Where to begin with PlatinumGames

All video game companies have their mascot. For Nintendo it’s the permanently cheerful moustachioed face of Mario (barring that one weird moment when he went to prison in Super Mario Sunshine and sat weeping in a lonely cell). Sega just celebrated the 30th birthday of the wise-cracking blue blur, Sonic the Hedgehog. PlatinumGames have an ancient pole-dancing witch who has guns in her high heels, demons in her hair and enjoys spanking angels to death. Bayonetta is a strange mascot for a video game company, but perhaps one ideally suited to a studio as oddly brilliant as Platinum.

Formed in 2007 from the ruins of Capcom’s short-lived but highly acclaimed Clover Studio, the developer boasts three Japanese game industry heavyweights as founders. The games of Shinji Mikami, Atsushi Inaba and Hideki Kamiya are legendary titles in Japanese gaming history, with director/producer credits on Devil May Cry, Resident Evil, Phoenix Wright and Okami between them.

In their 13-year history, Platinum have gone on to forge a fierce reputation as the studio for action titles – specialising in spectacular combat that’s inventive, addictive and incredibly nuanced. Short but sweet, easy to pick up but difficult to master, a Platinum game is instantly recognisable and endlessly replayable.

Very few video games could be called genuinely camp, but Bayonetta (2009) is a title that wears the label with pride. The entire game is so over the top, and the main character so absurd, that it entices the player into continuing just to see what unbelievable moment will come next.

Don’t think the game can top fighting an army of angels in a graveyard to a soft jazz version of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’? Or fighting on the back of a moving truck to an arranged version of Sega’s classic Outrun theme? Or riding a motorcycle vertically up the side of a rocket as it takes off into space? Well you’d be wrong – Bayonetta constantly defies expectation with each new jaw-dropping moment.

The story centres on Bayonetta as she finds herself inadvertently dragged into a battle between the angels of Paradiso and the demons of Inferno. The character herself has generated much discussion. Is her absurd hypersexuality typical lazy sexism or is she a subversive and empowering character? Presented as a kind of upper-class English schoolmarm crossed with a dominatrix, Bayonetta eye-rolls through each dangerous encounter with memorable one-liners: “I’ve got a fever and the only cure is more dead angels.”

The gameplay is PlatinumGames at their purest. It’s a hack and slash in the style of Devil May Cry, with the player given access to a staggering amount of combos, special moves, weapons and items. Each combat encounter flows like an elaborate dance, and encounters can be as simple or as elaborate as the player chooses – the ranking system subtly pushing the player to perform better. This is the perfect entry point for newcomers to the studio and, although the sequel is arguably even better, the original is the essence of the Platinum experience.

Following up Bayonetta was a tall order, and rather than develop another hand-to-hand combat game the studio produced the slick third-person shooter Vanquish in 2010. Unfairly overlooked and underrated at the time, the game has since been re-evaluated as something of a hidden gem, thanks to a dedicated army of online fans and a recent remaster. 

Reaction was mixed at the time as this seemed to be a Japanese studio misfire while attempting their take on a very western game genre – the cover shooter. Therein lies the issue. Vanquish is not a cover shooter at all, and playing it as such is to miss what makes the game special. Much like the modern reboots of Doom (1993), Vanquish is a game that’s all about flow and motion, the exact opposite of the whack-a-mole style of gameplay that traditional cover shooters employ. 

This is a game where the player can slide at breakneck speed on their knees thanks to rockets strapped to their thighs, backflipping off an enemy before triggering slow motion and raining down bullets on gormless cannon fodder below. To stay still in Vanquish is to die. Moment-to-moment gameplay features action that would normally only be confined to pre-scripted cutscenes by lesser studios.

The plot in Vanquish is pure straight-to-video sci-fi action schlock, featuring cackling Russian stereotypes and cigar-chewing space marines. Like Bayonetta, everything is wickedly over the top. In a gaming era of drab po-faced late-2000s shooters, the game felt a bit awkward: it faced criticism for its almost surreal levels of macho posturing and explosive clichés. The fact that the game steals a line from Paul Verhoeven’s Starship Troopers (1997) wholesale is surely no coincidence. But time has been extremely kind to Vanquish and, although it’s much more challenging than Bayonetta, it’s a tight follow-up that shows what the studio is capable of working in a different genre.

Three years later the studio dipped their toe in another company’s IP with the release of the ridiculously titled Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance (2013). It was the result of a notoriously troubled production, Platinum stepping in to take over key development on the title from Konami two years in. Starring Raiden, the much maligned protagonist from Metal Gear Solid 2, the game continued to cement Platinum’s status as the absolute masters of breakneck action. The game centres on a unique ‘blade mode’, which allows the players to slow down time (a Platinum signature) and slice enemies into tiny pieces. As usual the plot and set pieces are hilariously overblown, and the game is now notorious for featuring a villainous American politician who shrieks “make America great again!” during the final conflict.

Although Metal Gear Rising was a success for Platinum while utilising characters that are not their own, the trio of games they produced based on American cartoons proved to be disappointing. Transformers: Devastation (2015) is by no means a bad game, but the repetition and bland levels undermine the satisfying combat and interesting transformation mechanics. 

Teenage Mutant Turtles: Mutants in Manhattan (2016) again features tight combat but has numerous performance issues and uninspiring levels that endlessly recycle content. The Legend of Korra (2014) fared even worse, with critics noting that Platinum’s usual mastery of combat seemed to be completely absent.

In 2017 Platinum once again took on another’s IP as they unexpectedly developed the sequel to a cult Square Enix role playing game with Nier: Automata. Luckily this proved to be a return to form in a game that merges traditional Japanese RPG mechanics with a combat system that features trademark Platinum combos and elements of the hardcore ‘bullet hell’ shoot ‘em up genre. It has since become one of the studio’s best-selling games, even earning nominations in two categories at the 2018 BAFTA game awards.

The less linear structure of the game has also influenced their recent Nintendo Switch exclusive Astral Chain (2019), and head producer Atsushi Inaba has hinted that the hugely anticipated Bayonetta 3 could show a similar loose game structure. This was initially announced in 2017, so let’s hope it’s not too long before Bayonetta struts back to the hack-and-slash action genre to show us how it should be done.