Review: Dragon Ball Z – Ultimate Tenkaichi (PS3)

Let’s get one thing out of the way right off the bat. After going on at length in my First Thirty about the story (or, perhaps, excess of it) I can tell you that beyond the overblown, overdone cinematics, the story doesn’t factor in much. Here’s all you need to know. You are a witch, whose rather revealing suit is made out of her own hair, and who spends most of her time killing angels. There, easy. Not sure why you’re killing angels (which look more like ducks), but it has something to do with the fact that you can use your hair to summon a dragon-demon. Or something like that. Hit the jump for more insanity.

Bayonetta, it should be said, is a very, very good game. It controls beautifully, with your every button press being transformed into an elegant series of kick-ass moves, sometimes involving guns attached to feet, sometimes stilleto heels made of hair extruded from extra-dimensional portals to stamp floating heads out of the sky. The almost balletic grace with which Bayonetta dispatches her enemies makes you wonder how they made it control so well, how your sweaty-palmed input could translate into such a stylish series of savage strikes.

The gameplay is all in the combat – once you’ve got the jump, shoot, hit and dodge buttons down, you can be eviscerating with the best of them. The loading screens allow you to practice your moves, which is welcome, but you’ll find that the combos are easy enough that you won’t need to worry about memorising anything, as you can pull off really impressive manoeuvres with ease after a few minutes.

You rarely get frustrated – I played on Normal, but there are both Easy and Very Easy modes, which, I’m led to believe, can be played using only one button, so if you’re really terrible, you still get the visual payoff. And what a payoff. Most games are, visually and gameplay-wise rather risk/reward in structure: in Red Faction: Guerilla, for example, if you can get past the guards without being shot and lay some explosives, you can blow up a bridge and watch all the cars tumble into the ravine below. In Bayonetta, the risk is taken out. It’s just reward/reward. Or, more accurately, reward/reward/reward/reward/reward ad infinitum. It’s just incredibly beautiful. There’s always something exciting happening on-screen – in the first playable sequence, you’re fighting on the clock face of a tower in freefall while under attack from a giant two-headed dragon-angel.

Everything about the game (apart from the interminable cutscenes) seems to be geared towards keeping you playing, drawing you in. There are constant visual and gameplay incentives to keep your attention. Every enemy you kill drops Sonic-like rings (well, it is a Sega game) and they can be used to buy better guns to attach to your feet (I know it sounds like a joke, but you actually have guns on your feet). The controls are never frustrating, and when I died, I always acknowledged that it was my ham-fisted incompetence which had caused the death, rather than a problem with the game. An excellent mechanic is the dodge, which, if well-timed, can give you a burst of slo-mo Witch-Time, giving you ample opportunity to smack the nearest enemy silly until he explodes into a cloud of gore and rings.

Bayonetta has a very campy, silly sensibility. Everything is so overblown, so overdone, so over-the-top, that it keeps you laughing almost all the way through. Even some of the attacks are funny! At the point, I was chuckling while I was crushing an angel with an iron maiden made out of hair while my semi-nude character was taunting the enemy. There’s so, so much to love about this game. I had very few problems – one was the irritating J-pop soundtrack, but that could just be me, another was the ‘puzzle’ sections, but only because they kept me from killing more angels.

In short, I’m not sure you’re going to find a much better fighting game of this kind. It’s like Devil May Cry’s insane younger cousin. Seriously, if you like fighting games… hell, if you like games at all you really should buy this game. I haven’t had this much crazy, crazy fun in a long time. 4.5 out of 5 Aeropausonauts.

This review was based on a review copy of the game provided by Sega.