As a Bayonetta fan since day one, I had sky high expectations for Bayonetta 3. The third in a trilogy of increasingly unlikely-to-exist games, six years of development, and coming over three years after Platinum released their last major single player game. Bayonetta 3 would have to be spectacular to meet my expectations after all that time, but not only did it meet them, somehow it managed to surpass them.
After Bayonetta 2 opted to refine and focus up what Bayonetta 1 already excelled at, to middling results, Bayonetta 3 is an explosive gambit that takes everything Platinum has ever done and launches them full force at the player with shocking fury. Genre switchups are constant (if brief) and the core gameplay itself has seen radical changes with the addition of the Demon Slave and Demon Masquerade concepts. From a distance these changes may seem worrying or clunky, but when playing it all flows so smoothly and feels incredibly satisfying to utilize as a part of your ever expanding tool kit. Not only does Bayonetta 3 have the most overall weapon options in the series, these options are more varied and more fun to use than ever. You could play for 100 hours and not hit the ceiling of what this combat system can do with Bayonetta alone. And that's not even getting into Viola, whose combat flow is wildly different from Bayonetta's and requires a real gear shift to lock into.
Bayonetta 3 never rests, setpiece after setpiece blow your doors down and threaten to drag you out onto the street and mug you in front of your neighbors and God while you try desperately to keep your cool, clenching the controller to aim for those good scores. The game is effortlessly engaging and fun, with the variety of its combat and the expansiveness of its adventurous level design always keeping you busy with something or another, and that something always changing into something equally fun.
Bayonetta 3's only falter is in minor QOL concerns, things like replays not allowing restarts of verses and a few enemies not giving good enough audio cues when they fire their bite-sized arrows at you from the other side of the planet. These are nagging concerns, concerns that become annoyances when you're going for pure platinum rankings and trying to master the higher difficulties. But those are only issues for the crazy people like me who actually want to attempt to do those things. For the sane gamer who just wants to experience a thrilling action game, I posit that you can do no better on the Nintendo Switch than Bayonetta 3.
After Bayonetta 2 opted to refine and focus up what Bayonetta 1 already excelled at, to middling results, Bayonetta 3 is an explosive gambit that takes everything Platinum has ever done and launches them full force at the player with shocking fury. Genre switchups are constant (if brief) and the core gameplay itself has seen radical changes with the addition of the Demon Slave and Demon Masquerade concepts. From a distance these changes may seem worrying or clunky, but when playing it all flows so smoothly and feels incredibly satisfying to utilize as a part of your ever expanding tool kit. Not only does Bayonetta 3 have the most overall weapon options in the series, these options are more varied and more fun to use than ever. You could play for 100 hours and not hit the ceiling of what this combat system can do with Bayonetta alone. And that's not even getting into Viola, whose combat flow is wildly different from Bayonetta's and requires a real gear shift to lock into.
Bayonetta 3 never rests, setpiece after setpiece blow your doors down and threaten to drag you out onto the street and mug you in front of your neighbors and God while you try desperately to keep your cool, clenching the controller to aim for those good scores. The game is effortlessly engaging and fun, with the variety of its combat and the expansiveness of its adventurous level design always keeping you busy with something or another, and that something always changing into something equally fun.
Bayonetta 3's only falter is in minor QOL concerns, things like replays not allowing restarts of verses and a few enemies not giving good enough audio cues when they fire their bite-sized arrows at you from the other side of the planet. These are nagging concerns, concerns that become annoyances when you're going for pure platinum rankings and trying to master the higher difficulties. But those are only issues for the crazy people like me who actually want to attempt to do those things. For the sane gamer who just wants to experience a thrilling action game, I posit that you can do no better on the Nintendo Switch than Bayonetta 3.