Prefacing the post with a few details on his production of the Bayonetta 2 and creation of the designs, Yusuke Hashimoto posted on August 8th pictures and brief descriptions of the enemies players can expect to combat in the upcoming sequel to Platinum’s cult-classic Bayonetta. In his own words (and photos)…
HEADLESS ANGEL
“We call this guy Headless for short. I wanted him to have a powerful, solemn, sacred look to him, but also kinda be an idiot. The sword with the face on it is his actual body; the rest is just controlled by the sword. When I designed him I thought maybe the body holding the sword could be destroyed and replaced indefinitely, as long as the sword remained intact.” The Headless Angel would appear to be a sort of grunt enemy, seeing as how it’s meant to be kind of an “idiot”.
Intriguingly, he says hat the sword the enemy is holding will be of more prominence than the enemy itself. This could possibly mean some sort of unlockable weapon of sorts, or maybe a battle between Bayonetta and a disembodied sword. Either way or another, it’s a nice touch of flair to the overall design.
MAGIC ANGEL
“I designed this character thinking it might be interesting to have someone who could change things up in battle by raising his allies’ attack power and healing other angels. With those two done, I’d hit the bottom of the idea bank I had from the first game. To be honest, I feel like I put every creative idea I had in the first game. So, if the original’s enemies were good, why not just bring them back in the sequel and change them up some? Later I realized just how boneheaded of an idea that was. The more we developed the game, the more it became clear that a newly designed Bayonetta fighting not newly designed enemies was boring. As the director of the game, I wanted Bayonetta to fight something different. I had some trouble coming up with ideas until I realized—I should step away from using just the human frame as a base.”
From here, it appears that Hashimoto was forced to give some of the new “Angel” enemies a distinctive similarity to the Demon foes from the first Bayonetta, due to a creative block. It’s reassuring to see he isn’t condoning this kind of copy-and-paste design process, but we’ll have to wait and see just how different the final concepts actually end up being.
CENTAUR ANGEL
“As you can tell from the picture, his concept is part human, part horse. He’s one of the more common enemies in the game… So, for this game, we left the easiest “tells” that come with a human based design, but took some liberties with the new horse form, like putting his face on his stomach. We guessed Bayonetta’s attacks would likely land there, and it’d be fun to see what kind of reactions he’d make. I also tried to design his armor and accessories to give him a bit more of a “leveled up” appearance than the most common enemy in the original, Affinity (this is Bayonetta 2, after all).”
Numerous combat sessions with an angelic horse-man could indeed prove to be the boost of fresh content that Bayonetta 2 needs to distinguish itself from its esteemed predecessor. Hashimoto also states later in the post that this enemy in particular is much larger from the other standard enemies in the rest of Bayonetta 2, and that he is happy with how it turned out.
You can see more Bayonetta 2 enemy designs and developer commentary from Hashimoto here. As the original post is titled “Enemy Design in Bayonetta 2 (pt. 1)”, it isn’t a big stretch of logic to assume more info on this topic is coming soon. Keep your eyes peeled for more!
