Games like Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden are few and far between for good reason. It’s tough to make an engaging combat system that flows well without being one note like the Batman Arkham series, and it’s even tougher to make a game where that combat system doesn’t get boring to use. Then there’s all the other problems like enemy design, difficulty, and the fact that this genre does have its devoted fans but it’s not going to sell as well as something like Uncharted. This is why Platinum Games is one of the last bastions of this kind of game, and why Bayonetta 3 has been anticipated for so long, but unfortunately after playing it I think they should have kept us waiting. As a warning there will be some spoilers without specifics further in the review as I get angrier and compare this game to Ninja Gaiden 3.
The multiverse is ending and it turns out Bayonetta is the center of it all, as a bad guy called Singularity is killing Bayonettas in every version of reality to remake them in his own image. Our Bayonetta gets drawn into it as Singularity attacks her world, and a dimension-hopping witch named Viola tells her that they need to find four plot devices to access Singularity’s main reality. Thus begins a story that makes absolutely zero sense from start to finish, with so many inconsistencies and unexplained nonsense that it’s not even worth the time to go into it. The basic premise is easy enough to follow and the game unfortunately repeats the framework of each new level every time so you won’t be lost there either, but it’s in the finer details of “how, where, and why” that you’ll be completely lost, which is a shame because Bayonetta 3 LOVES its story. You spend more time in the first hour watching cutscenes than playing the game (and it’s not a generous ratio) so I wish that a game that cares so much about telling a ridiculous story put the effort into actually making sure it made sense.
But as I always say about this genre, we’re not here for the story we’re here for the gameplay. Bayonetta 3 has made a lot of changes to its core gameplay, to the point where I almost would recommend playing Bayonetta 3 only if you haven’t played the others because of how different it is. The nuts and bolts of playing as Bayonetta is still essentially the same, with button sequence combo chains and dodging attacks to slow down time, but there’s now a big emphasis on the demons that give Bayonetta her strongest powers. Gone are the cat form and butterfly wings used for traversal in previous games and instead Bayonetta can transform into a more demonic version of herself to move fast and end combos, with the transformation based on what weapon she has equipped. Yes, I said “weapon” because unlike the first two games you can only have one weapon equipped at a time in Bayonetta 3, which I think breaks some part of the Geneva Conventions. The whole freaking point of her having guns on her shoes was so that you could have a weapon in your hands and a weapon on your feet, but instead we’re just stuck with one-weapon combos like we’re playing any other action game on the market. I have to assume this choice was made just to prevent confusion about which demon form you would transform into for your movement options, but this is a problem that could have been easily solved by just having your primary weapon be your demon form, and you lose a lot of unique things about the franchise with this change.
The other big demon change is that Bayonetta can summon demons to fight for her, which is a spectacle straight out of Platinum Games’ canceled game Scalebound. With just a press of a button you’re suddenly not controlling a fast moving, quick dodging, trash talking witch and you’re instead controlling a hundred foot tall demon that attacks slowly and moves even slower. The idea behind using these monsters is to have “even footing” with the giant enemies that Bayonetta fights throughout the game, but in practice this new feature is just a plodding distraction from the game’s main combat that either act as an “easy mode” button the game will punish you for using or are simply ineffectual because Bayonetta can still be hurt while channeling them. If Bayonetta takes damage they disappear, if Bayonetta has to dodge an attack they disappear, and if the demon themselves takes too much damage they will enter a rage mode where you lose control of them and they attack you instead, so really using them as just a prolonged summon isn’t ever really worth the risk. Alternatively they’ve also added an admittedly neat looking feature where at the end of combos (or just before you’re hit) you can press the summoning button and the demon will appear to do a free hit without any of the baggage I mentioned earlier, but that cheapens the combat further because rather than mixing and matching combos you’re instead motivated to find the shortest combo possible to get the demon summoning prompt.
If it’s not obvious already, I think I hate the demon summoning mechanic. It’s visually awesome but none of the demons are any fun to control and once they run out of ideas four or five demons in they just start becoming glorified puzzle gimmicks or platforms for scripted sequences. Here’s a fast train demon that can hit everyone in the room by drawing patterns on the ground, here’s a demon that sings a song to make poison rain from the sky, here’s one that can see in the dark. It’s all so tired and gets even worse because Bayonetta is there every time you have to use a demon in these sequences, dancing away and shouting the same three lines of dialogue over and over again. If I have to hear her shout “If you would!” or “Do it!” one more time I think I’ll have to play on mute from now on. The worst part of all is that they completely changed Torture Attacks so that they are hinged entirely on using these demons in your stationary form, as now rather than being visually cool special attack finishers they are instead gimmicky “blink and you’ll miss it” button prompts that appear when a demon staggers an enemy. Since this stagger effect tends to happen after an enemy is launched through the air you’ll basically never see any of these attacks properly except the largest ones, as they’ll all be two screens away and you’ll be too busy trying to make sure Bayonetta isn’t hit to worry about what style of guillotine just appeared to sometimes not even kill the target. Torture Attacks were definitely the weirdest part of the other Bayonetta‘s, but at least they were a fun mechanic that helped make the game unique rather than the afterthought they are here.
In fact a lot of things seem to be an afterthought, like the structure of each level. The previous Bayonetta games came from the school of game design that most action games have followed since Devil May Cry 4 and the reboot of Ninja Gaiden 2 in the late 2000s: a relatively linear affair where the each individual level is essentially a long corridor from beginning to end. Sure there might be side rooms or puzzles or the occasional “go find the key” section but you’d never describe them as “open” or requiring “exploration.” However Bayonetta 3 seems to have once again taken the remnants of Scalebound and is suddenly a game with huge, open maps where you can your time scrubbing every inch of the area for health increases, secret levels, etc. As a rule I’m not opposed to bonus content but this is such a dramatic shift from both a design and a tempo perspective that it really throws the whole experience out of wack for me. You’re playing one of the trinity of action franchises alongside Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden, but it takes between ten to fifteen minutes to get from one action scene to another because you’re running up walls as a giant spider to collect cubes or you’re chasing a cat in a circle to grab its necklace.
Then once you actually get to your action scene it all becomes samey far too quickly. The game is split into four parts, one for each plot device, and each part plays out exactly the same though occasionally in a different order. You enter a new reality, see a weird static image of that world’s Bayonetta fighting a monster, gain that Bayonetta’s demon as an ally, do a gimmick fight or two designed around that demon’s quirk, have a “cinematic moment” action scene that involves riding that demon around as you chase or are chased by something, and then you have a final boss fight. It’s all formulaic and predictable after you do it the second time, and the few moments of creativity in these settings are lost when it’s something you saw coming a mile away. Worst of all are the final bosses, as rather than having an actually cool, climatic battle against a strong enemy like in other Platinum games such as Metal Gear Rising or the first Bayonetta you instead have to play a three-button mini-game after Bayonetta rips her heart out to summon a mega demon. That’s not a spoiler since it happens six times during the game, but instead it’s a haunting visage of Wonderful 101, another quirky title by Platinum Games that I didn’t review mostly because I hated how the boss fights were never culminations of your gameplay knowledge and were instead just gimmicky nonsense.
These are, much like the demon summoning itself, visually awesome but brain dead gameplay-wise. The only one I’ll spoil is that Bayonetta 3 turns two kaijus fighting into a painfully slow game of rock paper scissors, but one where you can see your opponent’s intended move before you pick yours. I’ll leave you to imagine how bad the others are with that visual in your mind. Compared to the bombastic nature of the bosses in the first two games I have to wonder who dropped the ball here; what key part of the Bayonetta 3 team was lacking compared to its previous installments? And if there was something missing, why didn’t they try to overcome that gap instead of just choosing spectacle over substance compared to the other games which had both? The finale in particular is a joke compared to the other Bayonetta titles, replacing headbutting a skyscraper that’s thrown at you and punching gods into the sun with an over-long fight in a parking lot against one dude who does the same four attacks over and over again. You’re told he’s tough because he keeps beating you in cutscenes that keep interrupting the fight rather than it being any mechanical challenge in and of itself, and Bayonetta out of nowhere won’t shut up about anime tropes like creating her own truth and trusting her friends. Every game needs to end somehow but compared to the devil may care, god slayer that we’ve seen Bayonetta be before now it all seems rather out of place.
In fact so much of it seems out of place that I’ve been seeing a lot of parallels to another third installment of an action game: Ninja Gaiden 3, which is not the sort of game you want to be compared to. Both NG3 and Bayonetta 3 removed previous gameplay mechanics to better design their game around their new idea, with NG3 it was their steel-on-bone attacks and with Bayonetta 3 it’s the demon summoning and forms, and both replaced their protagonist’s traditional otherworldly foes to fight man-made “alchemy” enemies instead. Both have their main character suddenly care a lot about their lives and legacy while introducing whole new bits of lore to justify these changes that don’t make any sense, alongside a story that makes even less sense. Both have a recurring nemesis character that you fight four or more times that ends up not only being a misunderstood good guy but also ineffectually fights alongside you as an AI companion by the end. Both endlessly bombard you with tip screens even hours into the game, and both have unlockable/hidden bonus levels where you fight bosses from previous games but without all the pomp and circumstance that surrounded those enemies originally, which just makes them feel like hollow fan appeasement.
Unlike Ninja Gaiden 3 however, there’s a chance that Bayonetta 3 won’t kill its franchise given how much they invested in the game’s other playable character, Viola. Viola at her core has the same basic controls as Bayonetta but with less variety, as she only has one demon, one weapon, and has to block attacks correctly to activate her time slowing abilities rather than dodge them. However what Viola does have over Bayonetta is that she’s actually fun to play, mostly because her demon summoning doesn’t lock her in place and instead she can still fight while her demon does its own thing. Using her demon takes away Viola’s weapon but she actually has a second, unarmed moveset that she can use while her demon is running around, and it’s not only incredibly fun to use but also fits perfectly in theme with why you’re supposed to be using demon summons in the first place: to fight larger enemies. So you toss your sword away and just start uppercutting the closest man-sized enemy while your demon cat fights the big ones, and it all just clicks. When she does have her sword she fights a little like Jetstream Sam from Metal Gear Rising, with sword attacks that can be charged at most parts of her combo for higher damage, but unlike Sam her dodge is essentially garbage and should only be used when you’re panicking and forgetting to press Viola’s exclusive block button. I would have liked her to get one more weapon and her exclusive “Devil Trigger” super form is a poorly designed joke, but you only play has her four or so times outside of optional levels so the tools she does have don’t bore you too much before the end.
I’ve beaten on this game already and I haven’t even gotten into the rough looking characters, how the main battle theme is the worst in the series, how the options to change controls is a joke, and how painful Viola’s dialogue is to listen to (Jennifer Hale does fine as Bayonetta though she doesn’t have as hard of an edge on her voice as Hellena Taylor). In all, Bayonetta 3 is Platinum Games both at their heights of ridiculous visual action and also their lows of choosing to have a cool thing happen on screen while sacrificing the substance that makes those cool things meaningful. The whole game reads like people were sad Scalebound was canceled so they took all those ideas and crammed them into Bayonetta’s catsuit so that all that money they invested in their big Xbox exclusive wasn’t a complete waste. This should have just been the start of a new Platinum franchise rather than a new Bayonetta, just call it Viola: Monster Mash or something and the absence of the gameplay mechanics I mentioned above wouldn’t have been as missed. If Bayonetta 3 could have actually foregone the mini-game bosses and ended each narrative arc with a solid boss fight like the first game I might have given this a recommendation, but such as it is if you’re a fan of the franchise and on the fence for any reason you won’t be missing much if you just skip this. Bayonetta 3 may not be the Ninja Gaiden 3 of its franchise, but it doesn’t feel much like Bayonetta either.
