Welcome to Bayonetta 3 / Hideki Kamiya’s Super Mario Odyssey / Yuji Shimomura’s Marvel Cinematic Universe. We hope you enjoy your stay!
At the heart of any good character action game (I hope people don’t dislike this genre term yet) is a character in which we can spend a whole game wrapping our brains around the depths of. In my eyes, the strengths of Bayonetta as a series have always been how it empowers the gameplay loop of self-expression - taking real life examples such as dancing, fashion, and eroticism, and mixing them with this ultra video game-y definition centered around combos and elaborate tech. And if there’s anything I am happy to say about this game, it’s that Bayonetta’s kit is incredibly strong this time around; most of my issues with Bayonetta 2’s gameplay have been shaven down. Her new weapons are incredibly cool in conjunction with each other despite the removal of arm and leg equipment, and there’s just a general sense that Bayonetta’s power has scaled further since the previous game. Every time I got a pure platinum trophy, I hit that platonic ideal of action games; I wanted to make an AMV out of my combos.
The new post-Scalebound cancellation therapy sessions mechanic known as Demon Slaves only contributed to this further: while you can’t control Bayonetta while inputting actions for your demon to execute, you move while your demon is attacking with inputs you buffered. My demons and I were doing NGE episode 9 sync kicks together by the end of the game. That being said, I did feel that Demon Slave wasn’t contested very much by the campaign during my expert mode playthrough, it’s just a bit too low risk high reward there. When I started the post-game, I immediately saw changes I was looking for in the form of enemies that are harder to react to at long-ranged than close-ranged, so the devs clearly know how to balance it.
While this isn’t really a new issue, I think Bayonetta is a bit too buttery smooth for my taste. Witch time is just such a powerful linear defensive technique that I can’t help but think it makes defense in these games a bit unengaging. I’m sure I’d feel the same way going back to the previous 2 games, but the incredibly fast dashes from the get-go, and the long-ranged safety nets of Demon Slave didn’t help my opinion of it.
This is where Viola could really come in and help, seeing as her central concept is having a parry instead of witch time. And I dunno…at least for me, Bayonetta games are about playing as the coolest character ever, and Viola just did not live up to Bayonetta’s kit or personality. Not enough variety in their single weapon, and their take on Demon Slave is notably less expressive. Throughout the game, your recurring humanoid rival character is the Beastman named Strider - who totally highlights the strengths of Bayonetta, as well as the flaws in Viola. He has so many animation mixups that bad witch times are a death sentence, and punishes lazy usage of Demon Slave by instantly killing them. On the contrary, Viola’s ability to infinitely hold a block button sort of makes fighting him super reactive and dull…
Bayonetta games have always been chasing the eternal question of how to fill downtime in action games, and this game is somehow closer and further away from it than ever. Closer in that the way our characters control in the overworld is super tight, conducting some genuinely fun platforming. But the developers have quadrupled down on the idea of Bayonetta as some gimmick highlight reel, despite how they were always top criticisms of previous games. Almost every chapter has some high-effort spectacle moment, and while these are the most visually engaging gimmicks in the series, none of them feel polished enough. You get this scene where Bayonetta rips her still beating heart out of her chest to perform a forbidden spell, and summons SIN GODZILLA - then the screen flips and turns it to a 2D fighting game perspective. It’s this perfect set piece slam dunk, and you play it for a bit, and you’re like… this is going a bit too long huh…oh no…the attack clash window is huge…guess i’ll just camp in the corner for a bit and shoot some projectiles... They made Kaiju Street Fighter, and forced me to play as Guile. These developers are fucking devious.
Maybe the lowest quality you’ll get are the Jeanne 2D stealth missions where you hide in womens bathrooms, and the healing spot is a shower that enemies will try to peep on her through. I was no longer playing Bayonetta: I was playing some 2 dollar anime shovelware game on steam called “Hentai Gear Solid” that my friend would gift me as a joke.
What I would like to briefly praise is the aesthetic direction around the antagonists - a huge departure from the roots of the series, but I digged it. Contrasting Bayonetta’s themes of self-expression, we get this villain literally named Singularity; fighting with mountains of assimilated human corpses. It owns. Also loved the underlying corporate tone of how every enemy has like, MOBA class descriptions lmao
Bayonetta 1 isn’t a game I’d characterize as having a smart story, but I would say it has a clever story - there is a difference! Rather than being a story that rode on emotional depth, the story always managed to set Bayonetta up to spark entertaining dynamics. She had this sharp charisma with every cast member, and could even make banter with the most generic of demon enemies fun. Bayonetta 3’s style is a complete u-turn; every encounter has to have emotional weight behind it, but nothing really interacts with Bayonetta. You’ll get this scene where she stands in front of a major character as they die - neither showing genuine human emotion, or cracking her iconic one liners. As a result, this game’s portrayal of Bayonetta is often awkwardly stoic during scenes that could absolutely be more than that! The returning characters now have more baggage than they ever did before; Enzo lost his family, and Luka has some tragic backstory now. You can really feel like they wanted to make Bayonetta as a series more mature - but if you asked someone what was mature about Bayonetta, their answer would be the character. Yet the storyline has chopped its focus up across a bunch of characters who never earned it. It feels like Platinum wanted to go for critical acclaim again; if Bayonetta 3 released 20 years ago, would it have “From the creators of Nier: Automata” on the box?
Bayonetta 3 is a game that likes Bayonetta less than I do. Or at the very least, it’s a game that is catering to a crowd they’re afraid of not liking Bayonetta. Every chapter has to have some grandiose gimmick that’ll stimulate your eyes and mind for a few seconds at a time - all so you can forget what game you’re playing. It’s ashamed to be an arcade-inspired game riding on replay value, so it kills its own replay value. It’s ashamed of being simple fun shlock, so it throws all this emotionally charged shit at you, hoping someone will miss the QTE and end up calling it peak fiction. And I’m just gonna be honest…this game’s critic bait! But killing the cynicism for a second; I know it’s true that while I, and many people who use this site would probably grin ear to ear at the idea of buying a literal Xbox 360 game in 2022, most of ours have red ringed by now. And while this is clearly a corporate production, I was impressed to see a Platinum game that felt at times like a true AAA title. I hope this game makes a lot of money, and before their staff is ship of thesius’d with age, they put out a genuinely uncompromised action game. Because as of right now, all I got was a sequel to No More Heroes 2.
At the heart of any good character action game (I hope people don’t dislike this genre term yet) is a character in which we can spend a whole game wrapping our brains around the depths of. In my eyes, the strengths of Bayonetta as a series have always been how it empowers the gameplay loop of self-expression - taking real life examples such as dancing, fashion, and eroticism, and mixing them with this ultra video game-y definition centered around combos and elaborate tech. And if there’s anything I am happy to say about this game, it’s that Bayonetta’s kit is incredibly strong this time around; most of my issues with Bayonetta 2’s gameplay have been shaven down. Her new weapons are incredibly cool in conjunction with each other despite the removal of arm and leg equipment, and there’s just a general sense that Bayonetta’s power has scaled further since the previous game. Every time I got a pure platinum trophy, I hit that platonic ideal of action games; I wanted to make an AMV out of my combos.
The new post-Scalebound cancellation therapy sessions mechanic known as Demon Slaves only contributed to this further: while you can’t control Bayonetta while inputting actions for your demon to execute, you move while your demon is attacking with inputs you buffered. My demons and I were doing NGE episode 9 sync kicks together by the end of the game. That being said, I did feel that Demon Slave wasn’t contested very much by the campaign during my expert mode playthrough, it’s just a bit too low risk high reward there. When I started the post-game, I immediately saw changes I was looking for in the form of enemies that are harder to react to at long-ranged than close-ranged, so the devs clearly know how to balance it.
While this isn’t really a new issue, I think Bayonetta is a bit too buttery smooth for my taste. Witch time is just such a powerful linear defensive technique that I can’t help but think it makes defense in these games a bit unengaging. I’m sure I’d feel the same way going back to the previous 2 games, but the incredibly fast dashes from the get-go, and the long-ranged safety nets of Demon Slave didn’t help my opinion of it.
This is where Viola could really come in and help, seeing as her central concept is having a parry instead of witch time. And I dunno…at least for me, Bayonetta games are about playing as the coolest character ever, and Viola just did not live up to Bayonetta’s kit or personality. Not enough variety in their single weapon, and their take on Demon Slave is notably less expressive. Throughout the game, your recurring humanoid rival character is the Beastman named Strider - who totally highlights the strengths of Bayonetta, as well as the flaws in Viola. He has so many animation mixups that bad witch times are a death sentence, and punishes lazy usage of Demon Slave by instantly killing them. On the contrary, Viola’s ability to infinitely hold a block button sort of makes fighting him super reactive and dull…
Bayonetta games have always been chasing the eternal question of how to fill downtime in action games, and this game is somehow closer and further away from it than ever. Closer in that the way our characters control in the overworld is super tight, conducting some genuinely fun platforming. But the developers have quadrupled down on the idea of Bayonetta as some gimmick highlight reel, despite how they were always top criticisms of previous games. Almost every chapter has some high-effort spectacle moment, and while these are the most visually engaging gimmicks in the series, none of them feel polished enough. You get this scene where Bayonetta rips her still beating heart out of her chest to perform a forbidden spell, and summons SIN GODZILLA - then the screen flips and turns it to a 2D fighting game perspective. It’s this perfect set piece slam dunk, and you play it for a bit, and you’re like… this is going a bit too long huh…oh no…the attack clash window is huge…guess i’ll just camp in the corner for a bit and shoot some projectiles... They made Kaiju Street Fighter, and forced me to play as Guile. These developers are fucking devious.
Maybe the lowest quality you’ll get are the Jeanne 2D stealth missions where you hide in womens bathrooms, and the healing spot is a shower that enemies will try to peep on her through. I was no longer playing Bayonetta: I was playing some 2 dollar anime shovelware game on steam called “Hentai Gear Solid” that my friend would gift me as a joke.
What I would like to briefly praise is the aesthetic direction around the antagonists - a huge departure from the roots of the series, but I digged it. Contrasting Bayonetta’s themes of self-expression, we get this villain literally named Singularity; fighting with mountains of assimilated human corpses. It owns. Also loved the underlying corporate tone of how every enemy has like, MOBA class descriptions lmao
Bayonetta 1 isn’t a game I’d characterize as having a smart story, but I would say it has a clever story - there is a difference! Rather than being a story that rode on emotional depth, the story always managed to set Bayonetta up to spark entertaining dynamics. She had this sharp charisma with every cast member, and could even make banter with the most generic of demon enemies fun. Bayonetta 3’s style is a complete u-turn; every encounter has to have emotional weight behind it, but nothing really interacts with Bayonetta. You’ll get this scene where she stands in front of a major character as they die - neither showing genuine human emotion, or cracking her iconic one liners. As a result, this game’s portrayal of Bayonetta is often awkwardly stoic during scenes that could absolutely be more than that! The returning characters now have more baggage than they ever did before; Enzo lost his family, and Luka has some tragic backstory now. You can really feel like they wanted to make Bayonetta as a series more mature - but if you asked someone what was mature about Bayonetta, their answer would be the character. Yet the storyline has chopped its focus up across a bunch of characters who never earned it. It feels like Platinum wanted to go for critical acclaim again; if Bayonetta 3 released 20 years ago, would it have “From the creators of Nier: Automata” on the box?
Bayonetta 3 is a game that likes Bayonetta less than I do. Or at the very least, it’s a game that is catering to a crowd they’re afraid of not liking Bayonetta. Every chapter has to have some grandiose gimmick that’ll stimulate your eyes and mind for a few seconds at a time - all so you can forget what game you’re playing. It’s ashamed to be an arcade-inspired game riding on replay value, so it kills its own replay value. It’s ashamed of being simple fun shlock, so it throws all this emotionally charged shit at you, hoping someone will miss the QTE and end up calling it peak fiction. And I’m just gonna be honest…this game’s critic bait! But killing the cynicism for a second; I know it’s true that while I, and many people who use this site would probably grin ear to ear at the idea of buying a literal Xbox 360 game in 2022, most of ours have red ringed by now. And while this is clearly a corporate production, I was impressed to see a Platinum game that felt at times like a true AAA title. I hope this game makes a lot of money, and before their staff is ship of thesius’d with age, they put out a genuinely uncompromised action game. Because as of right now, all I got was a sequel to No More Heroes 2.
ikissgirls
1 year ago
Also slightly more serious addendum, from what I can tell Yuji Shimomura isn't actually on the staff of Bayonetta 3. I wanted to reference his word because I am such a fan, and this game clearly eggs off his style 100% of the time, but I guess it'd be more objectively correct to write like "the mcuification of yuji shimomura's style", or something. But that didn't flow, so I didn't put it there. Sorry!