Review: Bayonetta, a misogynist's wet dream

I use as much tongue in cheek in the title of this review as Sega did when developing Bayonetta. However, there is a bit of truth to the title when you get down to the bare essentials of the latest Devil May Cry knockoff.

Bayonetta (which I played on the Xbox 360) is a mixed bag for me. The game excels at providing players with a solid combat mechanic. There are a ton of combos to utilize, making combat fun, engaging and a challenge. The art style is fantastic. The gothic design of the bosses are some of the best that I've seen in a long time. Each fight felt larger than the screen and made for a real tight sense of accomplishment when I was able to take down one of these divine creatures.

However, the pros ends there.

Bayonetta is the only game I have ever played that when I finished it, I still had no idea what the game was about. Something about angels fighting witches as a means to control a balance of... blah, blah, blah. The story and cinematics are as trite as it gets. Most of the time, I wanted to skip the cinematics just so I could get to the good part of the game, the combat, but I wanted to try to understand the game. Turns out that I still don't understand it. The cinematics, especially near the end, tend to drag on for much longer than they need to. The story sucks. There's no need to have cutscenes that are more than 5 minutes long if the story is balls.

The music is another part of the game which was a let down. There's nothing that says blasphemy like taking Bart Howard's "Fly Me to the Moon" — popularized by Frank Sinatra — and remixing it with J-pop. It's atrocious and a musical train wreck. In fact, all of the music wreaks of bad cheese.

But maybe that's the point of Bayonetta. Maybe it's supposed to be "bad." Then again, by how much story the game was attempting to cram down my throat near the end, I'm stuck thinking that Sega thought they were actually making a serious game here.

Now, let's get to the misogyny. I'm not one to throw that word around a lot. For instance, lots of people like to read into Bladerunner as a misogynistic text. Not, I. However, Bayonetta is dripping with the afterthought of some developer's wet dream towards librarians with giraffe necks.

If it's not her constant stripper dancing as she spreads her legs, or her bending over showing her ass, or the way she can pick up an enemy's spear and use it as a stripper pole, or the way her infernal hair demons force her to shed most of her clothes, then Sega makes sure you understand what Bayonetta truly represents with her dancing on a pole during the credits. Make no mistake, this is juvenile at best.

There is a difference between showing a woman proud and confident and showing the male fantasy of a proud confident woman. Chloe in last year's Uncharted 2 is a proud confident woman. She's appealing, but her looks and mannerisms do not overshadow her character. Unlike Bayonetta, which is also appealing, but about as deep as a petri tray. And that's being generous. She isn't real. She's a wet dream.

Now, I'm not going to say that Bayonetta doesn't have a place in the video game industry. If every other entertainment medium gets off on objectifying women with misogynistic representations, then why should video games be any different? I'd like to think that Sega was pulling a Suda 51 by developing a game built on satire, but I doubt that's the case.

The worst part of all of this is that Bayonetta is an extremely fun game to play. It's just a shame that a game with such an engaging combat mechanic is filled with characters and a story that you would find etched in the door of a men's public toilet.

Take it away, Yahtzee: