There are hidden depths to every person, if only you know where to check for the recesses. Replaying the first Bayonetta and its sequel when the two released on the Nintendo Switch this year, I was surprised by the extent to which their environments, architecture, and geographical variety allow Bayonetta—the character—room to explore the dyadic duality of her past and present lives.
Exemplary of a modernity which is in dialogue with a survived past
The first Bayonetta directly pulls its influences from a range of different periods in art history dating back to as early as the 12th century. The game frequently flashes back 500 years in the past to Vigrid, a fictional European city of Bayonetta’s past, the architecture of which resembles sort of a mishmash between the late-period Romanesque and Gothic. In Vigrid, historical witch hunts of the past century in our reality are recalled in portraying Bayonetta’s trauma, one of motherhood, genocide, and memory loss. The city’s name is pulled from the battlefield Vigrid of Norse mythology, where the Aesir and Vanir gods clashed against Surtr of Muspelheim’s forces during the cataclysmic Ragnarök. But with the majority of Bayonetta taking place in Vigrid of the present day, the game positions its titular character as exemplary of a modernity which is in dialogue with a survived past.
In this world are three coexisting realms known here as the Trinity of Realities: the human world, Paradiso, and Inferno, between which lies Purgatorio where Bayonetta resides. These dimensions were directly cribbed from Dante Alighieri’s opus of Christian theology, The Divine Comedy. Positioned next to Bayonetta and its sequel’s portrayal of modern New York City as hustling and bustling as in the real world, Bayonetta’s Vigrid stands out like a sore thumb due to the absence of an explicit presence of humanity. Humans are living here, but in their own realm of the human world; since Bayonetta walks between realms in Purgatorio, everyone not directly in her purview appears as extra-dimensional silhouettes. Vigrid here appears empty, yet, like the sardonic and prickly Bayonetta herself, the place is imbued with lively modernity: she arrives to the city by train, dances along the tops of cars on a sprawling highway, soars above it on the wing of a fighter jet, and duels her rival Jeanne atop towering high-rises which circle its pseudo-governmental corporate center.
Vigrid’s architectural past, which has survived to its present, gives crucial insight to Bayonetta as a historical personality. Massive cathedrals supported by flying buttresses and decorated with a ceiling of elaborate ribbed vaulting and stained-glass windows root Bayonetta all the way back to the medieval era of England. Lancet windows, hood moulds, and peaked finials adorn towering abbeys at every corner you turn, overloading the player with a volume of visual information which reflects Bayonetta’s maximalist punk bravado. These edifices of antiquity seamlessly intermingle with the game’s Victorian Gothic revival influences of England’s 19th century. Byzantine structures with their wayward contours darting every which way remind of the eldritch beings derived from Christian myth Bayonetta fearlessly faces off against in combat. As a daughter of a Lumen Sage and an Umbran Witch, Bayonetta’s core DNA makes her an heir of antiquated regality, denoted in Bayonetta’s architecture by these ornate Gothic constructions. But Bayonetta’s personality and vernacular are decidedly modern, her unrestrained domme sexuality a snapshot of the current moment in gender and sexuality-fluidity; not to mention the whole dual pistols strapped to her stilettos thing. Vigrid reflects this not only in its portrayal of the present but in its co-opting of the lower streets and roaming alleyways of the past, with several old buildings repurposed by today’s society as restaurants, stores, and street marketplaces.
Overloading the player with a volume of visual information which reflects Bayonetta’s maximalist punk bravado
Bayonetta zips from one section of the human world of Vigrid to the next, from a coliseum on the edge of town to a military air base. She then finds herself moving along the discrete sections of the Trinity of Realities which make up Vigrid in its extradimensional totality, those of Paradiso and Inferno. Her propensity for travelling along the spaces which connect these realms makes her a sort of walking axis mundi, a world pillar, much like Purgatorio itself. It’s in these between-places where Bayonetta largely diverts away from its historical architectural influences, more leaning in toward its fantastical ecclesiastical ones. The floating buildings and debris and which litter the cloudy voids of these more abstract spaces are where Bayonetta and its sequel shine brightest, bringing to mind everything from Renaissance painting portrayals of heavenly divinations to the tangled cityscapes of comic artist Moebius, to Sony Japan Studio’s Gravity Rush and even shades of M.C. Escher. Though often there are still enemies to face off against here, these spaces feel distinct from Bayonetta’s earthly sections by way of a calm and serene mise-en-scène. Doves flock throughout empty space in a silent reverie. Vortexes warble, buildings spin in perpetuity, angel’s feathers float gently; synthesizers and choirs pacify. I connect these airier, more ethereal spaces to Bayonetta’s knack for quiet introspection brought upon by a core sadness, one which stems from a lostness in the throngs of amnesia. She runs upside-down along light bridges gilded with angelic insignias, mentally insulated from the placid ridiculousness of such a scenario by the sound of her own thoughts.
The worlds Bayonetta darts through are malleable and constantly in flux. A city street might spontaneously combust from a deity’s rage at any moment, or a building might collapse while she stands on the side of toppling debris; so frequently in fact that you become numb to all the happenstance, just as Bayonetta must in this line of work. Each step she takes zips her away to a floating lagoon in the middle of nowhere, or the foot of a lake of magma, or a hyperdimensional dive bar. The intro to Bayonetta 2 sees Bayonetta battling hordes of angels atop zipping fighter jets, with the surrounding metropolitan cityscape as seemingly boundless as the vast megastructure of the City in mangaka Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame!. Skyscrapers fly by so fast as to boggle the mind; Bayonetta’s smirking nonchalance at this tableaux speak volumes. At what seems like the blink of an eye she’s jettisoned to the coastal city of Noatun which lies at the foot of Fimbulventr, further aligning Bayonetta along the periphery of Norse mythology.
Despite its modern flourishes, there still lingers a feeling that the first Bayonetta’s Vigrid is a place far more emblematic of Bayonetta’s past. In framing her trek through Noatun as part of an attempt to save once-enemy Jeanne’s soul from the depths of Inferno, Bayonetta 2’s Noatun, in all its vibrancy and liveliness, can be seen to more fully symbolize both Bayonetta’s present and her future.
PlatinumGames environmental artist Hiroki Onishi detailed in a blog post a photography trip to Bruges, Belgium, Florence, and Venice to get a sense of how best to bring Bayonetta 2‘s Noatun to life. In Bruges, Onishi captured monuments such as the Church of Our Lady; in Brussels, the Royal Palace; and the walkways, canals, roof tiles, and verdant flora of Italy. Looking at Noatun with this knowledge is revealing; Noatun was designed specifically with modernity in mind. Onishi and co. chose not to focus on past versions of these cities of the real world in creating the pastiched city of Noatun. Modern photographs of these cities in their current form as places of residence—not, as often the case was with the first Bayonetta, as historical monuments—instead took precedence. Bayonetta now isn’t so much concerned with her past so much as she is how she can live for the future, even if that means dipping her toe back into the balletic violence of yesterday if she must. Noatun feels at once like a rest stop and a vacation; there are indeed battles here, because of course, but it’s easy to forget those when you’re swept up in the deep, deep blues and the warm, cozy splendor of food trucks, fountain plazas, and flowered balconies.
Bayonetta now isn’t so much concerned with her past so much as she is how she can live for the future
This isn’t to say that Noatun has no connection to a version of its past; people in the human realm can be spotted kneeling in prayer to an effigy of Aesir, the overseer of the world—and yes, yet another riff on Norse myth. It’s appropriate that Noatun’s architecture would be modeled largely off of the Renaissance-era architecture of Italy, since its revitalization of Greco-Roman art and ideology would arrive in the fourteenth century following the Romanesque and Gothic periods which inspired much of the original Bayonetta’s décor. Indeed, this is still partially a place grounded in a specific historicity both authentic and contrived. But the radiance of the light refracting off waters, flags ruffling in the breeze, and the pensive sway of boats lean Bayonetta 2 and its titular character toward the now. How appropriate then that Noatun, unlike the smoldered Vigrid in the first game, is left largely undamaged, a sign of continuation for the city.
Noatun, though, is just another stop in Bayonetta’s journey. There, she meets Loki, a young man. A link to the future, something new and unexpected in life. Perhaps a new time, a new place. Together, they go on a journey toward the peak of the mountain Fimbulventr. More Renaissance-inspired architecture along their way push the player and Bayonetta further and further away from her past. But Bayonetta 2 takes a surprising turn later when Bayonetta is sent 500 years into the past, back to the time of the Umbran witch hunts in where-else-but Vigrid. In doing so, she learns the fate of her parents, at one point fighting alongside her mother in the process. This never feels overly voyeuristic; Bayonetta 2 is careful not to linger on the dormant trauma which is brought upon by the genocide of Bayonetta’s people and by the loss of her mother. We’re able to revisit Vigrid through a different lens, but in the process are shown something similar to the original Bayonetta’s portrayal of Vigrid: simply a vessel by which more violence perpetuates itself. Not just violence in the abstract, statistical sense, but the emotional wounds which percolate out toward whose left.
These feats of virtual architecture and digital ecosystem, are so rich as to imbue Bayonetta’s history with meaning and substance
Even in moving forward, Bayonetta’s past is never truly forgotten, never swept away. Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 allow the past to coexist alongside her present. Memories exist, whether we like them to or not. For Bayonetta, a strong sense of place informed by our lived world and theologian myth make up the crux of her memories, those muddied by amnesia like paintings in broad strokes. Memories of experiences inform ourselves and our futures; so too is it the same for Bayonetta. The trailer for the upcoming Bayonetta 3 goes so far as to suggest a world-weariness in her, a desire to lay down arms and mark out a different path to follow for the rest of her life. It’s understandable why; Bayonetta jumps, hops, and skips from dangerous battle and crumbling building to the next with reckless abandon. But because the games allow her time to slow down, Bayonetta is given the chance to make up for the memories she couldn’t have from 500 years ago. This duality in pacing helps to illuminate the witch Bayonetta’s complexity, her humanity.
Memories don’t subsist solely on time, though. Place is equally important as event is to Bayonetta and her history. It just so happens that these places, these feats of virtual architecture and digital ecosystem, are so rich as to imbue Bayonetta’s history with meaning and substance. By pulling from an assortment of architectural periods throughout our history, Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 are able to make more tangible Bayonetta’s thoughts, feelings, personality, and history. Such is the unique flavor of this, her strange, surprising, caustic world.
Heterotopias needs your help
We are currently trying to fund the next step in the Heterotopias project: The Continuous City.
A unique and beautiful book of analogue photography of game cities, showing the urban spaces of games in an entirely new light, it can be pre-ordered now on unbound.
By doing so you’ll be supporting both the book itself and the future of the wider Heterotopias project, making sure we can continue to commission and publish work like the piece above.
Thank you.
There are hidden depths to every person, if only you know where to check for the recesses. Replaying the first Bayonetta and its sequel when the two released on the Nintendo Switch this year, I was surprised by the extent to which their environments, architecture, and geographical variety allow Bayonetta—the character—room to explore the dyadic duality of her past and present lives.
The first Bayonetta directly pulls its influences from a range of different periods in art history dating back to as early as the 12th century. The game frequently flashes back 500 years in the past to Vigrid, a fictional European city of Bayonetta’s past, the architecture of which resembles sort of a mishmash between the late-period Romanesque and Gothic. In Vigrid, historical witch hunts of the past century in our reality are recalled in portraying Bayonetta’s trauma, one of motherhood, genocide, and memory loss. The city’s name is pulled from the battlefield Vigrid of Norse mythology, where the Aesir and Vanir gods clashed against Surtr of Muspelheim’s forces during the cataclysmic Ragnarök. But with the majority of Bayonetta taking place in Vigrid of the present day, the game positions its titular character as exemplary of a modernity which is in dialogue with a survived past.
In this world are three coexisting realms known here as the Trinity of Realities: the human world, Paradiso, and Inferno, between which lies Purgatorio where Bayonetta resides. These dimensions were directly cribbed from Dante Alighieri’s opus of Christian theology, The Divine Comedy. Positioned next to Bayonetta and its sequel’s portrayal of modern New York City as hustling and bustling as in the real world, Bayonetta’s Vigrid stands out like a sore thumb due to the absence of an explicit presence of humanity. Humans are living here, but in their own realm of the human world; since Bayonetta walks between realms in Purgatorio, everyone not directly in her purview appears as extra-dimensional silhouettes. Vigrid here appears empty, yet, like the sardonic and prickly Bayonetta herself, the place is imbued with lively modernity: she arrives to the city by train, dances along the tops of cars on a sprawling highway, soars above it on the wing of a fighter jet, and duels her rival Jeanne atop towering high-rises which circle its pseudo-governmental corporate center.
Vigrid’s architectural past, which has survived to its present, gives crucial insight to Bayonetta as a historical personality. Massive cathedrals supported by flying buttresses and decorated with a ceiling of elaborate ribbed vaulting and stained-glass windows root Bayonetta all the way back to the medieval era of England. Lancet windows, hood moulds, and peaked finials adorn towering abbeys at every corner you turn, overloading the player with a volume of visual information which reflects Bayonetta’s maximalist punk bravado. These edifices of antiquity seamlessly intermingle with the game’s Victorian Gothic revival influences of England’s 19th century. Byzantine structures with their wayward contours darting every which way remind of the eldritch beings derived from Christian myth Bayonetta fearlessly faces off against in combat. As a daughter of a Lumen Sage and an Umbran Witch, Bayonetta’s core DNA makes her an heir of antiquated regality, denoted in Bayonetta’s architecture by these ornate Gothic constructions. But Bayonetta’s personality and vernacular are decidedly modern, her unrestrained domme sexuality a snapshot of the current moment in gender and sexuality-fluidity; not to mention the whole dual pistols strapped to her stilettos thing. Vigrid reflects this not only in its portrayal of the present but in its co-opting of the lower streets and roaming alleyways of the past, with several old buildings repurposed by today’s society as restaurants, stores, and street marketplaces.
Bayonetta zips from one section of the human world of Vigrid to the next, from a coliseum on the edge of town to a military air base. She then finds herself moving along the discrete sections of the Trinity of Realities which make up Vigrid in its extradimensional totality, those of Paradiso and Inferno. Her propensity for travelling along the spaces which connect these realms makes her a sort of walking axis mundi, a world pillar, much like Purgatorio itself. It’s in these between-places where Bayonetta largely diverts away from its historical architectural influences, more leaning in toward its fantastical ecclesiastical ones. The floating buildings and debris and which litter the cloudy voids of these more abstract spaces are where Bayonetta and its sequel shine brightest, bringing to mind everything from Renaissance painting portrayals of heavenly divinations to the tangled cityscapes of comic artist Moebius, to Sony Japan Studio’s Gravity Rush and even shades of M.C. Escher. Though often there are still enemies to face off against here, these spaces feel distinct from Bayonetta’s earthly sections by way of a calm and serene mise-en-scène. Doves flock throughout empty space in a silent reverie. Vortexes warble, buildings spin in perpetuity, angel’s feathers float gently; synthesizers and choirs pacify. I connect these airier, more ethereal spaces to Bayonetta’s knack for quiet introspection brought upon by a core sadness, one which stems from a lostness in the throngs of amnesia. She runs upside-down along light bridges gilded with angelic insignias, mentally insulated from the placid ridiculousness of such a scenario by the sound of her own thoughts.
The worlds Bayonetta darts through are malleable and constantly in flux. A city street might spontaneously combust from a deity’s rage at any moment, or a building might collapse while she stands on the side of toppling debris; so frequently in fact that you become numb to all the happenstance, just as Bayonetta must in this line of work. Each step she takes zips her away to a floating lagoon in the middle of nowhere, or the foot of a lake of magma, or a hyperdimensional dive bar. The intro to Bayonetta 2 sees Bayonetta battling hordes of angels atop zipping fighter jets, with the surrounding metropolitan cityscape as seemingly boundless as the vast megastructure of the City in mangaka Tsutomu Nihei’s Blame!. Skyscrapers fly by so fast as to boggle the mind; Bayonetta’s smirking nonchalance at this tableaux speak volumes. At what seems like the blink of an eye she’s jettisoned to the coastal city of Noatun which lies at the foot of Fimbulventr, further aligning Bayonetta along the periphery of Norse mythology.
Despite its modern flourishes, there still lingers a feeling that the first Bayonetta’s Vigrid is a place far more emblematic of Bayonetta’s past. In framing her trek through Noatun as part of an attempt to save once-enemy Jeanne’s soul from the depths of Inferno, Bayonetta 2’s Noatun, in all its vibrancy and liveliness, can be seen to more fully symbolize both Bayonetta’s present and her future.
PlatinumGames environmental artist Hiroki Onishi detailed in a blog post a photography trip to Bruges, Belgium, Florence, and Venice to get a sense of how best to bring Bayonetta 2‘s Noatun to life. In Bruges, Onishi captured monuments such as the Church of Our Lady; in Brussels, the Royal Palace; and the walkways, canals, roof tiles, and verdant flora of Italy. Looking at Noatun with this knowledge is revealing; Noatun was designed specifically with modernity in mind. Onishi and co. chose not to focus on past versions of these cities of the real world in creating the pastiched city of Noatun. Modern photographs of these cities in their current form as places of residence—not, as often the case was with the first Bayonetta, as historical monuments—instead took precedence. Bayonetta now isn’t so much concerned with her past so much as she is how she can live for the future, even if that means dipping her toe back into the balletic violence of yesterday if she must. Noatun feels at once like a rest stop and a vacation; there are indeed battles here, because of course, but it’s easy to forget those when you’re swept up in the deep, deep blues and the warm, cozy splendor of food trucks, fountain plazas, and flowered balconies.
This isn’t to say that Noatun has no connection to a version of its past; people in the human realm can be spotted kneeling in prayer to an effigy of Aesir, the overseer of the world—and yes, yet another riff on Norse myth. It’s appropriate that Noatun’s architecture would be modeled largely off of the Renaissance-era architecture of Italy, since its revitalization of Greco-Roman art and ideology would arrive in the fourteenth century following the Romanesque and Gothic periods which inspired much of the original Bayonetta’s décor. Indeed, this is still partially a place grounded in a specific historicity both authentic and contrived. But the radiance of the light refracting off waters, flags ruffling in the breeze, and the pensive sway of boats lean Bayonetta 2 and its titular character toward the now. How appropriate then that Noatun, unlike the smoldered Vigrid in the first game, is left largely undamaged, a sign of continuation for the city.
Noatun, though, is just another stop in Bayonetta’s journey. There, she meets Loki, a young man. A link to the future, something new and unexpected in life. Perhaps a new time, a new place. Together, they go on a journey toward the peak of the mountain Fimbulventr. More Renaissance-inspired architecture along their way push the player and Bayonetta further and further away from her past. But Bayonetta 2 takes a surprising turn later when Bayonetta is sent 500 years into the past, back to the time of the Umbran witch hunts in where-else-but Vigrid. In doing so, she learns the fate of her parents, at one point fighting alongside her mother in the process. This never feels overly voyeuristic; Bayonetta 2 is careful not to linger on the dormant trauma which is brought upon by the genocide of Bayonetta’s people and by the loss of her mother. We’re able to revisit Vigrid through a different lens, but in the process are shown something similar to the original Bayonetta’s portrayal of Vigrid: simply a vessel by which more violence perpetuates itself. Not just violence in the abstract, statistical sense, but the emotional wounds which percolate out toward whose left.
Even in moving forward, Bayonetta’s past is never truly forgotten, never swept away. Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 allow the past to coexist alongside her present. Memories exist, whether we like them to or not. For Bayonetta, a strong sense of place informed by our lived world and theologian myth make up the crux of her memories, those muddied by amnesia like paintings in broad strokes. Memories of experiences inform ourselves and our futures; so too is it the same for Bayonetta. The trailer for the upcoming Bayonetta 3 goes so far as to suggest a world-weariness in her, a desire to lay down arms and mark out a different path to follow for the rest of her life. It’s understandable why; Bayonetta jumps, hops, and skips from dangerous battle and crumbling building to the next with reckless abandon. But because the games allow her time to slow down, Bayonetta is given the chance to make up for the memories she couldn’t have from 500 years ago. This duality in pacing helps to illuminate the witch Bayonetta’s complexity, her humanity.
Memories don’t subsist solely on time, though. Place is equally important as event is to Bayonetta and her history. It just so happens that these places, these feats of virtual architecture and digital ecosystem, are so rich as to imbue Bayonetta’s history with meaning and substance. By pulling from an assortment of architectural periods throughout our history, Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 are able to make more tangible Bayonetta’s thoughts, feelings, personality, and history. Such is the unique flavor of this, her strange, surprising, caustic world.
Heterotopias needs your help
We are currently trying to fund the next step in the Heterotopias project: The Continuous City.
A unique and beautiful book of analogue photography of game cities, showing the urban spaces of games in an entirely new light, it can be pre-ordered now on unbound.
By doing so you’ll be supporting both the book itself and the future of the wider Heterotopias project, making sure we can continue to commission and publish work like the piece above.
Thank you.
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