Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon

Originally played in 2023, I’m porting over my thoughts, first from a variety of messages sent in Discord to rappy as we played in tandem, and second from a small thread on twitter.

Out of nowhere, a small team within Platinum brought the mature, sexy, long legged Bayonetta into the pages of a storybook, and it worked out perfectly. With the combat sitting somewhere between Bayonetta 3 and Astral Chain, the game has you controlling Cereza for light platforming and puzzle solving, while your demon Cheshire protects and fights. I loved the combat & environment, the art style was great and the story was good. While I call this an action RPG - which I do think is appropriate - it also share some DNA with top-down Zelda games while also crossing into Metroidvania territory. There is backtracking, areas are gated off until you get the next item/upgrade, you will be presented with areas early that you won’t be able to access until later - all the genre hits.

Its a good presentation, and really, the combat is very fun and cool. It also fixes one of my biggest complaints with Bayonetta. Say you are ass deep in a level, you stumble across an Alfheim/Muspelheim room (If you don’t know these are secret challege rooms -don’t get hit, witch time damage only, etc etc), if you beat them you get upgrades (magic or health). If you are struggling you have to either finish them or move on, and if you want to come back to them you have to go through the entire level. In Bayonetta Origins you’re able to select these challenge rooms from a menu, a small but important improvement.

It also invokes one of my absolute biggest pet peeves. Let me present you with a word problem:

You have 5 health potions at a checkpoint right before a boss fight. You fight the boss and use two potions. You die, and get sent back to the checkpoint, how many health potions should you have?

Five! The answer is five, not 3, Bayonetta Origins. This kind of thing drives me nuts, especially in auto-save games that don’t let you choose different checkpoints to go back to; otherwise you can get stuck in a fight that maybe you aren’t able to finish because your potions are gone.

Apr 20, 2023

I had played the demo in Bayo3, thought it was cute, decided to buy & stopped paying attention to it. So getting this game & realize it was a small Zelda-like mixed with asymmetric combat was a pleasant surprise. You control Cereza and the Demon Cheshire separately!

Apr 20, 2023

The combat gets involved & deep, lots of options for combos. I feel they held back the complexity not just for the younger audience but because it can get confusing when you have to run everyone in opposite directions. But for the most part it worked without question.

Apr 20, 2023

The visuals are phenomenal. It has a water color, painterly quality that goes between story book & psychedelic 1970s op art. Lots of silhouettes, monochromatic splashs, akin to the hallucinations in 2001. The story takes some weird turns as well, and gets DARK QUICK! Play this!!

Final Thoughts

This game is unique and weird. I like that a lot of the talent at PlatinumGames has been used to nurture these small projects and unique gameplay mechanics. Despite what may or may not be going on at that company, you can’t deny that even with their current brain drain situation, their output is almost always still worth taking a look at. Yes, even their very underated - and very dead - mobile game - which I’m still hoping gets re-sold as a complete game on console, or their overlooked GAAS Babylon’s Falls - something even I didn’t try, though I didn’t have very long to make the move. But this game shouldn’t be used only as a frame for the story that PG is dead or dying. It exposed new talent, a great team that took some chances and delivered a really unique game with a control scheme that should be impossible to play but works so well. You really need to think about each hand as its own character, they each have their own tasks to accomplish, enemies to fight, platforms to traverse. They are working together, completely apart. And it works beautifully. I hope this is not the last we see from this team, and I hope PlatinumGames can continue to thrive - even if we have to suffer through another round of mobile games and free-to-play, online service games just to get another Bayonetta: Origins or the next experiment brought to market it’s going to be worth it.

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This game is ...

Buffonetta Origins

Even the proposition, as I'm typing, is pretty insane; chibi Bayonetta runs around a haunted, magical forest resucing the souls of slain children while asymetrically & simultaneously controlling a demon trapped in a giant patchwork stuffed-animal cat. It sounds like nonsense, but it's not. It works, it's great, and I hope they make a sequel. For all these reasons, and because it's more Bayonetta, I hereby deem Bayonetta Origins BUFF CERTIFIED.

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