Even after 16 years, Bayonetta is still Hideki Kamiya’s baby. Commemorating the anniversary of the series’ first installment in a recent X post, Kamiya reminisced on the ups and downs he faced during the development of PlatinumGames’ flagship title.
Amidst nostalgic posts on X celebrating Bayonetta, a fan asked Kamiya to verify one iconic statement from an old interview about the main heroine’s trademark glasses. Fans of the franchise may have seen the legendary “Bayonetta’s glasses are just like her underwear” quote circulating on the Internet, and many attribute it to Kamiya himself, but this theory is actually false. In his response, Kamiya once again confirmed that it wasn’t him who said these famous words, but rather animation director Yuji Shimomura, who was in charge of the cinematics for the game. However, Kamiya suggested that he has always agreed with the animator’s stance, explaining that during development, he fervently pushed for Bayonetta’s glasses to stay a part of her design, despite strong pressure from third parties who wanted them removed.
“When we were designing Bayonetta, our clients requested us to take off her glasses, and it’s true that I kept rejecting their proposals. But it’s also true that, on a separate occasion, Mr. Shimomura, who produced the cinematics, said ‘Bayonetta’s glasses are just like her underwear – do not take them off at any cost,” Kamiya said.
In response to the exchange, Mari Shimazaki, the main character designer for Bayonetta, shared the story of how the iconic design came to be. Apparently, Kamiya was so fixated on giving Bayonetta a pair of spectacles that Shimazaki always had a “glasses version” of every design proposal prepared for him.
“During the development of Bayonetta 1, when I was drawing up rough sketches of the character design, Kamiya appeared behind me out of nowhere and whispered: ‘Give her glasses.’ That’s how everything started. Later, whenever I was sketching rough designs for Bayonetta, he’d always come up to me saying ‘Why don’t you give her glasses?’ so it became a habit for me to always have a glasses layer ready in my designs. While the process of finalizing designs was sometimes a bumpy ride, I always had the glasses layer on standby,” she commented on her X account.
While they are easily considered Bayonetta’s most iconic feature, the glasses were never meant to be just for show. In Bayonetta: The Official Guide by Future Press, Kamiya mentioned that the heroine wears her glasses as a kind of mask, to protect herself from the outside world as her tragic past chases after her. Following up on this story, Kamiya explained that he had originally planned on writing more detailed lore behind why Bayonetta never takes them off in the first place. “Maybe it’s due to trauma, maybe there’s some other reason behind it, I really wanted to write an episode digging deeper into why she wears the glasses… Whatever the case, in all of the Bayonetta titles I created, the only man who ever got to see Bayonetta (Cereza)’s bare face was Luka,” he said.
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