Bayonetta & Vanquish
Bayonetta Exposed!
The director of Resident Evil 2, Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe and Okami talks sexiness, fan service and battling the forces of good.
By Cam Shea
Updated: 10 Jan 2020 9:59 pm
Posted: 1 Oct 2009 3:08 am
Hideki Kamiya is a legend in the Japanese development scene. This is the man, after all, that was a producer on the original Resident Evil and directed the second one, and then went on to direct such landmark titles as Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe and Okami. He's an inspiring designer, and we were fortunate enough to sit down with him at Tokyo Game Show 2009, along with Bayonetta's producer, Yusuke Hashimoto, another industry vet, who has had a hand in the development of everything from the original Resident Evil and Devil May Cry, to RE4 and God Hand.
We were there, naturally, to talk Bayonetta, the upcoming action title from Platinum Games. While it may not necessarily break the mould in gameplay structure, delivering an evolution of Devil May Cry's tried and tested third person combat model – albeit on a whole new scale, there's no denying it executes this with such style and panache that jaws invariably fall to the floor in this game's presence. The gameplay is lightning fast, and the wildly inventive visual design really makes it a treat to watch - and raises all sorts of questions. How did hair came to be so tightly integrated into the design and gameplay? Why are you a witch blowing the halos off angels? These questions and more, answered below...
IGN AU: I'm curious about how the core concept for the Bayonetta character came about – in particular the hair motif.
Hideki Kamiya: To really get to the heart of the matter, the explanation of how the hair comes into play in the game is that the hair is intended to accentuate and really show the physical movement of the character as you play through the game, sort of in the same vein as Dante or Joe from Viewtiful Joe. Dante had his coat and as Dante moved throughout the game his coat swayed and sort of accentuated that action, to give a really visceral sort of look and feel to the game. Same way that Joe's scarf flowed around him as he moved around. So in that same way, Bayonetta, as a beautiful woman, she has the long, flowing hair.
The TGS 09 Bayonetta trailer.
Initially that was how we had it – her hair was out flowing around behind her, and as she moved it really ebbed and flowed behind her to really give a lot of accent to the acrobatic movements that she does in the game, but the key weakness there was that it obscured most of her body, because her hair was out flowing around behind her, so we went back to the drawing board and thought 'well, how do we still have that visceral movement? How do we still show that, and yet, not obscure her whole body and end up covering up everything we wanted to show?' So we had the hair flow around her body forming into her battle suit, and it flows down off of her arms, so you still have that accent there – it still serves that same purpose, but it's a pretty drastic change to the overall costume and the look of the character, so in thinking about that we thought, 'well, what if we have her completely naked and her hair flows around her body and forms this suit?'
Independent from that, we had the idea that we wanted to use the hair as some form of attack – her hair is the source of her power as a witch but also as a beautiful woman, and we wanted to show that by having it summon forth these monstrous hands and feet and demons. We'd already had that idea so once we locked in the costume we then brought those two ideas together to see how they worked. Once you try and pull those two things together, it's pretty obvious that if she's using her hair to summon forth giant demons, what is that also going to say about her body, so that's where you have that the hair actually pulls away for a moment and you get to see a little bit of her skin underneath, then it snaps back into place. And so it was these two independent ideas that sort of naturally flowed together.
Fan+service+and+demons+-+Bayonetta's+got+it+all.
IGN AU: And that leads to some very nice fan service. It seems from watching the trailers and playing the game that this is a big component. How integral is that to the design?
Hideki Kamiya: It's a very good point that yes, it ends up being fan service, but it's sort of a natural result of putting together exactly what we wanted to make, and then the idea that it would be really good fan service evolved and came out of that naturally, but it wasn't that we set out to say 'what sort of fan service can we put in here?' We set out to make what we wanted to make, and that was just a bonus, basically.