Someone Please Explain To Me Why Everyone Loves Bayonetta

Earlier tonight, after my fourth attempt, I finally managed to stomach the idiotically long-winded and not all funny or cool opening (sure I could have skipped it, but I'm the type that has to soak everything in, regardless) and get the game going.

Truth be told, the core game is fantastic; I love the control and all the abilities of the character. But that seriously is it; everything else, from top to bottom, is pretty much crap.

It tries to be all slick and stylish, yet it just comes off so pandering, and worst of all, unoriginal to a mind-blowing degree. As noted in the past, it's trying to tap into Cowboy Bebop level of cool, which only worked for the source material and copycats circa 1999.

The music is especially grating, and if the use of Fly Me To The Moon doesn't scream "I have no fucking idea" then I don't know what does.

The lead character is a bore. To be honest, I'm a total sucker for a virtual piece of ass, but there's just something so lifeless and stilted that I cannot get into her. All the side characters thus far are equally lame. Seriously, a third rate Joe Pesci knock-off in 2010? Jesus Christ. Sorry, but the bar has been raised thanks to games like No More Heroes and Uncharted and denizens that inhabit them.

The story makes no sense, and I have tried to really think about what the hell is going on. Silly I know. You'd think with a battle between heaven and hell, you wouldn't also need some bullshit about diamonds being smuggled or whatever.

The cinematics in particular are a mess. Sometimes there are some cool things going on, but there's just so much nonsense that it just drags everything else down. There's like three different styles going on at once, and none of them meshes well. The worst part about the whole everyone is doing stuff but no one is actually moving thing (those who've played the game will know what I'm talking about) is how it slows EVERYTHING down; what should be 10 seconds is now 2 minutes.

Back to NMH, I blame that game for showing me what a game is like that has a genuine sense of style instead of something that has 20 times the budget and sheen but 0% of any sorta of... I don't want to be cheesy and use the word "soul". But overall, contrived and again pandering is what describes this game best (there's such a thing as good fan service, and this most definitely is not it), as well as an embodiment of everything that's wrong with Japanese games today.