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Mixed Thoughts on Bayonetta

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BayonettaBayonetta is fun. Crazy fun. Crazy over-the-top non-stop action fun. And it’s funny. Her poses, her comments, the way she walks…it’s all hilarious. But, two things are getting old for me. The big one is the quick-time events that plague every boss fight. I’ve died once for pretty much all of them because I couldn’t figure out the button combo quick enough. None of the events are that hard, they’re just getting tiresome. I’m missing some fantastic cut scenes because I keep scanning the screen for QTE triggers.

The second thing is the fighting. It’s hack-and-slash with flair. Your moves have to be deliberate and sometimes well planned out, and it often requires you to die once or twice to figure out what the new enemy has to bring to the table. While activating the Witch Time ability and slowing down time never gets boring, I’m getting tired of the formula of walk around, massive enemy fight, unlock seal, walk again, massive enemy fight, cut scene, unlock seal, boss fight, and finish with QTE. Granted, most action games have the same formula. NIER certainly did. There it was run around and kill things, run back, run somewhere else, boss fight. And as for Final Fantasy XIII, well, there’s a definite pattern there as well. Maybe I’m just extra sensitive to such patterns right now since I’ve played two, now three, games back-to-back with distinct patterns.

At least it’s fun, so it doesn’t seem like a complete chore. I’m also hooked on the story, and it presents a really interesting point of view of angels and witches. If I do indeed play Darksiders next, I may have more of my fill of angels to last me a lifetime.

I also have to say that the feminists out there who are crying out that Bayonetta exploits women have obviously not played a second of this game. Want to know what I’m talking about? You’ll have to play it for yourself.

Bought my first DLC, and yes, it was for NIER

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Nier and Grimoire WeissSo far with this latest generation of gaming consoles, I have not been tempted to purchase downloadable content (DLC) for my games even once. Okay, so that isn’t true. I was tempted for Lost Odyssey, but I was so very poor at the time so it never happened. I completed the fourth ending of NIER, enjoyed it immensely, and then purchased the DLC available that tells the story of Nier’s wife: “The World of the Recycled Vessel.” I attempted to play it today, and dammit, I wish I had known to not play through the fourth ending first before attempting the DLC.

This was important to know for a few reasons. Upon viewing the fourth ending, all of your game saves are WIPED. There is a reason for doing so, and it’s kind of cool and yet not at the same time. I didn’t think this would be a problem because I honestly thought that the DLC was just another chapter of the game, and not something that you do mid-game. You can’t access this new quest until Nier has Grimoire Weiss in his party. Basically, I had to play for a little over an hour before I could even access my additional content. At least this time I knew what I was doing and it went by far more quickly and hey, I got a combo Achievement out of it.

However, another thing I did not realize was that Nier’s wife’s health, weapons, and abilities mirror Nier himself. So the fact that Nier at this point in the game is only level four with two crappy weapons and two magic attacks does not forebode well for his wife. The enemies in this World are HARD. It only takes two bat bites to kill her off, and I couldn’t heal her because Nier had no medicinal herbs on him. Not to mention, her sword is so weak that it hardly fazes anything.

ARRRRRRRRRRRGH!

By the time I got to the fourth ending, Nier was at level 40! I had all the magic and all the weapons!! I had so much gold from all the sidequests that I could buy anything I needed for upgrades or whatever. I am so very, very mad at myself for not doing any research about the DLC and blowing through all four endings just so I could see it all. I’m obviously going to have to get quite further in the game in order to have any fun with Nier’s wife’s story. Sigh. And CURSES!

So for anyone looking at the NIER DLC, ye has been warned! As for me, I’m tucking my tail between my legs in shame and will focus all efforts on Bayonetta now.

Gaming Origins Story

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I’ve been telling this story a lot lately, so it seemed appropriate to discuss it here as well.

How I got into Gaming

I had a NES growing up, but I didn’t get one for years after the console’s release. I had to trick my grandmother into buying it for me and my sister, because my mom was and still is strongly opposed to gaming. Before that, I went over to friends’ houses to play Super Mario Bros. and watch them play The Legend of Zelda. (In fact, I was the map maker for Zelda for my friends, which is a whole different origins story.) When the SNES came out, I was in high school, and I was way too busy to play any video games. The NES collected dust for years until I gathered it up and took it with me to college my second year. A few friends had a SNES, and I played Super Mario World and Mario Kart on occasion, but it wasn’t like I sat and gamed like I do now.

Then I started to date my now husband. He introduced me to a band of friends who were really into gaming. They spent their Saturdays playing GoldenEye and Quake on the N64 and occasionally, we’d break out Mario Kart 64. They tried to get me involved, but I couldn’t manage the giant clunky controller with its analog stick. Going from the NES to that is hard, no matter what anyone says. I could barely manage the SNES controller at the time. They got me to play GoldenEye with them a few times, but I couldn’t manipulate my character well enough to even get out of a doorway and I kept dropping my weapons whenever people would enter my room I never left. So I died quite often. It wasn’t fun. I let it go that gaming just wasn’t for me and never would be.

Shawn, however, loved gaming so much, he actually forgot about a couple of our dates because he was too busy playing Syphon Filter. When the PS2 released, I bought it for him for Christmas 2001. A friend I met in grad school was heavily into gaming, and she knew I was geeky enough to be intrigued. She introduced to me Gauntlet: Seven Sorrows for the PS2, and that’s the game that taught me how to be comfortable with the analog stick and multiple buttons. She then introduced me to the greatness known as Kingdom Hearts and even bought it for me for my 25th birthday. Poor Shawn hasn’t really been able to get his hands on a game controller ever since.

He bought me a GameCube sometime later and a Wii the first year it launched. I bought the PS3, and Shawn bought me the Xbox 360 for Christmas a few years ago. (Lost Odyssey made me want the Xbox.) I’m not sure exactly how this happened to me, but for now I’m going to worry about the next future gaming problem: keeping Gabe out of my gaming time.

And before any snarky young’uns out there comment that due to my history, obviously I have no real experience and authority in gaming, I’ll have you know that most likely, I’ve been gaming longer than you, even though it wasn’t consecutively and I’ve been around to witness console history far longer. 😛

Stop the Sheep Murder!

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Nier is rated M for Mature. I can handle such games, I really can. But as strange as it sounds, I don’t mind violence if it’s directed toward people, as said people are usually quite evil. But when I have to kill animals in a game, I have a hard time with it unless they are trying to eat me.

In Nier, you have to take on some missions to kill sheep for food. I understand why I have to kill them, but I still wasn’t prepared for them to cry out when you kill them. And if that wasn’t enough, they don’t stop bleeding. They fall over and continue to pool blood beneath them. I know that that is realistic, but I don’t really play for realism.

As a result, I get very sad with each sheep and goat I slaughter. However, the tearful bleats of death and pools of blood won’t stop me from trying to get the Achievement for killing 100 sheep. So I’ll be an odd mixture of sad and happy.

I hope these people really need all this mutton to eat.

Nier is Here! (yes, that was intentional)

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I always get so excited when packages come, especially when they’re books, games or related to games. When it comes to strategy guides, it’s such a delightful combination for me.

Buying the strategy guide for Nier was not originally planned, so I honestly have no idea what to expect from the game. I’ve watched no clips, read no previews or reviews, so I’m going into this totally unprepared. Of course when my new shiny guide arrived today, I couldn’t help but flip through it and glance at the images and the walkthrough headings. I definitely couldn’t have predicted what this game is about, and I still may not know from the little I saw in the guide. It does seem to be non-generic, of which I’m glad, because when I first saw the hero with a giant sword, my first thought was, “Wow, typical Square hero. Yay.” However, if the screenshots in the guide are tell-tale at all, the graphics look to be of last-gen quality. That’s a little disappointing.

The guide, however, should be excellent. If you look at the cover’s bottom right corner, you will see that both Doug Walsh and Joe Epstein wrote this guide. Neither has failed me thus far in terms of guides (damn Costly Punch from Crisis Core aside), so I’m fairly confident this guide will be just as fabulous.

I can’t wait to delve into this adventure and finally give my poor Xbox 360 some love. It’s been neglected for so long, but the dust will be brushed off it soon enough, and then it will never turn off since Bayonetta, Darksiders, and Mass Effect are next on the list. My director told me that my review copy of the game is on its way, so everyone should see me on Xbox LIVE quite often very soon.

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