Wii U

Bayonetta

I hesitate to put Bayonetta into an official review capacity for the same reason I would never really “review” a fighting game: I don’t know if I am talented enough to review it. Obviously and realistically, I can review it, there is certainly no ordnance placed against me that prevents me to do so, but it would almost feel disingenuous after a certain point. There are elements I feel fully capable of talking about, like technical issues, writing, pacing, controls, themes, style, etc. But, do to my own shortcomings in ability to play video games, I can’t bring myself to fully appreciate the game on functional level since I am incapable of of functioning with the game on that level.

What I’m left with is merely to talk about my experience with Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2, two games I finally had the distinct pleasure of playing courtesy of the Wii U. I had avoided the PS3 version like the plague and actually do own the 360 version, but have no 360 to play it on. Nintendo was wise — or stupid — enough to include the game with the recent release of Bayonetta 2. Let me just start off by saying I have absolutely no idea what I am supposed why NIntendo decided to fund this game, outside of the fact that they didn’t expect the Wii U to bomb as hard as it did.

Are the Bayonetta games hard? They are definitely more difficult than the average hand-holding affair the AAA industry usually brings us in this day and age, but both games, Bayonetta 2 especially, feel as though both came be completed on the hardest initially available difficulty through sheer brute force. I myself can admit to essentially failing certain boss fights that I only ended up completing due to generous checkpoints. But overall I would say a button-masher a bit like myself would be able to make it through the game in a few days no trouble whatsoever.

The real difficulty arises from how the game judges you. Throughout my first playthrough of Bayonetta, I managed to get higher than the lowest rank at the end of a chapter twice. While individual scenarios I could excel in, my overall ranking for the game ended up being the lowest due to my sheer number of deaths at a few particular points. According to the game, I wasn’t good enough in most regards. I imagine getting out of this would require a lot more effort than I am willing to put in with so many more games to play. Bayonetta 2 felt far more lenient in this regard, as my lowest scoring medal was silver rather than bronze, though this felt like a condescending complement in the eyes of the game, as the “Stone” award had merely been renamed “Silver.”

In the case of the game’s mechanics, all feedback both games have given me is that I am woefully undeserving of passing judgment upon them. That’s not true, but who am I to judge a game when I can barely grasp its many intricacies to adequately proceed through it with acceptable prowess?

All I can say in response is this: Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 are fun games, inexorably so. Bayonetta places itself in between Devil May Cry and God of War — though far closer to Devil May Cry — between high-level action combat and visually stunning set pieces. One does not need a Masters in frame-perfect execution to know the game plays fast and fluidly, at least when no slowdown is present, something far more prevalent in Bayonetta 2 (I feel this is testament enough to Nintendo’s abilities as a developer that it is not the Wii U that is capable of 1080p/60fps with so few technical issues but the teams making the games for them). While I feel the combat is a bit too reliant on the dodge button and “Witch Time”, a slow-motion period achieved by dodging at the appropriate moment, but long, extended combos feel good to pull off.

Hell, even the cast is fun. I was somewhat dreading Bayonetta as a character in all her blatant, unfiltered brashness. Let’s just say I like sexy but not lazy. But Bayonetta herself is fantastic. She straddles (sometimes literally) the line between confidence, class, and crudeness usually in the most comedic fashion possible, dragging behind her a plethora of caricatures to talk down to in between kicking angels in the face. Every other aspect is just too stupid to take seriously. Much noise has been made of Bayonetta’s inhuman proportions but seeing her in Nintendo costumes really puts that into perspective. I had to turn them all off as soon as possible when they just looked wrong. The story is ignorable at best, a collection of meaningless scenes where Bayonetta irreverently talks back to beings a hundred times her size before beating them up. And why not? I can count the number of times Bayonetta actually felt threatened or in danger outside of gameplay on a single hand.

The only downsides to the game I can come up with are twofold. First, extended rail shooter sequences, usually leading up to a major boss, that take way to long and are not fun to play in the slightest. The second game rightly cut down on these scenes, but the second game feels like a step back from he first game in some ways. While a tighter experience overall, Bayonetta 2 just feels like a smaller game in every sense, similar to the change from Mass Effect to Mass Effect 2. It’s a shorter game and the ending lacks the over-the-top silliness of its predecessor. The only noticeable addition is Umbra Climax, which let’s you spend a full magic meter to superpower your attacks that manifest as giant hair attacks. And while this may spice up the core gameplay in ways I didn’t discover, for me it was just a time to get some free damage in.

But these are all minor complaints in what is truly a revitalizing experience in modern game space: a big-budget bout of style and insanity that does not care about what other people think about it.

Zombi U is a genuinely fun survival game ruined by a horrendously designed final act.

When the time came to man up and finally buy the Wii U I didn’t exactly do it with trepidation. Mario Kart 8 earlier that year had assuaged my fears some and the promise of Bayonetta 2 by the end of the year and the new Smash Bros. soon after made me feel a lot better about the decision. But ignoring the big Mario Kart release and the bundled New Super Mario Bros., there were a few things already released for the Wii U that tickled my fancy. One being the Wonderful 101, which I will get to in good time, and Zombi U, dull sounding game whose very title was a bad pun in the vein of a Nintendo 64 release.

But I remember at the Wii U’s launch the only game I was truly interested in was Zombi U. It was a game designed from the ground up with the Wii U in mind, meant to take advantage of the U’s exclusive features. While a lot of these end up meaningless (even detrimental), the truth is that Zombi U is a solid enough game in it’s own right to completely overcome the worthless gimmicks attached to it.

Zombi U takes place in London just after a recent zombie outbreak. Don’t stop reading just yet, I know zombies were way past their cultural goodwill years before this game’s release, but bear with me here. You play as a random survivor, given nothing but a name and profession, who stumbles upon a safe house and starts taking orders from a man named Prepper, who just wants to help you survive. And from there the game just starts. It’s not quite S.T.A.L.K.E.R. in it’s initial difficulty curve, but it did feel a good to play a game that let’s you figure things out for yourself.

Armed with a cricket bat, you make your way out into a fairly linear but branching enough version of London that invites you to explore, with caution, the wastelands left behind. Sewer holes make for fast travel connecting points and once you get a lay for the land it isn’t too hard to keep track of. You won’t find other survivors wandering the streets, just zombies.

This highlights the greatest use of the game’s setting. When the character you start as dies, they are turned into a zombie. You then respawn as an entirely new person with the same mission but with just the basic starting items. All the gear you’ve collected is still on the now reanimated corpse of your previous character. To get it back, you’ll have to kill that character, who stays near the place you died last time. Much like the Souls series, this adds a high cost to death and makes you extra careful about every action you take. It puts you at just the right level of unease that gives the whole game an unsettling feeling.

But when I say this game is about survival, I mean more in the general sense than in the zombie apocalyptic sense. Supplies are mostly scarce (Apparently the people of London subsist solely off of road flares) and even the act of opening a menu or scavenging a corpse doesn’t pause the game. Much like S.T.A.L.K.E.R., you have to wait until you find a safe place to pull out your backpack or to search a cupboard. This is actually one of the games less annoying gimmicks, as inventory is managed entirely through the Wii U’s gamepad, whereas the real time action never stops on your TV.

It sounds ingenious at first but most of the time it just becomes a minor distraction. The lockpicking minigame? Sure, throw it on the gamepad. Entering the number on a keypad? There have been worse ideas. Tapping the manhole cover of a sewer a few times to open it? Like that one. Tapping a board a few times to remove it from a door? How about I just press a button and it gets removed.

Despite being designed for the Wii U in particular, the developers never really found anything to do with the game pad that couldn’t have been accomplished without it, save for the inventory schtick. But most of these parts of the game are harmless. No, what really kills the game for me is just how badly the finale of the game plays out.

In fairness, the game does warn you: This is the final segment of Zombi U, you will not be able to go back from this point. So I go for it. In short, I have to go run to a specific place, then to another, collect a thing, run to another, run back to the safe house, and then try and escape through one more location. So I run to the first place, no problem. Make it to the second place where this time the number of zombies, which has increased dramatically, finally downs me. Okay, just got to make it back to that point.

I try to fast travel to the nearest location except all my shortcuts had been sealed up. Who the hell did that? Now I have to run my way back through everything I had just gone through, this time without my best suppliers, which are still on my corpse. It turns out I could reopen the shortcuts, but I didn’t even know they had been taken out in the first place.

Needless to say, I died and lost all of my most valuable supplies. I ended up beating the game with the leftovers I had in a stash and sheer gumption. I’ll admit, there is definitely player error at fault here, but what was supposed to be an intense fight for rescue turned into an absolute droll as I repeatedly walked through the same empty areas over and over again until I reached the locations I needed to, at which point the zombie count would be higher than ever before.

The ending definitely put a damper on my spirits for the game, but I had a lot of fun with it overall. I just have second thoughts about replaying it now. Though the game’s hardcore mode is tempting…