What Social Media Means to Me

Hello.

If you’re reading this, it’s possible you have followed a link from my Twitter or Facebook profiles after one of my online offerings “blew up,” as the saying goes. You might be wondering why I put together a blog post rather than some link to my works to piggyback off my “blowing up,” so let me tell you.

I hail from the era of Usenet and the early pre-AOL days. The sentiment of that proto-social media community was pretty unanimously “the Internet (yeah, we’re talking about the era where proper English dictated that the word was always capitalized) isn’t real.” It’s a social programming that I haven’t amended… and don’t particularly feel compelled to either.

Social media exists in my sphere of consciousness to peddle my wares and occasionally shitpost. It’s why I have more than one real life acquaintance and/or friend that has me blocked on various social media platforms (this is perfectly okay, for the record). Any nuggets of wisdom you find from me on Facebook or Twitter or Snapchat or wherever is going to be few and far between, and you’ll only disappoint yourself looking for them.

I prefer to leave my serious observations of insight to this blog… that rarely updates, which should tell you how often I have wisdom or insights to share. I’m just a dude, trying to create my own problems to resolve… then sell them to you!

I’m told I also intentionally construct things to make them look far more absurd then they really are. But that’s just silliness, I tell you.

Anyway, have a good day, afternoon, evening, or night. Feel free to explore this blog if you wish. Maybe buy something as long as you’re here.

Or don’t. It is a silly place, after all.

The Isle of Donne is Here!

Book 6 of the MegaTokyo: Endgames series is live!

After a more than long enough wait, The Isle of Donne is available for sale.

For paperback, follow this handy Amazon link!

If dead trees don’t suit you, ebook versions for Kindle, Kobo, and Nook are available!

MegaTokyo: Endgames books for sale!

The Gate Series

Book 1: The Broken Prophecy 

Purchase a print copy from Amazon.com…

Or purchase a Kindle e-book…

Or a Nook e-book

Not convinced?  Enjoy five short stories that set up the novel completely for free!

---

Book 2: The Sixth Prophet

Purchase a print copy from Amazon.com…

Or purchase a Kindle e-book…

Or a Nook e-book

Want to take a look before you buy?  Enjoy this free preview to whet your appetite.

So Jon Stewart Did a Thing…

I have… reasonably positive memories of Jon Stewart during his first run under the bright lights of the late night TV talk-o-sphere. The Daily Show under his run had some surprisingly deep dives into the sorts of issues that the people whose job it supposedly was refused to do. He spoke (meager) truth to power in the ways that our “legacy media” either couldn’t (or actively wouldn’t) do.

But at the same time, I had noticed he had started falling for the same “both sides” horse-race driven nonsense of the people he long criticized for a while. When he stepped away, I had thought that part of the reason was because he had recognized that after some self-reflection.

(Some behind-the-scenes revelations that he struggled with internal biases and race-related prejudice didn’t endear me, either, for what its worth.)

So, I was not eagerly awaiting his return to the bright lights as much as some might have thought. I saw very little evidence that he had done the soul-searching necessary to find the groove he had during his first run on The Daily Show from the few appearances he had done in the interim.

And as a result, I was not particularly surprised that when he made his grand return… he pretty much sounded exactly like the media he once loathed, just with his typical bombast and comedic delivery.

Now, the issue here really isn’t the facts. Both men are exceedingly old. The problem is that the facts in this case don’t tell us anything particularly useful and obscure and muddy the facts that actually matter… the exact same game that the legacy media used and Jon Stewart railed against for so very long.

Joe Biden is 81. Donald Trump is 77. If I wanted these sort of cutting observations, I could find it… well… at every other legacy media outlet in the United States of America. The only thing Jon is doing differently is the delivery.

As far as the cognitive issues go; would I be surprised to learn that Biden has lost a step (or two, or three)? Nope. Dude’s 81. My grandmother at 79 couldn’t even remember the names and faces of her own children. I’d be more astonished if he was as sharp as he ever was.

But when I see Donald Trump struggling to put two thoughts together coherently without going off on some completely unrelated tangent, I refuse to believe that we (as a collective) genuinely care about this issue. It’s just the same “bothsides” nonsense to try and sound impartial without actually putting in the work to inform us as a society why it actually matters.

I really don’t care how Donald Trump pronounces “Pennsylvania.” I care about how he apparently can’t tell Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi apart.

Cognition failings should matter, just not in the way that we’re choosing it matters. The Office of the President of the United States is one of the toughest and most demanding jobs in the world. Someone who says things like he would invite Russia to bully and invade members of an alliance when they don’t pay up (demonstrating a complete lack of understanding of how said alliance works while recalling a conversation that nigh assuredly did not happen in the way he claims it did, if it happened at all), probably shouldn’t be anywhere near the office, for example.

Or if they slip up and say “Mexico” instead of “Egypt” at a press conference.

If you don’t want to see the difference between those two observations, then there’s little I or anyone can say that will make you.

But you’re supposed to be better than that, Jon. Or… at least, you tell us repeatedly that you are.

Once More for the People in the Back…

“Welcome back, my friends
To the show that never ends
We’re so glad you could attend
Come inside! Come inside”

– Karn Evil 9 by Emerson, Lake & Palmer

So, here we are again. Another year. Another year of gatcha gamers furious at Hoyoverse and their staggeringly hit gatcha game Genshin Impact because they don’t feel “appreciated” by the company about their “new year rewards.”

I’ve spoken about exactly this sort of thing before, but I suppose it bears repeating, because gamers really don’t want to get it. They want to believe that publishers and studios have some sort of mutual investment with their players that players have with their games. They want to believe that the relationship is more than transactional. And so they continue to act like jilted lovers every time a company, like Hoyoverse, doesn’t “appreciate” them.

(And trust me, Hoyoverse doesn’t appreciate players. At all. They’re probably one of the worst companies when it comes to seeing players as anything more than numbers on a ledger. Tied with damn near every other game company.)

The most recent rage stems from Genshin Impact’s Chinese New Year rewards being exceedingly meager, like they were last year… and the year before… and the year before that…

Meanwhile, the game Honkai: Star Rail is offering up a free five-star character for their “loyal player base,” and it’s got Genshin players seething, threatening to pull their support and jump ship for that title. Leaving aside the eye-crossing ridiculousness of the threat (you’re taking your money away from Hoyoverse, and giving it to…. uhh… Hoyoverse), it really highlights the fact that gamers and publishers are speaking two entirely different languages. The latter group knows this. The former group perhaps willfully refuses to.

As I mentioned in the previous post, these sort of rewards and incentives aren’t really appreciation to current players, and more advertisements for non-players. Any rewards a game gives are, at least by publisher thinking, money left on the table. They are loathe to do that unless they feel they absolutely have to.

When Star Rail is offering a free 5-star reward, players choose to believe Hoyoverse is saying:

“We appreciate you for your support. Here’s an awesome reward for all you’ve done for us!”

When what Hoyoverse is really saying is:

“Our player numbers aren’t hitting our internal targets. Tell the world about our game, will ya?”

Now is this to say that Genshin Impact is “doing it right,” or that people shouldn’t be angry about not feeling appreciated? No. Because frankly Hoyoverse doesn’t give a shit about their player base. They never have given a shit about their player base. But when gamers rage online about being “unappreciated” and how [x] game is doing it all wrong, and [y] game is doing it right, especially when both titles come from the same company, you are unwittingly doing pretty much exactly what that company wants you to do; advertise both games and get those titles on people’s lips. Granted, it’s not ideal for them, but they’ll take it.

If you really want to send a message. Go silent. Take your money, and walk away. Until gamers have the willingness and the willpower to cut off these sort of companies, they will continue to play these games with their players.

Why Nintendo Hates the Smash Community (It’s Not the Reason You Might Think)

To say that Nintendo has had a unique level of ire for the competitive community for the Super Smash Bros. series would be kinda like saying the Hatfields and McCoys had some disagreements about how their neighborhood should be managed.

Nintendo hasn’t had much better than a thinly veiled animosity towards the small if ardently committed group that seek to play those titles at the highest level of skill, and there are a lot of theories as to why.

Some would argue that the one time Nintendo earnestly tried to have a partnership with the community, it turned out said community was a haven of deviants and deplorables with such a literal and metaphorical stench that Nintendo immediately withdrew and decided to never do that again.

Others would argue that Nintendo’s notoriously ruthless hand towards anyone who doesn’t wish to hew entirely towards their demands on how people should enjoy their games are the primary reason, as the competitive community is notorious for a very particular and static ruleset (sometimes to the degree of modding the base game) for their tournaments.

While neither of those are strictly “wrong,” and assuredly contribute to the amity between the company and its community, I’d like to posit a slightly different primary reason for the aggressive distaste. One that can be found in this chart.

There are a few things to note in this chart that with proper context might clarify what I mean.

For example, Street Fighter 2 (arguably the most recognizable fighting game in history) launched in 1992, and has (through various remakes and iterations) reached roughly 23 million sales. Smash Bros. Ultimate eclipsed that by a considerable margin launching 26 years later.

The third highest selling fighting game of all time launched exclusively on a console widely considered to be one of the biggest failures in the history of game consoles and a handheld device. Even taking the Wii U sales alone still puts that iteration of Smash above Marvel vs. Capcom 2 (which is largely considered to be the pinnacle of that series if you listen to its competitive community).

In fact, if you were to listen to the Smash Community, their favorite title (that has a sub-community ardently insistent on playing it to the exclusion of anything else) has sold roughly half of what that community largely considers its worst iteration.

The point I’m trying to make here is that what a competitive fighting game community thinks is the best rarely matches with what the general public thinks is best. That disconnect lies at the heart of Nintendo’s animosity.

See, people love to watch high level, skilled play. It’s why things like the Capcom Cup and EVO tournaments are a thing. People are less inclined to buy and play games with a high skill threshold. In fact, watching high-level play tends to discourage John and Jane Q. Public from buying a title. Most publishers know this, which is also why things like the Capcom Cup and EVO tournaments are a thing. If they can’t make their money selling to casual players, they can at least get a cut of the astonishingly high number of people willing to watch the games being played.

It’s why Netherrealm has been including “story modes” in their games with AI opponents that are uh… extremely low skill to put it nicely. The hope on their end is that enough people will find that (and other assorted casual friendlier game modes) worth the $60 or $70 rather than getting their asses handed to them routinely by people who have invested thousands of hours into mastering the proper frame counts and optimal animation cancels.

It’s why you see the degree of investment in server side matchmaking in a lot of titles nowadays. For those who wade into the online competition, publishers and developers are trying to avoid as many people as possible from bouncing off their titles within a hour, soured by the experience of getting railroaded over and over.

While Masahiro Sakurai and his team definitely made sure that the Smash series had a robust set of fighting game mechanics under the hood, that is absolutely not how the publishers at Nintendo want the general public to view that series, and have increasingly found the grassroots competitive community that has doggedly clung to relevance as an annoyance at best, and sabotaging at worst.

That disconnect between competitive high level play and the casual market is why Nintendo really wants people to consider the Smash franchise as a fun, quirky party game with some of gaming history’s most recognizable characters rather than a fighting game.

Because the game sales are found in the general, casual public, not the high-skill level quasi-to-total professionals that you see on Twitch streams (and occasionally ESPN 3), and that is what Nintendo cares about over anything else.

It’s Time to Let my Hero Rest…

I have been very uncertain for quite a while about what I was going to do with the newest announced Guild Wars 2 expansion, Secrets of the Obscure.

On one hand, I have been a devout follower of the series since quite literally it’s start on April 28th, 2005. I was literally a Day 1 player. There have been very few times where I’ve not been wholly certain that I was going to open my wallet for whatever content Arena.Net produced for this series.

Until now.

The entire narrative arc of Guild Wars 2 completed with End of Dragons. Everything this generation of Guild Wars characters fought for concluded with the resolution of the Elder Dragon problem. That should have been the end of the story for the heroes I leveled, geared, and ground out hours of work for.

Secrets of the Obscure should have been Guild Wars 3. It should have been an entirely new game with a new generation with a new experience with a new narrative arc. They should have been putting in the work to make this a complete title, not tacking it on crudely to a game that was already narratively complete.

Because Arena.Net has gone the way of so many other studios, and have leaned into the eternal “Games as a Service” model that emphasizes quick turnaround with as cheap of production as possible.

And I’m not interested in that.

I would have much rather given Arena.Net more money for a fully featured experience.

I would have opened the wallet for Guild Wars 3.

I have no desire to do so for Secrets of the Obscure.

It’s time to let my heroes rest, and for me to walk away from the franchise I’ve supported for eighteen years. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think my time was wasted. I don’t feel cheated. I don’t think this is a “slap to the face” or some sort of insult done to me.

I just wish I could have been compelled to spend more time and money in Tyria, and unfortunately Arena.Net wasn’t able to convince me.

Sega Does What NintenDon’t

It’s a bit interesting that the topic of Nintendo and their heavy legal hand has jumped into the news again. In 2004, this very topic was the subject of my sophomore year thesis paper for journalism composition. So, this is something that I actually had a bit of (dated) knowledge about. But one thing I’m not is astonished that they largely haven’t changed their stripes in the following twenty years, because they had been largely the same way twenty years before my exploration into their legal procedures.

One thing that I’d ask people to internalize is the phrase “technically correct,” because you’re probably going to hear it quite a bit in this blog post.

Part of the “Nintendo Problem” is that I think gamers are asking the wrong questions. The important question isn’t, “Why is Nintendo like this? Why do they shut down fan projects? Why do they harass Youtubers and other content creators?” Because that question has a very simple (and technically correct) answer. “Because they have to.”

See, the case with Nintendo isn’t about copyright. They certainly have copyrights to all of their work, but that’s not what compels them to be so aggressive. The issue is that Nintendo takes most of their IPs into the realm of trademark, which is a somewhat related but altogether different thing.

Trademark behaves much like a lot of gamers think copyright works. Trademark requires you to “defend it or lose it.” And it is actually a fight over trademark that is the core of one of Nintendo’s most prominent IPs.

We’re gonna dial the time machine to 1982. Nintendo had a deal for a Popeye video game fall through, and Shigeru Miyamoto decided to rework the game they had to feature “Jumpman” (who was the inspiration for Mario), and a big ape named “Donkey Kong.” I won’t go through the entire blow for blow of that case, but there’s a pretty good write-up of it at this link.

Long-ish story short; Nintendo was able to demonstrate that Universal Studios did not adequately defend the King Kong trademark, allowing tons of unlicensed material of King Kong to exist… and that’s presuming that Universal Studios even held the trademark for King Kong to begin with, which they also managed to cast into doubt.

At the end of the day, Nintendo won on quite literally every count, and they learned all the wrong lessons from that battle. Realizing just how powerful trademark can be, they started trademarking everything that wasn’t nailed down, and probably a few things that were. By the time I wrote my thesis almost twenty years ago, they had approximately 1500 unique trademarks, and assuredly that number is even larger now.

Some of those trademarks are positively absurd. For example, the sound the Mario games make when he collects a coin? That is a Nintendo trademark. The rainbow hued charging plates you saw in the (long ignored) F-Zero series? Yep. That’s a Nintendo trademark. Each and every different suit that Samus has ever worn in the Metroid series? Yeah… I think you see where this is going.

The question really shouldn’t be “Why is Nintendo so aggressive?” The question should be, “Why the hell does Nintendo have so many profoundly ridiculous trademarks?”

It’s because Nintendo realized the power of trademark. It allows them the legal power to shut down mods of their games in ways that copyright really doesn’t. Nintendo’s executives will shrug and say that trademark compels them, and they’re technically correct.

It’s why they can shut down a Let’s Play for charity (which they have been doing literally from the instant Justin.tv was birthed into existence). They’ll respond, “We have to. If we didn’t shut down this charity stream for St. Jude, then someone like Tucker Carlson can host an anti-trans stream using the same game, and we can’t stop him.” This is also technically correct.

But, technically correct isn’t actually correct. Nintendo uses restraint quite frequently when handling trademark issues, and exercises considerable discretion… when they want to. For a great number of derivative works, Nintendo is more than willing to see no evil (just take a look through any Nintendo IP category on AO3 or Deviantart for evidence of that). They can absolutely allow fair use without risking their trademark, and they do so quite frequently.

As a general rule, there are two ways to raise your risk of receiving a letter from Nintendo’s Legal Division to the danger zone:

The first way is to create a fan work of something they are in planning to do, or in active development of. This is what got the creator of the Mario Battle Royale and the fan remake of Samus Returns in trouble, evidenced by the “limited release” of Mario 35, and the official remake of Samus Returns.

These are things that are rather petty; clearing the field of any potential (and free) competition for their products. This isn’t uniquely a Nintendo problem. For example, if someone had made a fan remake of Resident Evil 4, Capcom is quite angrily demanding that get yanked off of the creator’s Google Drive. If someone developed a Final Fantasy game and called it Final Fantasy 16, SquareEnix isn’t going to be patting them on the back and saying good work.

But that’s not how it has to be. Bethesda happily invites mods of their work, and has on a couple occasions tried to launch programs to financially compensate modders for their work. Sega (as the title of this blog post implies) happily embraces fan work. Hell, if you do a good enough job, they’ll hire you do it. That’s how one of the Sonic series came to be, if I remember correctly.

Nintendo could be a lot more agreeable on this score. They choose not to be. That’s an active choice, not one compelled solely by trademark.

The second way to get on Nintendo’s shit list is what the bulk of the complaints on this issue stem from, however, and it’s one where there is a very clear narrative that one side really wants you to buy, sometimes quite literally.

When you try to make money off of Nintendo’s IP.

When Gary Bowser (yeah, if I had a nickel for every time a Nintendo story popped up about a real life dude named Bowser, I’d have two nickels… which isn’t a lot, but kinda funny how it happened twice) was arrested and his wages garnished for the rest of his life, he wasn’t just some nice guy trying to help poor kids play Nintendo games that just couldn’t afford them. He was one of the brains behind a group called Team Xecuter, a hacker collab that sold ransomware hidden under the hood of Nintendo products. You can certainly argue that his punishment is excessive (40 months in jail, and $10 million in fines to be paid to Nintendo), and I’d honestly agree, but he was not some fair Robin Hood of this story being railroaded by this massive corporate Sheriff of Nottingham, and that people want to believe he is isn’t really Nintendo’s problem outside of the PR hit they are taking in the court of public opinion.

It’s also at the heart of a lot of content creators that are seeing their videos stripped of ad revenue. This tends to happen every time Nintendo is getting ready to launch a title on one of their flagship IPs. Now, the nature of fair use when it comes to Youtube videos or other “critical” media is very blurry, and it’s not entirely clear whether or not such videos that use extensive cuts of copyrighted and/or trademarked IP falls under that umbrella. Nintendo absolutely is taking advantage of that ambiguity to bully Youtube and Twitch and TikTok or whatever into shutting down monetized content.

But, as I noted, this isn’t new. These content creators know exactly who they are dealing with, and what they potentially risk, when they post a video about Nintendo products and hit that “ad revenue” option. They know that Nintendo videos get eyeballs, and rack up the most views and ad revenue as a result. That’s why they are constantly trying to make Mario and Zelda and Metroid videos, and not Sonic or Skyrim. These are largely not innocent people just trying to show their love for their favorite products. These are fans who are trying get some scratch, and are using their favorite games to do it. They’re inviting people to sub to their Patreon for quick sneak peeks. They’re inviting them to donate or sub to their Twitch channel (you get one free sub if you have Amazon Prime, ya know).

These are people who know they are riding a tiger. They shouldn’t be crying out their victimhood when that tiger mauls them.

What Nintendo wants out of their exercise of trademark is the right to dictate how the customer enjoys their product, sometimes in very specific ways, on terms that can seem like they change daily. If you find those terms agreeable (and hundreds of millions of people very clearly do), then you’re not going to see much of a problem with Nintendo’s practices. Frankly… that’s okay. Nintendo is not a monopoly, and they don’t even dictate how video game fair use is handled, much less media as a whole. It’s not the dire issue that a legion of content creators want you to think it is.

That said, if those IPs are something you are emotionally invested in, it’s also okay to be angry about how Nintendo treats those who want to express their love of that product. Nintendo is willfully obtuse about the legality of what they do, nor are they always consistent in how they handle derivative works. It is worthy of criticism, even if it’s not the dire omen that those who are also financially invested want you to believe it is.

Trans People are People (This is Apparently Hard to Grasp)

So… Judy Blume decided to open her mouth and insert her entire ass recently, telling the world that she was “100% behind” J.K. Rowling’s attempt to forge a new flavor of Trans-Exclusionary Feminism.

(I honestly wouldn’t even call what Rowling is doing “feminism” to be honest, but I suppose that’s not my call to make.)

Now, Judy Blume is an author I’m familiar with; I grew up with a lot of her books in my family library. But to be honest, I hadn’t given her much thought since about seventh grade. My initial reaction to learning of the endorsement was, “WASPy old woman holds reactionary views. Color me not shocked.”

I had to be reminded that Blume isn’t Protestant, which rather negated the entire “WASP” thing, and that her bibliography is actually quite progressive. Which… okay, fair enough. And yet… I’m still not surprised, because I have become far too accustomed to people disappointing me on the issue of trans people and trans rights.

For whatever reason, even among the most progressive circles in the world, far too many of us once we get to the “T” trip on that part of the acronym, and they trip hard. I’ve seen so many even within the rainbow really want to chop off that part of the flag, to “divorce” themselves from trans people. I don’t think that they are hoping to gain acceptance from the rest of society by vilifying trans people. I think they honestly and genuinely think there is something fundamentally wrong with being trans, and are quite happy to risk their own place in society rather than ally with trans people.

Trans people are people. They should have all the rights that any white Christian male enjoys. I really don’t understand why this is so hard.

Revisiting Cyberpunk 2077

I never particularly wrote on this game because frankly, my opinions of the title amounted to “Trash Bin,” and that was after all the updates and patches the game got.

But then I stumbled upon this re-review from Luke Plunkett at Kotaku, and it inspired a couple thoughts.

1: In The Dark Knight, a theme that emerges, to the point that it is outright voiced on at least two occasions, is “You either die a hero, or live long enough to be a villain.” I’d like to offer a rewording, at least for the sake of game development.

“You either sell out a hero, or produce long enough for people to figure out who you really are.”

This sort of rushed launch and frantic patching to eventually produce a finished product was hardly new to Cyberpunk 2077. It may have been its most famous example, but you don’t have to dial the wayback machine too far to discover that The Witcher 3 was a nigh unplayable mess when it first launched. Or that The Witcher 2 didn’t exactly launch in what we would call a “finished state.” Or… The Witcher…

Hmm…

I actually struggled to think of any CDProjekt Red title that didn’t need significant patching to bring it to a playable state for a good many gamers. If your CDPR game played great right out of the box, you were in the minority. This sort of thing was not, and is not, new for this developer.

And it’s not like this phenomenon is unique to CDPR. For example, “Bioware Magic” was always fruitless management dithering followed by a frantic burnout stretch that destroyed employees to get their titles up to snuff before their publishers got too angry. EA’s production process was always about getting the most revenue for the least amount of effort possible. These companies didn’t really change their stripes in any meaningful way; the consumer base merely started to see them for who they had always been.

2: Another thing is that we really need development studios and publishers to understand is that games aren’t movies, nor should they try to be. Players really aren’t terribly keen on a four to five hour non-stop adrenaline rush when the controller is in their hands. They want to be able to take a breath, look around the world constructed around them, then dick off for three hours doing something completely irrelevant to the main plot if they so desire.

Any game that doesn’t understand that, and allow for the game to slow down, is probably not going to be received all that well. I suspect that’s a major part of the reason why I so loathed Final Fantasy XIII (a game which is getting renewed interest by a generation of gamers). I spent so much of that game rushing down hallways that it left me thinking, “If you guys wanted to make a movie, you should have just done that rather than give me a controller like anything I do here matters.”

Anyway, that’s my intermittent blather for the month. Have a good day.

A More Spoilery Narrative Review – Bayonetta 3

I figured it would take me a hot minute to get to this. I do apologize to all five of this blog’s readers. But here we are, having absorbed enough and processed enough of Bayonetta 3’s narrative to offer some thoughts on it.

Firstly, none of the characters that you see in this game are the same ones as the first two outside of Rodin.

Luka suddenly has some sort of werewolf like ability? No need to explain why that is. It’s just a different Luka from a different universe! Same thing with Bayonetta apparently being so into him (and not Jeanne)! None of these characters are the same, so now we can completely toss aside character development and get right to what we want to do!

This is why I tend to not be a fan of “multiverses.” It strikes me as more of a narrative cop-out than anything else, even when done well, a way to dodge lore you already established rather than anything that particularly adds to said lore, and it is definitely being used as a cop-out to give Kamiya the characters he wants to work with rather than the ones that had developed over the prior two games.

Which is a bit unfortunate, because in this case, it’s a rare situation where a multiverse actually can somewhat make sense narratively. Bayonetta’s setting is the same “Dante’s Divine Comedy injected with a little bit of Norse mythology” in which these sort of shenanigans actually could work, and to an extent it does. Singularity is an interesting foe, and the decision to make the major threat something not angelic or demonic was a nice twist.

It’s just blunted by what seems the real reason Kamiya and his team went in this direction.

Which dovetails into one of the big controversies of this game; Bayonetta (or at least one of her iterations) deciding to shack up with Luka at some undetermined point before the game.

After the first two games, I always felt that your opinion of Bayonetta sexuality said more about you than it did Bayonetta. The character quite happily flirted and teased damn near anything with two legs and a sentience, and carried very little seriousness towards any of them. Even her flirting with Jeanne came across to me as more playful than serious. They had a far stronger emotional investment than a physical one, in my opinion.

But that’s my point; I’m a largely asexual flirt, and so I saw those same traits in Bayonetta… largely because the entire series never particularly hammers any of that down, and I’d argue actively avoids doing so.

If you wanted Bayonetta to be a flamboyant lesbian, you certainly had evidence to support that interpretation. If you wanted her to be a girl who talked a big game, but actually had little opportunity for actual relationships, and thus had no real idea what to do about her interest in Jeanne or Luka or anyone, that had quite a bit of evidence to work with too.

It’s actually the same here in Bayonetta 3. Despite her affections towards Luka to the point of actively having a daughter, she’s still the same flirt with a strong emotional attachment to her Umbran sister. The significant difference in this case is that we now have very overt evidence she actually knocked boots with Luka in a way we don’t explicitly have with anyone else.

And brings us to the final point I want to address; Bayonetta’s daughter Viola taking on the mantle at the end of this game, presumably to become the heroine of future installments. Now, I don’t have any particular problem with Viola as a character; really the only thing I found bothersome about her was how mechanically different she plays and how that can be jarring for someone who already has significant muscle memory for the dodge mechanics rather than parrying.

Viola’s punk rock motif can carry just as much “girl power” as Bayonetta’s big band swing style, so I’m not particularly worried that she’d necessarily betray or lose any of that if she were to become the main character in the future. But I’m also not the slightest bit convinced that the mother is actually out of the picture. In a world where death has already been proven to be more inconvenience than anything else, I don’t buy for a second that Bayonetta and Jeanne are inherently buried deep in Inferno forever.

(I will admit I want to see Viola get more screen time, if for no reason that to confirm my theory that Cheshire is Viola’s father either turned into a demon, or some manner of construct derived from that particular version of Luka.)

Anyway, there ya have it. Bayonetta 3, simultaneously a big deal in regards to the characters and narrative… and also, not nearly as much as you might want it to be.

A Spoiler-Free Bayonetta 3 Review

Note: A more in-depth, spoiler-laden review will be forthcoming as I digest the details a little bit more.

So, after all the drama and spoilers and assorted nonsense, this (perhaps overly) anticipated game finally reached the mitts of the general public. It almost feels pointless to even have a spoiler-free review at all at this point, as quite a few things were already spoiled long before people outside of a handful of media outlets played it, but in this case, I think it might help to detach the story from the game for the time being.

Let’s be honest, if you were playing these games for the narrative… you were probably playing them for a different reason than Platinum Games and their head honcho made them.

Firstly (and let’s get this out of the way), it is not the same Bayonetta that you play in the first two games; thank you convenient narrative multiverse devices. In fact, the only character that is actually the same, as far as I understand, is Rodin. So, in that sense, a lot of things that might seem like ass-pulls at first glance in fact do have a story-based explanation. Not a particularly good one, but an in-game explanation nonetheless (we’ll get into more detail on that in the spoiler-ridden review, which might take me all month at the rate I compose blog posts).

Secondly (and let’s also get this out of the way), Hellena Taylor is a lying sack of human excrement who tried to manipulate what was, and is, a very real problem in the industry. It disgusts me how she will inevitably make it even harder for voice actors to get what they deserve in the future.

So, with that out of the way…

Mechanically, the game plays as well as it ever did. Combat is tight, yet fluid, and is probably the most gameplay-rewarding Bayonetta of the three. It feels really good to hit those combos just right, and the superficially similar foes (the homonculi and the angels really don’t play all that differently) still feel different and fresh; giving you benefit of a new experience that still rewards your muscle memory.

The more open world (because it is by no means open) is a nice touch to the linear experiences of prior games, and also serves to pad the length of a series that normally could be “full completed” in a handful of hours. As a result, the game doesn’t feel as fast-paced, which may be jarring for some but I found personally welcoming. Being able to backtrack (in a limited sense) was a welcome feature, especially to someone like me who hates just missing something a second before.

The new combat elements do take some getting used to. Directly controlling the demon beasts has a pretty rough learning curve, and the game doesn’t give you that much time to figure it out before making it really complicated. Someone not particularly used to managing two separate characters simultaneously will likely struggle.

The new character added to the game also takes some adjustment. Viola herself as a character isn’t the problem, and I don’t share the general sentiment of her being grating or unwelcome (I suspect that has a lot to do with her origins, which will be discussed in the spoiler-laden review). Mechanically, she is quite the deviation from the norm, and again, Platinum really doesn’t give you much time to get used to her idiosyncrasies before throwing you neck deep in some difficult fights.

The spy missions featuring Jeanne are a nice attempt to give her something unique to do within the story other than be a palette swap for Bayonetta, and while I appreciate the attempt, I think it’s a case of trying a little too hard to make her impact on the story and the game play different. Giving her some missions in the same way they handled Viola’s I think would have been fine.

The one part that is going to be rather wholly negative, and this really isn’t Platinum’s fault, is that we are definitely hitting the absolute limits of what the Switch’s hardware is capable of. Platinum does their best with what they have, but the graphics and frame rate do take some pretty heavy hits at times where there is a lot going on. Perhaps oddly, I think the game is more stable and pretty in handheld mode.

At the end of the day, if you’re not particularly playing this for the story, you’re probably going to enjoy the experience immensely. In terms of its play, it really is kinda like a Bayonetta+; it doesn’t sacrifice terribly much to give you more of what you already liked over two games, either by adding wrinkles to old systems or expanding the world to give you more to explore.

But if you were invested in the story and/or the characters… we’ll discuss that at a later time.