Bayonetta & Vanquish 10th Anniversary Bundle

Founded in 2007 and positioned to deliver four unique games for Sega by 2010, PlatinumGames needed to make a statement and establish a distinctive identity. Between oddball curiosities MadWorld and Infinite Space, PlatinumGames’ prized creative leads Hideki Kamiya and Shinji Mikami delivered Bayonetta and Vanquish to execute those goals. The former was an evolutionary leap from Kamiya’s own Devil May Cry entries while the latter served as Mikami’s rectification of western third-person shooters. While PlatinumGames wouldn’t reap enormous financial success until Nier: Automata hit a home run for Square-Enix, the critical aggregates and fan community lavished PlatinumGames’ work—with some exceptions—with praise.

The exalted reception of Bayonetta and Vanquish enshrined PlatinumGames as a premier developer of technical action titles. Even after Mikami’s post-Vanquish departure, that initial success created space for similar projects with Activision, Nintendo, Konami, Sega, and Square-Enix. I played both Bayonetta and Vanquish at release (and even reviewed Vanquish) but hadn’t touched either one in nearly a decade. Armature’s port work with the Bayonetta & Vanquish 10th Anniversary Bundle provides that opportunity with 2160 resolution and a more stable frame-rate than either the Xbox 360 or PlayStation 3 could provide. This creates a wonderful opportunity to revisit a pair of games and see how well time treated their objectives.

Bayonetta was a proof of concept for PlatinumGames’ design ethos and, at its North American release in 2010 and now in 2020, a high-water mark for stylish action. After a trial run with the Wii-exclusive MadWorld, Bayonetta picked up where Devil May Cry 3 left off and cast Ryu Hayabusa, Kratos, and Dante in a vapor cloud of pageantry and precision. Witch Time, Bayonetta’s ostentatious time-slowing innovation, added a mechanic to an entire genre and an identifier for PlatinumGames’ house-brand. Its madcap sense of spectacle—battles are fought while riding on missiles, a boss uses a skyscraper as a projectile, and Bayonetta’s beaming sexuality—created suitable venues for every cool videogame idea Hideki Kamiya ever had. Bayonetta’s signature remains visible in PlatinumGames’ entire catalog and the action genre as a whole. Ten years of tired and exciting Online Discourse continues to measure every successive action game against what Bayonetta, and PlatinumGames, accomplished in 2010.

The heart inside of Bayonetta’s titular eight-foot tall witch beats within an established genre paradigm. Combinations of light and heavy attacks compose a bulk of the offense, with jumping around and dodging provide support (and Bayonetta doesn’t have room in her heart for a block button). A pair of automatic pistols with infinite ammo may seem like a boon to performance, but they’re better off as bridges for combo strings in demonstrations of planned finesse or as aids in moments of terrified panic. Bayonetta’s origins can be traced back to the earliest beat ’em ups gaming had to offer, but when the genre split between Devil May Cry and Dynasty Warriors 2 (and, I suppose, God Hand’s evolutionary dead end), Bayonetta followed the former.

It would be a mistake to try and keep up with Bayonetta’s story. Objectively it details an amnesiac witch shifting through different realms and challenging the nature of light and darkness. In practice it’s a bunch of euphoria-inducing cut-scenes between action sequences with only two key points of interest: (1) Bayonetta humiliating and dismissing the dignified and massive classes of angels and (2) spectacles like this. Everything else causes my eyes to glaze over until a rendition of Fly Me to The Moon or Mysterious Destiny signals it’s time to regain consciousness wreak additional havoc. Ultimately the product of the late aughts’ insistence on needless complication and exacting plot machinations, Bayonetta’s story is as erratic as it is dispensable.

While it’s tough to call Bayonetta’s narrative logical, its flow follows a predictable pattern. Seventeen distinct levels are full of designed combat sequences, called Verses, and massive boss encounters. Each Verse takes place in a de facto arena where Bayonetta can conduct gratuitous levels of mayhem on an increasingly aggressive slate of rebellious angels. While these combat sequences remain as attractive and engaging today was they were ten years ago, the interstitial objectives and gameplay deviations feel archaic and unnecessary. Bayonetta has a lot of combat, but it also has a lot of essential and pointless collectibles, one-off descents into different genres, and dreadful quick-time events with real-time consequences. Ideas that seemed natural ten years ago are tedious and out of place today. Playing all the way through Bayonetta for the first time in ten years, I had forgotten how much time these sideshows can consume.

Nowhere is this fault more visible than in every reference Bayonetta makes to Sega’s storied history. Either a sign of appreciation for PlatinumGames’ maiden publishing deal or the product of a development team finally emancipated from Capcom’s lineage, Bayonetta is loaded with homages to Out Run, Hang-On, Space Harrier, and other classic Sega titles. This is simultaneously awesome and terrible. Thematically, I like the idea of riding a missile through space and obliterating everything in my path because Space Harrier was a cool weirdo acid trip, but it’s not very, well, fun and the penalties for failure are harsh. The aforementioned QTE’s, which feel more like extensions of Resident Evil 4 than references to Sega’s desperate and maligned pioneer Shenmue, come out of nowhere, are poorly telegraphed, and poison the purity of otherwise Olympian combat sequences. There’s beauty in a refined and multifaceted skill-set, especially in a game that levels up the player more than their avatar, but combat prowess is independent from QTE reactions and riding a motorcycle. It’s annoying at best and incongruous as worst.

But how about that combat! Bayonetta valued sixty frames-per-second right around the time other developers were giving up the ghost. Sixty frames proved instrumental in conducting Bayonetta’s combat flow, enabling players to opt of combo strings at any time, seamlessly switch between two distinct weapon load-outs, and dodge out of practically anything. Deeper down the rabbit hole was Rodin’s shop, where the player could bolt on magic-consuming techniques, accessorize with optional equipment, and create a safety net with a wealth of healing items and combat buffs. Bayonetta made room for player agency and then filled the space with opportunities for improvisation.

Witch Time’s value to modern gaming can’t be overstated. It’s a simple concept; dodge an attack at the exact right time, usually within five frames of animation, and the player is rewarded with time slowing to a crawl for a few brief moments. It’s a tactile reward for paying attention and enforcing patience and strategy against a vicious enemy and a mechanical prize that allows the player to punish an opponent and advance through the game more efficiently. Coming to terms with Bayonetta’s sense of timing and developing reflex-based responses to every incoming attack creates a ballet of destruction that, to any casual passerby, looks indistinguishable from total chaos. Coupled with the Moon of Mahaa Kalaa, an accessory that enables parrying attacks with an even shorter frame window, and high level Bayonetta play can enrapture the most passive audience. It all looks like magic.

While Bayonetta thrives in its grotesque theatrics and outrageous set-pieces, the core of the experience, for me, always comes back to the half dozen battles with Grace and Glory. Always deployed as a pair, these twin Virtues and their lethal claws have a fondness for melee attacks and command ridiculous speed. They’re part of that classic trope where, as the player’s proficiency increases, opposition that once served as a boss encounter eventually becomes a normal opponent. It’s a way to not only measure personal progression, but also Bayonetta’s cruel sense of humor. There’s a precious moment in the second half of the game where a grueling battle with Grace and Glory concludes with another battle with Grace and Glory. It’s hilarious, and an exceptional showcase of Bayonetta’s wry acuity. Like Sen’s Fortress in FromSoftware’s Dark Souls, there are visible signs PlatinumGames is actively fucking with the player and grinning the entire time.

Bayonetta’s attitude, ten years later, remains something of an enigma. On one hand it’s a self-aware descent into violence and bloodlust. On the other, it sure is weird to play a videogame where an attractive lady gets progressively more naked the better you play. I feel like the character of Bayonetta is self-determined and empowered and bests literally everything thrown at her, but she’s ultimately the subject of the male gaze and I did not then and do not now feel comfortable playing this shit in front of another human being. My perspective on this isn’t especially developed (beyond uh, well, this is ok??) so in that interest I usually default to people smarter than I am and respect their opinions as valuable and valid.

From the high prices of the items in Rodin’s store to a constant focus on ranking proficiency (and demanding improvement), Bayonetta isn’t intended to be played once. Unlocked items and accessories are countered with harder difficulties, up to an including the Non-Stop Climax mode that I will never be able to approach, let alone complete. As part of a $40 package, this time around, it’s possible to blow through Bayonetta’s 12-15 hours once on one of its two more accommodating and friendlier difficulty modes and feel satisfied. If you’re not there for the challenge there’s still an immense value in spectacle and production. Until Devil May Cry 5 last year, competent action games were never this delightfully self-aware and theatrically indulgent.

Playing Bayonetta in 2020 felt like playing Bayonetta in 2010, but without that weird time-travelling incongruity where the technical aspects of present reality aren’t consistent with rose-colored memories of time lost. Armature’s port work maintains sixty-frames with 2160 resolution without any noticeable hitches or drops. As far as how it actually played, well, at 36 I remained consistent with where I was at 26. Early chapters were lined with strings of gold and platinum rankings and fat ugly stone rankings consume the middle chapters (thanks, QTE’s) before I nail the timing on the Moon of Mahaa Kalaa counters and wreck shop through every anthropomorphic opponent the end of the game has to offer. Firing turrets against Temperance still sucks, the fire and ice phases of the last boss remain bullshit, and every encounter with Grace & Glory are opportunities to savor the best Bayonetta had to offer. Revengeance, Wonderful 101, Nier: Automata, and even Bayonetta 2 all have their moments, but none can match the raw excitement that came with knowing PlatinumGames was playing for real and Bayonetta was their coup de grâce to every challenger.  Bayonetta changed the course of character action games.

While Bayonetta refined Kamiya’s objectives with Devil May Cry, Mikami’s Vanquish took more circuitous path to fruition. His direction of P.N.03 and God Hand (both of which I love, shame on those who ignored them, you all missed out, etc) did not connect with mass audiences like his work on Dino Crisis and Resident Evil 4. It was the latter, along with the cover system adapted from Kill.Switch, that inspired the Xbox 360’s breakout exclusive, Gears of War and drove the cover-shooter boom of the late aughts. While Mikami directly cited influence from ambience of Casshern and, after the melee-obsessed God Hand, the desire to make a true shooter, it was difficult not to view Vanquish as the east’s response to cover shooters (and Lost Planet 2 and the dreadful Quantum Theory didn’t even bother to conceal that ambition).

Vanquish is a cover shooter only in the sense that it is a third-person shooter where the player is provided the option to stick to walls and take cover. It more accurately can be described as a shooter where the player embodies an expensive sports car, in the shape of a human, who can turbo boost around arenas with a remarkable degree of control and slow down time, at will, to pick off bad guys. Vanquish can be extremely fast and extremely slow in the same four seconds, contributing toward the cerebral whiplash experienced once its systems are internalized and the player musters command of all available faculties. Its mission is to develop new and inventive ways to point a gun at things until their health bar melts, but its purpose is to make the player look and feel cool for 100% of its operating time.

All of this is possible, internally through Vanquish’s provided logic, via the Augmented Reaction Suit. Courtesy of DARPA, which, along with the war-hungry United States, still exists in the near-future, this fucking awesome suit is kitted in silver with blue and green highlights and enables the player a host of unique abilities. They can press L1 and power slide across any flat surface, resembling either an ecstatic guitarist or a baseball player if guitar slides or third-base slides lasted six seconds and covered one hundred feet. They can also hold L2, tap the X button for a lateral dodge, and engage Augmented Reaction Mode, which liberally borrows the time-dampening mechanic from Max Payne. Both of these literal superpowers draw from the same meter and ration the player’s consumption of their abilities.

There’s a story bobbing around the barrel of Vanquish’s six hour run time, although what and why anything is happening is anyone’s best guess. A Hillary Clinton (Vanquish’s production likely took place the first time Clinton failed to be plausible presidential candidate) stand-in President Elizabeth Winters dispatches some Marines and player-character DARPA specialist Sam Gideon to a space colony to solve a dust-up with some hostile Russians. This narrative demands Sam visit a bunch of cool looking idyllic sci-fi locations and kill all of the robots occupying them. I have no idea what else happened, but I was frequently amused by Steve Blum, as Sam’s Marine buddy Burns, doing his best John DiMaggio/Marcus Fenix impression.

While Vanquish’s narrative is a polite excuse to change the scenery, it actually contains some engaging commentary on the rank and file members of its Marine Corps. Sam (with Burns) is almost always surrounded with in inexhaustible supply of indiscriminate supporting soldiers. Sometimes they have names, most times they do not. They die frequently, but seems to always be invisibly replaced by identical soldiers (in my end game stats, I was notified that I went through 512 friendly soldiers). Sam has the option to revive them if they’re down and obtain a new gun option as a reward. At one point Sam objects to their latest slaughter and all Burns offers in return is the oath that Marines get the job done. Who cares how many lives are lost in pursuit of goal for someone else? Vanquish isn’t brandishing any Big Ideas here, but as a minor subplot (that Mikami even inserts himself in, as a deliberate but pointless Marine in Act III) suggests someone, somewhere in Vanquish’s development, had something they wanted to say.

The remainder of Vanquish finds new and exciting ways to point a gun at something and destroy it. The sense of control behind this action is immediately stinking and distinctive. Despite wearing a suit cased head-to-toe in some combination of metal and polymer, Sam always feels nimble and lightweight. The dodge-roll mechanic tosses Sam around like a wadded-up ball of paper. Flashing into power slides and peeking out of cover are instantaneous and stand in contrast to the lumbering behemoths who compose the COG soldiers in Gears of War. This performance folds neatly into Vanquish’s ethos, which suggests pirouetting out of power slides is as crucial to its identity as the accuracy of a headshot.

And then there is Vanquish’s relationship with its time-slowing action. It’s a unique mechanic in that it can be switched on or off at will, or its automatically engages when firefights go south and your perceived amount of health reaches dangerous levels. Slowing down time is as much of a safety apparatus as it is an aiming crutch. It’s more valuable than the, by comparison, rudimentary built-in cover system as it let players control their environment out in the open and not behind the safety of a wall. Using cover and slowing down time are both balancing act with finite resources, but succeed in enabling players to find their own way through relentless hostility (and it’s interesting that both Vanquish and Bayonetta found novel ways to slow down time almost a decade after Max Payne proved the videogame viability of The Matrix’s bullet-time sequences).

Vanquish’s approach to player progression attempts to address an understated anxiety; which gun should I be using? There are no points to drop into skills or extra abilities to unlock. Vanquish believes in leveling up the player before their avatar, and every gun you find in the first act and every ability your suit exhibits at the beginning of the game is all it has to offer. Vanquish does, however, do something neat with its weapons. Only three of its eleven weapons can be held at once, and their total ammo capacity only increases when you stumble upon the same gun out in the field. Guns are essentially ranked by how many of that specific gun you’ve found while simultaneously possessing that gun. This allowed me to keep what I liked (the assault rifle, boost machine gun, and the laser cannon – two of which were DLC at initial release) and basically ignore everything I didn’t without the weird fear of missing out on Content. To add an element of risk, your earned gun rankings drop with every death.

Sam’s opposition may be Vanquish’s most normal assembly of what one might expect in a third-person shooter. Dozens of red humanoid robots fill out most of the battlefield. Some blue compact robots fly in, legless robots go on suicide attacks, and varieties of snipers and agile jumpers fill out the back half of the game. They’re all joined in increasing frequency by a collection boss-adjacent robots who are twice as tall and take four times the amount of bullets, if you’re not aiming at a disguised but generally red-colored weak spot. Vanquish deploys different collections of these fellas in a variety of ostentatious scenarios, ensuring the player has plenty to shoot at.

There are times when Vanquish feels like its deploying enemies at random for the sake of funneling the player through the treasure chest of muted, elaborately designed environments on the space station. Games have had rail and train car battles since the NES, but few have offered to do that with one rail car cascading across a 360-track aiming at another car rotating across a nearby track. Similarly, you don’t switch weapons out of the ether, your gun’s molecules shift into different forms. Everything in Vanquish is composed with spectacle as the first order of business, and the strength of the art direction holds its own ten years into its lifespan. Vanquish’s future may be a pastiche of science fiction’s worst nonsense, but it’s awfully pretty.

As much as I admire Vanquish’s adrenalized take on third-person shooting, it’s a procession that isn’t without some disruptive stumbles. The larger robots all seem to have a one-hit kill laser thing that, while telegraphed with visual and audio cues, always seemed to sneak up on me and end a run. The encounter with the Crystal Viper, a cross between Dr. Manhattan and the T-1000, comes bundled with exacting demands for button mashing that don’t sync well with Vanquish’s established rules. Cruel checkpoint positioning and bizarre health-melting, and otherwise normal, robots all sneak up here and there. To be clear these are all prices I have no problem paying for a videogame that lets me perform heavily-armed slip ‘n slides across its world, but they are real points of frustration.

In some ways, Vanquish is better positioned for players of 2020 than an audience in 2010. A decade ago it was a minor fiasco for Vanquish to decline filling-in genre checkboxes like competitive multiplayer and myriad unlockables. Playing for the joy of playing, with the Play It Until You’re Perfect sensibilities of an arcade game, also sidestepped expectations. I feel like these aspects are more commonly accepted in 2020, with a wealth of viable indie operations and a more accessible digital marketplace. One with the production value of Vanquish, even ten years later, seems like a rarity.

When I reviewed Vanquish the first time I concluded Vanquish isn’t simply Japan’s response to cover-based shooters, it’s the most dramatic take upon the genre thus far.  The era of cover-based shooters seems so quaint now, as does Vanquish’s ill-fitting position as a response to that period of gaming culture. Allowing it to exist outside of time, in a world consumed by mega-sized role-playing games and life-consuming battle royales, makes Vanquish even more of a joyous novelty. They don’t make them like this anymore, and they probably never will again.  

In 2010, Bayonetta and Vanquish suggested action games didn’t have to compromise between style and substance. In 2020, with a remastered tenth anniversary bundle, the acrobatic precision of both titles still feels ahead of its time. Hideki Kamiya and Shinji Mikami, and their teams at PlatinumGames, created enduring action masterworks and Armature’s 4K facelift varnishes them with another decade of luster. Bayonetta and Vanquish look and feel ageless.