Didn't expect to finish B2 this weekend, but I did, so here are my thoughts. I wrote the Bayonetta 1 review after I finished it rather than after I finished both. I decided to try them because B2 got so many GOTY mentions here.
I ripped the gifs from yt playthroughs.
BAYONETTA [WiiU]
Bayonetta is an action game, a beat-em-up with combos, horrifying enemies, and gigantic demonic summons. It also has freeform racing segments, participatory cutscenes with QTEs, and every fight against a Cardinal Virtue (a boss so big it occupies its own "Chapter") plays out like its own unique mini-game that utilizes different skills from Bayonetta's repertoire. You can choose to make skillful, elegant combos, which the game allows you to practice on every loading screen, or you can be like me and mash the quick attack button fifty times until Bayonetta's fist becomes an ultra-fast torrent of punches, culminating in a high heel made of hair flying through a portal and stomping your enemies.
But to take a step back from the gameplay, Bayonetta is about a witch who awoke from her slumber under a pond and wandered in an amnesiac limbo for 20 years, then begins chasing her memories when she hears about mysterious gemstones called the Eyes of the World. The first modern-day scene in the game involves Bayonetta tricking a bunch of angels into descending from the heavens to retrieve a dead man, only to mercilessly slaughter them all. Bayonetta has a real beef with the angels for reasons that are not immediately clear, going so far as to provoke one of the Cardinal Virtues when it attempts to leave her be. Upon the Virtue's defeat however, all the angels finally have Bayonetta in their sights as well, and hustle her along to some unknown destiny in a strange sun-worshipping city called Vigrid.
Along the way, Bayonetta encounters a series of comedy sketches that pass as characters for the game. She receives lore about Vigrid, its angels, and its witches, through a series of notebooks left by an intrepid journalist. The story of the game is depicted through a series of cutscenes that oscillate between what-did-I-just-watch levels of awesome when fighting is depicted, and some tepid, incompletely animated talking scenes that utilize an out-of-place photo negative aesthetic. This latter variety of cutscene creates unpleasant hangs in the game's otherwise breakneck pacing. There are also a few abuses of gameplay instructional or scenery highlighting cutscenes that put the game on hold, but these only become truly irritating when you reach a section of the game that takes more than one try to beat. There's also a few incidences of cutscene-walk down a hallway-cutscene. All cutscenes can be skipped, but doing so requires pausing the game, going down in the menu to the "skip cutscene" option, and then pushing left to "yes" in a confirmation window. Guh.
"I forgot to mention one of the reasons I hunt your kind. You're much too ugly not to put out of your misery." All visual elements of characters are bent either toward fashion or terror, being sexy or being glorious. In her design, Bayonetta occupies all ends of these spectrums. Her enemies, the angels of Paradiso, are strict incarnations of both glory and terror, white-armored demigods with pulsing red insides. The demons Bayonetta summons from Inferno are a part of her, incarnated quite literally through her hair, but they are also a distinctly humbled and shadowy set of designs compared to the angels, appearing like scavengers at the end of the fight to rip their weakened prey to shreds. The demons assume forms we already associate with darkness and brutality: snakes, insects, hands reaching out of the abyss. The angels meanwhile take on some shapes that are impossible to decipher, wheels and faces, double-layered jaws and armor-plated machinery. Many of the angels take their names seriously: Kinship is a longboat with many oars and attacks all working together to shoot you out of the sky, Fearless is a lunging, clumsy beast with a heavily armored head, and Joy is...well, I will get to that later.
This one dude does remind me of a pokemon though
I focus on what these designs inspired in me because they are highly memorable and unique in the world of videogames. Bayonetta goes out of its way to animate implausible-looking bodies, and manages to make them all classy. Visually the environments of the game are nothing to write home about. Vigrid appears to be a rejected urban set from a Final Fantasy, the game's brief lava sections are unconvincing. But the strength in the environments is that they constantly change and move as you progress through them. Among Bayonetta's abilities is the Witch Walk, which allows her to traverse any surface the light of the moon is shining on. That means up walls, on ceilings, out of the rising fires of explosions, and along the surfaces of debris spinning through space. You know you have it made as far as setpieces go when you are fighting increasingly large baddies while riding a missile as it flies toward a shining golden city.
There are a wide variety of enemies in Bayonetta, and while not all of them can be defeated in the same way, your greatest ally is a well-timed press of the dodge button that activates a slowdown effect called Witch Time. Witch Time gives you the extra seconds you need to pull off a devastating combo without being interrupted by an enemy strike. When you build up enough hits without being struck yourself, you can activate a Torture Attack which renders Bayonetta invincible while you perform a QTE event to deal damage to an enemy in a canned cinematic. I played with the gamepad, which felt a bit awkward and heavy the whole time, but I got used to the controls in a general sense. Bayonetta for Wii U does allow you to use the touchpad to perform attacks if you wish, but I did not attempt it. I did use the gamepad's gyroscope for one racing section, which was really fun but hard to control. I stopped because my wrists were starting to ache and switched back to the traditional control stick and buttons.
Bayonetta Kart coming soon to WiiU
The gamepad insists on re-displaying everything that is on the TV, which is very distracting and could not be turned off. I feel this was responsible for some premature controller deaths that forced me to stop playing, one of which occurred during the spectacular final boss fight. You can play Bayonetta for Wii U with the other types of controllers, which would probably be more suitable. Other than the occasional achy finger, the combat felt solid and consistently fun to me. Have you ever felt in a game, when you see a repeat of an enemy type you already fought, "here we go again"? A sort of internal sigh before you blunder through the encounter to get to the next story tidbit or setpiece? I never felt this way in Bayonetta. I was happy even to see the most basic grunt-level angel again, and I enjoyed fighting through every kind of mob in different scenarios with different abilities.
The only exception to this was a certain pair of enemies that are repeats of earlier enemies who negate your ability to use Witch Time, and that's only because they were hard as shit without WT. You do run into enemies like this sometimes, and they provide the occasional "breakthrough" moment, that run where you finally get it all right and you go from flopping around your foe like a fish out of water to expertly taking out their health bar with your fastest and strongest combos, and no small amount of surgical precision in your reactions to their attacks. It's not often a game makes me go "YEAH!" at my tv screen in my empty house or sort of grunt while clenching my fists in victory, and Bayonetta managed it multiple times. The game wisely provides you a little tally screen after each battle that allows you to safely get all self-congratulations out of the way.
Accordingly, Bayonetta rewards you for style: not getting hit, pulling off as many hits as possible, and doing damage as fast as possible (that means executing the right combo at the right time). But fear not: if you are just a hapless button-masher with the reaction time of sloth, many combos can be executed just by jamming your fingers into buttons and eventually you will come up with certain orders of button-jamming that feel instinctively good to you. My suggestion is that when practicing on loading screens, take note of where your combo finishers land. If you know a combo that finishes with a high heel flying out of the ground into the sky, you know it can be useful against an airborne enemy. Bayonetta felt really good, a lot more fun than many games I have played lately, even though I was not the most skilled at it.
What it feels like to play Bayonetta
I had a few issues with the camera. The game has a "lock on", but it is soft in nature and seems to release as soon as you let off the button. This means that if you are fighting a pack of similar enemies, you may have trouble sticking to just one. Watch for visual indicators of the most-damaged enemies, like sundered armor or guts hanging out. My other issue occurred most often in a recurring boss fight with a rival witch, where the camera would jump around and the fight would be obscured until I manually rotated it back to place. One more problem came when I used the Skip Cutscenes feature, which is already laborious. If you skip a cutscene and it ends with an enemy battle (most of them do), most of the enemies will probably be launching their attacks before the game pops back up on your screen. This means you need to start tapping the dodge button before you can see anything, and hope you're going in the right direction.
Bayonetta's gameplay is constantly evolving around its centerpiece of fast, combo-based fights. It still felt fresh after binging on it for a weekend, culminating in a couple of final boss fights that are suitably climactic. It is a game I definitely recommend, even if you are not a fighting game or "button masher" fan. I'm not!
It all started as an innocent doppleganger dance-off
I feel a separate review could be written on the "appropriateness" of Bayonetta, and the effects of its titular character's sexualization, but I am going to try and keep it short since I may have more to say about it after playing Bayonetta 2. First I will point out what I did not really see any problems with: Bayonetta's dance moves, Bayonetta's clothing melting away except for a few carefully placed coils of hair when she Climaxes (the game's name for it) out a demon from the Inferno, Bayonetta's appearance in general. The first two points I don't see as being terribly different from a concert or some other bombastic performance art. As for Bayonetta's design, she is an exaggeration of the female figure but she is certainly not in line with the standard direction of such exaggerations. I don't really find a long neck and stick arms to be that sexy, I more thought she looks cool the way a cheetah can look cool.
Then it got weird
But my perspective alone is not enough to dismiss a character as non-sexualized. Bayonetta is clearly someone's fetish. There are many exploitative camera angles. Bayonetta sucks on lollipops, groans and purrs. I feel the creators constructed Bayonetta's aesthetic and powers around a specific sexual fantasy- leather, BDSM, fashion and butterflies become exclusively female powers in this game. In general Bayonetta's Torture Attacks are based off medieval tortures, but there is also a case where the QTE determines how many times Bayonetta hits an angel's ass before lopping its head off with a guillotine, and the unique animation for a TA on a Joy angel, the only obviously feminized enemy, involves Bayonetta choking the angel with a chain while grinding its crotch into a spiked Spanish donkey. The angel's breasts bounce around during this animation.
Who would want to impede on this artistic vision
The absurdity of these encounters is such that I feel unqualified to say whether they were justified portraying Bayonetta this way. Bayonetta is also in-control the whole game. I don't mean this in a BDSM domineering way, but in that she is genuinely powerful and always a couple steps ahead of everyone else. This is great, but offset by the fact that the first man you meet is bumbling and stupid, and Bayonetta's most persistent male companion is also some sort of hapless stand-in for the supposed player (he wants Bayonetta bad). Luckily the game also has Rodin, a male demon, who is implied to be very strong and is also hilarious and no-nonsense. Like Bayonetta, he is not really an Earthly creature, so he is accorded a similar elegance compared to the two human men Bayonetta meets. This grace also exists in one of the last bosses, who is male and as much of a fashionista as Bayonetta herself- he wears an entire stuffed white peacock around his shoulders after all.
Would the game lose any of its charm if you cut out the bouncing angel breasts and Bayonetta flying across the room to land her crotch in an angel's face? Would it get more flak if the gameplay wasn't so fun? To me personally it did not feel so wrong that I did not enjoy the game. Bayonetta is about shedding real-life problems (no witch is ever going to worry about what she looks like, when her period is going to start, if she is going to get pregnant, if she is going to get paid less for the same work) and becoming a rock star. Part of a rock star is their sexiness, and part of it is their power. I thought it would be really cool to be Bayonetta. How would playing the game affect the perceptions of men about real-life women, or women's perceptions of themselves? I dunno boss, at the moment I just have to shrug and say it was a hedonistic pleasure. And I accidentally wrote four paragraphs about it, whoops.
COMPLETION:
This was my first playthrough. I completed Bayonetta 1 in 22 hours on Normal. I got Stone Awards for all but 3 levels (Prologue, Prudence boss fight, and Sage boss fight), translation: I wasn't very good at the game and died a lot. I completed only 1 Alfheim challenge. I began with Bayonetta's standard weapons, moved on to the samurai sword, and towards the end of the game used the claw weapons quite a bit. For a while I did not realize I had to equip weapons to use them, and I blew a bunch of halos on an extra copy of weapons because I thought I had to buy that to use them- I had a lot of issues with weapons ok. Towards the end of the game I put all my money toward what I knew would be winning choices: HP+ and magic+ items. I also tried all the Nintendo cosplay costumes once (Peach, Daisy, Samus, and Link). I did not use any accessories or lollipops, I bought a claw weapon costume fragrance from Rodin but I didn't figure out how to make it turn on. I have not played Devil May Cry and I have not read/watched any media for Bayonetta prior to playing, aside from GAF headlines about it.
BAYONETTA 2 [WiiU]
If you play this game, it will be in your Top 5 for the year barring some extreme allergy to action games.
Bayonetta 2 follows the same formula (down to some identical sequences) as B1, but improves on the mechanics of its predecessor all in the name of increasing how fun it is to play. I found combos much easier to pull off, Bayonetta in general moves and responds faster, I got a vast increase in the number of silver and gold awards I received compared to B1, and I did not die nearly as much. Gone are the QTEs to avoid instadeath during cutscenes, and all gigaton meters have a delay on them that let you reach max bonus with less controller strumming. All the camera issues from B1 also seemed resolved to me- no more losing sight of Bayonetta during a boss fight. Temporary enemy weapons are now assigned to their own button rather than taking over your entire moveset, so you don't have to change your playstyle each time you pick one up. B2's magic-based attacks (Torture Attacks and Umbran Climaxes) are much easier to pull off because getting hit no longer takes most of your magic bar away. The "challenge area" successor is much easier than in the previous game as well, and I completed every one I could find. Basically, B2 is not as interested in punishing you for being a bad player compared to B1. You tend to feel awesome, stylish, and powerful the whole time no matter how much of a button-mashing dork you are. This allows you to set your own goals for growth in your B2 skills, or just cruise through the game watching things explode. The downside is I never had a "YEAH!" moment in B2 like I have in B1 multiple times, but I think I'll live.
You still can't turn off the gamepad display, 0/10 for Bayonetta 2
I can already tell this review is going to be short because of how similar the two games are. B2 lifts a few environments directly from its predecessor, such as Vigrid and Alfheim (now with blue filter), but it also offers some lusciously rendered new zones including a demon's pearlescent stomach and the writhing red core of Inferno. Let me just stop here and say again how cool it is to go to hell in this game: everything is alive there, even the ground, and it is an extremely unsettling place. Perhaps the only downside is the boss, which is an uninspired humanoid thing that becomes Quelaag from Dark Souls in her second phase. Eh. Overall the game has a bright, robust color palette compared to its predecessor, which is a good thing when you are trying to be as fabulous as possible.
It's true I don't remember surfing on a water tornado in the first game
Bayonetta 2 introduces another catalog of enemies, the demons, who show up less often than angels and are in my opinion somewhat less spectacular. Angels defy our cultural conventions of what they should look like to increased effect in B2: cut away that cherubim's faceplate and you're apt to see a handful of green eyes and worming tentacles peeking out at you, rendered in loving detail. Demons just look strange- "alien" I think is what comes to mind for me. A lot of them appear thin and weak, their bodies have bright, jewel-like armor and there's a strong insect motif among the lot of them. It may just be that you are expecting demons to look horrid, so they are less impressive than the beauty/terror complex that the angel designs have. They still look fantastic. My favorite is Resentment, a giant snake monster with an infernal portal for a face.
This isn't Resentment it just looks cool
B2 removes the film negative frames, but not the semi-static cutscenes they showcased in B1. Now these scenes are portrayed through a prettier and much more visible witch clock, but I was still left a little annoyed when a dramatic escape of Bayonetta and her ally that involved jumping out and landing on a jet was portrayed with statics. I can only assume this is some limitation in the game's budget/dev time and not a stylistic choice. The cutscenes that are full-motion are carefully shot. Just in case you forgot what game you were playing, the opening scene begins with Bayonetta's crotch and revolves around her and another witch's body in slow-motion. A minute later, Bayonetta is riding on an angelic centaur and slapping its ass, while the effect of her bouncing on its back is done in slow-mo again, with little "boing-boing" sounds on each cheeky impact. I felt that overall B2 was slightly less interested in a pornographic take on its main character and more about fashion and power, though maybe I missed the questionable Torture Attack for this game. That said, Bayonetta does sometimes exclaim "naughty boy!" when you get the highest grade for a section, which is partly presupposing the player is male and partly being unapologetically sexual. There is also a lot of femdom type literal ass-kicking. Bayonetta 2 is a sexual game by men, for men. That is definitely problematic, but it is still a good game if you are willing to embrace its internal context.
Bayonetta 2 outfit > Bayonetta 1 outfit btw
Bayonetta's side character Luka remains a horrifying fashion disaster not even an angel could love. B2 is pretty interested in giving you actual sidekicks of varying usefulness, and the first one it introduces is the worst. Loki is an ugly design and his edgy swearing kid act wears off real quick. Mate mate love mate love mate mate love. Speak all terms of endearment with cynicism. Throw in a "fuck". That's Loki. Loki is tied to the rather silly/unessential main story that came to an abrupt end. I finished B2 in a scant 14 hours compared to B1's 22, but I think with the new "soft touch" mechanics that's mostly an effect of how much easier B2 was, combined with me knowing how to equip weapons several chapters earlier. It certainly helps that a few of the final chapters have repeats of enemies from B1 that I still remember the patterns for.
Too bad for you I haven't sprained my wrist yet this session
Witch Time is still readily abusable through the whole game. My thrills now come not from finishing a fight but from finishing with a good score on the round-up screen, or from flawlessly executing sweet-looking combos. Really there is nothing new under heaven with Bayonetta 2, and it's strongest in the middle rather than at the ends. Aside from YMMV Loki, though, all complaints about the game are minor next to its accomplishment of being fun from start to finish, as well as completely beautiful for the whole ride.
Cya in paradise
COMPLETION:
This was my first playthrough. I completed Bayonetta 2 in 14 hours on Normal. I got numerous Gold and Silver awards for chapters, a few Stones, no Platinums. I completed every Musphelheim challenge I found. I began with Bayonetta's standard weapons, moved on to curved swords, and towards the end of the game used curved swords on hands and whip on feet. I used the mega green herb lollipops a few times but ignored the rest, and I couldn't figure out how to craft them so I had a lot of craft supplies just sitting there the whole time. I spent the majority of my halos on witch hearts, then I got some techniques and costume fragrances (that I still couldn't figure out how to use). I also got one makeup box with a Chun Li looking costume inside. I did not try the Tag Climax co-op mode. As previously mentioned on my Bayonetta review, I have not played Devil May Cry and I have not read/watched any media for the game prior to playing, aside from GAF headlines about it.
I ripped the gifs from yt playthroughs.
BAYONETTA [WiiU]
Bayonetta is an action game, a beat-em-up with combos, horrifying enemies, and gigantic demonic summons. It also has freeform racing segments, participatory cutscenes with QTEs, and every fight against a Cardinal Virtue (a boss so big it occupies its own "Chapter") plays out like its own unique mini-game that utilizes different skills from Bayonetta's repertoire. You can choose to make skillful, elegant combos, which the game allows you to practice on every loading screen, or you can be like me and mash the quick attack button fifty times until Bayonetta's fist becomes an ultra-fast torrent of punches, culminating in a high heel made of hair flying through a portal and stomping your enemies.
But to take a step back from the gameplay, Bayonetta is about a witch who awoke from her slumber under a pond and wandered in an amnesiac limbo for 20 years, then begins chasing her memories when she hears about mysterious gemstones called the Eyes of the World. The first modern-day scene in the game involves Bayonetta tricking a bunch of angels into descending from the heavens to retrieve a dead man, only to mercilessly slaughter them all. Bayonetta has a real beef with the angels for reasons that are not immediately clear, going so far as to provoke one of the Cardinal Virtues when it attempts to leave her be. Upon the Virtue's defeat however, all the angels finally have Bayonetta in their sights as well, and hustle her along to some unknown destiny in a strange sun-worshipping city called Vigrid.
Along the way, Bayonetta encounters a series of comedy sketches that pass as characters for the game. She receives lore about Vigrid, its angels, and its witches, through a series of notebooks left by an intrepid journalist. The story of the game is depicted through a series of cutscenes that oscillate between what-did-I-just-watch levels of awesome when fighting is depicted, and some tepid, incompletely animated talking scenes that utilize an out-of-place photo negative aesthetic. This latter variety of cutscene creates unpleasant hangs in the game's otherwise breakneck pacing. There are also a few abuses of gameplay instructional or scenery highlighting cutscenes that put the game on hold, but these only become truly irritating when you reach a section of the game that takes more than one try to beat. There's also a few incidences of cutscene-walk down a hallway-cutscene. All cutscenes can be skipped, but doing so requires pausing the game, going down in the menu to the "skip cutscene" option, and then pushing left to "yes" in a confirmation window. Guh.
"I forgot to mention one of the reasons I hunt your kind. You're much too ugly not to put out of your misery." All visual elements of characters are bent either toward fashion or terror, being sexy or being glorious. In her design, Bayonetta occupies all ends of these spectrums. Her enemies, the angels of Paradiso, are strict incarnations of both glory and terror, white-armored demigods with pulsing red insides. The demons Bayonetta summons from Inferno are a part of her, incarnated quite literally through her hair, but they are also a distinctly humbled and shadowy set of designs compared to the angels, appearing like scavengers at the end of the fight to rip their weakened prey to shreds. The demons assume forms we already associate with darkness and brutality: snakes, insects, hands reaching out of the abyss. The angels meanwhile take on some shapes that are impossible to decipher, wheels and faces, double-layered jaws and armor-plated machinery. Many of the angels take their names seriously: Kinship is a longboat with many oars and attacks all working together to shoot you out of the sky, Fearless is a lunging, clumsy beast with a heavily armored head, and Joy is...well, I will get to that later.
This one dude does remind me of a pokemon though
I focus on what these designs inspired in me because they are highly memorable and unique in the world of videogames. Bayonetta goes out of its way to animate implausible-looking bodies, and manages to make them all classy. Visually the environments of the game are nothing to write home about. Vigrid appears to be a rejected urban set from a Final Fantasy, the game's brief lava sections are unconvincing. But the strength in the environments is that they constantly change and move as you progress through them. Among Bayonetta's abilities is the Witch Walk, which allows her to traverse any surface the light of the moon is shining on. That means up walls, on ceilings, out of the rising fires of explosions, and along the surfaces of debris spinning through space. You know you have it made as far as setpieces go when you are fighting increasingly large baddies while riding a missile as it flies toward a shining golden city.
There are a wide variety of enemies in Bayonetta, and while not all of them can be defeated in the same way, your greatest ally is a well-timed press of the dodge button that activates a slowdown effect called Witch Time. Witch Time gives you the extra seconds you need to pull off a devastating combo without being interrupted by an enemy strike. When you build up enough hits without being struck yourself, you can activate a Torture Attack which renders Bayonetta invincible while you perform a QTE event to deal damage to an enemy in a canned cinematic. I played with the gamepad, which felt a bit awkward and heavy the whole time, but I got used to the controls in a general sense. Bayonetta for Wii U does allow you to use the touchpad to perform attacks if you wish, but I did not attempt it. I did use the gamepad's gyroscope for one racing section, which was really fun but hard to control. I stopped because my wrists were starting to ache and switched back to the traditional control stick and buttons.
Bayonetta Kart coming soon to WiiU
The gamepad insists on re-displaying everything that is on the TV, which is very distracting and could not be turned off. I feel this was responsible for some premature controller deaths that forced me to stop playing, one of which occurred during the spectacular final boss fight. You can play Bayonetta for Wii U with the other types of controllers, which would probably be more suitable. Other than the occasional achy finger, the combat felt solid and consistently fun to me. Have you ever felt in a game, when you see a repeat of an enemy type you already fought, "here we go again"? A sort of internal sigh before you blunder through the encounter to get to the next story tidbit or setpiece? I never felt this way in Bayonetta. I was happy even to see the most basic grunt-level angel again, and I enjoyed fighting through every kind of mob in different scenarios with different abilities.
The only exception to this was a certain pair of enemies that are repeats of earlier enemies who negate your ability to use Witch Time, and that's only because they were hard as shit without WT. You do run into enemies like this sometimes, and they provide the occasional "breakthrough" moment, that run where you finally get it all right and you go from flopping around your foe like a fish out of water to expertly taking out their health bar with your fastest and strongest combos, and no small amount of surgical precision in your reactions to their attacks. It's not often a game makes me go "YEAH!" at my tv screen in my empty house or sort of grunt while clenching my fists in victory, and Bayonetta managed it multiple times. The game wisely provides you a little tally screen after each battle that allows you to safely get all self-congratulations out of the way.
Accordingly, Bayonetta rewards you for style: not getting hit, pulling off as many hits as possible, and doing damage as fast as possible (that means executing the right combo at the right time). But fear not: if you are just a hapless button-masher with the reaction time of sloth, many combos can be executed just by jamming your fingers into buttons and eventually you will come up with certain orders of button-jamming that feel instinctively good to you. My suggestion is that when practicing on loading screens, take note of where your combo finishers land. If you know a combo that finishes with a high heel flying out of the ground into the sky, you know it can be useful against an airborne enemy. Bayonetta felt really good, a lot more fun than many games I have played lately, even though I was not the most skilled at it.
What it feels like to play Bayonetta
I had a few issues with the camera. The game has a "lock on", but it is soft in nature and seems to release as soon as you let off the button. This means that if you are fighting a pack of similar enemies, you may have trouble sticking to just one. Watch for visual indicators of the most-damaged enemies, like sundered armor or guts hanging out. My other issue occurred most often in a recurring boss fight with a rival witch, where the camera would jump around and the fight would be obscured until I manually rotated it back to place. One more problem came when I used the Skip Cutscenes feature, which is already laborious. If you skip a cutscene and it ends with an enemy battle (most of them do), most of the enemies will probably be launching their attacks before the game pops back up on your screen. This means you need to start tapping the dodge button before you can see anything, and hope you're going in the right direction.
Bayonetta's gameplay is constantly evolving around its centerpiece of fast, combo-based fights. It still felt fresh after binging on it for a weekend, culminating in a couple of final boss fights that are suitably climactic. It is a game I definitely recommend, even if you are not a fighting game or "button masher" fan. I'm not!
It all started as an innocent doppleganger dance-off
I feel a separate review could be written on the "appropriateness" of Bayonetta, and the effects of its titular character's sexualization, but I am going to try and keep it short since I may have more to say about it after playing Bayonetta 2. First I will point out what I did not really see any problems with: Bayonetta's dance moves, Bayonetta's clothing melting away except for a few carefully placed coils of hair when she Climaxes (the game's name for it) out a demon from the Inferno, Bayonetta's appearance in general. The first two points I don't see as being terribly different from a concert or some other bombastic performance art. As for Bayonetta's design, she is an exaggeration of the female figure but she is certainly not in line with the standard direction of such exaggerations. I don't really find a long neck and stick arms to be that sexy, I more thought she looks cool the way a cheetah can look cool.
Then it got weird
But my perspective alone is not enough to dismiss a character as non-sexualized. Bayonetta is clearly someone's fetish. There are many exploitative camera angles. Bayonetta sucks on lollipops, groans and purrs. I feel the creators constructed Bayonetta's aesthetic and powers around a specific sexual fantasy- leather, BDSM, fashion and butterflies become exclusively female powers in this game. In general Bayonetta's Torture Attacks are based off medieval tortures, but there is also a case where the QTE determines how many times Bayonetta hits an angel's ass before lopping its head off with a guillotine, and the unique animation for a TA on a Joy angel, the only obviously feminized enemy, involves Bayonetta choking the angel with a chain while grinding its crotch into a spiked Spanish donkey. The angel's breasts bounce around during this animation.
Who would want to impede on this artistic vision
The absurdity of these encounters is such that I feel unqualified to say whether they were justified portraying Bayonetta this way. Bayonetta is also in-control the whole game. I don't mean this in a BDSM domineering way, but in that she is genuinely powerful and always a couple steps ahead of everyone else. This is great, but offset by the fact that the first man you meet is bumbling and stupid, and Bayonetta's most persistent male companion is also some sort of hapless stand-in for the supposed player (he wants Bayonetta bad). Luckily the game also has Rodin, a male demon, who is implied to be very strong and is also hilarious and no-nonsense. Like Bayonetta, he is not really an Earthly creature, so he is accorded a similar elegance compared to the two human men Bayonetta meets. This grace also exists in one of the last bosses, who is male and as much of a fashionista as Bayonetta herself- he wears an entire stuffed white peacock around his shoulders after all.
Would the game lose any of its charm if you cut out the bouncing angel breasts and Bayonetta flying across the room to land her crotch in an angel's face? Would it get more flak if the gameplay wasn't so fun? To me personally it did not feel so wrong that I did not enjoy the game. Bayonetta is about shedding real-life problems (no witch is ever going to worry about what she looks like, when her period is going to start, if she is going to get pregnant, if she is going to get paid less for the same work) and becoming a rock star. Part of a rock star is their sexiness, and part of it is their power. I thought it would be really cool to be Bayonetta. How would playing the game affect the perceptions of men about real-life women, or women's perceptions of themselves? I dunno boss, at the moment I just have to shrug and say it was a hedonistic pleasure. And I accidentally wrote four paragraphs about it, whoops.
COMPLETION:
This was my first playthrough. I completed Bayonetta 1 in 22 hours on Normal. I got Stone Awards for all but 3 levels (Prologue, Prudence boss fight, and Sage boss fight), translation: I wasn't very good at the game and died a lot. I completed only 1 Alfheim challenge. I began with Bayonetta's standard weapons, moved on to the samurai sword, and towards the end of the game used the claw weapons quite a bit. For a while I did not realize I had to equip weapons to use them, and I blew a bunch of halos on an extra copy of weapons because I thought I had to buy that to use them- I had a lot of issues with weapons ok. Towards the end of the game I put all my money toward what I knew would be winning choices: HP+ and magic+ items. I also tried all the Nintendo cosplay costumes once (Peach, Daisy, Samus, and Link). I did not use any accessories or lollipops, I bought a claw weapon costume fragrance from Rodin but I didn't figure out how to make it turn on. I have not played Devil May Cry and I have not read/watched any media for Bayonetta prior to playing, aside from GAF headlines about it.
BAYONETTA 2 [WiiU]
If you play this game, it will be in your Top 5 for the year barring some extreme allergy to action games.
Bayonetta 2 follows the same formula (down to some identical sequences) as B1, but improves on the mechanics of its predecessor all in the name of increasing how fun it is to play. I found combos much easier to pull off, Bayonetta in general moves and responds faster, I got a vast increase in the number of silver and gold awards I received compared to B1, and I did not die nearly as much. Gone are the QTEs to avoid instadeath during cutscenes, and all gigaton meters have a delay on them that let you reach max bonus with less controller strumming. All the camera issues from B1 also seemed resolved to me- no more losing sight of Bayonetta during a boss fight. Temporary enemy weapons are now assigned to their own button rather than taking over your entire moveset, so you don't have to change your playstyle each time you pick one up. B2's magic-based attacks (Torture Attacks and Umbran Climaxes) are much easier to pull off because getting hit no longer takes most of your magic bar away. The "challenge area" successor is much easier than in the previous game as well, and I completed every one I could find. Basically, B2 is not as interested in punishing you for being a bad player compared to B1. You tend to feel awesome, stylish, and powerful the whole time no matter how much of a button-mashing dork you are. This allows you to set your own goals for growth in your B2 skills, or just cruise through the game watching things explode. The downside is I never had a "YEAH!" moment in B2 like I have in B1 multiple times, but I think I'll live.
You still can't turn off the gamepad display, 0/10 for Bayonetta 2
I can already tell this review is going to be short because of how similar the two games are. B2 lifts a few environments directly from its predecessor, such as Vigrid and Alfheim (now with blue filter), but it also offers some lusciously rendered new zones including a demon's pearlescent stomach and the writhing red core of Inferno. Let me just stop here and say again how cool it is to go to hell in this game: everything is alive there, even the ground, and it is an extremely unsettling place. Perhaps the only downside is the boss, which is an uninspired humanoid thing that becomes Quelaag from Dark Souls in her second phase. Eh. Overall the game has a bright, robust color palette compared to its predecessor, which is a good thing when you are trying to be as fabulous as possible.
It's true I don't remember surfing on a water tornado in the first game
Bayonetta 2 introduces another catalog of enemies, the demons, who show up less often than angels and are in my opinion somewhat less spectacular. Angels defy our cultural conventions of what they should look like to increased effect in B2: cut away that cherubim's faceplate and you're apt to see a handful of green eyes and worming tentacles peeking out at you, rendered in loving detail. Demons just look strange- "alien" I think is what comes to mind for me. A lot of them appear thin and weak, their bodies have bright, jewel-like armor and there's a strong insect motif among the lot of them. It may just be that you are expecting demons to look horrid, so they are less impressive than the beauty/terror complex that the angel designs have. They still look fantastic. My favorite is Resentment, a giant snake monster with an infernal portal for a face.
This isn't Resentment it just looks cool
B2 removes the film negative frames, but not the semi-static cutscenes they showcased in B1. Now these scenes are portrayed through a prettier and much more visible witch clock, but I was still left a little annoyed when a dramatic escape of Bayonetta and her ally that involved jumping out and landing on a jet was portrayed with statics. I can only assume this is some limitation in the game's budget/dev time and not a stylistic choice. The cutscenes that are full-motion are carefully shot. Just in case you forgot what game you were playing, the opening scene begins with Bayonetta's crotch and revolves around her and another witch's body in slow-motion. A minute later, Bayonetta is riding on an angelic centaur and slapping its ass, while the effect of her bouncing on its back is done in slow-mo again, with little "boing-boing" sounds on each cheeky impact. I felt that overall B2 was slightly less interested in a pornographic take on its main character and more about fashion and power, though maybe I missed the questionable Torture Attack for this game. That said, Bayonetta does sometimes exclaim "naughty boy!" when you get the highest grade for a section, which is partly presupposing the player is male and partly being unapologetically sexual. There is also a lot of femdom type literal ass-kicking. Bayonetta 2 is a sexual game by men, for men. That is definitely problematic, but it is still a good game if you are willing to embrace its internal context.
Bayonetta 2 outfit > Bayonetta 1 outfit btw
Bayonetta's side character Luka remains a horrifying fashion disaster not even an angel could love. B2 is pretty interested in giving you actual sidekicks of varying usefulness, and the first one it introduces is the worst. Loki is an ugly design and his edgy swearing kid act wears off real quick. Mate mate love mate love mate mate love. Speak all terms of endearment with cynicism. Throw in a "fuck". That's Loki. Loki is tied to the rather silly/unessential main story that came to an abrupt end. I finished B2 in a scant 14 hours compared to B1's 22, but I think with the new "soft touch" mechanics that's mostly an effect of how much easier B2 was, combined with me knowing how to equip weapons several chapters earlier. It certainly helps that a few of the final chapters have repeats of enemies from B1 that I still remember the patterns for.
Too bad for you I haven't sprained my wrist yet this session
Witch Time is still readily abusable through the whole game. My thrills now come not from finishing a fight but from finishing with a good score on the round-up screen, or from flawlessly executing sweet-looking combos. Really there is nothing new under heaven with Bayonetta 2, and it's strongest in the middle rather than at the ends. Aside from YMMV Loki, though, all complaints about the game are minor next to its accomplishment of being fun from start to finish, as well as completely beautiful for the whole ride.
Cya in paradise
COMPLETION:
This was my first playthrough. I completed Bayonetta 2 in 14 hours on Normal. I got numerous Gold and Silver awards for chapters, a few Stones, no Platinums. I completed every Musphelheim challenge I found. I began with Bayonetta's standard weapons, moved on to curved swords, and towards the end of the game used curved swords on hands and whip on feet. I used the mega green herb lollipops a few times but ignored the rest, and I couldn't figure out how to craft them so I had a lot of craft supplies just sitting there the whole time. I spent the majority of my halos on witch hearts, then I got some techniques and costume fragrances (that I still couldn't figure out how to use). I also got one makeup box with a Chun Li looking costume inside. I did not try the Tag Climax co-op mode. As previously mentioned on my Bayonetta review, I have not played Devil May Cry and I have not read/watched any media for the game prior to playing, aside from GAF headlines about it.
