Bayonetta 3 is an absolute blast to play. The combat’s as good as ever, and the new demon summoning mechanic works surprisingly well with the flow of combat. It is a shame, in my opinion, that this is the worst Bayonetta game by a very large margin when it comes to pretty much everything else.
Bayonetta 3 is one on the most visually unpleasant games I’ve played in recent memory. The character models and the environments constantly clash, and the image quality is just sad. It’s the worst looking Bayonetta by far, which is insane because the first game came out in 2009. There are plenty of set pieces in the game (almost one per chapter) but none of them hit because none of them are visually impressive. Kratos was fighting hordes of enemies on the moving back of Gaia and Nathan Drake was hanging on to an airplane that was falling apart in games that were running on weaker hardware and they still looked a lot better than anything in this game. Even the set piece in Bayonetta 2’s prologue was more visually impressive and memorable than anything here. Is sliding down buildings on top of an infernal demon really that big of a deal when the buildings look like cardboard cutouts begging to go out of frame?
Then there’s the story, which is…sigh. Look, I’m not going to sit here and pretend that the stories in the first two games weren’t hot messes, but they were the fun, campy kind of hot messes. Bayonetta 3’s story is just kinda…bad. The game tries to do this whole multiverse (ugh) thing, but none of the universes you visit are actually all that interesting save for one, and you never stay in any of them for long enough to get an actual feel for the world. Then there’s pretty much all the characters feeling…a little off. Bayonetta feels like a different character at times, and it’s not just because of the VA change (Hale does a good job FWIW, but there’s no beating Taylor). She feels a lot more subdued and generally a lot less fun here. Same goes for Jeanne (I need to have a conversation with whoever came up with her design this time around to try and understand the thought process behind it because…) and Luka. Then there’s Viola, a terribly voice acted 2D cardboard cutout of a character that unfortunately ends up having a big role in the grand scheme of things. Then there’s the ending, which is insanely abrupt and is only made worse by the post-credits scenes that follow it. The game also has the worst soundtrack out of all of the games. It’s still great and there are a couple of bangers, but I genuinely thought Moonlight Serenade’s rendition was a joke when I first heard it.
There’s also a weird amount of padding in the game that really wasn’t needed. The Jeanne missions are…there but they at least try to mix up the gameplay a little as opposed to Viola’s missions, which had me constantly questioning why the game was forcing me to play as a clunkier, less-fun Bayonetta.
Again, Bayonetta 3 is an undeniably fun game and I still had a good time with it overall, but the first two games are some of my all-time favorites and this one just simply failed to measure up. It’s probably the most I’ve been disappointed by a game since Zero Time Dilemma.
Bayonetta 3 is one on the most visually unpleasant games I’ve played in recent memory. The character models and the environments constantly clash, and the image quality is just sad. It’s the worst looking Bayonetta by far, which is insane because the first game came out in 2009. There are plenty of set pieces in the game (almost one per chapter) but none of them hit because none of them are visually impressive. Kratos was fighting hordes of enemies on the moving back of Gaia and Nathan Drake was hanging on to an airplane that was falling apart in games that were running on weaker hardware and they still looked a lot better than anything in this game. Even the set piece in Bayonetta 2’s prologue was more visually impressive and memorable than anything here. Is sliding down buildings on top of an infernal demon really that big of a deal when the buildings look like cardboard cutouts begging to go out of frame?
Then there’s the story, which is…sigh. Look, I’m not going to sit here and pretend that the stories in the first two games weren’t hot messes, but they were the fun, campy kind of hot messes. Bayonetta 3’s story is just kinda…bad. The game tries to do this whole multiverse (ugh) thing, but none of the universes you visit are actually all that interesting save for one, and you never stay in any of them for long enough to get an actual feel for the world. Then there’s pretty much all the characters feeling…a little off. Bayonetta feels like a different character at times, and it’s not just because of the VA change (Hale does a good job FWIW, but there’s no beating Taylor). She feels a lot more subdued and generally a lot less fun here. Same goes for Jeanne (I need to have a conversation with whoever came up with her design this time around to try and understand the thought process behind it because…) and Luka. Then there’s Viola, a terribly voice acted 2D cardboard cutout of a character that unfortunately ends up having a big role in the grand scheme of things. Then there’s the ending, which is insanely abrupt and is only made worse by the post-credits scenes that follow it. The game also has the worst soundtrack out of all of the games. It’s still great and there are a couple of bangers, but I genuinely thought Moonlight Serenade’s rendition was a joke when I first heard it.
There’s also a weird amount of padding in the game that really wasn’t needed. The Jeanne missions are…there but they at least try to mix up the gameplay a little as opposed to Viola’s missions, which had me constantly questioning why the game was forcing me to play as a clunkier, less-fun Bayonetta.
Again, Bayonetta 3 is an undeniably fun game and I still had a good time with it overall, but the first two games are some of my all-time favorites and this one just simply failed to measure up. It’s probably the most I’ve been disappointed by a game since Zero Time Dilemma.