When I originally played Bayonetta 2, I found myself loving it a lot more than I did the original Bayonetta. However, upon replaying it, the more accessible gameplay can become redundent, allowing you to spam powerful attacks and stun enemies with ease. It's still incredibly fun, with an array of insane weapons that are arguably more fun to play with than the original, but it lacks the edge that the previous entry had. I'd be lying if I said this game wasn't addictive though, as the level design is improved by devoting less missions to mini-games and instead allowing you to fight against a diverse range of enemies and bosses, of which the fights with Baldur are highlights. The story has never been the greatest part of Bayonetta, but Bayonetta 2 manages to make the original better in hindsight by exploring the character's backstories and building their relationships with one another. I do wish there was more of Jeanne and Luka, as they're my favourite characters, but what we do get of them is great. I'm definitely returning to the first one right away to unlock some of the other weapons to further explore the game's details before I finally play Bayonetta 3. I will also remove my rating for the first game, as after playing this one, I think I like the first even more.

This is the second of a three-part retrospective I’m doing on the Bayonetta trilogy. Stay tuned for my thoughts on the third game!

Whenever a book, movie, or game that resonates with consumers is released, they always seem to desire a follow-up. That is the curse of the sequel and it’s tricky to judge what constitutes a good one. Do you play things safe and create more of the same type of content that fans loved? Do you go in a radically different direction to avoid stagnation, but risk alienating your core audience? Or do you try to find a middle ground between both extremes?

I have enjoyed safe, iterative sequels, but I also believe video games are an art form, so my perspective is twofold. For one, developers should feel free to create the games they’re interested in. And secondly, daring sequels will bear more fruit in the long-term. A straightforward sequel is okay every now and then, but we have to remember that the old games aren’t going anywhere. Gaming can’t evolve without taking risks, so we should be thankful when a developer creates a sequel that won’t necessarily sit right with everyone. I agree that a gaming franchise should hold onto core elements between installments, but this process is not always cut-and-dry. Sonic and Paper Mario, for example, made very controversial changes to freshen things up while attempting to hold onto the original appeal. Whether they were successful is up for debate, but at the end of the day, you would be hard-pressed to argue the newer games never offer a fresh experience.

So, what does this all have to do with Bayonetta 2? Well, it’s a weird sequel. It’s both very similar and different from the first game, and not necessarily in a good way. I’ll explain why, but suffice to say I think it’s merely an okay sequel, especially after playing Bayonetta 3.

To start with the positives, Bayonetta 2’s art direction is stunning. It’s a monumental improvement over the first game’s washed-out colors, which was an unfortunate trend during the seventh generation of consoles. Gimmick levels were toned down and the few we do have are better paced and have slightly more gameplay depth. Muspelheims (the equivalent to Bayonetta 1’s Alfheims) are much easier to find and their challenges more reasonable. The addition of demons to the enemy roster alongside some new angels was great and most of them were very fun to fight. Enemy telegraphing was also a lot better, keeping most fights feeling fair. There are no more gotcha QTEs that can one-shot the player. And finally, the weapons were excellent. The new weapons had even cooler designs than the returning ones and they together allow for even more playstyles.

Bayonetta 2 also tweaks the combat with a powerful attack boost called Umbran Climax and a greater emphasis on Witch Time in the enemy designs. These initially seemed like positive changes, but everything is designed around them to the point the player is no longer dictating the pace of the combat. Enemies have larger health pools so that Umbran Climax doesn’t feel too OP, but individual attacks end up feeling much weaker than the first game. This is best seen on Infinite Climax, where enemies not only take forever to kill, but they hit like trucks. Witch Time is still available, but you’re practically required to use it for defeating bosses like Masked Lumen. These fights are blatantly unfair when playing as Jeanne since the boss almost always blocks or dodges your attacks unless you’re in Witch Time. Her activation window is much smaller than Bayonetta’s, so the challenge really falls apart. It’s disappointing coming off of the first game’s elegant difficulty design.

Now, I could forgive these tweaks if there were way more gameplay additions or overhauls. Sadly, that isn’t the case. I get the impression Platinum didn’t want to change the combat too much because it worked so well before. However, it’s clear Bayonetta 2 both altered and didn’t alter aspects about the first game. This is what I meant when I called it a weird sequel. It improves several things outside of combat, but the core gameplay is both identical and completely different from before. As such, it ends up simply being “more Bayonetta” for me. A follow-up to a great action game is practically guaranteed to be a good time when a lot of its features are still present. Just don’t expect that second climax to hit the same as the first.

Just enough of a step down from the first to be a slight disappointment but not nearly enough a step down that it's not still a great time from start to finish. Most of the problems with this game are only going to bother you if you're an elitist action game nerd like me, and at the very least they don't totally invalidate what a solid combat system Bayo 2 still has. There's some really weird stages and mechanics that I don't think are very fun to interact with, and the boss fights are more of a mixed bag but what's here works for the most part. At this game's very worst it's just kind of meh, but still has more than enough quality action game goodness to keep me engaged, even if nothing QUITE hits the same highs as the first game.

On the bright side the QTEs are gone! Fuckin thank you.

If you ever feel useless, just remember that someone at PlatinumGames had to program the shoot button in Bayonetta 2.

Bayonetta 2 starts off really refreshing, because it’s purely concerned with being fun. A lot of character action games are fun, but they’re conditionally fun; provided you’re able to get good at them, to master the systems, to use everything to your advantage and be the coolest guy in the arena, you’ll have fun. Bayonetta 2 isn’t especially interested in that. Bayonetta 2 is a remarkably simple, remarkably easy game, largely just encouraging the player to participate in spectacle over everything else. Combos are flashy, there’s almost always some sort of fight between giant monsters happening in the background, enemies keep getting introduced one after the other, and Bayonetta herself is borderline invincible provided that you know how to press the dodge button within a week’s notice of the enemy indicating they’re going to hit you.

But as the game wears on, it starts to become very apparent why so many character action games lock a lot of the fun and style behind mastering complex systems. Bayonetta 2 isn’t just easy, but it’s so easy that it’s boring. I found the absolute most efficient strategy to just hit the punch-kick-punch wicked weave until I could get enough magic for Umbran Climax, and then just mash punch until it wore off. Rinse and repeat. There was nothing in the game that could counter this. Dodge offset makes this even more consistent. I was getting pure platinum medals every single encounter. It was stunningly easy and it was the most rewarding way to play the game; if the other options give me worse combo scores, worse times, or make me more likely to take a hit, why would I ever use them? Love is Blue breaks the game in half from the word go and requires almost zero execution ability to use all four guns optimally. This is a starting combo, too, so there's almost no reason to invest your halos in anything other than Witch Hearts and Moon Pearls.

The Gaze of Despair helps somewhat to mitigate the easiness, but I started running into a bit of a Goldilocks problem the longer the game went on. The Gaze of Despair essentially puts enemies into a permanent enrage state, making them significantly more dangerous. They attack faster, they have armor that prevents them from being juggled, and you only get a small fraction of the Witch Time you would normally get if you dodge them. However, giving them juggle protection means that some enemies like Sloth wind up being fucking ridiculous; there’s nothing stopping them from keeping up the pressure while evading yours, meaning that using Gaze of Despair against these especially agile enemies mostly just leaves you chipping away with single hits for several minutes. By contrast, 3rd Climax is such a dead simple difficulty that I mostly wound up sleepwalking through the entire thing. The hardest difficulty available on a first playthrough is way too easy, and equipping the Gaze of Despair makes it too hard. There’s nothing here that feels just right.

Bayonetta 2 mostly just comes across like Bayonetta, but worse. Bayonetta was still a really good game, mind, so there are far worse things to be than a worse version of Bayonetta. A lot of this is just a retread. Bayonetta goes to a far-off city and becomes the ward of another kid. Bayonetta has to do another incredibly lengthy shooter section before she gets to the final boss. Bayonetta goes back in time and spends a few chapters literally going through beat-for-beat copies of levels from the first game. There’s no individual element of Bayonetta 2 that I can really point to and confidently say “yeah, that was a lot better than it was in the last one”. The bosses really suck in this. You do a lot of repeat fights against the Lumen Sage, with him taking the role of the Jeanne battles, but his moveset isn’t up to par with even Jeanne 1’s. You can’t even see most of what he’s doing because the game keeps pulling focus to kaiju fights happening in the background. The final boss is an especially egregious anticlimax, nowhere even in the same realm as Jubileus. There are just so many woefully simple movesets possessed by enemies who die too quickly to make full use of the few options even available to them.

The long shadow of Bayonetta remains cast over Bayonetta 2, and there’s largely no reason to play the latter over the former unless you’re really dying to experience more Bayonetta. Even then, I’d suggest that you exhaust Non-Stop Infinite Climax and Jeanne Mode from the original before bothering to tackle this, and that alone is probably going to be more than enough to satisfy your Bayonetta urges.

This is right after the beginning of the PlatinumGames flop era, circa 2013 – present.

Pain

I honestly think this game does many things way better than the first game such as the levels and environmental design, no qtes or highly egregious gimmick levels, way more enemy variety, no forced ‘no item’ clause on normal difficulty, way better art direction than the other two entries, improved combat challenges, new weapons, and various other quality of life updates that smooth out the overall experience compared to Bayo 1. The prologue kicks ass and is my favorite out of the series and I love Bayonetta's and Jeanne's designs here. Unfortunately, the combat has been tweaked in the most baffling ways possible that, while being way more approachable to pick up and play, ruined the smart design of the series.

Yeah yeah Umbran Climax is broken and destroys the already easy difficulty, but what killed me the most were the knock on effects brought on by this new mechanic and how everything is balanced around it. Bayonetta is devastatingly weak and has less combos than before while the enemies have ballooned in health quantity, which encourages using climax to finish up enemies quickly rather than being stylish and doing sick combos, also not helping with enemies being able to block and evade to stop the flow of combat. Witch Time is even more necessary, but it's a complete joke here compared to Bayo 1 and 3. Telegraphing felt slightly off with even more stuff happening on the screen at once, especially during the boss fights in air, that usually ended up with me getting hit randomly or witch time not triggering or triggering for only a second. The new enemies are so aesthetically cool, but are an absolute chore to fight against on harder difficulties with higher pools of health and stronger attacks. It's so disappointing coming off of Bayo 1's strong and rewarding execution of combat and difficulty.

Bayo 2 still felt like a good overall package with necessary additions, but those felt heavily outweighed at times because of the terrible combat tweaks. It seems so easy to one up the predecessor by just having those new parts added in while keeping the combat as strong as before, but Platinum still managed to fuck it up. Still superior to Bayonetta 3 though, even if I won't be returning much to this one again.

Bayonetta 2 is a weird one for me. It's easily one of my favourite games I've played this year but despite that, I don't have a lot to say about it.

The story is a step up from the original since you can actually follow it...until the last third where time travel shenanigans just ruin it. Visually, the game improves on the original too with how good Fimbulventr looks and as a whole the game is so much more vibrant than the first game which did look dull at times. The gameplay is just as good to me as it was in the original only with more weapons to play around with (Chernobog and Rakshasa kick ass) and the new Umbran Climax mechanic which is basically just Bayo's equivalent to Devil Trigger. The gameplay cuts down on the gimmicks too and as a whole isn't as reliant on mashing so it removes my main 2 issues I had with the first game's gameplay. The bossfights were some of the best parts of the original and they somehow managed to one-up themselves here. Seriously, the scale, spectacle and choreography is just mind-blowing especially in the chapter 4 boss which is like, the most hype I've been when playing a game for as long as I can remember. My only big problem with the game is that it's waaaaay easier than the original, I played both on normal difficulty but I wish I played this one on hard because I barely died on normal and it made the game nowhere near as satisfying to beat as its predecessor. Also, this game's got like the best non-smash Amiibo compatibility, I loved using a different costume with every chapter. But anyway, I adored this game from start to finish, easily one of my new favourites.

It's a good entry point to the Bayonetta series but unfortunately, that came at the expense of what made the first game truly great. The QoL changes make for a "smoother" experience for new players, but the overreliance on witch time, low stun value outside of Umbran Climax, and input buffering ultimately ruin the high-level play the first game excelled at. The more you try to push this game to its limit, the worse your experience will be. Still, it's a good action game and well-deserving of its place in the character action canon.

YOU GO TO HELL TO SAVE YOUR BEAUTIFUL LOVING WIFE THIS GAME ROCKS. In reality I did enjoy this game way more then bayo 1. I do think there is some things that holds this game back. This may be because of just skill I have gained from Bayo 1 but this game felt like CONSIDERABLY easier then the first. I don't want to be hit with a stone award after every mission but getting consistent silvers I went "oh?". I also think the retreading of old environments/enemies a little like same-y? It isn't done an insane amount but enough of like "I wish I fought a bit more new enemies and didn't go to a place that feels the same even if the layout is different". The bosses feel way cooler in this game and way more of an epic scale of shit (except nothing like jubileus). I think overall there is just more shit to do in this game including the fact you can just play as Jeanne if you want to aswell. And while she plays similar enough she has her own unique style. I didn't talk about it with Bayo 1 but these games have such good fucking music aswell and 2 doesn't let down. Definitely really glad I started the series and this was a great sequel

understands that designing a game around a score attack system based on replaying levels requires designing levels worth replaying in the first place.

moon of mahaa kalaa should be a technique rather than an accessory.

alraune is a toku villain and cutie j is the rider we deserve.