Punch Kick Pause Punch Sunday, January 17, 2010

To play this game in front of any human being over the age of 12-- indeed, just to play it in front of yourself-- is to develop a sense that something has gone horribly wrong with your recreation. This choice of leisure bespeaks some profound defect in your makeup. That niggling thought that shadows much of our play...is amplified to the point of palpable shame by Bayonetta's relentless barrage of steaming tawdry nonsense.

So begins Iroquois Pliskin's recent post about Bayonetta, which ends:

You cannot pass up this game for its visual and thematic inanity. The libretto for your average operatic masterpiece is some genuinely nonsense, and this does nothing to obscure the beauty of the music that is its rationale. As Frank Lantz astutely noted, games are more music than cinema. Let the music take your mind.

Unbridled admiration combined with mouth-watering disgust of just this sort seems to pretty much sum up what people have been writing about this game. As for me, I am truly enjoying the smooth, unapologetic, and nearly-mechanical videogaminess of this title. Its self-awarness is of itself as a Video Game, and not as a Video Game attempting to be something else.