Hello, welcome to The Back Page of Video Games Podcast. I’m Samuel Roberts, and I’m joined as ever by Matthew Castle. Hello. Matthew, the road to episode 200 has begun, episode 101. Hey, 101, the wonderful 101. This is a platinum episode. That’s fucking good, isn’t it? It’s almost like we did it on purpose. Note, we didn’t, no. Yeah, good, but reversing into good content yet again. Is it gonna be a wonderful 101, or is it gonna be a merely fine 101? We’ll soon find out. But yes, this is the follow-up to our 100th episode. For those who haven’t listened to that one, because you thought it was gonna be a boring clip show of old episodes, that was a joke. They were all original clips we made up for a big laugh. And it’s an original podcast. So if you missed that, go back and have a listen. Did you notice, Matthew, there were a few people who said, oh yeah, I skipped this one, or I was gonna skip this one because of X, Y and Z, but then I saw people talking about it. Were you a bit surprised by that? Yeah, I would have thought they would have been interested enough to kind of listen or like had faith that we would have, even if it was a tried to clip show, we would have still done it with good humor. But you know, it’s just tough. It’s a tough crowd, clearly. Yeah. Which makes the fact that lots of people have seemed to enjoy it, it’s all the more rewarding. Yeah, it’s been really nice. The response to it really surprised us, right? Cause we felt like it was a slightly compromised version of an original idea we had, and then yet people were really into it. Yeah, and there was a lot of umming and ah-ing and shall we kill this off, and shall we… Even once it was edited, there was, I mean, like we focus tested this episode to make sure we weren’t absolutely embarrassing ourselves, and bits of it got moved around. It’s way too much work for the total bullshit that it is, but work did go into it. We actually re-recorded the Persona confession skit because we didn’t think it was good enough on first go, so yeah, now it’s sort of gold, obviously gold, so that’s good, solid gold. So yes, episode 100, that’s behind us, Matthew, but we come to November 2022, and what a month of podcasts we have here. I think it’s, is it seven podcasts we got this month in total? It’s quite a bumper selection, so for those who didn’t know, we hit our £2,000 a month stretch goal on Patreon, which has unlocked the PC gaming classics mini series hosted by Phila Wanyuk and Jeremy Peel. Jeremy, of course, a contributor to these, to some episodes of the podcast, three, I think, at this point. So we’re excited to have them on, to talk about a whole range of PC games. That begins this month. There’s a six-episode mini series. We’ll roll out a different episode each month, and it’ll be exciting. So I’ll just fire through, Matthew, what we got here, coming in November. November 4th, we got God of War Games ranked, the episode I’ve spent two months preparing for. That’s going to be a good one, though. Note that we won’t be ranking Ragnarok in that episode because we won’t have played it, but we’ll rank the whole series up until this point and revisit Ragnarok at a later date. November 11th is what we’ve been playing. It’s been a little while since we’ve done one of those, so we’ll also answer some listener questions. So drop in the pod questions Discord channel if you want to ask us a few questions for that one, a few fresh Qs, and then we’ll give you some fresh As. God, that sounds filthy, doesn’t it? November 14th is our first Patreon XL tier-exclusive episode of the month, the PS5 versus Xbox Series X Revisited for 2022. That’ll be fun. The very first episode that we had was about these two consoles going head-to-head, so here we’ll revisit it with fresh thoughts, which will be cool. November 18th will be Cyberpunk 2077 Revisited. I have not played this game properly still, beyond the first few hours. I’m playing through it right now. I’ll have fresh thoughts on it. We’ll talk about it and a little bit about the Netflix show, which has inspired so much interest, revived interest in what was a controversial RPG. I better watch it then. Well, watch one episode and just have some top line thoughts, Matthew. And then, yeah, November 21st, which is a Monday, PC Gaming Classics Episode 1. That will be about either System Shock 2 or Thief. We’ve been letting our patrons vote on that. I think System Shock 2 is ahead at the time of recording. And November 25th, two giant men play God of War Ragnarok. So some non-spoilery thoughts and some spoilery thoughts on the big PS5 exclusive of the year. And finally, November 28th, XXL episode for patron subscribers of the XL tier is the James Bond movies ranked. That’s our pop culture episode of the month. Oh, Matthew, that’s quite a lot of podcasting, isn’t it? How are you feeling about all that? Yeah, there’s a lot of games that need to be replayed or played. I’ve got a cram, yeah, got a cram a lot in. Too much, perhaps? No, it’s fine. It’s good. This is the stuff I enjoy. I like it where we’ve both played the same things and we can discuss it rather than me just monologuing or you just monologuing, more likely to be me just monologuing to be honest about some Nintendo things. So I always think they give us some of our best episodes. Like I love the Resident Evil Village one, the Elden Ring episode I really enjoyed. So yes, a bit of cyberpunk because I feel like we didn’t cover that properly because I’d played it, was kind of a bit sick of it. You haven’t played much of it. So to be able to really get into that would be good. Yeah, we can also, in that episode, we can litigate the CD Projekt Red announcing six or seven games or whatever it is at once thing that happened. That might be a good fresh thing to talk about too. So yeah, I’m looking forward to it. God of War games, like of all the ones we’re doing this month, I think that’s the one where it’s going to be like, that feels like a solid gold episode waiting to happen, doesn’t it? Yeah, yeah. So that’s going to be like your version of Zelda episode or Kirby. Yes, but with more embarrassing sex QTE minigames. You obviously haven’t played Kirby. Oh yeah, not all of it. I’ve actually just played the opening intro of Kirby and the Forgotten Land, Matthew, and I was there thinking, it’s quite mournful, the opening, isn’t it? It’s like Kirby sort of like, or Carby, just driving through the post-apocalypse, a little bit of like forlorn vibes to it. Yeah, for sure. I just love the idea of a game starting that way. It’s like, yeah, this is the Kirby version of The Last of Us. It’s going to be a bit dour now while a little blob boy becomes a car. And it’s like, fair play, you know, I look forward to discussing that on the Game of the Year episodes. But yes, so this one, Matthew, we finally got through the fucking long preamble. Bayonetta 3 and Platinum Games more generally. So we’re going to build a Hall of Fame, much like we did in our LucasArts episode. So that will involve picking five representative games from the catalogue of Platinum Games to sum up their history and their greatest achievements to date. Oh, kind of a weird time to be doing an episode about Platinum, isn’t it Matthew? How are you feeling about it? We exchanged notes about this, I think. I swear we had a discussion a few weeks ago of like, are we talking about Platinum? Are Platinum okay to be celebrated? You know, obviously referring to the recent allegations against them. And while that rumbles on, it seems like… I’m not going to say it seems like they’re fine, you know, like there’s still some stuff involved with it. But I think where we’re currently at, we kind of felt comfortable talking about them. There was a part of it for me where I thought, well, if we dwell on that a lot for this episode and that becomes like a massive crux of what we’re talking about, it’ll kind of like go against the remit we try and have for the podcast to make it relatively timeless, you know? Yeah, yeah. So I think it’ll timestamp it a bit too much if we like talked about it for 20 minutes, for example. Not to say it’s not important. Yeah, no, absolutely. I do have some, I have some like thoughts on it and like how it reflects on like Bayonetta 3 itself, which I’ll get to when we talk about the game. But with all these things, you know, it’s just the perils of jumping in when someone hasn’t had the right of reply. And, you know, it’s, it’s just, it’s always such messy business these days. You know, everyone wants to be on the side of righteousness, but it’s quite hard to place where, where that is sometimes. So, yeah, it’s, it’s, it’s tricky and it’s messy and there are, there are, you know, they’re quite a complex bunch and people have quite a complex relationship with some of them, specifically Kamiya, because he’s such a sort of allowed specific presence on Twitter and whatnot. And yeah, it just, I think there’s just a lot of baggage with this, with this studio and it’s a shame that that baggage gets in the way of a pretty amazing kind of lineage of, you know, in the past and that their, their body of work has platinum as well. So hopefully we can celebrate that stuff. Yeah, I think so. Not to get any deeper into it than this, but they definitely just made me think about how social media blasts aren’t, don’t feel like a way that things get solved. They think that they just feel like a way that bring in a million armchair experts and it’s not proper justice. And, you know, maybe feel people feel like they can’t actually go to a proper source to get proper justice for various reasons. So social media is all we have and it’s just messy and complicated. And it turns into very much a he said, she said situation. And, yeah, and then a bunch of assholes get pulled into it to scream at either party who know nothing about what’s going on either way. So not good. And Twitter not a solution to anything, it seems. The first key learning of this episode. Yeah, apart from sharing Blorko memes, of course. Oh, yeah, that’s always good. And Jeff Keighley Borgen memes also. That’ll pop one day, Matthew, I’m sure of it. Never. So Matthew, what are memories of the emergence of Platinum? So in 2008, they arrived on the scene. They’re a merger of the company Seed Inc. which was in 2007, it was reported that this company had been founded by former Clover Studios personnel at Capcom. Now Clover Studios were the developer behind Beautiful Joe and Akami. They’re a wholly owned Capcom subsidiary. And they worked on, yes, this kind of array of games like God Hand, Beautiful Joe, Akami, and Got Closed Down. The developers go off and form this new studio Seed Inc. And then they merge with another company called Odd Inc. which is where former Platinum president Tatsuya Minami came from. They announced this splashy four-game deal of original IP with Sega, Bayonetta, Mad World and Infinite Line, later called Infinite Space, were announced up front. And then the reveal of Vanquish, a game worked on by Shinji Mikami, the creative Resident Evil and sort of like creative genius behind Resident Evil 4, along with a lot of other people of course, was making this third-person shooter. So it was a pretty huge moment, I remember. But what are your memories of it, Matthew? I was obviously on Endgamer at the time. Nick Ellis was the editor. He went to a press event in London with Sega. And Sega, I believe they kind of sort of introduced Platinum to the world through the three games that they announced at the time. Which obviously, Mad World, like you say, Bayonetta, Infinite Space. And I don’t think I necessarily made the connection between who these people were and what they had worked on. But I remember Nick coming back and telling us about Mad World and less so Infinite Space. As I’ve said a thousand times on this podcast, just the excitement of someone being big into the Wii and making something weird for the Wii and making something quite adult for the Wii, which was this ultra-violent hack and slash brawler, Mad World, seemed excited. So I was probably distracted by the Weenus of the story, rather than the, oh, look who’s actually here and who’s working here. And I think it took a while to sink in that Bayonetta was going to be a big deal. The cameo connection I didn’t necessarily make. And I remember Mike Gapper on Xbox World talking a lot about Bayonetta and being really excited and going to endless Bayonetta press events. And yeah, it wasn’t until I kind of played it that probably the whole kind of platinum story kind of clicked into place for me. Sorry, I was laughing off mic there at distracted by the Weenus. I was laughing at that off camera. That happened a lot. I really was in such a Nintendo bubble to be a staff writer on a Nintendo mag. You kind of had to be. And it was possible for quite momentous things to bash you by. So my memory of it is that I was deeply into the whole Clover Studios idea because it seemed like the end result of… This is all outside speculation, I guess. But it felt like in the early noughties, you saw this rise of certain game developers in Capcom having a lot of power. It maybe feels less like that now. But when you had the Capcom 5, for example, that felt like the ultimate Shinji Mikami flex. I will make these five games for GameCube. Only four came out, of course, exclusively for the GameCube, even though it was the lower selling format of the generation. Obviously, all of those games, minus PNO3, would later come to PS2. But yes, I felt like the logical next step was this, basically, spin-off studio that got to make, seemed to have a lot of power over what it made. But it lasted for such a short period of time. But A Viewful Joe pre-existed already before Clover did. But A Calm Me and God Hand is a one-two punch of what a studio’s values are. It just felt incredibly meaningful to me. It’s the end of the PS2 generation, and here are two games that are diametrically opposed in terms of the subject matter, style, all that stuff. One is visually spectacular, just looks better than, arguably, probably 99% of the library of PS2 games even to this day. And then this absolutely bonkers anime-infused brawling game that was literally designed with one person that Mikami knew in mind, which is amazing. So I was definitely like, I dug that as someone who was like 18 and playing a lot of PS2 games, you know, I was really into that idea. So when Platinum emerged, it just felt like the second coming of Clover to me. That’s kind of how I saw it. So that felt like a huge deal. And I’m, one memory I do have, because they did announce these three games at once, is thinking that Bayonetta looked a lot weirder than Devil May Cry. I was like, the character design, the style of it. Because Devil May Cry, obviously, which Hideki Kamiya developed in 2001, started life as an idea for Resident Evil 4 and became its own standalone series. You can sort of see a little bit of Leon influencing Dante. He kind of seems like, you know, he’s got a similar sort of hairstyle and vibe, I guess. You can see how that game started life as a Resident Evil game. But you look at Bayonetta and she doesn’t look like any other video game character, really. Certainly not any other video game character at the time. With these guns, you know, strapped to her feet and stuff like that. They’re kind of like a sort of tight leather outfit. The slightly different vibe of female character design that you saw in other games around that time. It felt, it just had a completely different flavor to it. And I remember thinking, okay, I guess like the whole thing with the Sega and Platinum thing is they have been given free reign to make the games they want to make. Or at least that’s what it felt like to me from the outside looking in. Whether it was that way or not, I’m not sure. But yeah, certainly at the time, that’s how I felt about it, Matthew. So long winded there, but hopefully insightful. Yeah, no, I get that. I think maybe what changes or definitely a line that they’ve pitched is that while they obviously have these like superstar names that you know really well, like mainly Kamiya, you know, there’s a lot of talk in Platinum interviews and they’re weirdly open for a Japanese studio in terms of like the volume of interviews and they put out a lot of their own like blogs and podcasts and videos. Like they really have tried to document their journey themselves in quite an interesting way. It comes up a lot that they like boisterous creatives across the board who can kind of contribute to the games. The idea that loud voices can get their ideas in like no matter where they come from department-wise, which is why you maybe get such sort of strangeness like Bayonetta. There’s such a jumble of weirdo stuff in there and it doesn’t feel like it necessarily all comes from just cameo. There was definitely that kind of vibe to them. And then the games were also different from each other as well, right? Like it was, I think like Infinite Space wasn’t technically developed by them, right? It seemed like it was shepherded by them. Yeah, they worked with Nude Maker who is home to Mr Steel Battalion. So that’s like an old Capcom relationship of Inaba’s who is like, that was good. Let’s do that again. I’m mates with this guy. We’re talking a lot and it factors into, we just want to make, you know, no two games that are alike. So actually a weird spaceship building space opera battle simulator thing is like perfect for that agenda. And then Vanquish had come a little bit later, released in late 2010. And that was, yeah, a third person shooter, kind of singular amongst their catalog, which we’ll get into. So Matthew, what are your current feelings on Platinum compared to where they were when they started? So like, I think that maybe a slightly, a slightly has changed since Platinum were founded is maybe in an age of social media where we have more access to people, or we know more about how games are made, or whatever it might be that maybe the idea of the mythical video game creator makes less and less sense these days. Maybe that’s been debunked more. Maybe we think about it less. But where do you stand with with Platinum these days? Do you think there’s any sort of decline, rises, falls, that sort of thing? I do agree with you on the creator thing. And it runs counter to the fact that whenever I talk or think about games, I always try and crown them into like neat narratives, where like a single creator is like a key creative voice. And, you know, I, you know, it’s very easy to kind of like conjure these neat ideas of like, well, this guy did this, this and this. And I think part of that, like decline of that identity at Platinum is intentional in that I don’t think they wanted to be just the studio that makes fine games and then a cameo game, which is like the main event, which they could have arguably have been. And they’ve pushed other people to the fore and they do big up lots of talent there. There are many names which have come out of there now. You hear more and more and they’re positioning younger talent as like big breakout directors. And I think they still have that structure in place. Like I still think they like that kind of hierarchy and the idea of some kind of, almost like a sort of ringmaster to this kind of din of ideas that seems to exist below. I think your overall opinion of Platinum probably hinges on whether or not you’re a big Nintendo person. Nintendo’s relationship with them has been amazing. I think like their games, not all of them are absolute stunners, but for the most part have been really good fun and Nintendo have financed some stuff which they probably shouldn’t have financed but I’m really grateful that they have. I think if you aren’t a Nintendo gamer you’re probably looking at them going well they’re so diminished but you know they’re just because they don’t happen to be making things for other people and when they do they’re a lot more hit and miss. Right now I’m feeling kind of okay about them. There’s this sort of narrative around Bayonetta 3 of like Platinum’s back baby and it’s like well it’s only really Babylon’s fall that really really shit the bed. Astro Chain was a really well reviewed game and is a really really good game. That to me speaks to someone who you know basically bought Bayonetta, bought Metal Gear Rising, bought Nieria and says well where’s my next one of those and they’re going where the money is which is kind of a necessity. So personally feeling pretty good. That was a very long-winded way of saying I personally am feeling very good about them and it kind of irks me that there’s this sort of narrative that they’re basically like on a completely you know they’re completely bust because or bust creatively I don’t know how they’re doing financially because it’s just not true. Yeah so I think it is easy to conjure up that narrative like you say just based on like maybe one or two games that weren’t amazing. There is like a spell where they’re making not particularly well reviewed Activision games, tie-in games and that felt like a pay-the-bill situation you know from the outside looking in which is absolutely fine if that’s what it takes to keep going then fair enough and not all of these games are bad as we’ll get into. And yeah I think but I think when you look at the broad sweep of things right up to even like the last two or three years you know you can you can really just see so much so much gold in there still and like there’s still a sense as well that we don’t know everything they’re making right there’s at least a couple of other things probably on the way from them that is remains a surprise whatever the Astral Chain guy’s working on right that is uh yeah that’s yeah that’s that’s in the mix and you know they also have you know scale scale bound is obviously like a huge sort of disaster story for them but I do wonder if like scale bound had happened and had released on Xbox reaching the kind of people who aren’t touching these Nintendo games obviously it’s impossible to say whether that game is going to be good or not but if they had released a game which had followed the trend of cameo basically making 90 rated action games for his whole career the narrative would be completely different like it’s it’s just that gap you know and and there is a there is a big like not to make it all about him I think there is a big I think it’s been a big cameo-shaped hole in the last five years. And you feel it, and you feel its fingerprints on a lot of games, but you also feel like the main event hasn’t happened for them for a bit. Yeah, there is a sense of that. I think the truth is, if Scalebound had come out, it would have basically released in the very tough Xbox times of 2017, 2018, and not been a massive seller, but later very much appreciated when it arrived on Game Pass. So I’m basically comparing it to Sunset Overdrive, Matthew. Or it could have been a wonderful 101, like sort of wasted on Wii U basically. Yeah, exactly. So yeah, it’s hard to say, but that is undoubtedly part of the narrative as well, of course. There’s the scuttling of Scalebound. So yes, an interesting history for sure, even though they’ve not even been around for 15 years. So Matthew, you’ve been reviewing Bayonetta 3. How was it reviewing your game in this series? Was it worth driving yourself a bit spare by playing the old ones with COVID? Yeah, I think so. My memory is so patchy these days, I was just trying to remember, like, what do I think about these games? And I knew we were doing this episode. And, you know, I was interested in, you know, I remember 1 and 2 being quite different experiences, but not being able to quite put my finger on why. And I’m actually kind of glad I did in that it, I think if I hadn’t, I would have come into Bayonetta 3 with certain expectations of how 1 and 2 behaved and what I liked and didn’t like about them. So actually, it was good in that way. It was actually a very enjoyable review experience. We had quite a lot of time to get in. And I’ll tell you what, though, an absolute motherfucker of an embargo or NDA on this one. Like, it was so surgical about which levels you could and couldn’t talk about. I’d say we could probably talk about half the game, but not the first half, like half the game throughout. I had to do, like, a big editing pass on my review, basically with the switch in one hand, comparing like the levels to the embargo, going, was that in this level or that level? I can’t talk about that. Was this? Oh, it was really odd considering the game’s out in like three days. I can’t really pinpoint, like, what the thinking was. Like, if it was story beats, I don’t know. Like, who gives a fuck about Bayonetta’s story, really? You know, certain boss encounters, but I don’t know. So yeah, navigating that was a pain. But actually, after all my umming and ah-ing in previous episodes, I thought the review went okay. I was quite pleased with it. Okay, well, one of my questions was gonna be, do you fight God in space in this one? But my guess is that whatever paperwork you were given by Nintendo says, specifically do not talk about God in space. We’re God in space to be in the game. Am I on the right answer? The game’s out today, so I can technically talk about anything. Oh, yeah, that’s a good point now. Yeah, it’s like public domain, right? I wouldn’t want to spoil it, but you know, probably. You’ll spoil God in space in Kirby. I think you’re fine. Yeah, like, yeah, you do go to, yeah, there’s a bit of that. It ends big. I will say it ends bigger and better than Bayonetta 2, but probably not as big as Bayonetta 1. Okay, that’s a kind of good sort of like hint there at what’s to come for people who are picking up the game from today. So Matthew, tell me about the weapons in this one. It’s a weird one to, a weird angle to start with, I suppose, but one of the reasons I didn’t get on with Bayonetta 2 is for whatever reason, I just couldn’t make the weapons interlock for me in terms of using combos in a way that I could with the first one where all the weapons sat so nicely next to each other. So what’s in your arsenal in this one? And do you think it kind of like compares favorably to the other two? Yeah, so it’s a little bit different in that you don’t split weapons between your hands and feet. If you’ve got a weapon equipped, it has like one move set. So you’re not mixing together stuff which sort of simplifies things and makes it a bit easier to get your head around. You can have two weapon sets equipped that you can change with a button. So like at any time you only have access to two weapons where in Bayonetta 1 and 2, you sort of technically have access to four weapons at any given time. Each weapon feels much more like a complete play style because it kind of physically transforms her when she has them, like her costume changes and she sort of takes on elements of the weapon. She has this one weapon called the Dead End Express, which is basically like a locomotive train on a stick. The idea is that it’s sort of churning wheels have like a chainsaw effect. It’s basically a chainsaw, it looks like a train. But when you equip it, you have like a train conductor’s uniform on and you can kind of turn into a kind of half woman, half train and then drive around like running into people full steam ahead. Yeah, it’s, I would say like it’s simplified, but like a lot flashier. It kind of every weapon has either like visual kind of pull to it and a very different play style. Like each weapon has a kind of clear gimmick to it. In terms of how they all connect, like it feels like something that will emerge over time. I mean, the way I tend to play these games is that I find something that I can kind of get my head around them that’s working for me. And then I just try to kind of enjoy the action that way. Like one of my complaints in the review is that it throws so much stuff at you so quickly and constantly throughout that you’re always thinking, well, I haven’t really learned this. Do I really want to give this up to like spend a level with this weapon, which I’m not really going to have mastered? Or shall I stick with this and like enjoy slicker gameplay? Like it’s, you know, there’s maybe like 15 weapons, like amassed in like 15 hours or something. And it’s just like, ah, so much. And you can only have two equipped at any time. So you’re just like, what, what am I doing? What’s the, what’s the answer? What’s, you know, what’s the, what’s the, what do you recommend me do the game? There’s this like microphone stand, where if you like hold attack at the end of a combo and like no enemies can get to you, you sing into the microphone and like buff Bayonetta in different ways depending on like which note you sing. So those are quite, that plays into like very stylish Bayonetta in that you’re like doing these long chains. And then if you can scatter people at the end, you then end in like a power pose and start like warbling away, which I quite like. There’s like a magician’s hat, which summons loads of like mad props out of it. So like when it gets big, like entire cars can drive out of it and run enemies over and things like that. So I’d say it’s like flashy over surgical, which is kind of how I feel about the weapons in the older games. Like they were very precise tools that you could combine in very precise ways where this is more like, every single one of these is like crazy fun. So like it’s almost too different to Bayonetta 1 and 2 to like properly compare. That’s interesting. Do you think that robs it of the level of mastery that people maybe expect from these games? It obviously has the same ranking system. Like I think there are a few fewer parts in play. Like just switching to two weapon sets in the middle of a fight is enough to like bump your combo up that you’ll probably get a pretty good medal at the end. Like this is the first one, the way I played through it for the first time, I came out the other end with probably like golds. I know on normal difficulty, I should say, which is how I played through it to begin with. That thing I was saying about how like, like surgical she feels like as a character in those first two games, I definitely think that is slightly diminished. Like the weapons themselves are so big and overblown and their effects are so massive, like visually they just eat up so much of the screen that it feels less like this sort of coherent fighter who’s staring through. It’s more like someone throwing like heaps of like mad magic tricks at someone that ain’t quite literally with the hat. That also factors into the fact that you have this summon system where you summon these giant monsters and basically play as them while Bayonetta kind of dances in the background. And the idea of like a combo going from like Bayonetta who’s like she slips through this attack, she kicks this guy into the air, she follows them up, she pummels him, she dodges this attack, she does that, you know, where in the previous games that would have been like one long motion with her. Those motions are now naturally broken up with, oh, now you’re suddenly, you’re going to turn into a 40 foot monster, which is really slow. And it still continues your combo going and the combo meter is a lot more generous to factor in these quite slow monsters. But like inevitably going from this incredibly quick silver human to something so big and like quite far away on screen often, inevitably doesn’t feel like quite as slick. Also, and I wish I’d mentioned this in my review because I saw someone else talk, I think Martin Robinson mentioned this in his years and he’s absolutely spot on, is that because of that summon system, the camera is quite a bit further out. And so it feels a lot less intimate when you’re just Bayonetta. Like she’s physically smaller on screen because it’s basically prepping for there to be a huge thing on screen with her at any given time. Because of that, like the impact of everything is slightly like lessened. Coming straight from Bayonetta 2 to 3, Bayonetta 2 feels a lot more impactful as Bayonetta. Like you can see everything in slightly better detail. Like even the monster designs are a lot more ornate in Bayonetta 2 and 1 because you’re that much closer to them. We’re here because you’re further away. Like everything is slightly softer, almost deliberately. And that might be a problem if like, if 1 and 2 are your dream game, like that will probably jump out at you more. I personally felt like, well, it’s kind of a different action system now. So I’m kind of on board with it. Yeah. The one reason I think that might provoke some backlash is because there are so few games of the very, like you say, surgical hack and slash sort of like type of game that Bayonetta sort of like didn’t pioneer, definitely cry pioneered in the kind of 3D space. But then obviously Bayonetta became the kind of standard bearer for it. But those kind of games are few and far between these days. So I do wonder if that might make it controversial with a certain crowd. I’m not saying that crowd’s correct, Matthew, but it does sound like there might be a bit of acclimatizing that needs to be done to this type of game. Like I definitely spent the first couple of hours going like, how am I meant to play this? Like, am I meant to be amazing Bayonetta? Like, am I just meant to be stretching like what Bayonetta can do? Should I over rely on these summons? Because they’re so powerful, like, you know, they draw all attention to them. Enemies who you might have to fight for like 20 seconds as Bayonetta, they can kill in a second. And you’re like, well, obviously, I’m going to use the big monster. And like, there are some giant enemies. You just have to use the summons for because like Bayonetta is just kind of chipping away at them. Otherwise, it does take a while for you to get into your head. Like, how is this meant to be done? And I got the definite feeling that we’ll be seeing people like really drill into it and find out what the ideal balance is. Even having played it for 30 hours now, I couldn’t tell you what the optimal way to play this game is. Like, it doesn’t really make it particularly clear. OK, interesting. Well, I think we should come back to it a little bit later, Matthew, when we do the Hall of Fame as well. But I would ask, actually, does Bayonetta 3 still have non-cryptic references to other games? I know that the first one had loads of Sega and Capcom references. The second one had loads of references if you tried to scan in Amiibo of different characters. Does this have anything along those lines or is it a bit more straightforward only? There are definitely like game nods. There are sections where you play as Jean, Bayonetta’s friend, and like her levels are like 2D stealth levels. All right. Like they play like Mark of the Ninja. That’s very different. Yeah. She like hides in air vents and doors and things. And there’s like, it feels like there are some Metal Gear gags in there with like, she looks at like posters of beautiful women on the thing. And there’s bits where you can take a shower to like lure enemies into the shower as her and things like that. It’s all a bit sordid. Stake never did that. Although that would have been pretty funny if you did. There were just loads of echoes of like other platinum games in there. Like the relationship between you and the summons is like a little bit like the legions in Astral Chain. There’s a second character called Viola who fights with a sword. And she’s a bit more like Raiden in Metal Gear Rising in that she activates Witch Time by parrying, not by dodging. Right. Platinum, greatest hits rather than, oh here is Dr. Eggman being buried in a grave or whatever. It’s like in conversation with other platinum games. That’s interesting. I had a much wankier version my review, which was about 15 years of Bayonetta Platinum, like how the two are kind of one in the same and I was like, this is just piss. And it got a bit close to like that Hotel Dusk review where I was like, wait a second, like Bayonetta is a metaphor for a game studio is actually quite confusing. Did you turn Bayonetta on her side Matthew? Well I was just like, what’s the studio equivalent of like a flying uppercut? It doesn’t make any sense. So I quickly abandoned that. I didn’t think Andy Robinson would go for it. So you just went with, I turned Bayonetta on her side and read her like a book. That’s what I say about all games. That’s just my new style. Editors have to take that out of every single one of your reviews, don’t they? I suppose this is a good point to ask the question I was going to ask a bit later actually, which is the relationship between this game and Scalebound. Let’s unpick that quickly. So how much of that of what they showed of Scalebound, which is a game where you played as a douchebag with headphones who fought alongside a dragon, the idea being you had this giant AI companion with you. How much of that manifests here in both obvious and not obvious ways? Obviously that game was going to be a proper open world RPG, which this isn’t. This is still a series of arenas. Mechanically, it’s quite close to what I remember of Scalebound. I’ve seen more of Scalebound than is on the internet because of behind closed door demos at Gamescom. Originally when they announced Scalebound, the whole deal was like, here’s a guy, here’s a dragon, they’re independent. The dragon is following its own AI and you’re fighting in the foreground, which is actually quite close to Viola in this game. When she summons this cat called Cheshire, it does its own thing and she carries on fighting. But with Bayonetta, when you summon them, you are the summon, which was actually a special move in Scalebound. There were set pieces where you could take direct control of the dragon and that is the whole deal here. 100% of the problem solving they had done on Scalebound was used to make this game. They worked out how to make these two things play in tandem and some tricks that are satisfying. There are some almost like Zelda dungeons in this where you have to use the summons to solve puzzles using their special abilities. I could see that being in Scalebound. That’s the fantasy RPG element of it. Without that game happening, I don’t think this game happens, so I’m glad a bit of it lives on. Well, good stuff, Matthew. My only other question then on Bayonetta 3 is, is this the best game in the series in your opinion? I think it’s pretty clear from what you’re saying there that there’s still something to the first game maybe that this one does not have in its broadness. I think as just a pure action game, I think it’s probably the worst. That makes sense. By softening the action, it’s probably the most purely enjoyable accessible one. It doesn’t make you work very hard for this game to look quite exciting compared to Bayonetta 1 and 2. My last question Matthew is what would you like to see from Platinum in the future? Just looking forward, I think that my personal preference with where this studio goes is because I know that they’ve got like 10 cent backing or something so they seem financially secure but I would love to see them become almost like an intelligent system style Nintendo developer basically where they’re just making like one to two games every three years you know. Yeah. Making sort of stuff that’s in their wheelhouse, making new series, making sequels to existing games, just because it feels like, not exclusively, but it feels like they do a lot of their best work with Nintendo you know. They’ve hired a new president who is an ex Nintendo guy, like they clearly have a lot of bonds with them and did a big interview on VGC about it actually and they’re trying to sort of define themselves more as their own kind of masters and their own publisher. Like it isn’t the talk of we’re desperately looking to be bought by Nintendo. I would love that to happen. They bring something to Nintendo consoles that Nintendo don’t do in house. I would like to see them step away from the kind of character action space a little bit more. There is this brawling core to like most of their games which I don’t think represents this original pitch of like we want every one of our games to be completely different and you never know what you’re going to get with Platinum. At this point I know I’m going to get a pretty amazing combat system and then some interesting stuff around it which might be a bit different but I’d love to see like the Platinum that made Akami or whatever the creative spark that made Akami when they were at Capcom kind of come into play again. Yeah, that’s a good point actually. That is definitely one way in which they change very quickly. After that Sega deal is over they basically do become the character action studio. Right, that happens. Like I say there’s no follow up to Vanquish really in terms of it’s like being a third person shooter that’s near the kind of top of that genre. That just doesn’t happen again. So yeah, that’s a good call. I would say actually in the character action space like if Konami decides to do with Metal Gear what it’s doing with Silent Hill and like commission three or four new games at once, a Revengeance sequel in there would be would be quite welcome, I think. Have another stab, so to speak, at that, that’d be good. I’d say what I’d love them to do, although it would scupper one of my favorite series at Capcom, I’d love them to hire Shootakumi and let him make a game for them. I always thought it was sad that like, of all the people who left Capcom, like he’s kind of he feels like he’s of a sort with them. You know, they all came up under Mikami, you know, they’re all best mates. And he’s like the guy who stays behind. Either get him in to make a game there that’s crazy, or get him to like do all the stories because I think their writing in their games is absolutely atrocious. Yeah, that is funny. I do wonder how much of your sort of waking days you spent thinking about the idea of hiring Shootakumi, Matthew. That’s like, not a significant amount of it. If I was a billionaire, I’d hire him just to be my friend. Like just hang out with me. And everyone’s like, who’s that? I’m like, this is Shootakumi, the creative ace attorney. Yeah, okay, good. I’d have to hire a translator as well and that would be awkward. Just constantly everywhere. That’s good. I look forward to that tragic future for the man. I’m assuming he’ll become a billionaire one day. That should be good. Yeah, it’s not as sinister as it sounds. He’d live a really good life. In Bath. Well, you know, maybe. If I was a billionaire, I’d probably buy a house in Japan. Go be friends with Shootakumi. I like the idea that you go to Shootakumi, look, I’ve just made a billion in fucking cryptocurrency or something. And you can either go work for Platinum Games or be my best friend. One of the two. I like that as an ultimatum. Last thing I was going to say, I do want to see their name on a Nier Automata sequel. I know it wasn’t on that redo of the original Nier that came out two years ago. Last year, I don’t remember. Time is immutable. But yeah, I would like to see. I assume that again, it’s been five years since that first game came out, or second game rather. Surely there is someone somewhere making a new Nier game. You would hope that Platinum are part of it because the Elevated Combat was key part of that. So yes, we will see, Matthew. Shall we take a quick break and come back with a Hall of Fame? Let’s do it. Welcome back to the podcast. So it’s time to build another hall of fame, this time from Platinum Games Library. It’s a really interesting one. We’ll go through the games one by one, and we’ll select games we think should be in there. Then we’ll make a final list, eventually boiling it down to five. Does that sound good to you, Matthew? Yeah, for sure. Okay, so we’re gonna do this chronologically. We start with Mad World, Matthew. Like you say, I got very excited by The Weenus back in 2008. So yes, very violent, black and white and red sort of action game. Didn’t seem to review incredibly well versus maybe what people were maybe hoping for from like a studio made up of former Devil May Cry developers. What’s the sitch with this as an expert? It’s probably a seven that we all gave an eight because we were just sort of willing it to be better than it was and celebrating like a real original voice. I would say it’s like a fun version of Sega’s The Club. It’s sort of set in these kind of arenas full of violent props where you can crush people and poke things through people. It’s basically about squeezing as much pain out of a person before their body is too disintegrated for you to like hurt anymore, which is like a really sort of twisted pitch for a game. Interesting backstory to this. It’s directed by Shigenori Nishikawa, who was a developer under Mikami, working in Resident Evil 4 and felt like very kind of creatively constrained working on that and was constantly pitching like wilder ideas. And then as he tells it in quite a funny Platinum podcast, Mikami kept shooting him down saying, no, no, you can’t make a wild game. Then Mikami made God Hand and he was like, well, you can fucking do it. I’m gonna do it if I ever get a chance. Platinum gives him that chance. So this is basically, he says all the ideas he sat on that Mikami wouldn’t let him make kind of crammed into one game. He’s actually now at Tango, a key designer on Evil Within 1 and 2. Kind of an interesting game. Probably one of the best initial play throughs you’ll have of your game. Like an absolutely wild four hours where you’ll laugh your ass off at like how obnoxious it is. It’s got amazingly foul commentary by Greg Proops and John DiMaggio. But once you’ve played it through once, I don’t think you’ll ever play this again. It only lives on Wii. So it has that kind of like interesting Metal Gear Solid 4 on PlayStation 3 energy. We’re big fans of games which are locked to consoles on this podcast. They have an allure to them. Hall of Fame, great statement of intent, but come on. Yeah, fair enough. I feel like in the Wii draft, we covered this sort of bracket of Wii game quite well, that secondary layer of interesting eights. Oh no, interesting sevens in this respect. But you know, like that, it’s kind of in that bracket with Zack and Wiki, for example, right? Of like, you wanna, I know you would say Zack and Wiki is better, but like- I would, and it would be true. But any Wii collection should have this game in it, right? That’s like the kind of what you would probably say. This was so quickly on like special offer. Like, if you bought this for a tenner, that’s perfect for what it is, and the amount of fun you’d have out of it. If you’re not gonna get it now, just watch a video of it emulated on PC, because it looks, it’s certainly got something. Well, that is the thing with this Sega deal, right? It’s like none of the games are commercially successful, ultimately. Like, I think that Bayonetta is as close as it gets, but none of them are like monstrously popular in an age of like Assassin’s Creed and Halo’s and, you know, Call of Duty. Does Assassin’s Creed let you stick a trumpet through someone’s throat? Maybe in the next one, Matthew. I’ve got my fingers crossed on that one. I doubt it. It’s a setting that looks very historically grim, I think. Yeah, I’ve actually not watched the trailer for that. Assassin’s Creed is firmly off my radar now. It’s like I see people talking about the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 2 campaign, and I’m like, I’ve got no thoughts on this whatsoever anymore, because I’ve completely tuned it out as a series Call of Duty. If in Mirage, Bassim flicks his hand and a full oboe pops out of his sleeve, and then he sticks it into someone, I would give that game a 10. Yeah, then they patch it to replace the oboe with a clarinet, Matthew. Yeah, because they’re like, oh, sorry. The oboe is a bit too funny. Yeah, I just need to dial that down 10% or so. OK, next up then, 2009’s Infinite Space, a DS favourite. Matthew, I believe it was in your top 10 games of that year when we did that episode, the best games of 2009 or 10 or whenever it came out in the West. So, yes, it’s not technically made by them. Does that invalidate it as a Hall of Fame inductee? I don’t think so. I think there’s like a strand of like weirdness and wickedness that runs through this, which feels very Platinum-y, like the characters and the humour. It was at least made in tandem with them. Okay, interesting. So give a top-line summary of this one then, Matthew. What’s appealing about it? What’s kind of distinctive about it in the DS library? It’s an epic, I mean truly epic, it’s an incredibly long game, space opera. Quite a chewy space opera. It sort of pulls from Arthur C. Clarke, the director, also cites like Battlestar Galactica as a big inspiration. It’s about building spaceships using a grid system on the touchscreen of the DS where you kind of slot rooms together to make the insides of these giant hulking warships. And then the rooms you slot in obviously change the behaviour of that ship in almost like very advanced rock, paper, scissor space battles. This isn’t like a dogfighting game. This is about incredibly slow moving juggernauts kind of looking at each other across the expanse of space and then just unloading a million missiles at once. But the way the ship you’ve built alters how it behaves in the rock, paper, scissors I think is really, really subtle. I think this is a really underrated game. There’s nothing else quite like it. It’s also incredibly difficult, very hard to find, very, very long. While I think there’s platinum in it, I don’t think there’s enough platinum for it to be like a definitive platinum game. The only person from platinum whose input you feel is Inaba who’s obviously best mates with Mr Nude Maker because it’s a steel battalion, so it might just be like platinum scratching the back of one of his old Capcom mates. I would do that. If I set up a huge studio, I would probably throw work your way if you wanted it. You and your best mate, Shootakumi, yeah. Yeah, I’d let you hang out with us in our strange house in Japan. If that wouldn’t be uncomfortable for you. Yeah, not at all. Sounds a bit like that film with those two people coming to that house. Actually, it’s not quite that grim. I’ll just move on. Okay, so Infinite Space is probably a fairly low-budget game as well by comparison to the others. I feel like my memory of it at the time, Matthew, is that they very much put Bayonetta front and center. Then Mad World was kind of like their tertiary. They gave it a push kind of game, definitely. But then I don’t remember Infinite Space getting like loads of love at all, really. That feels like it just kind of came out. It was a game that existed, then it came out. So, yeah. Okay. So it doesn’t even go on the maybe pile? Let’s humour Infinite Space and put it on the maybe pile. It isn’t going to be one of the five, but it’s not so ranked. I don’t want it sitting on the pile with what I know is going to be on the no pile. Let’s elevate it for at least the next hour. Yeah, that’s fair enough. Okay, so we come to 2010’s Bayonetta. We released in 2009 in Japan, but released in 2010 in the West. So third person action game in the Devil May Cry mold featuring this kind of witch character called Bayonetta had guns on her feet and in her hands. Definitely felt like a sort of very clear successor to Devil May Cry at a time when Devil May Cry was still, again Devil May Cry has never really had a bad installment. It became more controversial at a certain point, but like this follow Devil May Cry 4, which I personally didn’t find to be the strongest, you know, the brightest hour for that series, even though it was still pretty good. But this came along and it was kind of like the, like a game that got nines and tens, people were just so ready for it. And it was edge 10. Yeah, exactly. From, from Rich Stanton, spoiler alert for edge scores, which you’re not supposed to give out the names of people who did them back in the day. Even though we’ve done that loads on this podcast. So yes, it comes along. And I think what was significant about it is it was this very complex hack and slash brawler game that existed in an age where games were becoming more simplistic in terms of how they controlled how they played, particularly from Western Studios. If you compare this to something like Assassin’s Creed 2, where, you know, extremely fun game, beautiful looking, but the combat system doesn’t exactly play itself, but it’s fairly simple. It’s very, very simple by comparison to Bayonetta. At the same time, Bayonetta tried to break down the bow, the barriers of that Devil May Cry style experience by giving you this witch time dodge mechanic, which I think actually did give you a little bit of a reprieve if you weren’t like a mega sort of like genre head for this stuff, which was significant for sure. And it was absolutely packed with different references to Sega and Capcom things. It has like a basically like a space harrier level in it. It has like a whole section that riffs the music riffs on afterburner, but it feels quite sagry in terms of how it feels. Some of the Arcadia sides in this. And I feel like it’s a masterpiece, Matthew. All these years later, I feel like it’s still revered. It’s widely available on PC, PS4, Xbox, anything you like. It’s a masterpiece. I think personally it should be on the pile. What do you think? Carstein, yes, for sure. I think Witch Time is one of the great game mechanics of all times. It takes the pressure off in a very full on game and allows the game to be full on because they know they have this kind of slight safety net. It makes the action incredibly thrilling the way it’s constantly cranking in and out visually. There’s a beauty to this game you literally can’t appreciate until it’s going in slow motion because it moves so fast, the enemy designs are so ornate, their attacks are so strange that there are lots of moves in this game which are deliberately made so that you only really can appreciate what’s going on in slow motion. The one that always jumps out to me and it’s a Bayonetta 2 trick admittedly is there’s a big boss fight underwater where this guy has a giant sword and when you dodge that sword you realise it’s moving so fast it’s creating a vacuum in the water and in the witch time you are suddenly like in dry air between like a parting of the waves. It’s just conceptually this idea of like there’s a world beyond what you can see at normal time that I think is just so beautiful and so mechanically sharp. Even without all the interconnecting weapon systems and the infinite combos and the mad summons and the torture attacks, just a combat system with witch time is a 10 out of 10 idea. One question I did have for you though. Do you actually like Bayonetta and the world of Bayonetta? Oh, that’s an interesting one. I would say I don’t entirely gel with it personally. I think it’s just because it’s kind of like the pseudo-religious imagery right all over the place, like angels and very cursed looking sort of like big baby statue things. Not to be consumed during COVID. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so like, there’s that kind of religious angle to it. She’s in a kind of nun style outfit at certain points right as well, which is sort of like provocative in a kind of like quite a daft way. Yeah, I would say that like if I’m being completely honest, right? I really think the voice actress, Helena Taylor did a great job with that character and bringing her to life. And I really love her energy as a character. But the overall world of it, I prefer less to like Devil May Cry’s world where everyone’s a little bit heightened and fun, particularly in that fifth one where you’re going around with that girl in the van and she’s really fun to hang out with. And like, there’s a lot of good hangs in the Devil May Cry series. I’m not convinced the same number of good hangs exist in Bayonetta 3 beyond Bayonetta herself, you know? Kind of in agreement. Like, and this is partly triggered by the fact that there was a bit of discourse today around Bayonetta 3 because there were two reviews that hammered it quite hard for like changes to the characterisation and the story. It seems to have come from a cursory glance of Twitter anyway, which is always the worst way to get your head around a discourse of like, there’s a big appreciation for sort of Bayonetta. It’s the queer character and they think Bayonetta 3 kind of like removes some of that. I’m not entirely sure I agree, but then I thought the story was so sort of baffling and over the top that I don’t… there are subtleties that could have passed me by. But I did see someone making the point of like, does any straight guy actually find like Bayonetta sexy? Like she’s so weird. Is this like some mad fantasy for anyone? It just made me think. I find her like very abrasive and obnoxious. I don’t really find her titillating at all. No, same. Incredibly like sexual in a way which is key to the character and key to the character’s power and the way she folds it into her tacks. I have had the thought of, I wonder who really likes this? Who is this for, I guess? I guess like the point that people make though is it isn’t for us, right? Like that’s like the, you know, a reading of the character. I think she’s a magnificent action hero. Like I love her as a, as a mechanical being and the gulf between what’s achievable in cutscenes and what’s achievable with the systems is actually very, very small. But like this is so much story that there doesn’t need to be. Like the cutscenes are like maybe five minutes long of quite shrill writing for what are often very shallow joke characters. Luca, this journalist, the whole joke with him is that he’s like hopeless and, you know, he’s basically an imbecile compared to Bayonetta. The good joke with him is that whenever he swings in to help anyone, he misses them and smacks into a wall. That’s all that character needs to be is a guy who swings in occasionally and hits a wall. But even he will stand there and talk about his backstory with his dad and like the lore of these games in one and two is like fucking interminable. Like you’re just like shut fucking skip, skip, skip. I am with you on that. One thing I will say right is that I think that Bayonetta exists right on the cusp of when like localization in games is getting really good. Right. One of the reasons I think people feel so firmly attached to the portrayal of Bayonetta by the actress is that it was legit good at a time where so many of these characters were so disposable. Like the voice of Cloud in Final Fantasy 7 and all those other characters has changed at least once now because of the remakes. The Rezi characters have been so many characters who have played Chris Redfield or Leon and people don’t really blink when they change, right? Whether that’s fair or not is true. But with this, she gives the character so much life, so much specific life that people feel the absence in their hearts. It’s different. I didn’t mention it in the Bayonetta 3 review mainly because it’s just dominated the discussion around the game and I wanted to talk about what the game actually was. Her absence is felt and it’s really my big take on the whole Helena Taylor situation. It’s just really sad that they couldn’t have worked it out because Bayonetta 3 feels like an end of a thing. It feels like the final part of a trilogy and it feels it would have been very rewarding for that character to be able to see it through. I think Jennifer Hale does a really good impression and by the end you aren’t like, oh this voice is different at all, but due to like what does happen in the plot and it has this multiverse element where there are loads of Bayonettas throughout the game and you think, oh this would have been so much fun to play because you get to be all these different Bayonettas and it’s a real celebration of that character and what that character could be and what it might be like in all these other worlds and when it all comes together at the end it doesn’t ruin it. I wouldn’t even say it sours it but there’s a definite hint of sadness. What a shame they couldn’t see this project through to its completion because the ending actually feels like something they were working towards across the games and you’re like, it’s a bummer. If in Marvel’s Avengers End Game Iron Man had been someone else, it would have been like, well this is fun but it’s not quite right. Yeah, exactly. So I think in answer to your original question I’m actually coming back around based on what you’re saying there. I love the character but not the world and the story. Does that make sense? I like being around the character. I think she is a great action heroine with a very specific vibe and I love the dialogue they write for her. It’s just the rest of it I can take or leave. And definitely by Bayonetta 2 which we’ll discuss in a minute. I felt very much like these cutscenes are doing nothing for me. I just want to crack on with the game. So yeah, that’s my answer to that. But the original Bayonetta, yeah, firmly the fall of fame. The only reason I mention that and like, story’s not really important to this game at all, but the Edge 10 review, the extra juice that pushes it into the 10 is like, it not only loves the action system, it loves the world and the attitude and everything about it. And I’d say I don’t quite have that, but I do think it’s like mechanically such a beautiful thing. Just that opening clock tower bit, just as a statement of intent. In that generation, you hadn’t seen something as disorientating as that in 3D. It just looked mad. This studio can do things other people can’t do. Yeah. Loading screens, they could practice combos. That was rad. Her movement was rad. The fact that she could turn into basically like dark Amaterasu and leave behind flowers when she ran. That was amazing, which turned into an animal. Yeah, there was, I adored that first game for sure. The fact that as well, actually, this is an interesting contrast to Bayonetta 3 from what it sounds like, Matthew. The fact that you basically didn’t get the entire arsenal on the first run. It was basically a game built to be played twice, so you could get everything. Or maybe more than more than twice. But it certainly felt like the second playthrough is arguably when you complete the journey of how you understand that armory and unlock that armory, you know. This is true actually of loads of their games, but it definitely starts in Bayonetta. When you’ve just scraped through the last boss fight with maybe like a bronze medal or a stone medal because you got your ass handed to you, and then you go back to the first level and you start platinum-ing the game because the muscle memory you’ve built up through it is just suddenly unleashed. They never stop at the end credits. Yeah, for sure. It was a heck of a game. I give it a 9 at the time, but I can certainly see why you would give it a 10. Yeah, it’s fantastic. Okay then. So should we move on to Vanquish, Matthew? Yes. Yep. So 2010’s Vanquish, third-person shooter, directed by Shinji Mikami. In a genre that was where the fundamentals of cover shooting had been established by Gears of War, here comes this game that is incredibly fast-paced by comparison. It basically lets you slide around on your knees using rocket-based abilities. You can slide around the environment, go into slow-mo, target enemy weak points, zoom very quickly into an enemy, do a powerful physical attack. It gave you a much broader array of abilities to control your environment in a sort of shooter level than Gears did or any of its contemporaries did. I think it probably remains, maybe there’s an argument that Gears is still the best shooter technically in terms of cover shooting, third-person cover shooting, but this was basically more of what I wanted in an alternative and the fact that this comes along in the same year as Bayonetta is like one of the all-time one-two punches, but no one buys Vanquish, which sucks, like the people of 2010, what the fuck were you doing? Very annoying. It means that there was no sequel. Mikami goes off after this and founds Tango Game Works. I think that I always got the impression that Mikami was kind of like a, maybe like a contract director on this, Matthew, or whatever, but I’m not entirely sure what the story is there. But either way, the years later, I think this remains just like a widely celebrated and loved game, even if it is, you know, in a completely different genre to Bayonetta. It just showed what Platinum could do outside of that, like you say, hack and slash brawling space. Thoughts, Matthew? I think the important thing to get over here is it looks like a cover shooter, but if you play it just like a cover shooter, like you’re not experiencing the game at all, and putting the time, you realise how you’re meant to play it. But the idea of slow motion and the tricks you can do when you’re in slow motion, like shooting a grenade out of the air to blow loads of people up, and the way you can amplify and accelerate damage using your tricks. I felt like I had to eke quite a lot of that out, but if you do put in the time, it is just such its own kind of creature. You can just run circles around people and you’re meant to run circles around people and boost behind people and shoot them in their arse when they’re not looking. It is a hybrid of cover shooter and a kind of aggressiveness you’re meant to have in a brawler, in a way. Bullet hell as well is a good way of looking at it. Not a world I love. Oh yeah. I find it very, very sterile. For me, I almost wish these mechanics were in the world and characters of Binary Domain, because that’s a similar looking, feeling thing. Binary Domain is a terrible cover shooter compared to this. It’s pretty rudimentary. It has a zany Yakuza team humour to it. I couldn’t even tell you what the guy was called or the place where you are. Sam Gideon. Sam Gideon. I agree that much more so than Bayonetta, this is a world that is completely forgettable and what is there is hard to like. I do agree with that. I do think that the design of the main character is fantastic. That white suit. When you see what he can do and how seamlessly it moves between all its functions, it’s absolutely a beautiful piece of animation. Because I’m an idiot, at the time I took it personally that this did badly, but people were all over Gears. I just thought that people were just rejecting, well, Gears is quality too, but they were rejecting something that was fundamentally more interesting approach to the genre. Because cover shooters took the athleticism out of shooting games. They just made them sit and cover, blind fire, throw grenades, and it was the one, everyone had the same one solution to how you do shooting in that template. And that really bothered me because I felt like there was a massive missing piece of what you could maybe do if you had a bit more experimentation. And that is what this game did. This game was like, okay, well, you know, what Gears did is excellent, but what if you added all this other stuff in terms of movement options and skill ceiling? And I think it’s, it’s just like, yeah, it’s lost the time a little bit. Third person, sort of like cover shooters don’t really exist in the same form now anyway, right? They’re basically just like mechanics exists within wide, wider open world games or whatever, like, yeah, you read deads, GTAs, divisions, etc. But still, yeah, that’s how I felt at the time. I just felt like it was unfairly neglected, Matthew. And it’s been salvaged again for modern formats. You can go play this. I don’t know if it’s a 60 FPS on PS4 and Xbox, but definitely is on PC. This is actually, for people who haven’t played at 60 frames, it’s almost as transformative as Max Payne 3. It’s so reactive and smooth that actually the power you have and how smoothly it flows really is integral to it. There’s not many games, you know, like Gears I can happily play at 30 frames. I’ve got no problems with that. But yeah, this stuff, when it kicks off the particle effects and the mad fire coming out of your rocket knees and all that stuff, it’s not meant to be played at 30. Shout out to Sega for salvaging so many great older games and putting them on modern formats in good versions. This is definitely one of them. So going to the Hall of Fame then, Matthew, I personally think it has to be. These two games cast such a long shadow. And there’s nothing else quite like this in their library. So I think this has to go in as a big, what if this had carried on and they’d done more of it? Right then Matthew, are you ready for the fifth game in the Sega Platinum deal, which was Anarchy Reigns, an open world beat-em-up. Now, I don’t have loads of first-hand experience with this one. I remember it coming into the office and looking at it and feeling, looking at it being reviewed by my staff writer at the time on play and feeling like it looked quite, quite mid, you know, just not very, it didn’t feel like it looked like it had the sort of any of the, like the trademark amazing action in it. It looked like hard work to me and it was received relatively coolly as well and had like, had like an online mode but didn’t seem to like set the world on fire compared to, you know, Bayonetta and Vanquish. It felt like a sort of maybe a bit more of a floppy appendage to those other, the other games in that Sega deal. What’s your take on this one Matthew? Sort of a spiritual successor to Mad World, but without the art style or the commitment to extreme violence, like very, very stripped back. I’ve only ever seen this being played in the office and not very enthusiastically at that. I did watch absolutely brilliant sort of defence of this game by someone who was really into it at the time. And they were talking about, they were saying actually the multiplayer is where it really came alive because the multiplayer was like basically like a 16 man free for all with these quite broad brawling characters. And they said it played like a 16 person power stone. That sounds pretty good actually. Yeah, which is, that’s a good pitch. You know, on top of just having all these people like beating the crap out of each other, there was also like PvE elements, weird vehicles would turn up and strange events would only happen in the multiplayer that wouldn’t happen in the single player. And in their enthusiastic commentary over some footage, I was like, oh, this sounds great. And they also said it had a couple of things which were just so broken that in this video, it was talking about a famous event where platinum played the community and the community used all these like cheese exploits against platinum to show them how broken it was, like as a protest. And he had all these tweets from the time of the platinum team going like, oh boy, we’re having a really rough time playing against this community. Like they’re really smashing us. And there are all these pictures of the platinum team like looking at the instruction manual, trying to work out how to play their own game and things. Made me laugh. But that the best thing about this is a video that I watched. It probably means it’s not even on the maybe pile. Yeah, it got broadly slated for its single player offering versus what the multiplayer could offer. But the problem is they even staggered release, right? Released in Japan in like July of 2012, and then released in the in the West in January of 2013. So it just that’s not really conducive to building a big player base for an online player base. And then it was always going to be niche anyway. It was a budget game is right at the end of the PS3 and 360 lifespan. Like all those signs just kind of doomed it, I think. Yeah, a bit maybe like a slight afterthought in terms of like how it was sort of treated long term maybe versus what it could have been. So not quite the hall of fame. Does have a pig character who when he sprints he shouts bacon over and over again. That does sound pretty good. Doesn’t it rep a few different platinum characters to say like the mad world dude in this and also Bayonetta? The mad world guy Jack Kamen is like the he’s one of the big playable characters in it and I think Bayonetta might have been DLC for it and the and the yeah maybe some of the other boss characters from mad world. I wonder if they thought this was going to be like their like platinum smash brothers yeah they just only had Bayonetta and mad world at that point like if you could play as a space freighter from infinite space I would have bought this game yeah or the president of the united states from vanquish yeah like um there’s uh do you want to hear the most rich Stanton sentence ever from his nine out of ten um you’re a game review of this this game nine um yeah nine yeah nine out of ten anarchy reigns isn’t a game that hits you immediately it takes a few hours to settle but once it does you realize this is as close to god hand to as we’re ever going to get that’s amazing what a take yeah damn it’s shame he’s not here to kind of litigate that maybe one day we’ll um we’ll talk to him about it um yeah he can only make because he stole my copy of god hand That’s what makes that review sting even worse. Oh dear, that’s a good runner on this podcast, isn’t it? Okay, so moving on then to another game released in 2013, is Metal Gear Rising Revengeance. So for a long time, Konami had been talking about doing this hack and slash game where you play as Raiden. They were developing it internally at Konami, Kojima Productions. Didn’t seem to go all that well, so they outsourced it to the experts at Platinum to make this game starring Raiden. Set after Metal Gear Solid 4, so quite far ahead in the Metal Gear timeline. Well, the whole time that it was known as Metal Gear Rising before the end of the Revengeance, it was a game where they were showing off these slicing mechanics basically. Raiden is a cyborg ninja. He basically cuts through lots of different things, and once he cuts through them, they basically break apart into precise tiny pieces. It was a nice novel conceit. That was indeed at the center of how they did this game. We have talked about in the podcast before, and I think it’s pretty good and is close to being Hall of Fame material. But I think if you compare this to Bayonetta, which is, I think you have to when it comes to Platinum’s catalog for an exercise like this, Matthew, it just doesn’t stand up next to it. I also found it incredibly frustrating at a few moments throughout the game, and I don’t think it has the visual pizzazz of either Metal Gear or Bayonetta. It’s a very boxy and boring take on the Metal Gear world, if you ask me. Give or take juggling Metal Gear Rex thoughts? I think slightly compromised by the desire to make something which is sort of honest Metal Gear and has elements of it and a Platinum action game, which is like the opposite of stealth. If you do do stealth runs in this level, you miss out on combat encounters, which are then used for like rankings and things like that. It just feels like it doesn’t. It’s two things that don’t really add up. I do like the chopping. That is a great trick, really satisfying chopping off a guy’s arms so that you can only do drop kick attacks on you. That is funny. The parry system, very nice. The fact that you have to kind of like attack into an attack to parry it. Very risky move, but also very distinct from which time. Problem with this game is the best bits the first half hour. Yeah, Metal Gear Ray. And the last boss, Senator fucking Crapo, is one of the most overrated moments in games, but we’ve litigated that so many times. Wasn’t terribly fond of, was it Jet Stream Sam as well? Wasn’t too fond of that character. Yeah, I think it actually like lacks good bosses this game, which is a bit strange. Yeah, so it just didn’t, I think my expectation to this might have just been through the roof because there was a long, you know, after Metal Gear Solid 4 came out, there was nothing for a long time from Kazuma Productions, like on, you know, HD consoles. You had Peace Walker in 2010, but then you didn’t have really much else going on from that studio until obviously Ground Zeroes and The Phantom Pain came out, but they were still a few years away. So, Revengeance was a big deal to me because I always thought that cutscenes you see in Metal Gear Solid 4 where Raiden turns up and fights Vamp or wherever he fights those mechs, I always thought, well, that’s the dream, right? It’s like those cutscenes come to life in an action game. And I just think it only really got 50% to its full potential of what that could have been in my mind’s eye, which is a dumb thing to hold against it. But I just think it’s just, yeah, it’s like an eight where Bayonetta is a nine, I guess, you know? I think I gave this a seven, actually. Yeah, I think I agree it’s a seven, actually. The gap is maybe wider than it was. Yeah, definitely not horrible. There is still something hilarious about going into slow motion and dicing a whole helicopter like you would a cucumber and just seeing shards of helicopter go in all different directions. It’s grasp of slicing physics is truly preposterous in a way which I’ve got a lot of respect for. Okay, so next up, Matthew, the wonderful 101. I think this will be a really interesting one to discuss. Do you want to lead on this one since it’s a big favorite of yours? What Kamiya did after Bayonetta, a very strange combat system in that you are a superhero who has a huge crowd of civilians who you enlist into the wonderful 101, a huge superhero squad. The idea is that you then form those people together into giant weapons. And probably the most controversial element of this game is that instead of just scrolling through those weapons, you draw them onto the world, which obviously made sense on a Wii U pad. But there’s also an analog stick version of it. It wasn’t so stubborn that it was going to force you to use the gamepad in that way. Basically, an incredibly unusual control system at the heart of this game, and if you don’t click with that, you will have a really rough time and not enjoy it. If you do click with it, you begin to enjoy a combat system which is like, what if… so what if Bayonetta but every weapon was in play all the time, and those weapons were kind of the key to cracking different enemy types. So maybe you use this big hammer to crack the shell of this armadillo guy, then you’re using this giant jelly to reflect this tank that’s trying to drive into you from another direction, you then use a whip to pull someone out of the sky… it kind of brings together all the biggest, most satisfying combos of Bayonetta into one control scheme. I just think it explains itself so horribly. This is the best Platinum game that scuppers itself. You have to work so hard to get to the core of what is amazing about it, and there is so much amazing about it. The quick time events, the constant shift in gameplay styles. You know, this is a fighting game, then it’s an escaping game, it’s a vehicle section game, it’s a side scrolling shooter, it’s a punch out clone, there’s bosses that riff on all kinds of things. But you just have to be able to get over that hurdle of like, can I click with this weird control system? It’s almost like the best and worst of Platinum at the same time. I must admit that my experience with it has only ever been quite frustrating, and I’m definitely due to give another go. Like it was, this is like a horrible seller, right? It just did no business at all, basically, on Wii U, just kind of doomed. And if we’re talking about being in conversation with other games, with the creator’s names on it, I suppose like Akami is a good, like there’s a slight link in terms of like the way you would draw the different weapons feels a little bit like how you use the paintbrush in Akami. So I like that about it. I like the, what I would describe as isometric tiny town aesthetic, Matthew, that the levels have. Yeah, yeah. Very beautiful looking game. I’ve got the Switch version, so maybe I should give it another try. Yeah, you can often get it for quite cheap, but should it be in the Hall of Fame? I think it should. I just think Kamiya makes their most complete games. He makes really long games with roller coaster pacing. He crams so many ideas in them and they just build and build and build and they always end with something really special. And I love the final like our boss fight of this game is one of my like happiest gaming memories. If the Hall of Fame is like indicative of the true character of of the studio, they’re making this wonderful game which is so stubborn that it refuses to compromise in the name of accessibility. That is sort of part of their character. I don’t respect it necessarily, but it is true to them. I think it’s a good point. It’s a good argument, Matthew. I’m going to let’s put it as yes. Now we’ll come back to it if we get more than five by the end of the list. Okay, great. So we come to the next Platinum Wii U game, which is Bayonetta 2 in 2014, Matthew. Now I always felt like this existed almost as like the Wii U isn’t doing so hot, or at least reception to the Wii U early on is so cool that maybe giving hardcore players Bayonetta 2 is a sign of intent from Nintendo. Like that’s not necessarily how it came together. They were already making wonderful 101 for them, but it did feel like Bayonetta 2 should have happened before 2014 and didn’t. So it was weird for it to come back as like this Nintendo exclusive game. What I will say is, Matthew, I didn’t find the flow of this game nearly as satisfying as the first one, both in terms of like how it played, but also the structure of the levels. They felt like very boss fighty levels a lot of the time. And that just means it just paled next to the original for me. What were your thoughts on it? That’s my memory of it too. I actually replaying this, I absolutely love this. Less of a traditional action game feel, like there’s very few levels where you’re just exploring an environment and having regular fights. It’s maybe like that for the first couple of levels. Lots of the levels are just like one boss fight set piece where there’ll be like a gimmicky vehicle section and then you’ll be pulled into a little boss fight and then you’re pulled into a vehicle section and then the boss fight finishes. But actually the execution of them technically, technically I think this is maybe like the most impressive of the three. Certainly on Switch it looks so good. There’s a level where you’re on this like watery tube fighting this boss. You’re like surfing this watery tube. I don’t even know what the tube is or how it came to be. And you’re dodging all this shit and then the boss punches you inside the tube and then you’re in this vortex. The water swirling around you. It looks unreal at 65 seconds. Like there’s nothing as pretty as that. Like Bayonetta 3 is an uglier game than Bayonetta 2, for sure, because it has this like giant summon thing, which is probably eating up like most of the most of the graphics power. But like because it only has to do Bayonetta, this game is such a looker. Maybe I’m coloured by the Switch port and playing on an OLED where this game pops. It’s also like much easier in Bayonetta 1. I think this is really the sweet spot of like playing through it once on normal campaign to unlock everything. You get a lot more toys a lot more quickly. Like Bayonetta 1 on normal is actually pretty hard. I would say like Bayonetta on normal is like Bayonetta 2 on hard. It kicks your ass and the annoying thing is when you play Bayonetta 1 on easy, it’s like too easy. It feels like it’s pandering to you and it’s just not very satisfying. This has that sweet spot which I think is a key difference certainly for that initial playthrough. The fact that you fight the angels and then you go down to hell and you fight all the demons, the demon designs, they’re all like made of like this glistening kind of purple glass which I just love the look of it. This game shows you a lot more than Bayonetta 1. It just maybe does it in like such a hurry that you don’t ever get to like luxuria in it in the way that you do in Bayonetta 1 which is I think probably that structural thing you’re talking about. It’s really good this game. I was gonna come in here with the bold tape this was the best one. Right, right. Right, and that’s… but I mean like… it is too gimmicky. The actual amount of time you spend as just traditional Bayonetta doing all of her attacks and fighting loads of things from all different sides is probably like half the game and the rest of the game is like you are some weird version of Bayonetta. You’re surfing Bayonetta or flying Bayonetta. There are several boss fights in this where you’re just flying around and it feels like a simplified version but I like the lowering of the skill floor. I know the Bayonetta hardcore think this one is like way too oversimplified as a game. Well wait until they get a load of Bayonetta 3 Matthew. That is 100% the trend. Bayonetta 3 is like even lower skill floor because you can literally get a fucking dragon to do the fight for you. So like if you thought she was overpowered in this game wait until you get a load of this. Like you can get platinum medals by like mistake in Bayonetta 3 which shouldn’t happen. By mistake. Yeah so gosh you know what like as someone who has not replayed this I probably played this for the first time in 2016 I think. I didn’t come out of it feeling that fond of it and I have revisited the original Bayonetta in the meantime and enjoyed it so yeah but I am I can’t argue with someone who’s replayed it so recently as you have and has such like who I trust anyway with their opinions on games so like but I can yeah I don’t also want to monkey island it and just fill this thing with Bayonetta like yeah easy to do I think Bayonetta 1 is the purest version of that character it’s what that character is meant to be like it makes you work a little harder but the reward is is that much better this gives you the fun quicker but the the the the peaks of the reward will be that much lower the first one I think has the bigger transformation when it all clicks together yeah go get the dumb ass rocket launcher wherever it’s called what’s that um is it named after like uh apocalypse now oh colonel kilgore yeah that’s it yeah yeah that’s uh yeah well done to everyone involved with that one this one’s got like a massive hammer which once I got that I just stick with this huge hammer and like the bosses you can You can like stun lock them a bit, where you just keep bashing them over and they can’t do anything, and it really takes the piss. But in my fevered COVID sickness, it was nice to kind of take back some control. Oh, how cursed. It was really cursed. Take back some control has bad Brexit energy to it. Well, it’s more like, I won’t go into details. There was stuff was happening, which was just really, I just didn’t want to be happening. But in the context of Bayonetta 2, I could kill God in space with a hammer. Side note, Matthew, I’m really worried that, I bought a Switch OLED, right? I’m really worried that the reason I bought it is you sold me on it by it being your only source of comfort while you were nearly dying of COVID. I’m worried about what that says about me as a person, that I would make such a buying decision based on that. Some of my Bayonetta 2 love does come from this, like the COVID is part of it as well. So you have to take it with a pinch of salt. I know I’ve definitely said this before, but it has got big 30 Rock, Glitz Lemon, Oprah Winfrey, hallucination, energy to it. Am I actually talking about this game as it was, or just as I remember it from my sickness? Yeah, I don’t remember the bit where Bayonetta 2 and Randy Newman team up on God in Space, Matthew. That’s good. All right, let’s get into some dregs, shall we? Yeah, we can get to these quite quickly, I think, because they won’t be in the Hall of Fame. They are interesting. So after the Sega deal ends and there’s two Nintendo games in a row, it’s a bit of a… They do keep working with Nintendo consistently throughout, up until present day, really. But at the same time, you have The Legend of Korra in 2014, based on the Nickelodeon series, which I think is a spin-off of Avatar the Last Airbender, right? Very well-liked animated shows. Not completely hated by critics, but did get a 54. Now that is like a sharp downturn from previous Platinum games. I think that basically what these times do is take the kind of character action base of the Bayonetta type of game that Platinum is at this point synonymous with, and builds out watered-down versions of them for these different licenses. Do you think that’s fair, Matthew, based on the crop here? There’s some serious talent on these games. A lot of these games are directed by people who also directed games you love. And you just get the idea that Inaba must have called some of these people into his office and he’s like, You’re not going to like this, but for the next year, you are my Transformers Devastation guy. And listen, it’s that or we shut the studio. It’s a bit like when Nick came back from a meeting with our publisher and was like, We’re doing six pages on Pokemon every month, so we can have World of Pokemon on the bag, whether we like it or not. And sometimes you just got to make six pages on Pokemon. Sometimes you got to make a Legend of Korra beat him up. What a beautiful way to put it again. So no to that one. Absolutely not. Okay, next up, a game I’ve actually played from this crop. So Transformers Devastation. This is pretty good, this game, for what it is. It is a kind of like cell shaded in style, sort of like evocation of the Transformers animated series. I think it features a lot of the voice actors who are in that series. I don’t have a Transformers connection, Matthew. I know you don’t either. But trust me, we wouldn’t be doing this podcast if you did. So I think this was like based on like the overall reception, this seemed to be the best reviewed of these games by quite some distance. It is like a game where you can play as various Transformers who have slightly different fighting styles, not wildly different. And you could indeed transform between into vehicle mode at any time. And then a mix of melee attacks and ranged weapons. The combat very much felt like a kind of a Bayonetta riff, but simpler. It wasn’t particularly long, but it was perfectly fine. And I reviewed a couple of Transformers games that Activision published, and they were heinous compared to this. So I think while it should be in the Hall of Fame, it’s not a complete write-off. The sad thing is, of course, you can’t go and buy this now. Some of these games, because they’re tied to licences, they just vanished. In fact, I think all of them are gone now. I think you can get maybe one of the ones we’ll talk about physically. But there isn’t much evidence of these games that even exist now. There’s no more way they can make money from them and no way you can get hold of them legally. So yeah, Transformers Devastation, did you ever play this one, Matthew? Definitely meant me to playing it, but I can’t work out how, because it’s not on my Xbox. Maybe we had it in the office at some point. I really hate Transformers. So horrible bias I bring to this one. I’ll abstain on this. Yeah, it’s a no, but if you do get a chance to play it one day, give it a try. Because it was better reviewed than these other games that were published there. I thought it was pretty decent for what it was. I finished it. The director of Metal Gear Rising directed that one. Yeah, okay. Again, come into my office. You’ve been working on Transformers for two years. Well, the studio closes. Yeah, that’s so funny. It’s a life raft in disguise. I like that we have no factual basis for that, but we’re just going with it as a runner. That’s good. You know that’s how it was. Well, you know, you pay the bills however you can, right? That’s like, you know, it’s a reality of working life. But that’s the thing with the whole mythologising of game developers thing that makes no sense, right? Ultimately games are a business and they should be seen that way and talked about that way. I just like the idea of looking through the window, the glass wall of Inaba’s office and thinking, why has he got Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles comics? What’s going on with that? And then like… Puts the phone down, puts his head into his hands, you know. I’m sure it didn’t happen that way. No, but you know. It’s nice to paint a picture. Okay, next up, we can talk through this very quickly. So 8-bit Bayonetta, a web browser game. I think it was also like a release on Steam. I’ve seen like kind of like a fun little Fyrway side minigame thing. I don’t really know why it existed. Was it to tie in with the PC release? It was an April Fool’s thing. Oh, was it? Is that right? They’ve done that a couple of times. No, it was released in February. Oh, right. Obviously not. Oh, wait. No, no, you are right. Sorry, it was March 31st it was released. So yeah, that’s it. But pretty good for what it is when you look at the visuals of it. It’s like, you know, a nice looking sort of 2D thing. But yeah. Interesting that like they’ve got a bit of 2D in their past in Beautiful Joe, but it’s not something they’ve like really engaged with. But I have no thoughts beyond that. Yeah, exactly. Let’s move on. Not in the Hall of Fame. Oh boy, I know nothing about this game other than the reputation its control scheme has, Matthew. Star Fox Zero 2016 on Wii U. Your thoughts on this one? I don’t really count this as a true platinum game, to be honest. Miyamoto is front and centre. The idea was Miyamoto has this pitch, he’s got this idea for controls. He wants a game which is going to show how the Wii U gamepad can really benefit a single player game, not just all these asymmetrical multiplayer games we’ve been making. Like, this to me feels like words are high, there’s so little platinum in the game’s DNA. Visually it’s just an expanded riff on Star Fox 64. It just does everything Star Fox 64 did, but a little less interestingly. Like the branching parts aren’t particularly interesting, boss design, there’s some scale to it which shows some platinum input, but there’s no like wit or excitement to it. It’s very disappointing, because actually I think if you just let them make a traditional Star Fox game with like platinum’s grasp of… I don’t understand why this game’s so fucking ugly. That’s a really mad thing, because their engine is capable of great things on Wii. You know, Wii at Wii U. Like we’d seen what flying sections could look like in Bayonetta 2, and yet for some reason that isn’t here, and it’s just scuppered by this need to push this control system, which really doesn’t add a lot. Like it’s a big, big miss for Miyamoto, this one, and Platinum with it. I always thought this was kind of a shame, like right in the Wii U doldrums as well. This is like not a good time for the Wii U, right, it’s the end of life, basically. Has not been salvaged elsewhere. Feels like this, do you think even with the control scheme fixed, this would be just a regular control scheme, Matthew? This would be a better game? I just don’t think there’s anything interesting about it. I don’t think it moves the formula on. But Star Fox has this problem, like the best one is 64 and no one ever knew what to do with it afterwards. Be careful what you wish for. It’s almost like why I don’t want them to ever do F-Zero again because I just dread to see what would happen to it and what it would be. I keep thinking if they did do F-Zero it would end up like the F-Zero version of this Star Fox. Be very stripped and like, ugh, just, no. It just came and went this game. I just remember people were just not into the control scheme and that was kind of it. I’m glad we dodged the bullet. O&M was dead by then and we didn’t have to cover it. That could have been three covers for you, Matthew. Oh god, that would have been, by then it would have been a year of cover. It would have been alternating that and like, I guess, Breath of the Wild speculation. Yeah, or Twilight Princess HD, you know, yeah. Like, move over Ace Combat? Move over good Star Fox games, it’s a bad one. Okay, a real oddity. Remember a few weeks ago when we thought we dreamed this game, Matthew, or I did? Star Fox Guard, which has Platinum’s name on it, but is also a Nintendo EPD game. Kind of a tower defence game, got like okay reviews, seemed to get an okay reception, but didn’t really, you know, didn’t seem to like get much attention from people. I would firmly leave this out of the Hall of Fame. What do you think? It’s an old Miyamoto tech demo called Project Guard, reskinned with a bit of Star Fox. But yeah, the reason I thought I dreamed this is because it does feature the tower defence takes place in various spaces owned by Slippy’s uncle, Grippy. Now, you can see why I think I dreamed something like that, right? That doesn’t doesn’t seem like something that would actually happen. That’s got big Twin Peaks Season 2 energy to it. What’s funny is, because my memory is Matthew, maybe this is not quite correct, but the tech demos that will become Star Fox Zero and Star Fox Guard, were they debuted in that Edge feature that Nathan Brown talked about, where they were talked about the different Wii U prototypes that Miyamoto had? Am I imagining the connection there? Maybe. I get a bit confused, because they had early tech demos of lots of things at E3, which then became Nintendo Land games or Game & Wario games, so maybe there was some extra stuff that we didn’t see there. I can’t remember playing an early tech demo of Star Fox. I feel like there was a Star Fox something that existed for a long time before the game actually became Star Fox Zero and had Platinum’s name on it. Maybe I’m imagining that. This one has powerful steel diver energy, which is a cute little idea, but because it’s Miyamoto’s idea, everyone has to humour it and make it into a bigger thing. Just keep Miyamoto happy. Now it’s fine, because he’s just making theme parks. We come to the last of the Activision games that Platinum worked on, Matthew. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Mutants in Manhattan 2016. Even though it’s in the 3D action space, obviously with the Turtles games and the idea of someone like Platinum working on them, you would think that’s a killer combination, right? That there’s that SNES legacy of great side scrolling games connected with the sort of heir apparent to that genre of games in the 3D space. You’d think that would make a good game, but it didn’t. This was like a slated game, weirdly a 2016 game that released on 360 in PS3, which is really strange, and was pulled from sale after less than eight months, which is not great. Metacritic for this one on PS4, 44 out of 100, grim times. Digital Foundry’s John Lineman criticized the game for not reaching 60 frames per second on any platform, even though an Activision producer stated that local co-op was omitted to reach that target. That’s not great, is it? So yeah, I don’t think this is going anywhere near the Hall of Fame, is it Matthew? Even Anarchy Reign’s apologist Rich Stanton couldn’t drum up much support for this. I think he gave it like a six for Eurogamer. Yeah, okay, that’s funny. Okay, let’s move on then to another contender. 2017’s Nier Automata. Now it’s characterized in their history that after Scalebound fell apart, that Platinum kind of needed this game to keep going. Very much the case with Nier was it was originally released on PS3 and 360 the first game. It didn’t have great combat, had lots of baffling tonal stuff that people loved though. This game was like, what if we made it more of a sci-fi futuristic game with very beautiful looking sort of Android characters and we kind of like zhuzhed up the combat by bringing in Platinum games who were the experts at the time. And I think that that that paid off handsomely. This is a masterpiece in my opinion, even though it doesn’t seem to run perfectly on PC and has never been, those problems have never been addressed. I did all of the main endings to this game and didn’t regret it. However, I would say that the combat is only okay on that scale of sort of like complexity from Platinum’s games, Matthew. It sounds like this falls a bit closer to Bayonetta 3 in terms of like, it’s pretty much anyone could get to grips with it really. And it’s not, there’s not, there’s not really that, a massive layer of mastery to it. I don’t think. What do you reckon about this one? I really love it. I do find it quite hard to untangle from the Yoko Taro-ness of it. The ownership of this game and who’s actually responsible for what is a little hard, because he was such a, like a big weird spokesman for it, you know, with his weird papi-mache head, that it’s easily in their top five, like best games. But that eats into the platinum-ness of it a bit. Yeah, it feels like a true collaboration, this one, right? Like the tone and universe very much comes from Yoko Taro and his people. And then platinum definitely adds the sort of combatty nature. That is like pure platinum, right down to the fact you have a little drone pal who can shoot. So you have like ranged attacks alongside your main character’s melee attacks. So that feels very platinum. It is very, you know, it is still very surgical, even if it’s not nearly as complicated to play as Bayonetta. Yeah, I think it is fantastic. I personally would vouch for this going on the list. Yeah, then that’s good enough for me. Because at this point as well, it’s been four years since we’ve had a game on here. We want this to represent the whole, whole eras, the different eras of platinum. I like the idea that the guy who looked through Inaba’s window and saw Legend of Korra DVDs and went uh-oh, and then saw Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle comics and went uh-oh, and then they look up and just see a man with a moon for his head. And they’re like, well, I don’t know how this is going to go, but it can’t be as bad as what we’ve been doing. Good news! Yeah, very good. Yeah, okay, cool. So a masterpiece that has Platinum’s name on it, even if it’s maybe not pure Platinum. Yeah, you’re right. I don’t know why I’m being difficult. That’s got to go in. That’s fine. So next up, Matthew 2019’s Astral Chain, last discussed on this podcast in the Nintendo Switch Games Hall of Fame Volume 1. Let’s do Volume 2 next year. That’d be good. So this feels like a yes to me. It’s like it’s significant. It’s a sign of like maybe the future of where where Platinum’s types of games will go. It does. It may be. It definitely pushes forward that character action that we’ve seen in all these games from being exactly the same as it had been before. This is maybe where you see the, you know, like the idea of another something joining you in the battle being a significant part of the battle. What’s, what do you take it from here? It’s a definitely an interesting game from like the next generation. This is directed by Takehisa Tora, who Inaba in interviews has called their like superstar, their future talent. Not the new cameo, but the guy they are internally very, very happy with. He was the lead gameplay designer of Nier as well. What I love about this game is the partnership with the legions, which is this sort of giant chained creature, which you send out to fight alongside you, but you can also kind of interact with them in a very interesting kind of way, because you’re joined by a chain, and that chain is a physical item. So you use the chain to kind of wrap around enemies or trip enemies up in combat. I think it has the, you’re playing as two things at once thing that Bayonetta 3 has and Scalebound was going to have, but it’s like very, very focused in, like maybe that’s more of a Nintendo influence on this one, in that it’s like a very clean cut mechanic. They milk loads from it, but it is fundamentally like a hundred uses for a chain between you and a big thing, which feels like a Nintendo idea to me. A step in the right direction for this, and I definitely said this in the Nintendo episode, is that I find the game around the combat almost just as enticing as the combat itself. This slightly sci-fi, anime, sort of Ghost in the Shell type world. A lot more kind of compelling, a lot more coherent. It isn’t just endlessly talking like someone has edited this game’s story, which again feels like maybe Nintendo’s hands involved. You’re like a detective, so outside of combat you’re going around like investigating stuff. It feels like a very complete package in a way that, a lot of their other games, I’m a little unhappy once the combat stops. Yep, I think this is like our last yes, personally, of the Hall of Fame, Matthew. Like, just look at the rest of the games, I don’t think they’re going to get in there. Not a big World of Demons fan. And not a big Salt Crest ahead either, necessarily. Yeah, I think that this is a good one to have in here, because like I say, I think that, I don’t know, we want this to, there’s a real risk with Platinum, because they peak so early with Bayonetta and Vanquish. It’s like, you don’t want the entire story to be told of the Hall of Fame, of just those early games, and so I think that by denying too many of these later ones, we basically paint the picture that they are in decline, and it’s just not true, I don’t think. So I think this has to be a yes also. I think we’ve got one too many yeses there, so we’ll come back to that. But yes, a favourite of yours, and it was really cool to hear you discuss on that previous episode, so I recommend people go check that one out if they haven’t already. So yeah, World of Demons 2021, Matthew, a mobile game. I think we can skip that, right? That’s not getting on the list. Yeah, looks a bit like a commie. I’m never interested in seeing a developer, such a console-focused developer, move into that space, not to be too cynical about it, but… Yeah, yeah, but it’s Apple Arcade, so it’s, you know, there’s some quality control there, but yeah, we don’t need to see anything else. Yeah, it was pretty well-reviewed. Maybe I am being too harsh there. It was quite well-reviewed. Got like sevens across the board, basically. An edge six, of course. It looks like a bit of a kind of Legend of Korra to me, you know? In terms of like, you’re like, well, Platinum, they won’t ever make a truly horrible combat system. It will always be fine, but there’s just nothing else, you know, I just don’t think there’s any scale to this game outside of the combat. Yeah, I also don’t want to be too harsh on this, because like you say, it is a true reprise of the Akami aesthetic, isn’t it? And, you know, that was, that’s them, you know, that they would have referenced out so many years later in another game is cool. You also enlist demons to fight with you, just a little bit Bayonetta 3-ish. That’s just going to be in every one of their fucking games now. Yeah, they’re really into like, maybe that’s them, like, telling us what it’s like to work with, like, corporate partners. It’s just all these heroes have to team up with, like, dreadful demons. Bit cynical, isn’t it? Hey, while we’re inventing narratives on this podcast, Left, Right and Center, why not? Just throw that into the mix. Okay, good. So next up is Sol Cresta, a side-scrolling shooter that does have Kamiya’s name on it, Matthew. Like, a kind of bullet-hairy kind of shooter. Looks very pretty, plays alright for this kind of game, but to be honest, I’m not an expert in it, but I know you’ve been playing it this week, right? So what’s your take? A sequel to Mooncresta and Terracresta, which I’m not a shoot-em-up guy, so I’m not going to pretend I am, but the gimmick in those games is like, you connect your ship to other ships to make a bigger ship with more and more bullets. The Platinum Twist, and this is like a cameo, a passion project, this, is that you connect with these other ships and then you can basically change the formation. And the formation you end up in alters the attacks you make. So you’re trying to… almost a little bit wonderful 101-y, in a way. In that, like, if you go in a straight line, you’ll shoot like a big laser out in front of you. If you make a triangle, you’ll shoot a load of missiles off at a diagonal angle or whatever. So you’re trying to do these formations to cause as much damage as possible. This feels just like a really mad cameo passion project, because he is super into, like, shoot-em-ups and arcade games, and that is, like, a big part of him. That’s why there’s always shoot-em-up sections, like, hidden in, like, Bayonetta and the wonderful 101. And it’s fine. Like, I wouldn’t knock it. I wrote in my notes, it’s a bit like Edgar Wright making that documentary about Sparks. You’re kind of like… If you’re into Sparks, you’ll watch that and go, absolutely amazing. If you’re not into Sparks, you’ll be like, oh, fucking, why don’t you make Baby Driver 2 instead, you know? Two Baby Two Driver, yeah. Yeah. It’s got a little bit of that. We were like, well, I’m pleased you got to do this, but… But the rest of us have to live with it. Yeah, and like, I don’t know. Get back to it. Like, only you can make these truly extraordinary 3D character action games. And like, don’t just spend the rest of your life being like mean on Twitter and making super niche arcade riffs. Well, there you go. Now we’ve veered into career advice for Hideki Kamiya from Matthew Castle. What a wild podcast. I will say, listen, I don’t want to derail this into a Kamiya conversation, but I’ve seen a lot of people are like, fuck Kamiya, he’s a total asshole, and he’s been revealed as an asshole. I’ve met him a couple of times, interviewed him once properly, been in presentations with him, and he was really nice. Yeah, he’s really nice. And everyone who’s met him says he’s really nice. Andy Robinson has talked to them a lot and really, really vouches for him, as like his Twitter persona has just got away from him a bit. But he isn’t like that. And just remember, people aren’t their Twitter personas. That’s all I say on Kamiya. We all need to get the fuck off of there, basically. Oh, it’s rank. Nothing good’s come from there. Apart from Glorko. And even Max, kind of shit. Yeah, people selling shirts off the back of your sense of humour. That’s tragic to see. Yeah, OK, so really, like a really interesting outlier compared to the rest of this list, but not quite Hall of Fame territory. Also, a game I’m waiting till it’s cheaper before I buy, because it’s fucking pricey. I bought this for 30 quid. Oh, wow, OK, yeah, committed to. Matthew, will you do anything to make this podcast good? Well, we’ve got that Patreon money now. I’m pretty, like, you know, I’m so flush. I’ll be like, yeah, it makes the podcast better. I’m going to do two minutes on this game. That’s worth 30 quid. Oh, that’s inspiring, frankly. OK, moving on then to back to another dud. Babylon’s Fall, a game that is being decommissioned, a live service co-op hack and slashy thing. I haven’t played it. I can’t say whether it’s good or bad, but had, like, a legendarily low player base. And now, you know, basically people are giving copies away to just get it out of, like, the stock rooms. Or at least ask to, kind of, report. I think it’s still… I don’t think you can actually just go on eBay and buy it for, like, 1p. It’s not that situation. But it is weird that they’ve made it… It’s not like ET buried in the desert, you know? Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, it’s a bit of a strange one, this. As the Square Enix published games, you would assume that this came out of the very successful partnership that they had with Nier Automata. Wikipedia describes it as a significant commercial disaster. Yeah, never reached more than 1200 players concurrently on release day, which is pretty bad. Yes, servers will be shut in February 2023, and then the game is basically done. So, not in the Hall of Fame, right? No, not at all. 41 and 46 are Metacritic, that’s tough. I saw Catherine playing this and it just looked rubbish. The idea that you’re climbing this Babylon’s Tower is the idea that you’re climbing this big tower over a live service game, and like every season everyone would get a little higher working towards something in the top. That’s kind of fun. That’s a good idea. There’s nothing about it that seems egregious, it’s just the execution seems like pretty poor. People use this one game as an overblown indicator of Platinum’s demise. It’s like, alright, ignore Astral Chain being their most commercially successful game then. Or Nier Automata selling five million copies. Yeah, I mean, it’s probably still near, but like Astral Chain had the Switch effect. Fuck the internet, man. Why don’t we even let that… We shouldn’t even allow their voice on this podcast. I think it’s like perfectly okay to be like Platinum’s fallible and can still make crap. That’s perfectly fine point of view to have. And this, you know, this does prove that. But it is sandwiched between quite a lot of great games here. So, yeah, I don’t… I’m not wildly offended by it. In fact, I don’t really care. So lastly, Matthew, Bayonetta 3. Feels like we firmly established this can’t get to the top. No. But nonetheless, that doesn’t mean it’s a dud by any means. It just means it’s not quite sailed to the heights of its predecessors. Is that fair? Ticks so many of the boxes. It’s even sillier than the other Bayonettas, and I actually quite like the multiverse Bayonetta stuff, and it moves quite fast between them, and it ends with a real bit of good fan service. And there’s just so much weird stuff in it that I love. There’s a rhythm game in this. That’s fun. I’m excited to play this on my Switch. Oh, yeah, I’m sure it’ll look pretty. Surprisingly rough by their standards, but honestly, if you get to the end of this and you’re like, that’s boring, I’d fear for you. Read my review on VGC for all these thoughts, but slightly more succinctly. In which case, Matthew, we have got our five, I think, actually, looking over it. So our Hall of Fame for Platinum Games is Bayonetta, Vanquish, The Wonderful 101, Nier Automata and Astral Chain. I don’t think I’ve missed one there. I mean, it’s not a controversial Hall of Fame, but I think it is the right Hall of Fame. I think so, yeah. And I did enjoy the argument you put forward for Bayonetta 2 based on your recent playing experience. This is the exact list that Ashley Day also suggested. It would suggest that indeed this is not a controversial one. But I personally think that there is like… It would be very easy to sweep Wonderful 101 aside and put Bayonetta in there or put Revengeance in there. That’s probably where the biggest tension point comes from. I think Wonderful 101 is the one most people would have issue being there, but it’s a hugely important game to me in terms of like just having this thing to champion on O&M. I loved playing this alongside Joe Scripps was playing it. Joe did the review, a great review for O&M. It was just such a happy time to like nerd out about this game. A very rare opportunity to actually really write and talk about these things in any great depth, you know, which I haven’t, you know, ever written anything about Bayonetta until Bayonetta 3. So that was exciting. For sure. It’s a really good like well-rounded list in terms of like genre as well, I think. It’s like, yes, there are character action games in there, but there is basically almost every twist they’ve done on the character action game. We put it, we’ve got represented in there in some form, I would say. Yeah. So that’s good. Maybe like the sort of cutting in Revengeance being the big feature that’s maybe not represented. Well, that’s in Astral Chain. Oh, right. OK, yeah, fine. Not as bloody because it’s like Nintendo, but it’s sort of in there. Well, that’s good. There’s a good format this, Matthew. I look forward to doing it again with another developer down the line. I’m very much enjoying it. Fucking loads of games here. Way more than I realized when we started out with this. We need to pick a studio with a smaller output. We should do Insomniac. Oh, that’s an interesting one. But you know they have done like 1400 like Ratchet and Clank games, right? Yeah, well, none of those are going in, are they? So we can just skip it. We can talk about the serious contenders. OK, so we’ve got Sunset Overdrive and Spider-Man as the acceptable games to Matthew Castle and none others. Good, that’s going to be fun. All brown shooters and platformers are chucked in the bin. A two-game Hall of Fame. Amazing. I suppose there’d be two Spider-Man games in there, so three-game Hall of Fame. What a shame. They also did I think Stormland or the VR game. That’s meant to be good. Anyway, that can be another time. So yes, look forward to revisiting this. But in the meantime, thanks for listening. If you’d like to follow the podcast on Twitter, BackpagePod on Twitter. That’s where you can also find a link to our Discord, if you’d like to join our community, very friendly community that we’ve got in there, I would say. At least in the channels I don’t have muted, Matthew. You can also support the podcast at patreon.com/backpagepod. As mentioned, in November, we’ve got three episodes that are exclusively going to Excel tier patrons, so it’s a good time to sign up potentially. If you’re already signed up, thank you very much. Matthew, where can people find you on social media? Mr. Basil underscore pesto. I’m Samuel W. Roberts. We’ll see you next week for God of War Games Ranked. Goodbye.