Recently went back to Bayonetta 3 and finished it. God it just sucks.
When I was younger and still had an aspiration to be a game designer I used to deliberately play bad/frustrating games to see what goes wrong with the medium. I stopped because there’s only so much you can take of deliberately doing this, but this game brought me right back.
I was mainly curious to see how it connects to Bayonetta Origins as I had heard the prequel (which I enjoyed a lot) helps explain a plot thread in 3. It doesn’t really. It has some alt-universe versions of some characters which makes things more confusing, transmedially lightweight.
The main cast, including Bayonetta herself, are all killed off to make way for the new character being the franchise lead. I actually don’t mind this. Go nuts, do a reboot, Bayonetta, she had a good run. There’s just no stakes to any of it. The entire multiverse is supposedly threatened but the game only really centres around a tiny cast which paradoxically makes the game feel small scale. The characters have so many alternate universe variations of themselves that they feel oddly disposable. Enemies have very little charisma or distinctiveness and their colour palette gets applied to everything as this muddy cyan glow that washes everything out.
By the game’s end (and after the sixth ‘you’ll never defeat me’ dialogue with the final boss) they start up some hackneyed theming to try and put a big corsage on the whole thing. Bayonetta and Luka are revealed to be destined lovers after all this time as well as the alt-universe parents of Viola. Why this is saved for an 11th hour twist is beyond me. Why not just reveal this from the get-go and build off of the character tension creates? She isn’t interesting otherwise! Her schtick is no-one calls her by her name and she hates that… Anyway, we really needed to give Bayonetta a guy to smooch before she died forever. It’s like playing bad fanfiction. Writing like this motivates me to just pick up creative writing myself instead of just complaining about it.
The game also suddenly pulls this ‘If we all just work together we can achieve anything’ theme right at the end because it forgot the game’s central conflict should probably be about something and our villain is a fairly bland AI/scientist man who just wants to destroy all the stuff. This culminates in the Metal Gear-esque, ‘We are the World’ power ballad (literally called ‘We are as One’) that plays over the credits suggesting the game was about something all along. The tone just feels really miserable and weird for a Bayonetta game. It’s not meaningfully explained how anything gets back to the status quo after the credits. Billions are dead, every world you visit has been completely killed, and most of the people who fought to stop it are gone. Time for a big dance number.
Viola is such an awkard moveset which I’ve already gone over in this post but mainly because it’s constantly in contrast to Bayonetta which is a much freer and fluid moveset. It’s not a Nero situation since Nero just functions in DMC4/5 whereas Viola really needs to be played in a very particular way to work. She is not expressive, her mobility sucks, and that’d all be OK if it was just her game with its own deliberate limitations but it’s not.
Even though playing as Bayonetta is more enjoyable overall, the demon summoning just never clicks. You can buy a charm to partially automate it but it doesn’t really feel like it’s working half the time. Rather than do optimal combos the automated demons just randomly pick attacks from the list, half of which just whiff, mainly because demon attacks are so slow especially when chosen for the wrong situation. The camera doesn’t know what the fuck is going on.
It’s clearly just the result of development hell and no vision being preserved between directors, but I had to get it off my chest. I’ll never hateplay anything again.
