Bayonetta: One of the Best (and Most Overlooked) Games of this Generation

--> Released in January of 2010, Bayonetta, with its scintillating visual style and a blisteringly fast yet nuanced combat system, proved a formidable challenger to the God of War series for most exhilarating action game on the market. Bayonetta is so fast-paced, so insane, that sometimes you simply don't know what you're looking at...and that's okay, because that's what makes the game a masterpiece.  Bayonetta's developer, Platinum Games, simply doesn't care about any genuine emotional investment in the game's story or its characters -- the only thing that matters here is the feeling of blissful feeling of oneness with the controller and the action on-screen.  Everything becomes so natural that, after a while, you no longer need to make sure you're hitting the right buttons at just the right time.  The timing and button presses become second nature, leaving you to enjoy the nonstop on-screen action.   The game’s eponymous protagonist Bayonetta, an exaggeratedly sexualized witch who has been resurrected from the dead, controls effortlessly, surging from enemy to enemy, incapacitating entire armies of angelic creatures with a marked sense of panache that corresponds so perfectly with the rhythmic and finessed input of button presses. The result: a euphoric feedback loop. The one-to-one correspondence of controller input and onscreen action enables the gamer to “get into the groove” of masterfully timing button presses to cue up beautiful, intensely gratifying onscreen flourishes that, if done just right, culminate in Bayonetta transforming into a wicked beast, such as a gargantuan dragon that obliterates enemies, or--for the even more sadistic—calling upon a torture device, such as a guillotine, to dispatch enemies with a merciless, unabashedly gory sense of style. Bayonetta has all the violent visual flair of Kill Bill with an added layer of quirkiness and creativity. While the vibrant and stylistic visuals imbue Bayonetta with a distinctive look, it's this tight correspondence between a silky smooth and nuanced control scheme and the stylized on-screen violence that make Bayonetta transcendent. The entire package is wrapped in an eccentric sense of humor, a charmingly unintelligible B-movie type story, and some of the strangest characters this side of Deadly Premonition. While the PS3 version was paralyzed by heavy frame rate issues, the 360 version is a real diamond in the rough, a gem that went under-appreciated perhaps as a result of its no-man's-land release in early January, the dead zone sandwiched in between the holiday gaming season and the release of Bioware’s behemoth, Mass Effect 2. If you've recently been wrapped up in a slow-paced and ponderous game such as Heavy Rain or L.A. Noire, you may find yourself hankering for some juxtaposition in the form of an invigorating, over-the-top, no-holds-barred experience. Here's a suggestion: look for the lollipop-sucking, demon-slaying Bayonetta in your local game store’s bargain bin, and dive into an experience that no other form of media but a video game can deliver.