Released by Platinum Games in 2009, Bayonetta is the fourth and almost final instalment in my list of games that you can get for cheap and should not even as a gamer, just as a human most definitely play. On its release, Bayonetta was met with almost universal critical acclaim. It holds a 90/100 on Metacritic, and a perfect 40/40 in the notoriously hard to impress Famitsu magazine. Now with a sequel in the works (a Wii-U exclusive, which caused no end of tantrums in my house) and teaser trailers beginning to pop up all over the place, chances are you know who Bayonetta is. How could you not, what with it being raved about by almost every critical outlet four years ago? But with final sales for the game finally resting somewhere around the 1.35 million mark, those same chances indicate that just because you've heard of it, doesn't mean you've played it. And you should. Oh my, how you should. And it's for that reason that I bring to you today my
5 Reasons you should drop what you're doing & play Bayonetta.
5. Challenge
Normally when you talk about challenge, you use it in the sense to describe how hard it is to get from the beginning of a game to the end, but that's not how I'm going to use it here. You see, Bayonetta is a challenge from start to finish even on Normal setting but it's when you decide that you want to collect everything that the game has to offer where the real fun and hard work begin. Now this might turn some of you off, but to see everything the game has to offer in terms of collectables and upgrades, you're going to have to play through it a number of times... on a number of difficulties. I know what you're thinking, playing through the same stuff over and over again with enemies that are only ever so slightly harder than they were the first time, is something tedious enough to have you grab your PlayStation or 360 and throw it through the, probably curtained, window. I don't blame you, I'm much the same, and can probably count on the fingers of one hand how many times I've played a game over and over just so I can claim that ever elusive platinum trophy (inFamous2, Ratchet & Clank: A Crack in Time, Spec Ops: The Line, Devil may Cry, and Dark Souls to name most of a few). There's nothing worse than having to slog through a game again and again only to find that the last difficulty is so ridiculously super-hard that there's no point in even trying. Well let me tell you, the last difficulty of Bayonetta is ridiculously super-hard, but it's never cheap and it's never anything but an absolute pleasure to play... but we'll get to that later. So the challenge in Bayonetta isn't just that it's hard first time over, it's that it gets harder and harder the more you play. And you'll want to play. You'll want to get better. And when eventually you do, you'll be bouncing around, guns a'blazing, like a true Umbran Witch.