Hello, my name is Daisuke Sakata. I was the sound designer for the original Bayonetta and now Bayonetta 2.

Some of you may not know exactly what a sound designer does, so I’ll start off with a brief explanation. Basically, I handle all the sounds in the game outside of music: I make all the sounds related to character actions, and the sounds that go with the environment, like rain and fire. I also organize voice data and edit the multi-audio for every cut scene.

So, ultimately my job covers a pretty broad spectrum, but today I thought I’d talk to you about some of the enemy SFX in Bayonetta 2.

Bayonetta 2 has many more types of enemies than the original, and it features demons: a whole new category of enemy. My job making enemy SFX could be broken up into two parts. The first part involves creating base sounds, such as gunshots, sword swings, and so on. Then, I create sounds that characterized angels and demons, and blend them with the base.

Creating a base sound consists of just replicating a sound that players are familiar with from what they hear in other games, movies, etc. Most people have their conceptions of what a gun being fired or a hammer being slamming down should sound like, so these are easily communicated.

Creating a sound that is angelic, or demonic, on the other hand, is a little trickier, as perception really changes from person to person. If we were to say that our base thwacks and bangs were like toast, these sounds would be like the spread. Ultimately the fact that you’re having a piece of toast doesn’t change, but the taste changes completely depending on if you’re using butter or jam.

As far as angelic sounds were concerned, we had figured out our overall concept for angelic sound design in the first game, so that was a process of simply importing those sounds over. The real challenge for us was figuring out what a demonic sound was, since those enemies didn’t exist in the first game.

If angelic sounds could be described with words like sacred and divine, we figured demonic sounds would probably best be characterized by the opposite, words like profane and unholy. I started creating sounds by using these keywords as a guide.

The game’s director, Hashimoto, would come over and review what I’d come up with, then turn down ideas one by one until we could start to get a feel of the direction we wanted to take sound design in. By the later stages of sound design, Hashimoto was able to say just—

“Add the demonic sweeteners.”

And I’d say, “No problem!”, and know just what he wanted me to do.

As a side note, our term for angelic elements was “magical sweeteners.”

I focused on enemy sound design for this blog, but of course the sound team puts a lot of effort into making any sound you hear in the game. Ultimately, you’re the one who gets to decide if anything sounds good or not, but we try to give the game sounds that will enhance how fun the game is, so we hope you’ll agree when you play. Try to keep the different nuances of sound in mind as you play! See you again!