we expect similar sort of half-rants/opinions from Ash too?
I never thought about it that way, but you’re so right. The only thing that saved it for me at the end was all the boss battles. The final one with Jeanne is a personal highlight, even though I had to suffer the way to long missile mini-game to get to that fight.
A comment a while back sure sounded like scolding Anthony for complaining about the game simply being too hard. I don’t know about you but I was almost sure he was rather complaining about the difficulty interfering with what made the core gameplay so great. Just thought I’d say that.
Personally I’ve never played Bayonetta and quite frankly, know little about it, and actually the closest I’ve ever gotten to fun melee combat outside of Star Ocean (which was too serious for the fun,) was the old Xbox gem, Unreal Championship. I guess it was because you were Supposed to die in that game so really, there was no consequences and if the other team won you could just laugh it off.
On the difficult side of things, I guess this is why I just prefer shooters. Who cares about your exact route you take while flanking somebody; if you’re a quick and good enough shot, you can bypass the small strategical things.
WOW! I never felt how you felt while playing Bayonetta Anthony. Bayonetta was pretty much a cake walk for me and was playing before the PS3 patch came along. Got the platinum before the patch as well. If you really want a challenge unlock Jeanne as a playable character. Playing as Jeanne is only for the masochist gamer. lol