Remember how Bayonetta was supposed to ride word of mouth towards redefining the genre?  Tough to do that when your opening week in the Western World is summed as “We got outsold by Darksiders!?”

What to blame?  Examine the sentiments scribed by Gus Mastrapa of Wired:

Playing Bayonetta made me feel genuinely embarrassed, and not for the pushy sexiness. It was everything else: the sounds, words and scenery draped all around the woman. The tired biblical allusions, the feigned trench coat cool and the towering, but ultimately hollow architectural wonder didn’t just bore me to tears — they offended me.

I don’t care how brilliant Bayonetta’s button mashing is. It doesn’t matter to me that Chris was pleasantly surprised by the way the game plays with conventions. I gave Bayonetta her chance and now I know where I stand: I don’t want to be seen in public with her, let alone her tacky friends.

Know how Starcraft fans hate Warcraft’s vivid colors?  How long-time Zelda fans hated The Wind Waker?  Well, Bayonetta’s sexuality wouldn’t be out of place in Pink’s music.  She careens through sixteenth-century architecture with firearms strapped to her feet, and mauls the larger baddies with her hair. Welcome to another edition of “This is gay, yo.”

Remind anyone of another Japanese title that mocked its genre while employing deeper gameplay than the norm, was well-reviewed, and sold poorly like Bayonetta probably will?

Earthbound: The game that mocked your struggle against pallete swaps of Pack Rat by boasting a cup of coffee as one of its most feared enemies.  When it was released in 1994, Final Fantasy VI had just become the benchmark for storytelling in a console game, the crown in a Super Nintendo role-playing lineup that was setting the system apart from the Sega Genesis.  And here was Earthbound tearing apart a genre that had gone unchanged since Dragon Quest.

And despite selling poorly, Earthbound was right. We just managed to roll through a decade that the Japanese Role-Playing Game embraced its clichés a bit too tight.

Meanwhile, Bayonetta is a scathing criticism of modern beat ‘em ups, a mess of Dragon Ball Z characters who use quick-time events to slam a garage door on a dragon’s head.  And people are embarrassed to play Bayonetta?  Anyone notice that God of War II’s opening level pits you against the Colossus of Rhodes?  A bronze statue that slams his foot through a building onto Kratos, only to be thrown flat on his ass because the player pressed Circle fast enough?  Nobody laughed at that?  It felt like the baby steps in a bad horror movie, an axe murderer putting holes through the top of a getaway car when it seemed the good guys made it out.

Gaming needs titles like Bayonetta and Earthbound to remind us of our complacency.  Why?  Played a first-person shooter lately?  Most of the characters wouldn’t be out of place on the front cover of a bodybuilding magazine.  Seen the latest one?  It’s called Quantum Theory.  No, it is not the Japanese-developed sequel to Gears of War.

Anyone up for eviscerating the first-person shooter?  I’ll buy three of any game you put out.

If you hail from the States, you’re reading this blog because a Japanese company convinced your countrymen that their new video game console was an “Entertainment System”.  That’s how bad the Crash of ’83 was: It turned “video games” into a dirty word.  American businesses were horrified at the idea of getting burned a second time.  Fortunately for Nintendo, they had the savvy to unveil R.O.B., a product that has its own wing in the Nintendo Hall of Shit.  That useless pile of crap convinced retailers the Nintendo wasn’t about video games, it was about quality entertainment.

A year later, Super Mario Brothers became the shot of adrenaline that revived American gaming.  Nintendo’s success with their first home game console marked a long-term blow to American dominance in the game industry.  Today’s young adults don’t know who Nolan Bushnell is; they know about Mario versus Sonic, Sony versus Nintendo, the dominance of the Playstation 2, and Nintendo’s recent revival.  For twenty-five years, the history of video games has been the history of Japanese companies waging war upon each other, and the end result has been a near-monopoly on the greatest games to grace video game consoles.

Currently, that track record is facing serious issues.  It’s not merely the worldwide recession.  The combination of demographics and economics are threatening to sunder the country’s status as an economic power, and deal a fatal blow to the Japanese game industry.

Pictured above is Final Fantasy VI.  Remember when these games used to be relevant?  The Super Nintendo and Sony Playstation reigned victorious in the 1990s because they offered better JRPGs than the competition.  The United States couldn’t muster Japan’s infatuation with story-driven games, but a new Final Fantasy was always a huge event.  And when a country falls in love with a genre of video games, the quality of the games goes hand-in-hand.  When the Japanese magazine Famitsu released a readers’ poll of the all-time top video games, it read like the swan song for the depressed loner, listing off his true loves before shooting up the school.

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