The Bayonetta 3 Debacle

 It's been a hot minute since I've paid any kind of attention to some industry drama and good golly has a sort of big one managed to fall in front of me.  

Bayonetta is a sort of niche series I think but she IS featured in Smash so I assume most people know about her but just in case you live under a rock being stored in a nuclear bunkers panic room Bayonetta is game series about a freakishly tall women fighting angels or something.  Granted I've only played the first game and even that was way back when it first came out but I'm pretty sure its something to that effect.  It's basically Devil May Cry but with a freakishly tall and lanky lady instead of a freakishly handsome and funny dude.

On Sunday I came across a series of videos from the voice actor for Bayonetta, Hellena Taylor, talking through sobs and tears about how shes SO well educated and SO well versed in her field and was somehow only offered a total of $4000 to voice the entire game.  Not only this, but as a result of her shitty offer she was calling upon fans of the Bayonetta series to boycott the release of the game and not buy it.  Also at this point I think news came out that by not taking the offer she was dropped from the series and a new woman, Jennifer Hale, has now taken up the role for the third game.  ALSO  ALSO Hideki Kamiya, one of the big boys over at Platinum Games, the developer of Bayonetta, went on an all caps tirade about how shes lying and the offer was closer to $150,000 before his account got deleted, seemingly by his own volition but I have no idea whats going on with him.

So at this point I was sort of torn.  It's a well known thing that voice actors are underpaid in a lot of cases and $4000 to do all the voice work for the 3rd game in a niche yet quite succesful franchise of character action games seems insanely low even by shitty game industry standards.  But something felt off about Taylor's videos.  The chest beating regarding her education and experience, the call for a boycott and the crying just gave her videos a weird stank that had me siding with Platinum Games instead of her despite her shitty situation.

Now I'm not going to go down the stupid Twitter argument route of "BUT WHAT ABOUT THE OTHER DEVS BEING PAID FOR THEIR WORK" because, like most people are eager to point out, the other developers of the game are probably salaried or have some kind of other contract going on and have already made their money or have agreements about their money with the company.  But put the money aside for a second.  Imagine you are a programmer, a level designer, sound engineer, 3D or 2D artist or one of the myriad other jobs required for a game to get made.  You've spent YEARS of your life putting this thing together, working hard, probably doing a fair bit of overtime and maybe even making some personal sacrifice to try and ensure that the fans of this game get an experience that they enjoy and that you can be proud of.  Then, some suit in your company, completely devoid and separate from your work goes and makes a bad decision and makes ONE member of the team a crappy offer suddenly all the work you did for all those years is getting hate thrown at it and potentially thrown to the wayside just because of that.  You'd feel like complete shit.  If I was, for example, Takaaki Yamaguchi (the lead Animator according to Bayonetta 2s credits, assuming its still him) and I heard that you were trying to sabotage years of my animation work because some businessman in the company offered you a shitty contract, I would want to find you and smash a glass bottle right across your stupid fucking head.  Takaaki is probably a bit more level headed than that, but the rage I would feel over even the SUGGESTION of something like that would be incredible.

BUT THEN I load up Twitter this morning and I find that the plot had thickened.

Turns out that, if true, the actual offer for Hellena Taylor's voice over was $4000 per session in the booth (which according to the same Twitter user is 4 hours) and that she would be paid that 4 or 5 times.  That's considerably more money than what she was claiming to be the case in her original videos.  This still seems sort of low, I guess, I am not entirely sure what is considered to be a "good wage" for video game voice work but its still significantly higher than what she originally suggested in her fishy as fuck run of videos on Twitter.

My inital theory on Sunday when discussing it with a friend of mine was that Bayonetta is just not a very voice heavy game.  Most of it is high action with a couple of cutscenes here and there and even of those cutscenes, a percentage of those are going to be mostly unvoiced action scenes.  Getting $4000 for 4 hours of work to get into a booth, say a few lines in an over the top British accent and then spend the rest of my work day going "HYA!" "HOO YA!" "TAKE THIS!" into a microphone seems like a pretty good fucking deal to me.  Then again I guess I don't have the "pedigree" that Ms Taylor has now, do I?

If Taylor hadn't have made an attempt at emotional manipulation in that first run of videos my reaction would have been "wow, that sucks, I hope she can negotiate something better" and I would have moved on.  But this has now EXPLODED into a big story with people potentially lying and parties skirting what can and cant be said thanks to NDAs and it's now something I'll be watching quite closely.

Oh and by the way, I'm going to go play Bayo 2 right now and I'll pick up Bayo 3 on launch, fuck you and fuck your tears, Hellena

Metal Gear Rising Revengeance

I already mentioned this once as the game that basically restored my love for gaming after 2012 ended up being so incredibly shitty, well now I'm going to gush about it!

So to start, I did a google search on the world revengeance, because I was convinced that was just made up to sound cool, but it is actually a thing, so straight off the bat I'm learning new things by playing this game.

Anyway, silly words aside, it's really quite hard to find a single word to describe Metal Gear Rising.  The best thing I can come up with is "Radical", but even then this games level of rad are so high that it doesn't really do it justice.

So I don't really know where to start with this "review", so lets start at the plot.  The game starts out with some group trying to destabilise stuff in order to cause war because war generates money for Private Military Corps and they like that.  Then it turns into a plot around child organ harvesting and shit gets really crazy from there.  But for the first time ever I didn't really give a flying fuck about the story in a Metal Gear game.  It's not bad by any stretch, but when there is all this high octane hacking and slashing going on, I just want to concentrate on that.

Which brings me to the game play, oh lord is it good.  The core game play revolves around hacking and slashing enemies until they die and if you have played anything like Bayonetta or Devil May Cry, you can expect a combat system that's just as fun and rewarding.  The thing that everyone knows about though is the games "Blade Mode", where you are basically free to cut anything in any way and this is used to harvest spinal cords for healing yourself or killing big enemies.  This is also a really fun mechanic and doesn't interrupt the flow of game play.

Now for the blocking, because I've seen a lot of people complain about the blocking.  There is no dedicated block in Metal Gear Rising and instead we are given a parry which is performed by pressing forward towards an enemy and doing a light attack.  The parry comes in two flavors which is a standard parry which prevents damage, and a perfect parry which prevents damage and counters.  I saw a lot of people saying things like "it's not well explained" or "it's too hard to perform".  Please ignore these people because they are just bad at the game since the window for just pulling off basic blocks is huge and the game explains the controls behind a parry right away in a VR mission AND gives you plenty of time to practice.

Anyway, for all my griping about people slagging off the parry system, I'm not saying this game is perfect.  The final few chapters feel a little bit rushed and have very little length and it's a bit of a shame the second half of the game wasn't a little more fleshed out.  Also there are some quick time events and while they aren't too bad I'd still prefer it if they weren't there.  Also the stealth segments of the game are fucking crap and while they aren't mandatory it feels that they were shoehorned in there just because it's a Metal Gear game. They are incredibly out of place when just slicing up dudes is just as, if not more effective than sneaking.

Finally the length, I'll admit it is a little on the short side with my total playtime being six and a half hours on hard mode, but that's not counting cut scene time and I'm pretty sure failed attempts aren't included in the total time either.  That said the game is full of replay value, because my six and a half hours of playtime were filled with pretty crap grades, so I want to go back and improve my skills.  On top of that, beating the game unlocks another difficulty and doing it again unlocks an even harder one.  On top of THAT there are 20 VR Missions which task you with killing dudes as fast as you can for a big gold star.  Finally on top of THAT there are 20 collectable thingies to get throughout the game which only give stupid shit like concept art but are hard to find and for a completionist like myself, add some more replay value to the game.

So the TL;DR version of this entire post is, game is awesome go play it!  If you're a fan of action games like this who were left wanting after DmC, this will perk you right up.  If you aren't a fan, go play it anyway and you will be soon enough.