Book Review: Bayonetta: The Official Guide Limited Collector's Edition

For anyone who wants to master Bayonetta totally and utterly, this is the book to get. It will even make Angels beg for your mercy. It's that good.

This is a hardcover guide with over 400 pages, including a 32 art and interview section. The book even has a ribbon bookmark, an imitation of Bayonetta's hair ribbon. There's also a nifty quick reference card which I use as my second bookmark. Actually, there's so much information I'm using three bookmarks.

This is a very thorough guide covering everything from weapons, combos, accessories, strategies, combat techniques, enemies, strategies, secrets and of course the walkthrough. The main chapters are Scenario Guide, Pure Platinum Battle Guide, Angels, Combat Guide and Secrets.

Future Press really did a fantastic job with the Scenario Guide or walkthrough, which is concise and easy to follow along. If you want to retain the element of surprise during the first play, you can just use the maps to locate all the items and the hidden Alfheim Portals. Finding the hidden Alfheim Portals without any guide will be a bit difficult as some of them appear only under certain situations. Note that under different game difficulty, item locations are sometimes different.

Chapter 3, The Pure Platinum Battle Guide, details the requirements for the Platinum rank and the strategies for every verse, under the Normal, Hard and Non-stop climax mode. This and enemy section are incredibly useful when facing grueling boss fights. This section is for the serious gamers who want test their limits.

My recommendation when reading the guide is to go first to the combat section to understand the weapons, combos and combo scoring. For a character, Bayonetta has more combos than any Street Fighter characters. The combat guide sections doesn't just list the moves, but also goes through the good and bad about them. This game isn't about combos, it's about combos of combos, and you can learn them here in detail.

And finally, there's the interview with Bayonetta's Director Hideki Kamiya and Producer Yusuke Hashimoto. There are also some cool concept art for the game included.

Overall, this guide is really great because it feels like it was written by a gamer who had actually spent hundreds of hours on the game.

Highly recommended to all Bayonetta fans. Well worth the money.

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By the way, Future Press aren't allowed to sell this book in North America because of some rights thing. You might have to import it somehow or check if any book stores or video game shops that stock it. But you can always get it from Amazon UK.

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Also check out my game review for Bayonetta.

Here's what you can master. View in fullscreen and HD to feel the awesome-ness.

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