Sorry I tend to disagree. With pretty much everything you said actually. What a surprise! Bayonetta features one of the most fluid fighting systems I have ever played in a third person action game. If they felt unresponsive to you then I don't know what to say. You can say Lollipop Chainsaw is unresponsive and I will agree but Bayonetta? Disregarding the story aspects and the character qualms one may have, Bayonetta is an excellent score based third person action game. The next best thing to a new Ninja Gaiden. Metal Gear Revengeance and the DMC reboot doesn't measure up that is for sure.
Now I'm not outright saying you liked Ninja Gaiden so you should like Bayonetta. The games are similar though. Your analogies to the other games were nothing like the one I made.
You seem to have misunderstood my criticisms of the game. I didn't say it was poorly designed, I said I didn't like its designs. Perhaps my use of the
Spawn game as an example of frustratingly bad design gave off that impression, but I was simply using it to describe
different dimensions of frustration with game design, not explicitly drawing parallels.
But if I were to try to explain why I came to the conclusion of B having an "unresponsive" set of controls, again I would opt to delve into analogous examples. If you're familiar at all with the
Tekken series, it's a fight game genre with MANY different characters with wildly different and totally distinct fighting styles. This is exemplified with each of their command inputs being different, whereas the same command inputs can work across characters in
Street Fighter and you'll just get different attacks. If you were to pick up the character Forest Law, you could mash the buttons and he would seem to be endlessly attacking (the dreaded "button masher" tactic that most fighting game players loathe of newbies) because his command inputs are just that fluid. He DOESN'T endlessly attack, but his moveset IS fluid enough that it feels that way, and it equally feels like any beginner could pick him up and start kicking as with him for that very reason. Yet a skilled player would kick your ass if you tried. So does that make Law a worthless character? Actually, no. An equally skilled player can work wonders with that character, and put up a good fight against the guy who'd kick the ass of some incompetent button masher. These are even more the case with Eddie Gordo, who is infamous for being a button masher's ideal character to play, because he CAN endlessly combo just by mashing buttons. BUT the rule of skill still applies. However the opposite is the case of, say, Lei Wulong. THIS character, in the hands of a skilled player, will seamlessly transition from various kung fu stances and psychologically dominate unprepared players because it's hard to predict where he'll attack from next. BUT his command inputs are incredibly stiff and not fluid at all. Pushing buttons will result in Lei tossing out a punch and sinking into a vulnerable state of recovery frames, leaving the player wondering to themselves, "What the fuck? Why isn't he doing that shit I saw earlier?" Completely different set of controls to the other, much more simple-to-grasp characters. He's more of an expert-tier character to play than Forest Law, even if both have high skill caps, because a novice can't pick him up and kick ass with him. It's not bad design AT ALL, but it is stiff and feels unresponsive (since you have to KNOW your timings and positioning).
That is what B felt like, to me. Like I said, I SAW friends play the game and pull off incredibly showy maneuvers, and I watched them rack up points, then restart a section because they were unsatisfied with their results, and I could understand why, having played plenty of games like that (not just NG). But that doesn't mean it was a game that could be picked up by a novice, mash a couple buttons, and pull out some of those showy moves on a first try. It's just not gonna happen. It doesn't cater to any degree of button mashing at all, so it's not a game that feels comfortable to newbie players, even if it feels great to those who have practiced their skills at the game. But NG has both, which is why I say its controls are so streamlined and fluid. You CAN pick up the game, not knowing at all what you're doing, and mash buttons, and Ryu will pull out a bunch of really stylish moves and you'll feel like a badass. You WON'T be a badass, but you could be fooled to thing that you were. =) Meanwhile, those controls do NOT cater themselves strictly to button mashers, because the tighter your control of the game and the more accurate your input of commands will yield infinitely better results than any level of mashing buttons ever could. So despite feeling entirely welcoming to the newbies, it's designed for practiced experts. Being able to satisfy such a wide gulf of varying skill levels, purely by its controls and designs, are why I give it such praise as being a masterfully put together series.
And like I already said, same genres simply have no bearing in liking another game or not.
Borderlands IS a FPS, as is
COD4, but liking one is no guarantee of liking the other. It just doesn't work that way. Liking
Journey is no guarantee of liking
Dear Esther. My thorough enjoyment of NGS doesn't necessitate that I would like DMC, B, or any other third person action game with scoring system at all. It's just irrelevant to what makes me like the game.
I feel like you probably didn't play much of Bayonetta to fully grasp it's play style. Yes it is not exactly like Ninja Gaiden, but the genre is the same, they play similar, and it is generally agreed upon that Bayonetta controls very smoothly. As a matter of fact I haven't heard too many complain about it not controlling well.
Quite to the contrary. As explained above, I played it enough to "get" its control schemes just fine. Enough to determine that they weren't for me. Not because I couldn't understand them or such...
I've heard people moan about sexism and other tired nonsense, but not the control gripe.
Like I said, that does nothing to me. The fact that Rachel or Sonia or Ayane are around and/or playable in the NG games doesn't motivate me to pick one up and play it over the other. Neither does it rile my bones and get my blood boiling and make me thing that it's misogynistic drivel... cause it's not. A bit on the shallow side? Sure. But that's not even remotely similar to sexist or the other complaints. That's just activist types who want to raise a fuss, and they'll raise a fuss about just about anything. I always get a chuckle for myself when I think back about all the accusations of rampant sexual objectification and poor female role modeling in GTAV, because when I heard a (I think it was Good Morning America?) network program levy these accusations on the game, I was RIGHT IN THE MIDDLE of playing Tennis with my loving wife in the game! Soooooo objectifying! Suuuuuch a negative female role model! XD Anyway, that's really an encapsulated example. But my point being, I couldn't really care less about any of that. The game is what matters. I bought
Dead of Alive Extreme 2 because I read an article that said DOAX Beach Volleyball was a REALLY good volleyball simulator game, and it happened to have the DOA girls in bathing suits along for the ride. But the babes weren't the selling point for me at all. Little did I know DOAX2 was a woeful disappointment in terms of gameplay... ~_~ No amount of fan service can get me to play a game that sucks, and thus it collects dust on my shelf to this day!
If you are unable to play it simply because it doesn't play exactly like Ninja Gaiden I don't know what to say. That would be like me not playing Wasteland 2 because it isn't as good as Fallout 2.
I said I didn't want to play it because it wasn't for me. You're essentially putting the cart before the horse here, that seems to be what you're not understanding. Not that I can't play it because it doesn't play like some other game exactly, but that I determined its feel wasn't something I liked, so I never felt like playing it more than the few hours I spent at the helm, incredibly bored, and incidentally it doesn't play like another game of no consequence.
God of War has nothing to do with this. The amount of combos in that game is weak. The game is structured completely different.
Yes, that was my point. It was a solid game with tight controls and I lvoed it for it. It felt nothing like B, and B felt nothing like it. The closest similarity in gameplay I got of ANY game was the aforementioned shitstain
Spawn game, but that's where their similarities end... Whereas GOW was well-designed, S was little more than somewhat faithful to the source material (as opposed to that God-awful movie from the 90s) but otherwise a shit brick as a game.
Bayonetta really picks up after you beat the game. That is when it truly gets challenging.
I wanna quote something Yahtzee said, but I can't remember the exact wording. But it's something along the lines of how silly it is when people suggest that it takes X amount of time for the game to get good, or that it takes beating it once for it to start shining. Maybe there was a being boiled alive analogy somewhere in his quote? I can't quite recall. Anyway, you're not doing the game any favors by telling me I gotta BEAT it before I start liking it. =P
At any rate I can't wait to pick the new one up. All I was saying is maybe you might like the competitive nature of the combo system and score attack and the great replay value. Generally I turn the music down on Bayonetta since it annoys me. I know Ninja Gaiden isn't as tongue in cheek so that probably is one of the problems you may have. I feel like you may be too serious to enjoy games for what they are.
"Too serious" has nothing to do with it. There's plenty of dry jokes strewn about NGS, like a comment if you interact with an object that was the leftovers of something that had been removed from the game from previous versions, and it acknowledges that "someone must have removed it". XD Touche, Team Ninja! I loved how abstract
Echochrome was. I love how totally absurd the heroes are in Dota2 (it's Valve, you should expect them to be very humorous) regardless of how grim or serious they APPEAR be. I adored the over-the-top childish cuteness of
LittleBIGPlanet and how it lent itself to its clever premise of everything being the manifestation of everyone's dreams and creativity, brought to life. I'm not too serious to tongue-in-cheek humor at all, otherwise how could I love
South Park so? It simply had nothing to do with my not taking toward B, just like the "sexism" was irrelevant to me, as well. I care about how the GAME plays, and I didn't care for it. Everything else comes second.
Edit: That fragile ego comment is funny. You might apply that to yourself and try Bayonetta again. Some of it may be on you. The combat is very deep once you dive into it.
I never said my lack of fondness for B was due to an inability to accept that getting my ass kicked in it was my lack of skill at the game. I never bothered with it long enough TO get my ass kicked. =P I was saying that NG was a series that (decreasingly so with each sequel) brought out the inner rage in most players who picked it up, kinda like what
Demon's Souls and
Dark Souls would do 5-7 years later. But whereas you could play through COD:WAW and legitimately complain that the game was bullshit for various reasons (infinite grenades, instantaneous "in cover" sniping, infinitely respawning enemies) at its highest difficulty, NG was jut frustrating at EVERY difficulty... but it was never bullshit, it was always fair. Supremely challenging, but fair. It came before DS and DkS and the paltry few games of their ilk which actually STROVE to challenge their players (*shudders*
Soldner-X.....) in the time where games were becoming increasingly lax in their efforts to try and push the limits of players, and as such it undeservedly got tons of flak for being "bullshit". But that's where my comment on fragile egos comes into play. If you can accept the fact that you getting your ass handed to you in a game MAY be due to your ineptitude, and that a little thing like practice might be warranted, then you could foreseeably tolerate NG's level of challenge. If not, then stay away. Nothing of the sort deterred me from B at all, however, meanwhile I rose to the challenge of PLENTY of games that had insane difficulties (sans bullshit), such as the GOW games, the aforementioned S-X duology, KZ2, DS2's Hardcore difficulty, and plenty more... =)
EDIT: I find it ironic that when I'm finished with posts such as these, the button I press to submit it reads "Post Quick Reply". There's nothing quick about any of that! XD
