Hideki Kamiya Wants Pros to Try Bayonetta's Auto Mode

When I played Bayonetta at a retail event on Saturday, I chose to play using "easy/automatic" mode because I wanted to make sure that I'd get to try out the new PlayStation 3 areas. I was surprised to find that even in this mode, you still have a good amount of control over Bayonetta, and can make full use of Witch Time and the character's two combat styles. Still, easy/automatic mode is definitely easy, and to a certain extent automatic.

Kamiya (center) and Hashimoto (right) at the Feel Bayonetta event last month.

The area of difficulty was one of the main talking points during a Q&A session director Hideki Kamiya and producer Yosuke Hashimoto held with the press following the Games Maya version of the retail demo event. 4gamer provided a transcript of the proceedings.

Kamiya explained the problem with setting game difficulty in a response to a question about whether or not the staff thought the game's easy/automatic mode might be too simple. "When we make a game from scratch," said Kamiya, "we end up becoming masters at that game. In that state, we always have difficulties with the 'simple' line."

He recalled an example of Viewtiful Joe's Kids Mode. Even with this mode, some said that the game was too difficult and they couldn't clear it, so the staff thought that maybe the Kids Mode should be Normal Mode. When re-releasing Viewtiful Joe (I think this might be in reference to the PS2 version, which came out a year later), they made a Sweet Mode, which was even simpler. Upon looking at player reactions, though, they determined that the Sweet Mode felt like it might actually be at Normal level, so they thought that they could make the difficulty go even lower.

Returning back to Bayonetta, Kamiya said, "Here, we also worried about how simple we should make it. However, with this title, we feel that you first understand the enjoyment once you've tried out Bayonetta's beautiful combos. Rather than lowering the difficulty for easy mode, we placed the focus on freely moving Bayonetta around."

Devil May Cry also had an automatic mode, recalled Kamiya. He laughed noting that there was some talk about making it the main mode because it was so interesting.

Closing off, Kamiya said, "We put a lot of effort [into easy/automatic mode], so even core players should be able to enjoy it if they try it. We'd like you to play automatic mode at least once."

You apparently won't have to commit yourself to one of the control schemes. Explained Hashimoto, those who don't care for automatic mode can go into the pause screen and switch to normal.

The retail demo of Bayonetta will be hitting PSN and Xbox Live Marketplace later today. See this story for a preview of what to expect.