While playing a little bit of Bayonetta I decided, what the hell, why not Pure Platinum the game? I'm not a huge fan of the scoring system in Bayonetta, but the core gameplay is fun enough that a rank run could be amusing.
Figured I'd be best served with sandwiching the bad levels (i.e. boss levels not involving a "Father") in between good ones, so as not to make for a run-killing situation like DMC1's Mission 22, which should have descriptor text of "Abandon all fun ye who enter here".
Opened up with Chapter 1, Chapter 2, and Chapter 5.
The first Chapter can be surprisingly difficult, if only because many of the fights include Joys, which love to throw out Stingers Stilettos and whip attacks with little-to-no warning. Given that this is a Pure Platinum run, one hit, no matter how minor, will void the entire run. That means Joys can be a real pain, especially when the combo point quotas are somewhat strict, forcing one to fight them with pickup items, or actually build up a sizeable combo before unleashing "The Horse" (one of the strangest attacks in an already off-kilter game) on them. The rest of the chapter, save one verse, is none-too-difficult to Pure Platinum if you know what to do. That one verse, the big brawl in the courtyard, is mostly a challenge due to combo point quota.
See, Bayonetta, like Devil May Cry, gives incentives to players to perform long combo strings in order to achieve a better score/rank, but in a different manner. Devil May Cry rewards the player for building up the style meter quickly and then fighting as much of the battle at it's height as possible to rack up the most points or maintain a high Stylish Hit Average (depending upon what installment in the series one is playing). Bayonetta wants the player to keep combos going as long as possible, with very little concern for efficiency or variety. In fact, the player is often punished for making use of certain tools, namely powerful attacks, because they carry an extremely low points/damage ratio (besides one technique that's likely unintentional). Dropping Durga bombs or unleashing Iai-Jutsu slashes can take some skill in frenetic combats, but will absolutely murder combo score as they kill enemies too quickly to milk the optimal amount of points from them. Devil May Cry sidestepped this with the style meter, as heavy techniques (Real Impact, DTEs, etc.) rocketed the meter upwards, or built up a lot of points; things were a bit better balanced.
The upshot of all this is that some fights need to be drawn out a bit longer than one may like...fights like the Chapter 1 courtyard brawl. It's not too bad here, because most of the enemies can be easily juggled, and aerial wankery is funfunfun in Bayonetta (like DMC3, but much easier to do and more fluid). But in other verses, it can be a little annoying, often requiring a change in tactics or liberal use of the Gaze of Despair (enraged enemies yield more points on hit, and the Gaze enrages all enemies at the cost of an accessory slot).
Chapter 2 and Chapter 5 are fun enough, but spark a trend that will pretty much continue through the rest of Bayonetta and onwards through all of Platinum's games...Chapters/Missions are too damn long, especially for single segment score runs. Doing eleven-plus verses perfectly, which translates to about 18 minutes of in-combat playtime (not counting any other stage factors, like platforming or puzzles), is a daunting task. Missions in Devil May Cry were a lot shorter, with a few outliers of 15 minutes or so, and most only tasked the player with completing around five combat encounters. Getting SS ranks or Special Bonuses demanded sustained execution, but there was an upper limit; you weren't going to lose a 25+ minute run due to one slip up, because run times never bloated that much; the games only asked so much of the player. Bayonetta (and Metal Gear Rising) "solve" this problem by doling out frequent checkpoints, that essentially allow players to segment runs, solving one verse/encounter at a time.
With a certain skill level, success is inevitable. It kind of takes away from the experience, but doing things "fairly" (i.e. single segment) would be completely absurd and anti-fun. Compounding this problem is that the ranking below Pure Platinum, regular old Platinum, is absurdly easy to achieve single segment because of the way ranking is calculated; all verses have equal weighting on the overall award, allowing players to tank on the few hard encounters, earning "bad" ranks like Gold/Silver, but completely make it up with some of the "free" (Pure) Platinums doled out in easy verses. Devil May Cry had a bit less of an absurd gap between S-ranks and Special Bonuses or SS-ranks. Regular S-ranks were reasonably difficult, and rewarding in their own right to pursue, and higher marks were more difficult, but not astronomically so.
Whatever, though, just sperging 'bout akshun scoring systems. At least these levels were fun. Unlike the boss levels. These...these are pretty poor.
Bosses in Bayonetta tend to be designed for spectacle first and depth second. They're BIGHUEG! beings that make for titanic tussles in core systems that aren't well suited to this scale of battle. Bayonetta, like most akshun games of this sort, are designed around fighting foes more one's own size, with Godzilla-sized foes requiring all the usual conceits: convenient platforms, enemy techniques that leave the foe incredibly vulnerable for a set amount of frames, platforming sections, conspicuous weakpoints, and QTEs/mashing sections to progress the fight at specific times.
And while I guess it's cool to have fights where the player character takes apart enormous angelic beings, piece by piece, it's not so fun the second, third, or nth time around...bad in a genre that thrives on re-playability. Dismantling bosses also makes for extremely linear, formulaic fights, and offers little room to change up the fight or take it in a different direction. There's a lot of ways one can fight something like DMC3's Beowulf, Agni&Rudra, or even "bad" bosses like Gigapede or Geryon. But taking on a Cardinal Virtue (or Jooby) in Bayonetta always takes the same path. Dodge attacks, punish, QTE/climax, dodge attacks, punish, QTE/climax, enter phase two, dodge attacks, punish, climax attack for the win. That's Fortitudo, Temperantia, and (sort of) Sapentia. Iustia doesn't even have a phase two, merely repeating the same process a third time to cap off a dreadfully boring fight.
Running for score further reduces credited lines of play in these boss fights. Now only certain attack and routes will suffice to make time limits and point quotas. At the very least, most of these runs are pretty easy, and not too long. Well, save two very...*special* chapters: Isla Del Sol and the Epilogue.
The Epilogue has the longest boss fight in the game, a 12+ minute slog, bracketed by some gimmick sections (motorcycle shenanigans, verses during the credits, punching a demiurge thingy into the sun). Haven't had the "pleasure" of doing this yet, and not entirely looking forward to it. Kamiya just loves to make ball-busting final bosses.
Isla Del Sol, though, been there...done that. The first half is the typical half-baked shmup section that pervades almost every Hideki Kamiya game, with a horrible perspective that makes it difficult to see enemies, projectiles, and even where your character is aiming alongside some seriously archaic controls; I get that it's supposed to be a reference to an old Sega game, but certainly some modern conveniences could be implemented, like not having to mash for a faster rate-of-fire, or a dodge move that isn't going to induce motion sickness (and even completely disorient those immune to such a malady).
And these 15 minutes of bad shmupin' (broken up into only two verses) happen to have relatively stringent scoring requirements that force players to actually be decent at the minigame, even moreso if Super-Secret-Tech™ isn't employed (the Eternal Testimony accessory for unlimited homing missiles). At least it's possible to switch off inverted flight control in the options menu...one of the rare times in a Kamiya game where players can actually remap any controls.
Clearing these sections doesn't mean one is out of the woods. Oh no, the fun's only just begun, as there's a boss fight as well. While the boss isn't gigantic in stature, she's certainly an enormous pain in the ass. It's the fourth, and final, fight against this game's "rival" character, Jeanne. It's a popular thing to do in these types of games, to make a boss fight that's a "mirror" of the player character, the Ken to your Ryu to draw a fighting game analogy. These bosses are usually well-liked, and likely also serve as a shrewd way to re-purpose mo-cap and animation mesh assets. Fiend Ryu, Vergil/Nelo Angelo, the Devil Hand, and whatnot are all good and well liked, so what's the problem with Jeanne, you ask?
It's that the symmetry between her capabilities and the player character's capabilities is taken a wee bit too far. These sorts of action games are built upon asymmetry. That is to say, players are given access to all sorts of techniques that would be an absolute nightmare to play against in some sort of hypothetical adversarial matchup, but are integral to evening out bad odds against multiple opponents and whatnot. Easy juggles, stuns/crowd-control, invulnerability, etc. would be horrible in something like a fighting game in which most battles are one-on-one affairs, but are almost necessary in scenarios where the player is up against groups of hellspawn, ninjas, cyborgs, or any other enemy du jour; they need to be high capability to fight against uneven numerical strength.
And that's why a lot of "rival" fights gimp the opponent to some degree. DMC3 Vergil won't bust out 7-Rune DTEs from nowhere nor can he spam Phantom Blades endlessly on top of other attacks (like the playable version can). Dante's Royal Guard in the DMC4 boss fight against him is highly telegraphed and actually can't block all of Nero's techniques (contra how playable RG can block anything). And the Devil Hand's roulette techniques are all direct damage and able to be dodged, unlike the player character's versions from the God Hand, which are strictly limited by resource, but infinitely more powerful.
But Jeanne has access to a lot of Bayonetta's more "broken" abilities like Wicked Weaves and being able to cancel anything into a dodge/parry. Wicked Weaves don't really follow typical conventions of timing and positioning in action games. This makes the fight a real mess, with powerful, fast, long-ranged attacks (with excellent tracking ability to boot) going off all over the place, from both witches, Jeanne and the player character. All of the typical sort of risk/reward logic that underpins these sorts of boss battles goes completely out the window...the same nasty attacks are going to be thrown out at any distance of engagement or from any relative position. It's certainly different, to say the least.
And if there's a logic to Jeanne's dodging, I haven't grokked it. Sometimes she will cancel out of attacks into a dodge. That's okay, given that the player character is capable of doing so and can actually continue combo string thanks to the wonders of Dodge Offset (ace mechanic, not enough praise for it from most fans of this game. Every action game with long combo strings, like Ninja Gaiden or God of War, should adopt this). But there's no real consistency or predictability to it. Sometimes she'll saunter forward, in a neutral stance, and then eat a six-input combo in it's entirety with no thought given to parrying/dodging. Utterly baffling.
And then there's a whole bunch of other issues, like how she uses Stinger-likes at close range (hello just-frame dodge window, how are you?) or the fact that every Jeanne battle becomes filled with screen-clutter, either due to Wicked Weaves polluting visual space or the strange choice of the devs to have every fight be in a driving rainstorm or torrent of SAMs (yes, missiles). It really makes me feel that these fights were not balanced for Infinite Climax rank runs, what with no Witch Time and vastly increased enemy speed and aggressiveness. All of Jeanne's shenanigans are pretty tame to a bro or sis playing through on Normal/Hard, just trying to clear the game. She's much slower, her "cheap" attacks do paltry damage, and Jeanne's Wicked Weaves when dodged/parried invoke a few seconds of Witch Time (i.e. give free hits). Wouldn't surprise me. Less than 10% of the purchasers of the game are likely to play on higher difficulties, much less attempt rank runs on them (I'm in the Top 100 on a lot of the (Pure) Platinum combo point leaderboards, and not using the Kilgore Kick...can't be that many people with my dismally low scores ranking so high). And of that set, I'd wager a good amount have masochistic tendencies...they want it to be hard. How else would they have excuse to sperg out about it? Wait a minute....
All that said, the good stuff is mostly ahead. Lots of fights against a great cast of foes and the two good bosses (both of the "Father" bosses) to Pure Platinum. Good shit. Kinda makes me want to finish off some other rank runs. DMC1 Fresh DMD! S-Rank run sounds tempting...
