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What's the best title to have come from PlatinumGames? My own answer changes with the wind - sometimes it's the just about perfect third-person shooter Vanquish, other times it might be the outrageously eccentric Wonderful 101 - but when it comes to the purest expression of what the industrious Osaka studio is about, then there's only really one answer. And that's the brilliant Bayonetta, of course.For all its out-there strangeness - this is, after all, a game in which you play a domineering witch with guns for heels and whose hair transforms magically into screen-devouring demons - Bayonetta initially had the distinction of being one of PlatinumGames' more straightforward offerings. Part of the very first wave of games brought to life through the fledgling studio's partnership with Sega, Bayonetta sat alongside the thrillingly weird MadWorld, a game which ran counter to so much that was going on with its host platform the Wii at the time, and which bizarrely features a writing credit for the outstanding Yasumi Matsuno. Elsewhere in that line-up was the sadly unsung Infinite Space, a star-faring JRPG which squeezed an entire universe onto a DS cart.
Eccentric exercises, both, but in the whirling madness of Bayonetta there was something familiar - a clear, clean line to the balletic action of Devil May Cry, the game that cemented the reputation of its creator Hideki Kamiya. Bayonetta's winning trick is taking that original formula and at once refining it while pushing it outwards to almost unimaginable extremes. It's the Super Mario Galaxy to Devil May Cry's Mario 64 - an exercise in audacious creativity, all delivered with a gun-strapped boot to the arse. Heady, breathless stuff, served up with a camp panache that makes it an absolute delight.
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