Hmmm, well as I rambled on about in another thread about animated babes, I find something a bit "off" about Bayonetta. This coming from someone who would be predisposed to like the character because I'm a big fan of spellcasters, and have a BSM fetish. I'm not really big into the whole "Spectacle Fighter" genere (as Yahtzee puts it), but it's notable that I'm probably going to support Dante's Inferno (a similar type of game) and relegate this one to budget bin "maybe someday" fare. My reaction is similar to X-blades (which I was right about, and only spent like $8 on).
Simply put some of the stuff in the game looks cool, but honestly as "cool" as chain whipping someone onto a spiked bondage horse is, is that going to be awesome enough to be something I'm going to want to do for hours on end? Looking at one of the "leaked" videos on Youtube (where I am taking that move from) I notice they have Bayonetta doing that move again and again too, and it doesn't even appear to be a finisher but an overdone spammable attack.
On top of that when I say Bayonetta looks kind of off, for me it's the fact that the face looks almost like a quintessential Japanese nerd. I almost suspect it's intentional. On top of this while all of the features such as breasts, legs, etc... could be considered perfect they just seem a bit off in the way they all sync up to me. Almost like what George Alec Effinger wrote about in books like "When Gravity Fails" in talking about cosmetic surgery mistakes. Someone taking a bunch of features that they find attractive, tossing them all together, and winding up with something that is out of sync when taken as a whole. I see this right now as almost a visual representation of what he was talking about.
Also for the record I am one of the same people who actually DEFENDS being attracted to video game/anime/comic characters as normal, providing you don't blur the line between fantasy and reality, existance and non existance. Of course even then I believe that isn't all that uncommon (even if it's a problem) which is why things like the Myth/Legend of Galatea have endured.
I even go so far as to say that anyone who claims to not have been attracted to a drawing, painting, or a bunch of pixels is either a liar or insane. In most cases the former though because of societal pressure to try and present what is normal as being abnormal. In most cases people who get mocked for having an attraction to a fictional character MEANT to be attractive, are people (nerds) who are going to get mocked by those people anyway. That's just a conveinent path of attack, and even the people doing the mocking are probably guilty of very similar things to the accusations they are making.
At any rate, for those that read this far, I will say that I *COULD* very well wind up being proven wrong about this game, and wind up buying it (even if I won't rush out for it). It will depend on what happens when it's released. Despite the opinions I've formed based on what I've seen, I've also heard that Japanese magazines have been rating the game higher than Final Fantasy XIII (which is one of the iconic series down there). It pulling perfect scores and such. Purely as a comparitive thing this is VERY noteworthy. For all I know this might be the spectacle fighter that kills "God Of War" and "Devil May Cry"'s dominance of the genere and drags a lot of new people who weren't impressed by it before (like me) into the fold.
I however do not think it's very likely.
