Roughly a month ago I decided to do something crazy and buy myself an XBox 360. This turned out to be a horrible mistake financially, but such is the curse of hindsight. Or the lack of being able to tell the future, one of those. There isn’t much I can do about it though, so no reason whining. So I have a 360 now, and this is the first console I’ve ever purchased for myself. I was rather spoiled on consoles as a kid, they were always my big gifts around the holidays. I’ve had an NES, the old brick Game Boy, a Sega Genesis (as well as a 32x and a Nomad), a SNES, a Sega Saturn, a Playstation, a Playstation 2, and that was the end of my console legacy. I got my first computer during the PS2 era, and that killed any drive I may have had to buy other consoles. I think StarCraft singlehandedly made me a PC gamer.

So why did I slip back into my console gaming ways for a 360? One word: Bayonetta. I was slowly coming to realize there was a void in my heart that the PC couldn’t sufficiently fill. I needed to play an action game and I needed to play one bad. Back when my PS2 was still my favorite toy, I put countless hours into the Devil May Cry series and the God of War games, not to mention Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors of various flavors. I could play shooters and RTSes and RPGs all I wanted on the PC, but I couldn’t play the really badass high-impact action games I used to love so much. There was something missing from my life, and I just happened to realize it just before Bayonetta‘s release date. It had to be mine. So it was!

Bayonetta was awesome as far as combat goes. It was, essentially, the height of Devil May Cry‘s combat distilled and refined. It wasn’t as complex as DMC, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing in the context of the game. You were a saucy witch out to beat up angels. That was the entire point of the game. Combat being fast, simple and rewarding was a good thing. Any additional complexity would’ve taken away from the combat pacing, I think. To say it fulfilled my need for a badass action game is an understatement. It was fantastic.

The game isn’t without its flaws, though. Much like Devil May Cry, they tried very hard to build a story around the action, but the formula they used didn’t really work here. The narrative was shallow and made little sense, much of the dialogue took place during weird storyboard sequences, and there was way too much talking going on for a game about kicking angel ass. They failed to make me give one shit about anybody in the game besides Bayonetta’s more attractive (but unfortunately less bootylicious) counterpart, Jeanne. The load times were also horrific, I was honestly grinding gold in World of Warcraft between scenes in Bayonetta. The loading screens had a neat feature where you could try out combo moves in a black void while you wait, but you can only do that for so long before you realize you’re throwing high kicks into nothingness for no gain and no purpose. It was a pain.

Bayonetta was a gratuitous action game and the combat sequences never, ever pretend to be more than that, so it struck me as odd that they tried so hard to string together a tragic story throughout. Can’t a witchy temptress* that summons demons out of her own hair (which is also her clothes) beat up angels just for the hell of it? Seems simple enough to me!

The quicktime events were also something of a bother at times. Most of the time you could see them coming, and pushing Triangle to jump off of an exploding platform at the last second wasn’t a big deal. Other times it was just damn unfair. When you’re in the middle of a very zen moment of asskicking and suddenly it goes WHOASHITPUSHTRIANGLETODODGETHISFLYINGBUILDING while giving you barely a second to hit the button… it’s very enraging. Dying to something like that made me more angry than I want to admit. These moments were few and far between, however.

I highly recommend the game if you do like action games. Don’t expect much depth, it’s not an epic tale of good versus evil or anything like that. It’s over the top action with a strong, sexpot main character. Buy the game, kill some angels, relish in it. It’s all that matters.

A Bayonetta/Devil May Cry crossover is on my list of things that absolutely must exist before I die.