Without a doubt Bayonetta 2 is definitely an upgrade to the first game. Trims some of the fat of one and doesn't have gimmicky stages made by Kamiya. However for every step forward in its other departments, Bayonetta 2's gameplay is easily three steps behind.

Bayonetta herself still controls the same however, the enemies do not seem to care if you hit em with a wicked weave, only really flinching outside of W.T. This is because the game is centered around W.T and it really shows, where as Bayonetta 1 removed the training wheels Bayo 2 keeps them on even on the hardest difficulty, because without W.T Bayo's damage output is pretty much gimped, so much so that you end up relying on Umbran Climax and because of how overpowered it is there's no really a point to use any of the other techniques in the game since Umbran Climax is just generally a win button and if the damage output wasn't enough Magic gain is also gimped to abysmal gains which means save all your magic for that Umbran Climax.

The bosses in Bayonetta 2 are just terrible. Aesir and Balder specifically are just bad, pretty much ignore the rules of the game and sometimes having attacks that are so fast that its almost impossible to react. The flying mode is also just terrible, it limits your control of Bayo to just her ground combos despite being in the air not to mention most of the segments are just really draggy and used quite often.

Lastly i think this game focused too much the spectacle and aesthetic to is demerit. A good example is the first Balder fight where it starts off fine the background isn't cluttered and while its dark your opponent is wearing bright white so you can see him fine, However as the phases changes its gets more difficult to keep track of Balder due to both him and Bayo Summoning monsters to fight in the background, but the camera seems to think thats more important than this annoying boss, his final phase in that fight is even worse since its a flying battle and Balder is quite small and its hard to focus on due to the big ass kaiju battle.

Overall this game is not really fun to play, the gameplay isn't as deep as the first so you can just mash p and umbran climax to win but even at high skill your essentially doing the same thing since this game forces you into this one play style due all your other options being kinda shit in comparison, but yea if I were to judge this game purely on it's spectacle then it definitely excels at that area, just if you looking for Bayonetta 1's depth there's not much to be found here, makes me worried for Bayonetta 3 honestly.

Pillars of Eternity is the most boring CRPG I've played in a while. Maybe it was a sign that I dropped this game twice but I recently decided to finally sit down and finish it.

Honestly it was a waste of time, a lot of the game's problem comes from this obsession the writers had with making sure the player knew the inner workings of the world Eora, its people, its culture, its politics, and its gods. Hell they wasted no time with the excess lore dumps and dropped them right away in the character creator. Instead of giving a basic run down Obsidian really want you know the ins and outs and leaves nothing open to interpretation, There is a saying that less is more and clearly no one writing this game subscribes to that.

Another problem Pillars has is balance, The game is way too balanced that it is honestly unfun. Perhaps it's because I like to break games and feel powerful and like a god sometimes in my rpgs but in Pillars I never once felt powerful at all unless I was overleveled for whatever content I was doing at the time. Which made a lot of combat encounters when I was the intended level feel not only really sluggish but also didn't really promote me trying out anything new since I ended up cheesing what I could when I could. The dlc kicked it up a notch by having a lot annoying enemies and the first dlc having way too much combat encounters. Ultimately it was just a lot of forming choke holds because they work and not trying anything new. Even hitting certain weaknesses didn't' exactly feel particularly strong just did slightly more damage than usual.

The plot suffers immensely from the world building to the point where there really isn't any urgency which I get some people joke about in RPGs, going to do millions of side quests to level up or doing some mini game for something else. However in Pillars it generally doesn't feel like there is any urgency, because the plot is mostly preventing the main character from going insane due to becoming a Watcher. No real time limit or anything just kinda yea the main character might go insane. You can't even really say the main plot is even stopping the Leaden Key or stopping the hollowborn curse since that's just a side effect of preventing your character going insane and not really the main goal. Plot could at least be better if half the writing team had stopped focusing on world building and had instead wrote a half decent plot. No wonder Act 3 has you just talk to people for a bit then do a side quest and now your allowed to go to the point of no return.


Lastly your companions just kinda of exist, many of them don't really have any connection the main plot and the only one that kinda does only ever mentions that he's a member of the villain's cult but his companion quest is simply about him being schizo.


Pillars of Eternity was a very boring game that I really should have dropped it but decided to actually finish it and It was not a very good experience for me.