From Japan, a Lethal Leading Lady
The title character of Sega’s Bayonetta is a beguiling witch who uses spells, martial arts and guns to dispense with her enemies.
Video games are undoubtedly Japan’s most successful and popular cultural export. Television, film, music and most other mass media are usually too closely bound to the particular sensibilities of their country of origin to appeal to a broad global audience, especially in the case of a relatively homogeneous country like Japan.
Related
Trailer: Bayonetta Blog
ArtsBeat
The latest on the arts, coverage of live events, critical reviews, multimedia extravaganzas and much more. Join the discussion.
Bayonetta, developed by Platinum Games and published by Sega, is the work of Hideki Kamiya, who also designed Okami.
By contrast, there is a universality to gaming that transcends cultures and that has allowed Japanese games to find eager audiences around the world. The United States, in particular, is infamously resistant to most popular entertainment from overseas. Yet over the last several decades Americans have demonstrated an affinity for Japanese games that in the category of cultural imports was previously reserved for British rock groups.
In that vein, it is certainly no coincidence that the most famous Japanese game characters, like Mario, Sonic the Hedgehog, Solid Snake (of the Metal Gear series) and Link (of the Legend of Zelda franchise) are not themselves Japanese. And so it is with Bayonetta, heroine of the ridiculously, phantasmagorically brash new hack-and-slash action game from Sega that bears her name.
Imagine Sarah Palin equipped not only with glasses but also with Jennifer Lopez’s posterior poured into a backless black skintight jumpsuit, double-barreled pistols strapped to both hands and both ankles, an angel-munching dragon demon concealed within her topknot and a more spectacular repertory of acrobatic moves than Nadia Comaneci. That’s Bayonetta. Lara Croft should go run and hide in a closet because Bayonetta, the character, is both more alluring and more powerful than any female game lead I can recall.
Likewise, Bayonetta, the game, is more alluring and more powerful than any big-budget game to come out of Japan in recent years. For all of its historical success, Japanese game development has seemed to stagnate lately. But that is certainly not the case with Hideki Kamiya, Bayonetta’s director at the Osaka developer Platinum Games. Mr. Kamiya directed other landmarks in Japanese gaming, including Resident Evil 2 (1998), Devil May Cry (2001) and Okami (2006), and it is clear that the transition to high-definition gaming has provided him with more tools to realize his incredible visions.
It is worth pointing out that Bayonetta was primarily developed on the Microsoft Xbox 360, not the Sony PlayStation 3, and so the 360 version runs much more smoothly than the PS3 version. And with a game like this, if it ain’t smooth, it ain’t fun.
And that, in turn, is because the game is all about some of the most fluid, creative, eye-searingly beautiful combat animation yet created. Bayonetta punches, kicks, shoots, impales, decapitates and otherwise brings the pain with such grace and style that it is as if an otherworldly female Bruce Lee had taken the lead of the Kirov Ballet.
Bayonetta glories and revels in melee combat in a way that American and European games almost never do. Western games can certainly be violent, but even when they are, it is usually in a very functional way: you shoot someone or something, perhaps there’s a big explosion or three, and then the bad guy is dead.
By contrast, Japanese games like Bayonetta fetishize the aesthetics of hand-to-hand violence. (Even with guns, all of the combat in Bayonetta is at close range.) And of course in a video game the laws of physics and the other bases of reality are entirely optional and can be sacrificed readily for the sake of visual appeal.
There is a story somewhere in Bayonetta, but it is not worth even trying to follow. Put simply, hell and heaven are once again going at it, and Bayonetta, as one of the witches of darkness, is out to give those radiant beatific types a smack (or more) in the face. But even when torrents of unintelligible plot exposition are washing over you in the game’s noninteractive cinematic sequences, you can just sit back and marvel at the stunningly rich and kinetic animation.
As for the combat mechanics, Bayonetta has a seemingly unending menu of moves to choose from, using various combinations of just a few buttons on the 360 or PS3 controller. The problem with most melee combat games is that they take themselves far too seriously and end up too difficult for anyone but the most hard-core player. That pitfall is skirted here through an ingeniously scaled range of five difficulty settings — at its easiest levels, Bayonetta can basically be played with one hand — and the provision of an unlimited free-form practice mode.
At a moment when so many games are trying to become more like movies (not necessarily a bad thing), Bayonetta savors its identity as a gamer’s game. Perhaps that is because video games never suffered quite the social stigma in Japan that they did in the United States until recently. Whatever the reason, Bayonetta can take credit for demonstrating that Japanese game development may not be quite as moribund as many players have recently feared.
沒有留言:
張貼留言