"It's been a while". I found myself saying that a lot at my make-up Convocation Ceremony two weeks ago, as I greeted people I'd gone to university with, yet hadn't kept in touch in the two years since I'd last been a student. A lot's happened in the year that's passed since my last newsletter, but before I get into any of that, I wanna talk about the thing that spurred me to write this one.
Warning: Much of Bayonetta 3 is gonna be spoiled here, so read ahead at your own caution, or skip ahead to the next part.
The Bayonetta franchise holds a quaint place in my heart. I remember successfully smuggling in my copy of Bayonetta 1+2 for the Wii U beneath my parents' radar, lest they caught me buying a game with such a provocative (by Brown immigrant parent standards) in 2014, then successfully smuggling in my copy of the Bayonetta 1+2 remasters for the Nintendo Switch beneath my parents' radar, albeit for different reasons (they didn't want me spending my money frivolously when I was in university).
I remember the sheer awe I felt playing Bayonetta 2 for the first time, and what a radical leap it was from the first, and I even got to re-experience that same feeling when playing through them again earlier this year. But where the first two occupy a place in my heart, Bayonetta 3 occupies a weird space in my mind. I finally got around to making an almost-complete list of the games I played this year, and while I played quite a lot (to my surprise), none have quite stuck with me the way that Bayonetta 3 has in the two weeks since I finished the game. It's stuck with me in such a way that I felt compelled to write something about it, thus forcing me to revive this newsletter to even do so.
Bayonetta 3 has had quite the tumultuous 5-year journey from announcement to release, and I went in not knowing what to expect at all from the game by the time it got into my hands. It's a bit funny that the game came out on my birthday, yet took another two weeks before I got a hold of it. I honestly didn't know what to expect going into it. In my mind, Bayonetta 2 had already closed the loop on things both narratively and mechanically, so I really didn't know where a third entry in the series would take things. But to its credit, the game knows that.
Bayonetta 3 almost feels like an entirely different game featuring Bayonetta rather than a Bayonetta game, per se, to the point where when enemies from the first two games show up it took me by surprise, like whoa, hey, are you even supposed to be here? But when I call Bayonetta 3 a unique experience, I almost mean it in the narrative sense.
Let's cut to the chase here: the story has never been the strong point of any of these games, opting to focus on style over substance. But Bayonetta 3's plot, while still the weakest element of the game, is in my eyes the most earnest in its intentions of the three. Five years is a long time to decide where to go with a franchise, and writer/supervising director Hideki Kamiya carried this into the narrative, deciding to center it around the idea of what exactly it means to be Bayonetta.
Despite knowing about the multiversal angle long before going into the game, its true purpose didn't really sink in for me until I got to the death of the second alternate-universe Bayonetta (or Arch-Eve, as the game calls them). It was at that moment that I'd encountered Bayonetta 3's first scapegoat, with the loop of each Arch-Eve dying and relinquishing their abilities to the Bayonetta that I was playing as, Cereza. I'd honestly loathed the loop more and more with each subsequent Arch-Eve that died, firmly believing that they served no purpose other than to cement Cereza as the one true Bayonetta, but the game subverted my expectations at the very end when it opted to kill off Cereza as well, imparting the title of Bayonetta (and presumably the helm of the franchise from here on out) to her daughter from an alternate universe, Viola.
Before I go any further, I should probably address the Viola of it all. I quite like Viola! Perhaps a hot take to some, but she grew on me pretty quickly. I'd also figured out her parentage a minute into her opening monologue (perks of having played the previous two games shortly beforehand), which probably helped endear her to me quicker. That being said, she's also woefully underserved by the plot. Firstly, you don't get to play as her until the fifth chapter of the game, by which point you'd have already sunk into the rhythm of playing as Bayonetta. It's a hard brake into a left turn, but I quickly glommed onto Viola's playstyle. But switching between Bayonetta and Viola's gameplay styles every two or three chapters afterwards made me feel like I was losing my grip on my ability to play well with Viola, which sucks, because Bayonetta 3 should've been a proper "and introducing" moment for Viola just as much as it was a send-off for Bayonetta. The passing of the title and mantle from mother to daughter(?) at the end of the game is done in a rather bittersweet and heartfelt manner, but it feels like I'd somehow missed a solid 5 chapters' worth of development between the two of them beforehand.
That's where the second scapegoat comes through. Bayonetta 3 opts to do a lot of its worldbuilding through collectable trinkets throughout each level, each containing data on heroes and villains, and fleshing out the worlds and characters of each Arch-Eve. It feels very much like the kind of shit Dan Slott et. al. would do with the Spider-verse, where they'd build out entire Edge of the Spider-verse stories for alternate Spider-people that'd just bite the bullet in a one-off panel in the main event. I wouldn't call it lazy storytelling, but rather conflicted development. Adding substance to a franchise that's always been about style is no easy feat, and doing it in the middle of an already-troubled production (which Imran Khan delves into in his own newsletter) adds another layer of difficulty. Could this narrative have worked and flowed better if the game ended up being the open-world narrative that it wanted to be? Tough to say for sure, but the echoes of those intentions are sprinkled throughout the end product that we got.
The final scapegoat is one that hasn't been used yet, at the time of me writing this. In the final battle with Singularity (which, as far as Bayonetta villains go, is the weakest-written of the bunch), Cereza receives a Hail Mary save in the form of her selves from the past two games coming in to tip the odds in her favour. My biggest concern with the implications here (namely that the previous two games take place in their own universes separate from the current Cereza and her adventures) was that it offered an easy out for Platinum to go back on their word and pretend that the events of Bayonetta 3 were just another alternate universe that'd come to pass. But thus far, nothing really seems to point to that being the case, with Platinum even digging their heels deeper with the announcement of the Bayonetta Origins game coming out next year. With Viola seemingly set to star in Bayonetta 4 or whatever the next mainline game in the series will be, the message is clear: Bayonetta is a title, not any one person.
It's the most interesting thing about this whole endeavour; that in spite of all its missteps and stumbles, PlatinumGames remains headstrong in what they wanna do. In the end, that's what I admire the most about Bayonetta 3. It's a story not only of Bayonetta but PlatinumGames as a whole, a developer looking to re-establish its footing after a rocky, uneven few years. The game's caught me at a pretty salient moment in my life, as I find myself unsure of what I want to do or where I want to go with my life in the next few years. I'm not sure of what the future holds for me or Bayonetta, but I might as well stay headstrong and see how it turns out.
A roller coaster of many things. It all feels like a blur of events that happened to me, with me taking a passive role in it all. But I guess to summarize, I:
Got into fansubbing (you can find my work here)
Survived two rounds of layoffs at my day job (and feeling anxious about the possibility of a third)
Gave my parents a nice 25th anniversary celebration, where I:
Got to meet the next generation of my family (many babies, all of which had been born during the pandemic)
Watched ~276 movies (According to Letterboxd, though the count disappeared this morning before I could finish watching my last movie for the year, Apocalypse Now)
Played 25 video games
Read 0 Venom comics
Started a podcast (which you should listen to here; I write show notes for it here)
Started my path towards homeownership (probably not gonna see the fruits of that for another couple of years)
It's been a rocky road, and there's a lot I wish I could've done differently, let alone done at all. But I am still fairly proud of what I was able to accomplish. I was knocked out of the writing mood in general very early into the year, which is why this is the first newsletter you're even getting from me this year, if it somehow hasn't gone into your junk mail. Truth be told, finding the motivation to write has been one of the toughest challenges for me this year. I put out three pieces of published work this year, none of which I'm particularly proud of, but one was written under a pseudonym, so it doesn't matter. I haven't read any of the finished releases, mainly because I don't like looking at my own work once it's been published, but in the case of two of the reviews, I wrote them right before I got myself into some twitter discourse about the state of comic reviews (and took the stance that they they're ultimately just PR fluff used to inflate the egos of creators, or as bait to enrage them), so it became a real tail-between-the-legs moment for me after that. I don't regret doing the reviews, but damn, if I didn't have the foresight. As for the third thing, I'll never disclose what I wrote, who published it, or the pseudonym I used, so have fun trying to figure that one out.
I'm not sure if I want to write more in the new year. Like I said, finding the motivation to sit down and write for hours on end is tough for me, which doubly sucks because I wanna get back to making YouTube videos next year. Either way, that's something to figure out for next year. For now, I gotta enjoy the 15 minutes of 2022 I still have left.
Peace, and see you in 2023 (maybe).