familiar it’s not something one expects to hear when talking about Bayonetta. The beloved witch is known for her domineering attitude, her revealing style, and her suggestive humor. She still Bayonetta Origins: Cherry and the Lost Demona surprise prequel from PlatinumGames, it might just be the most amazing family game to release in 2023. The highlight of the game is its use of a narrator, instilling a sense of childlike wonder in anyone who plays it. Bayonetta Origins.
You have to do the voices Every good fairy tale needs a good storyteller. Bayonetta Origins It has a great narrator. Narratively presented as playing through the pages of a storybook, the game eschews the traditional freeze-frame scenes illustrated in Cherry’s storybooks and the events she finds herself in along with short bursts of text, all narrated.
Bayonetta Origins It clearly draws inspiration from traditional fairy tales, but the storyteller’s joy is that the game also revels in the art of storytelling. While the narrator is a nice mechanic right off the bat, he really shines in introducing the titular second protagonist: the lost demon Cheshire.
The storybook pages distinguish the fearsome demon’s dialogue in italics, and when the narrator reaches this part of the text, he puts on a different voice for the new character. Like any good story time as a kid, or today’s best audiobook reads, Bayonetta OriginsThe narrator fully commits to the role and launches into a joyously imaginative portrayal of Cheshire.
While the storyteller’s idea may seem clever, it instead feels genuinely inventive. He asks the player to join in the fun of this colorful fairy tale world.
story time – In all the media we consume, there is usually some level of suspension of disbelief. Video games may have wacky magic and supernatural plots, and be rooted in incredibly gamified tasks, but that’s the nature of the medium to a degree.
As an audience, we agreed to put some of that nonsense aside in order to immerse ourselves in the world of the game. the trick of Bayonetta Origins it is that it asks us to acknowledge the absurd and reframe our interaction with the game as a piece of theater and collective narrative.
Walk into Bayonetta Origins, most people starting the game will already be familiar with the witch Cherry becomes when she grows up. The impression of a fairy tale is that the reader usually knows how the story ends. Although we don’t know how Bayonetta Origins will end, we know where this little witch goes next.
Storytelling in games is rarely implemented to such great effect. other games like Bastion and Divinity: original sin II implement this with wonderful results, but the clear childlike joy that comes with Bayonetta Origins‘ Narrator feels like nothing else in video games.
Although the vibrant watercolor environments and characters that populate the pages of Bayonetta Origins can fulfill the task of effectively showing this fantastical world to the player, a job that a skilled storyteller would normally be responsible for when reading a fairy tale, the storyteller still remains.
Bayonetta Origins it is a stylistic, tonal, and mechanical departure from the franchise to which it acts as a prequel. While Cherry clearly has the seeds that grow into the resourceful and overbearing Bayonetta, it wouldn’t be surprising if the connection were lost entirely. Although that’s not a bad thing thanks to the nice Bayonetta Origins it’s passing time, especially when you have the narrator to draw you deeper into the story.
Bayonetta Origins: Cherry and the Lost Demon releases for Nintendo Switch on March 17, 2023.
