If you ever feel useless, just remember that someone at PlatinumGames had to program the shoot button in Bayonetta 2.

Bayonetta 2 starts off really refreshing, because it’s purely concerned with being fun. A lot of character action games are fun, but they’re conditionally fun; provided you’re able to get good at them, to master the systems, to use everything to your advantage and be the coolest guy in the arena, you’ll have fun. Bayonetta 2 isn’t especially interested in that. Bayonetta 2 is a remarkably simple, remarkably easy game, largely just encouraging the player to participate in spectacle over everything else. Combos are flashy, there’s almost always some sort of fight between giant monsters happening in the background, enemies keep getting introduced one after the other, and Bayonetta herself is borderline invincible provided that you know how to press the dodge button within a week’s notice of the enemy indicating they’re going to hit you.

But as the game wears on, it starts to become very apparent why so many character action games lock a lot of the fun and style behind mastering complex systems. Bayonetta 2 isn’t just easy, but it’s so easy that it’s boring. I found the absolute most efficient strategy to just hit the punch-kick-punch wicked weave until I could get enough magic for Umbran Climax, and then just mash punch until it wore off. Rinse and repeat. There was nothing in the game that could counter this. Dodge offset makes this even more consistent. I was getting pure platinum medals every single encounter. It was stunningly easy and it was the most rewarding way to play the game; if the other options give me worse combo scores, worse times, or make me more likely to take a hit, why would I ever use them? Love is Blue breaks the game in half from the word go and requires almost zero execution ability to use all four guns optimally. This is a starting combo, too, so there's almost no reason to invest your halos in anything other than Witch Hearts and Moon Pearls.

The Gaze of Despair helps somewhat to mitigate the easiness, but I started running into a bit of a Goldilocks problem the longer the game went on. The Gaze of Despair essentially puts enemies into a permanent enrage state, making them significantly more dangerous. They attack faster, they have armor that prevents them from being juggled, and you only get a small fraction of the Witch Time you would normally get if you dodge them. However, giving them juggle protection means that some enemies like Sloth wind up being fucking ridiculous; there’s nothing stopping them from keeping up the pressure while evading yours, meaning that using Gaze of Despair against these especially agile enemies mostly just leaves you chipping away with single hits for several minutes. By contrast, 3rd Climax is such a dead simple difficulty that I mostly wound up sleepwalking through the entire thing. The hardest difficulty available on a first playthrough is way too easy, and equipping the Gaze of Despair makes it too hard. There’s nothing here that feels just right.

Bayonetta 2 mostly just comes across like Bayonetta, but worse. Bayonetta was still a really good game, mind, so there are far worse things to be than a worse version of Bayonetta. A lot of this is just a retread. Bayonetta goes to a far-off city and becomes the ward of another kid. Bayonetta has to do another incredibly lengthy shooter section before she gets to the final boss. Bayonetta goes back in time and spends a few chapters literally going through beat-for-beat copies of levels from the first game. There’s no individual element of Bayonetta 2 that I can really point to and confidently say “yeah, that was a lot better than it was in the last one”. The bosses really suck in this. You do a lot of repeat fights against the Lumen Sage, with him taking the role of the Jeanne battles, but his moveset isn’t up to par with even Jeanne 1’s. You can’t even see most of what he’s doing because the game keeps pulling focus to kaiju fights happening in the background. The final boss is an especially egregious anticlimax, nowhere even in the same realm as Jubileus. There are just so many woefully simple movesets possessed by enemies who die too quickly to make full use of the few options even available to them.

The long shadow of Bayonetta remains cast over Bayonetta 2, and there’s largely no reason to play the latter over the former unless you’re really dying to experience more Bayonetta. Even then, I’d suggest that you exhaust Non-Stop Infinite Climax and Jeanne Mode from the original before bothering to tackle this, and that alone is probably going to be more than enough to satisfy your Bayonetta urges.

This is right after the beginning of the PlatinumGames flop era, circa 2013 – present.