Mike Newey:I was not especially inspired by anything when the idea of Bayonetta came to mind, but if I had to say, she reflects my idea of my perfect woman. The reason why I decided to create a woman protagonist is that I had already lots of male main characters and I wanted to do something different. Bayonetta’s image grew from my desire to depict a female action hero in a game. What I paid attention most was her sexiness. I believe that the essential element to express sexiness is high quality design, not the exposed skin. So I always directed designers not to expose her body without having good reason to for the game design. In addition, I also attached importance to the fashionable sense, as we did in Dante, in order not to make a “battle suit”. Regarding the fashion, I attached greater importance to it than before because our protagonist was a woman. I appointed Shimazaki, the female designer for that reason. Bayonetta’s costumes were born from her feminine and sensitive point of view. In the game Bayonetta can use her own hair as a catalyst to manage her magical power. To be specific, she makes the demons possess her hair and uses them to call them from the world of evil spirits and borrow their power. The possessed demons appear in shapes such as a huge arm or leg, or fierce fangs, which become weapons to attack enemies. In addition Bayonetta’s clothing is made up of her hair too, so we when she summons the demons to attack her enemies she temporarily loses a bit of clothing too. Bayonetta’s hair is also effectively a tool to make her movement and action more dynamic, show her action more dynamic, same as Dante’s coat in DMC and the scarf in Viewtiful Joe; however, we had technical difficulty to express her hair because several problems stood in our way. For example there was the difficulty of seeing the action because of the hair covering Bayonetta’s body.

Mike Newey:I had already decided that when writing the initial proposal as I answered above. Because I had already fully expressed male main characters in games till my heart’s content, with characters like as Leon from Resident Evil, Joe from Viewtiful Joe and Dante from DMC, I naturally came to decide to create a female protagonist who would provide us with new game play possibilities. II want characters to fight whilst showing their principles in addition to just beating the enemies. For example, Dante, the pretentious tough guy, shows arrogance and stylishness in the way of fighting. Joe innocently plays the role of a fun hero because he is still a teenager. Then, I strongly felt that what I wanted to depict next was a feminine, beautiful and elegant fighter and the project of Bayonetta began. The supple and fascinating motion of women is a really attractive element to take to an action game. In addition, the contrast between a very beautiful woman and violent actions that she can commit also is an interesting prospect when creating a game. We created Bayonetta by recording the action of various professionals in a motion capture studio, such as a stuntman who had plenty of experience in martial arts as well as a female gymnast who was once chosen for the Japanese national team and a female dancer. Along with her actions, Bayonetta has a lot of elements which have unique tastes specific to women; she always walks like Marilyn Monroe. Her lock-on cursor shapes like a lipstick mark. The magical power which assists her when she makes double jump is expressed as butterfly wings. Blood flying off her when she’s attacked changes into rose petals. So you can see we’ve gone to great lengths to express Bayonetta’s femininity throughout every aspect of the game. Moreover, we built Bayonetta’s style into the soundtrack. Although hard rock certainly goes together with the action game, I tried to create the battle BGM for women because our protagonist was a woman. As a result, we succeeded in making the soundtrack in Bayonetta original, with the up-tempo music expressing the sense of speed and action. When you hear the sound with your eyes closed, the image of a heroine flying and fighting gorgeously may appear before you. Our protagonist girl brought us various ideas and they are reflected throughout the game. Her attraction greatly enhanced our creativity during the development of Bayonetta.

Mike Newey:I believe that all of game developers should create games with their own ideas in mind, and not so much look at the competition. Having created Dante for DMC I’d certainly say that there experience on DMC has rubbed off on me, and part of that has contributed to Bayonetta, but I also think that you take something away from every game so Bayonetta is a culmination of all my game making experience too.

Mike Newey:It was greatly stimulated by the spectacular expression and dynamism in the God of War series in the respect of reflecting the sense of climactic action, although the gamplay in Bayonetta is very different to the GOW series. I’m really looking forward to God Of War 3 and I hope that it and Bayonetta should give a massive boost to the third person action genre.

Mike Newey:I think our control system will really captivate gamers’ attention. I keep saying please play this game to everyone, as I wanted gamers to experience the sharpened next-gen control scheme in our game. I’ve also already mentioned climax which is what we’ve really focused on with the action in the game. As the game progresses, players will be able to experience some massive climactic scenes similar to those in a movie which really takes the genre to a new level of action and excitement. The most exciting part in action games is obviously the combat. We have an extremely fast paced and dynamic combat system and have focused heavily on making the game have lots of variety and surprises along the way.

Mike Newey:I have a conviction that the quintessence of appeal of the game, especially this type of game, is in coming up across difficult challenges and overcoming them challenging difficult tasks and overcoming them but I know that you also have to cater to a hardcore and a casual market. Some gamers don’t want to play a difficult game and instead want to experience the action easily till the end like seeing an action movie, and I wanted to respond to their needs. We have lots of difficulty modes within the game so that players of all abilities can enjoy playing Bayonetta. When you start the game you can choose from Normal and Easy mode, and further modes are unlocked through completing the game. In Easy mode I’ve created a control scheme that allows the player to pull off the combos that advanced players could do but with less effort so it’s not as difficult, and obviously the enemies are not as tough. I’m sure we have plenty of tough modes for the hardcore gamers. (Gamers can guess how tough the difficulty levels are from the levels of Devil May Cry, Viewtiful Joe and GOD HAND!

Mike Newey:I developed the title with an aim to create the ultimate battle action game, and the quintessence of the game is keeping challenging your own skill. I focused on the stand-alone game play to pursue the best tuning for users who like being challenged and improving their skills as they progress.

Mike Newey:No we won’t have DLC for the game. We packed into the game all the extra elements that occurred to us as we wanted to give the gamer a complete experience, so there’s a huge amount of extras in there and plenty of re-playability.

Mike Newey:I am a little surprised but in fairness we did feel that we had something special and were really excited to get it out there in gamers’ hands. We’ve had some great reviews for the game which is a fantastic reward for the hard work that the guys in the studio have put into this game, and hopefully all going well, we’d love to start thinking about working on another Bayonetta.