The surface charm of Bayonetta, a hypersexualized spectacle, belies a sadistic seduction, the pinnacle of character action gameplay gate-kept by the genre's tradition of ball-busting difficulty. Taking after it's spindly namesake, the game by nature is a sort of dominatrix, stomping you down into the dirt and cracking the whip at your attempts to fight back. It's brutal, frustrating, agonizing to watch as your nerves fray and senses dull, with each encounter providing a fresh boot to the teeth. Broken, battered and bruised, you look for solace, only to be greeted with a stone-cold consolation prize for your struggles. Against the crushing odds, each step becomes heavier, each mistimed strike putting you at the whims of Heaven and Hell alike. Hours pass, anger boils over, resentment turns to fascination… and the highlight of any character action game, the most brilliant of afterglows, shines clearly – the flow state: the melding of mind and body, attuned to the same frequency for a singular purpose. Free from your submission to unceasing cruelty, you take the reigns as a domineering hellion, a unholy agent of divine retribution against the legions of Heaven's army.

Unshackled from preconceived notions, Bayonetta's essence breaths uninterrupted. PlatinumGames's masterwork is informed by the inescapable interplay of sex and violence; the first glance at Bayonetta herself can tell you that. But despite the game's seemingly adolescent pandering, there burns a heart of rebellion within the work, a feminist bend buried under the suffocating weight of the social gaming sphere circa 2009. The duality of Bayonetta, as sex-positive icon of empowerment versus gross exploitation of sexuality, is ingrained into every aspect of her.

This is to say that, despite the obvious trashiness inherent to the game, the blatant fanservice and standard anime bullshit lacing the game, it's hard not to see a extreme version of myself I'd want to see: a hyper-femme confidence elemental, a perfect beauty that defines human limitation, a plain-and-simple unstoppable bad-ass. Dare I say, with every tasteless shot and embarrassing line in consideration, that Bayonetta is, in fact, transition goals?

In a way, Bayonetta represents an "ideal", a splinter of me shattered and scattered across a million separate works. But with this knowledge in mind, it's difficult not to feel slightly conflicted: after all, the character exists as an amalgamation of Hideki Kamiya's fetishes and fantasies, a woman that literally lives to please a man. For all my desires to view her as some new-age feminist idol, she is a personification of the objectification of women in gaming. I suppose it's only fair to invision her divorced from her initial context, a messy reimagining to fit her into an even messier personal image. Consider it me embracing another odd inspiration into an increasingly messy queer narrative.

The scandalous spirit of Bayonetta is, at the same time, its most beautiful and most reprehensible quality. Without it, it would stand as a husk, mechanically interesting, but without a soul to prop it up. In equal senses, it's the exact reason I recommend and shy away from suggesting the game; it represents a part of me, while also being an element I'm somewhat ashamed to admit to. Needless to say… this game feels essential. Whether it clicks with you on an individual level or not, you owe it to yourself to try it.

Bayonetta 2 was made for people who only did one playthrough of Bayonetta. At launch critics and fans praised the game for fixing a lot of the glaring faults of the original. It's more vibrant in colors, removed all resemblance of insta-kill QTEs and terrible After Burner levels, and made cool new additions such as the introduction of Demons and Umbran Climax. However, over time the game's reputation devolved, and if you ask any Platnium Games fan about the game, they'll tell you it's a weaker entry than the original. I share that same sentiment.

You see, the main problem with Bayonetta 2 is that it revolves too much around Witch Time. Now I know what you might be saying, wasn't Witch Time the central mechanic of Bayonetta and so naturally they would want to keep focusing that clear central mechanic? That was never the case.

Witch Time was made as a crutch for newer players to get used to the game on its lower difficulties, but even then there were enemies that spawned that outright ignore Witch Time. On my first playthrough, I thought that was a bug or something, but no, it was intentional. The highest difficulty of Bayonetta 1 you unlock after beating hard mode, Infinite Climax, outright removes Witch Time altogether. That seems insane for anyone who played the original once, some encounters seemed like they're impossible without the mechanic. But no, Witch Time wasn't made for these encounters, it was Dodge Offset.

Dodge Offset was the secret mechanic to the first game that allows for these Witch Time-less encounters to work. It allows Bayonetta to continue combos while dodging. The problem however lies in that while there's a visual queue for a successful dodge offset, that game never explicitly told the player how to do it, and it's the most crucial mechanic to learn how to master the game's combat. I admittedly pissed farted and shitted my way through the first game without ever knowing it was even in the game until years later.

I feel the team behind Bayonetta 2 without Hideki Kamiya's influence thought because the first game never told the player how important Dodge Offset was only a supplemental gameplay mechanic and felt the need to include it in the game without asking the player to master it. It's most likely why Infinite Climax in this game actually has Witch Time activated, as it's this game's main mechanic now.

Well okay, fine, you want to make the game easier for new players and make learning technical stuff an optional thing. That wouldn't be an issue, but for some reason, Witch Time is notably nerfed in this game too. I guess they didn't want players to gain too much reward from it during encounters, but that requires Bayonetta to do any real damage in this game.

The second issue with this game is that Bayonetta doesn't do any damn damage in this game. I already thought the health pools of bosses in the original were obnoxious, but it's taken to ludicrous degrees here now that Bayonetta feels she hits people with a wet towel, and the new weapons don't give any improvements to her damage output. Why? Oh yeah, so Platnium can shoehorn Umbran Climax to your face. It's fine if you wanted to give the player a Devil Trigger-like mechanic, but it shouldn't be the end all be all for dealing substantial damage. It also doesn't help that enemies can break out of combos easier now, which makes getting that damage naturally even harder. It devolves all of the encounters to just waiting for a Witch Time opportunity to do pixel-health damage and to build Umbran Climax meter then releasing it so you can actually nuke their health bars until either the encounter stops or the boss goes away.

I also gotta say, what was the point of adding in slow-moving walking sessions or the Snake Within or Crow Within abilities that amounts to "helping you move by flying or swimming". These don't add anything to an action game, these are blatant padding techniques to bloat out an already shorter game than the original.

So, while Bayonetta 2 does indeed remove a lot of things that plagued the original release, it adds in a bunch of useless features that not only make no sense but completely unbalances what made the original the more compelling and interesting to master game.

The thing is I never actually noticed these things on my initial playthrough. Like most people, I thought it was an upgrade to the original because it was prettier and didn't have those terrible QTEs, but what I didn't realize that the monkey paw twisted one of its fingers when I asked for these changes when playing the original. I only did one playthrough of each game and when you only have little understanding of those mechanics you will naturally feel Bayonetta 2 is the better game. But it was until revisiting those games with a better grasp of both these games mechanics and action games as a whole is how I figured out that this game was a lot of smoke and mirrors. It's pretty and flashy, but that can only give you so much to work with.