Bayonetta, a recent hit game from Sega, doesn’t make much sense. If it had lived up to its initial promise, once resembling a Japanese satire of Western culture, its gonzo presentation might’ve been a good match for the silly, visceral premise: Control a superwoman who can punch and kick everything she sees to death.
The game opens with a British-accented woman in Tina Fey specs who proves to be a magic witch, wielding her sexuality to kill an army of angels. Um? I tried suspending my snark to see where they were going with this—perhaps laying down a broad, anti-Westernization stance through the game’s weird characters and pseudo-New York scenarios. But as I’d suspected, the game devolves into feminine exploitation and little else.
In her first battle (skip five minutes into that vid), Bayonetta has a nun outfit shredded off by her foes—amidst moans with every slice of cotton, no less—and then, with a new, skin-tight outfit, she kills ‘em while the camera pans in slow motion over zooms of her chest, her legs spreading slowly, and her bent-over pause, looking backward at the camera. A pole shows up in the battlefield for no purpose other than to allow her to pose against it as she fights. Seconds later, a lollipop is thrown her way, which she takes a moment to insert in her mouth with a lick and a moan of delight before fighting again.
That’s not to mention her assistant in the game, a large salesman who occasionally suggests that she visits his shop just so he can sleep with her, or the gimmick in which “special” moves transform Bayonetta’s clothes into a beast while she stands passively, strategically covering her body with her long hair.
Seemingly, nobody in the games world cares about this. The locals at Penny Arcade, after joking about Bayonetta’s breasts, shrugged their shoulders and deferred to games writer Leigh Alexander, who copped out by saying since she wasn’t offended, well, nobody should be:
The title character uses the mantle of her sexuality as a power source. Between Bayonetta and her equally fierce rival, Jeane, it’s a women’s world—the boys just play in it.
Actually, from my experience, the boys get to sit back and watch with amusement as the camera goes to town. Sega’s game could’ve gone so far as to let its lead character take command as a sado-masochistic top, but Bayonetta, behind its flash and supposed sex appeal, proves itself the feminine game industry’s bottom. What happened, Sega? How many women do you have in your board rooms in Japan and America signing off on this stuff? Anywhere near 40 percent, to reflect the male-female split of current game players?
I like an ass-kicking leading lady as much as the next guy (case in point: 2003′s Beyond Good & Evil), but that’s not Bayonetta‘s racket; to that point, I’ve yet to see a game parade its male heroes around the same way. Find me a game in which its closing sequence is a four-minute dance full of male characters shoving their virtual bits into the camera, and then we’ll talk.
