Of Ranks and Grades (or, How to Fuck up Bayonetta)

I enjoy a good challenge just as much as the next guy, really I do. I might not be the most sporting gamer, nor one who takes a loss as well as he probably should, but I find it very hard to trade the frustration a game might instil in me for being so hard, in the place of unbearable boredom for a game that lets me plow through it with hardly any resistance.

What I seriously cannot stand, however, is the ranking of a player’s performance within a challenging situation. Why in god’s name would I give a fuck about how many times I slipped up when trying to surpass each and every one of the countless challenges a game decides to throw at me? To me, the only purpose this serves is to constantly remind me just how much I suck at a game, because I’m not going to be playing it with the intention of performing at my highest possible levels my abilities would allow me to.

This is specifically the reason why I absolutely, positively HATE Devil May Cry. Oh, fine; I’ll admit it’s a good game by most measures, but I fucking hate the damn thing solely on the basis that it can’t leave well enough alone and let me play it in peace. “Oh, you got hit once in a battle against 20 monsters all at one go? You took 5 seconds too long to dispatch them? This simply won’t do. This is going down on your permanent record as a sub-par performance, and we will be sure to remind you of this multiple times along the progression of the game.”

Fuck that and Fuck you, okay?! More often than not I don’t bother playing a game through a second time, so it’s a safe bet that I will be put through this sort of treatment in the first and only playthrough of the game. By this logic, I would have no concievable, logical or reasonable way of knowing the patterns of all the countless different enemies in the game that I would have to memorize in order to dodge each and every attack down to the millisecond. Further to that, then, I will unavoidably perform at a subpar level, which I’m sure we can all agree is perfectly acceptable.

"Excuse me, we wanted to interrupt your current battle to remind you that you're still at D rank."

Why is it, then, that I have to be told this kind of useless, superfluous crap as I’m playing? In doing so, I’m constantly egged on, just like having a friend, who’s better at the game than you in every concievable way, constantly poking you in the shoulder and telling you what you’re doing wrong (and whoever says that’s not annoying is a filthy liar). And then, when I try to play better, I just end up fucking shit up worse than it already was, only to have to repeat segments of the game for a variety of reasons.

This is not my idea of a good time. I was perfectly happy with Bayonetta up until shit got real and the enemies were no longer total pushovers (it’s worth noting that in spite of this, I still wasn’t succeeding at getting decent ranks). This was also true for another similar game, God of War, which I also enjoyed and felt was challenging almost to a fault, but although they had key similarities, there was one difference to the pattern, demonstrated as follows:

• Fighting nearly endless numbers of enemies in increasingly frustrating patterns and combinations, likely dying numerous times in a single segment before progressing to another, more frustrating one.
• Fighting nearly endless numbers of enemies in increasingly frustrating patterns and combinations, likely dying numerous times in a single segment before progressing to another, more frustrating one, AND BEING TOLD THAT YOU SUCK THE WHOLE TIME.

Can you tell which is which?

Now some of you may be thinking “Well, if you hate sucking at a game maybe you should play at a lower difficulty!” and you do bring up a valid point. Unfortunately, you’re wrong. My problem is not with a game being too hard. As far as I can remember I’ve been enjoying Bayonetta as much as I did God of War, with multiple, repetitive deaths all included. What I want to see abolished is the stupid ranking system that nobody gives two shits about, making me feel inadequate while I’m just trying to enjoy my game.

“Truth be told, the way Rankings are implemented within Bayonetta is never disruptive to the flow of gameplay.

Now, in spite of my raging and frothing, I still don’t think I’m being unreasonable. A parallel could easily be drawn between the ranking system and achievements; effectively acting as a mechanic to (arbitrarily and artificially) improve a game’s longevity and replay value. Once again, the primary difference is that achievements don’t constantly remind you about failing to obtain them. In my opinion, the player should have the option to disable rankings, or at the very least minimize their visibility.

Truth be told, the way they are implemented within Bayonetta is never disruptive to the flow of gameplay, and unlike DMC, does not feel it necessary to give you an RSS feed of your current level of performance as you try to concentrate on the battle at hand. In spite of this I still feel that it is a mechanic of the game that is seriously detrimental to the enjoyment garnered from it and adds nothing of value other than to the die-hard fans of such genres.

In the end, nobody really cares about your rank but yourself.