Played it for the first time and had a lot of fun for most of the experience.
The cutscenes with action and Bayonetta being sassy are exquisite.
A lot of the combat encounters are just the right amount of frenetic with diverse enemy types to keep things fresh, and the difficulty is tuned the way I'd expect it to be for a character action/hack-and-slash game on normal that I could get through some encounters perfectly, some encounters just scraping by, and some encounters requiring multiple attempts.
The spectacle of some of the levels and boss fights are still impressive for a game that came out well over a decade ago. Little Cereza is adorable.
The story is tired fantasy drivel that could barely hold my attention, and I was glad whenever Bayonetta would shut the monologuing angel demons up. Too bad she couldn't stay that way for the last stretch where the game tried to get serious with the exposition and lore and emotional stake-raising that I couldn't give two shits about. Even though these specific cutscenes probably don't even add up to half an hour, they all still drag on way too long.
Speaking of dragging on too long, god all these gameplay sections where Bayonetta isn't fighting are just the absolute worst. I get that developers do these sorts of minigames where you suddenly have to use a whole new set of controls and mechanics to break things up, but they almost always turn out to be frustrating padding.
I probably wouldn't have minded these sections so much though if they were over quickly, but no, they take 500000 years to finish.
Actually, no, I would have probably also gotten really annoyed because they'd be turned into QTEs that instakill you if you don't press the right buttons in time. Shit like this popping up is a stark and painful reminder of how much QTEs plagued action games during this era. Fucking hated them then, I still fucking hate them now, and Bayonetta has way too fucking many of these.
The core gameplay is already just so good that I wish Platinum had been confident enough to stick to the fighting instead of dumping a bunch of these terrible minigames and QTEs throughout the game.
I do wish I were better at this genre! The combat system is obviously incredibly deep, and I've even watched a handful of videos on how to "get good" at it. I just don't have the dexterity, situational awareness, focus, and determination to become intimately attuned to pulling off varied and complex combos, switching between weapons on the fly, executing dodge offsets, doing effective crowd control, and reacting quickly enough to visual and audio cues to not get hit, all in a consistent manner. It feels absolutely fantastic when I actually accomplish all that to clear out an arena flawlessly! I just can't keep it up over long stretches.
Maybe if I had played this when it came out, I could see myself spending more time with it to get better scores and play through the harder difficulty settings. Now, I'm just reminded of why I gravitate more towards the deliberate action of the Souls games and Western brawlers. I did play a lot of MGR: Revengeance, even beating it on its hardest difficulty setting, but that's way more simple than this game (and way tighter). Sekiro is the fastest I think I can go these days.
If you can handle Sekiro or Revengeance, you can handle Bayonetta.
The cutscenes with action and Bayonetta being sassy are exquisite.
A lot of the combat encounters are just the right amount of frenetic with diverse enemy types to keep things fresh, and the difficulty is tuned the way I'd expect it to be for a character action/hack-and-slash game on normal that I could get through some encounters perfectly, some encounters just scraping by, and some encounters requiring multiple attempts.
The spectacle of some of the levels and boss fights are still impressive for a game that came out well over a decade ago. Little Cereza is adorable.
The story is tired fantasy drivel that could barely hold my attention, and I was glad whenever Bayonetta would shut the monologuing angel demons up. Too bad she couldn't stay that way for the last stretch where the game tried to get serious with the exposition and lore and emotional stake-raising that I couldn't give two shits about. Even though these specific cutscenes probably don't even add up to half an hour, they all still drag on way too long.
Speaking of dragging on too long, god all these gameplay sections where Bayonetta isn't fighting are just the absolute worst. I get that developers do these sorts of minigames where you suddenly have to use a whole new set of controls and mechanics to break things up, but they almost always turn out to be frustrating padding.
I probably wouldn't have minded these sections so much though if they were over quickly, but no, they take 500000 years to finish.
Actually, no, I would have probably also gotten really annoyed because they'd be turned into QTEs that instakill you if you don't press the right buttons in time. Shit like this popping up is a stark and painful reminder of how much QTEs plagued action games during this era. Fucking hated them then, I still fucking hate them now, and Bayonetta has way too fucking many of these.
The core gameplay is already just so good that I wish Platinum had been confident enough to stick to the fighting instead of dumping a bunch of these terrible minigames and QTEs throughout the game.
I do wish I were better at this genre! The combat system is obviously incredibly deep, and I've even watched a handful of videos on how to "get good" at it. I just don't have the dexterity, situational awareness, focus, and determination to become intimately attuned to pulling off varied and complex combos, switching between weapons on the fly, executing dodge offsets, doing effective crowd control, and reacting quickly enough to visual and audio cues to not get hit, all in a consistent manner. It feels absolutely fantastic when I actually accomplish all that to clear out an arena flawlessly! I just can't keep it up over long stretches.
Maybe if I had played this when it came out, I could see myself spending more time with it to get better scores and play through the harder difficulty settings. Now, I'm just reminded of why I gravitate more towards the deliberate action of the Souls games and Western brawlers. I did play a lot of MGR: Revengeance, even beating it on its hardest difficulty setting, but that's way more simple than this game (and way tighter). Sekiro is the fastest I think I can go these days.
If you can handle Sekiro or Revengeance, you can handle Bayonetta.