Interview: Bayonetta's Hideki Kamiya and Yusuke Hashimoto

Like the US release of Bayonetta, this interview from Tokyo Game Show is fashionably late. Who's responsible for creating a world where a witch must fight evil angels with her hair and shoe-guns? We talked with Platinum Games' Hideki Kamiya and Yusuke Hashimoto about the seriousness of Bayonetta's plot, and the inspiration behind the game's one-handed mode. [Note: While two people were interviewed, only the responses from our single Sega-provided translator are transcribed. We apologize for the lack of proper attribution.]

Joystiq: Bayonetta has sex and violence, but do you consider it a "mature" game?
It's definitely not a game for kids. Being a parent, is this a kind of game I would want my grade schooler playing? Absolutely not. It's pretty straightforward: all the blood and violence and sexual overtones. My idea is even more than that. If you see a movie for adults, does that necessarily make it an adult movie that you wouldn't let your kids watch? Or, would kids really understand it and get any value out of participating in that?

Having made games like Viewtiful Joe and Okami, and Bayonetta as well -- it's never been a thought of "oh well, is this intended for adults or intended for children?" It's more like "we're making the best game we know how to make." And for a game like Bayonetta, because there's so much blood splattering on screen when you're in battle and stuff ... if it weren't for that, it probably would be alright for kids to be playing, on just the level that it's a game, an action game, and it doesn't really matter how old you are when you're playing it. You should be able to appreciate it and enjoy it. So the idea that we're targeting a specific demographic, or specific age rather, when making a game doesn't really enter in too much. Once the game comes in reaches this level of development, and reaches this stage of concept, it naturally gravitates in a certain direction.

On a related note, would you consider the story of Bayonetta to be serious? How crucial is the story to the gameplay experience?
The story in and of itself is definitely not serious. But the design goal for the story components is to build up the entertainment value of the game. And so, as exciting and dynamic as the gameplay itself is, the cutscenes also are intended to be exciting and dynamic and really over-the-top, really bring the whole package of entertainment this game is attempting to deliver. If you look at any of the trailers, and see snippets of the various cutscenes, and it should give you an idea of the tone of the game's story.

How did the story of Bayonetta get developed? Was it meant to have a clear direction, or is it meant solely to drive players from one action sequence to another?
So while I wrote the original story, once the game actually gets under construction, the biggest input was from Yuji Shimura, the movie director that led the cutscenes. As you're mapping everything out and looking at how you can render that into an actual action sequence for a movie, then it's like "oh, but if we can include this" or "if we did it this way, it would be that much more interesting." You get a lot of input, especially from him, and from other people that have a lot of neat ideas and good advice. All of that blends together into creating what the Bayonetta story comes out to be.



One of the most memorable features of Bayonetta revealed so far is its "one handed automatic" mode. Where did the inspiration for this come from?

First of all, having a difficulty setting like this was even in Devil May Cry, so I don't really consider it out of the ordinary, or unusual. But even so, I'm a hardcore gamer so I'm never going to play using Easy mode. It's always going to be Normal, or if possible, Hard mode just from the get-go. Bayonetta is very much built to those people. Those people are easily going to be satisfied on either of those modes. But, there's a whole subset of people who cannot make it through the game, and if you're going to spend money on playing games -- games are very expensive nowadays -- if you're going to buy one and you can't even get to the end, that kind of sucks. How do you respond to that? How do you help players so that they can at least get to the end and enjoy the game? The style of Easy Automatic isn't just "let's give enemies less health," or "you do more damage." What players are going to want, and what's going to be most frustrating to them is not being able to pull off those combos -- you see somebody that has that skill, someone that's playing on Normal or Hard mode and they're doing all kinds of crazy combos, and if you just reduce enemies' health, you're not going to be able to do that. And that impacts more on the satisfaction of the game than not being able to simply make it to the end. So, right away we thought "how do we support that?" How do we get that level of satisfaction and hit on that specific note, so we added Easy Automatic which helps pull off combos easier. So, even on the easiest mode setting in the game, you can fully enjoy the entertainment value of the game and not really have to do anything. It's almost equivalent of putting a DVD into the DVD player and watching all the way to the credits. So long as you don't fall asleep, you'll at least be able to get the full enjoyment out of the whole package experience. It's kind of like, on that level, sitting at home watching a popcorn movie.

One other important idea behind Easy Automatic mode is that it's a step for players that aren't at that level to play on Hard or Normal mode. It's someone that's new to the genre, or somebody that's intimidated by it. At any point during the game, you can turn it off and just go off into Normal mode and continue on. It's something that gives you an easy step -- not just throw a hard game at you, and ease you into it. The overall effect of that is to broaden the market and help make more hardcore gamers, more people that can appreciate the type of game Bayonetta is.

We really do believe it's a very good stepping stone for getting into the higher levels of the game. While you can compare it into putting a DVD into the DVD player, here you do have to give some kind of input to get into it. There might be some players that start off in that difficulty setting, just by doing a little bit at a time ... it might lead into somebody playing and realizing "oh, I can play this game. It's not as difficult as I thought it might be."