Bayonetta 3 feels like a game made by an ideas guy plagued with a terrible cause of ADHD who contracted a team of programmers who are just competent enough to execute his ideas so that they don’t turn out complete shit, but forgot to make them actually fun. Spectacle has always been a big part of the Bayonetta games, and Platinum’s games in general, but never to the point where it interfered too much with the game’s central mechanics. With Bayonetta 3, it unfortunately seems like Platinum has forgotten why people like Bayonetta in the first place.

I’ll fully admit I’m a shitter at these games, and I’m never going to be good enough, bored enough, or insane enough to try to do stuff like Pure Platinuming all the chapters on even the easiest difficulty, let alone on Infinite Climax mode. If that means I lack the qualifications to properly criticize this game’s combat in your eyes, so be it. I’d like to believe however that I have at least a basic understanding of what made the first two games fun. Their combat was pretty basic action game stuff where you have punches, kicks, and a dodge, with dodge offset and witch time being the two main things setting Bayonetta apart from other games in the genre. The appeal at least for me was always the extremely satisfying and polished combat, the spectacle of crazy fights and scenarios, and of course Bayonetta herself.

Where Bayo 3 goes wrong is that it leans so far into spectacle, it doesn’t pay enough attention to pretty much everything else. This game’s main gimmick, demon slave, is an ability that allows you to summon and control a giant demon at will, draining your magic meter as you use it. You can’t move Bayonetta during this, and dodging will automatically unsummon the demon and give control back to you. Attacking with the demon has a buffer system where you can input a chain of attacks, let go of the summon button, and move around or attack as Bayonetta as long as there’s still attacks for the demon to do. You can then continue holding the button to keep the demon on the battlefield.

It’s definitely an interesting mechanic, and I can see the potential for some wild stuff, but the fact that it completely takes over almost every battle ruins a bit of the fun. I don’t play Bayonetta to play as some giant, slow, awkwardly controlling monster. It doesn’t help that the camera stays behind Bayonetta so you feel like you’re controlling something in the background and not even part of the action most of the time. To accommodate for the size of the demons and some of the enemies, every arena is massive, meaning that whenever you aren’t using demons, you’re spending far too much time running back and forth to each enemy. Thank god for the homing skill in this game, because you’re going to be using it a lot.

Once you unlock more demons, this aspect of the game does improve, but it never feels as polished or fun as it should be. Whenever you get the few fights where you’re just playing as Bayonetta, it’s a major breath of fresh air. Then the realization struck me that I really wish I was playing either of the first two Bayonetta games rather than this one. Pulling off wicked weaves is so much more satisfying in those games, and here they might as well not even exist. You do get something called wink slave, which allows you to quickly summon demons at the end of an attack string, but that’s literally just a slightly more complicated wicked weave. Also, I swear I got hit by offscreen attacks way more than any Platinum Games game. Either that, or this game’s visuals are such a clusterfuck of neon greens, blues, and ugly grays that it all blends together in a visual sludge that makes combat readability virtually nonexistent at times. The camera somehow managing to be the worst camera in a Bayonetta game yet doesn’t help with that either.

With all that being said, Bayonetta’s combat definitely isn’t bad, it’s just not as good as previous games. If the game gave you more time to get used to the general combat, maybe I would have felt more positively about it, but the problem is that Platinum felt the incessant need to fill every chapter with some gimmick section that plays way more differently than any other part of the game. One of these involves a kaiju battle, one’s a rhythm game, Jeanne has her own set of 2D levels inspired by the Elevator Action games, and more. The best way to describe all of these is that they’re all conceptually neat and fun on paper, but once you play more than 30 seconds of them, you realize that it’s either really boring or really obnoxious. I can only imagine the suffering people will go through trying to Pure Platinum these parts. One of my biggest issues with Platinum is their obsession with gimmick sections like this, especially when they’re the most difficult part of their games (I’m looking at you, Wonderful 101 shmup sections). Bayonetta 3 manages to double down on this, to the point where I’m convinced that half of your playtime isn’t even really playing as Bayonetta. We’re legitimately bordering on a minigame collection with this one.

And then there’s Viola. I have nothing wrong with multiple playable characters in games like this, but holy shit Viola sucks. Literally everything about her sucks. Her combat sucks, her personality sucks, her story sucks, like Jesus Christ there’s so little to like about her. She is genuinely the worst controlling Platinum Games character ever that I can think of. It’s so jarring going from how smoothly Bayonetta controls to how clunky Viola does. The worst part of her kit by far is her parry. It doesn’t work like in Metal Gear Rising, as you may expect it to work. Platinum decided that her parry should have this weird start up lag, meaning that you have to hit the parry button way earlier than you think you do in order to activate witch time. You can also just hold the block button to prevent most attacks from damaging you, but it turns the game into being way too defensive and passive, which is the exact opposite of what I want from a Bayonetta game. She has a summon too, Cheshire, and it genuinely tends to feel more effective to just summon him and have him do most of the work while you spam her dart attack. People are finding out tech with her that makes her seem more interesting, but I doubt she would be more fun. Even Platinum didn’t seem to have confidence in her gameplay style considering she only gets 3 levels devoted to her. I can’t help but wonder if the demon slave and Viola mechanics were leftovers from their cancelled game, Scalebound, that Kamiya decided to sneak into this game because he was still buttmad over Microsoft dabbing on his idea and throwing it in the gutter.

While we’re talking about Viola, might as well dive into the story. Bayonetta has never had a particularly great story, sometimes bordering on downright incomprehensible, but it was generally serviceable and the characters always stood out and carried the poor writing. Bayonetta 3 though has a terrible problem with tone. It appears that Platinum had no idea what they wanted to do with this game, so they just put everything in the pot and made the story equivalent of a cacophony. It’s really bizarre going from the intro scene of New York City being utterly destroyed, millions of innocent people dying, and then seeing Bayonetta do her quirky little winks and dances as jazzy music plays. Bayo 1 and 2 had moments of destruction that probably lead to a couple people getting offed, but it never lingered on that stuff at all unlike in 3. In a game that seems to be trying to take itself more seriously, the more wacky moments really stand out as awkward. It gets even worse when you get into the multiverse stuff and see one Bayonetta after another getting killed in the most boring, unceremonious way right after silly scenes like an army of zombie-like creatures doing a Thriller dance. It’s like if The Last of Us had Joel doing Fortnite dances when he defeats a group of enemies before a scene where he’s told that Ellie has to sacrifice herself for the greater good.

What’s especially bad is that Bayonetta barely feels like a character anymore. Jennifer Hale actually does a surprisingly good Hellena Taylor impression, so it’s a shame that she never really gets to shine here. Her dialog is the most generic, uninteresting dialog you could think for a game like this. You know why these kinds of action games are often called character action games? Because they’re all about the personality and charisma of the character. The only time Bayonetta really feels like herself is at the very end of the game, and it’s not even the one you’ve been playing as.

Even worse is that Viola seems to have way more dialog and it’s the cringiest shit ever. I can’t tell if Viola is supposed to be a parody of DmC Dante type characters or not, but the fact that they appear to be really trying to get you to like her makes me think they’re being genuine with this. Platinum tried to pull a Nero with her and failed miserably. Oh yeah, going back to tone, Viola literally has scenes where she becomes a Looney Tunes character. There’s actually a moment where she steps out of a portal and does the whole “standing on nothing and gravity doesn’t affect her until she looks down” gag. They’re trying to do a “passing the torch” story with Wile E. fucking Coyote. All the dumb slapstick with her is poorly done and goes completely against the more serious tone of the overarching storyline. It probably would have been better to just have her be a complete edgelord to contrast with Bayonetta’s more calm and collected demeanor. I really don’t want to harp on Viola too much because she really doesn’t take up that much of the game, but man for how little you play as her she really drags the game down hard. It’s impressive how bad she is. Hell, even her music is forgettable. They give her this punk rock look, and her music is basically just Paramore. Oh yeah, the first thing I think of when I imagine punk is fucking Paramore. I hate Viola so much it’s unreal.

Anyway, the story for the most part is bad and forgettable. Nothing happens for the majority of it other than every Bayonetta dying 5 minutes after being introduced, and you getting each of the Chaos Emeralds Gears. Luka, formerly a joke character, now has super powers and can turn into a werewolf creature. Then some guy in a pod turns out to be the big bad and kills Jeanne in a way that really should not have killed her. Also Bayonetta and Luka are really into each other now, despite there being little to no indication in previous games of them having those kinds of feelings for each other other than on a purely sexual level. I guess Bayonetta is just really into werewolf dick.

I’m not one of those crazy Twitter cultists who thought that Bayonetta munched on carpet on a daily basis, but the romantic aspect of this game truly does not make any sense. It comes completely out of nowhere. Again, I have no idea what the fuck Platinum was thinking with this story. It’s the same level of quality as a Kingdom Hearts fanfiction.

What’s most frustrating about all this is that there is a truly great game in here somewhere. It’s certainly not bad, just not as good as it should be. Combat is still mostly satisfying and fun once you get used to the new mechanics. Many of the boss fights are pretty cool too, including the final boss which was actually a step up from Bayonetta 2’s lackluster finale. Considering things like Hellena Taylor’s temper tantrum forcing Platinum to find a new VA and the original director leaving the studio in the middle of this game’s development, I can only imagine the production issues this game underwent. I’m convinced that there were a bunch of other behind-the-scenes mishaps that led to this game being the mixed bag that it is. Ultimately, the game ended up a disappointing hodge podge of cool ideas that are half baked and take too much time away from the series’ strengths.

Sadly, I can’t see myself really wanting a Bayonetta 4 to “fix” things since Platinum has been on a downward spiral in my opinion for a while now. Their licensed games were forgettable to bad (I’m sorry, I won’t be gaslit into believing that Transformers Devastation is anything better than adequate), Nier Automata barely even counts as a Platinum Games game, and Astral Chain was also a disappointment to me, albeit it is an outlier since most people seemed to enjoy it. Then there’s Babylon’s Fall, which might go down as the biggest bruh moment in video game history. This was Platinum’s last straw for me and I do believe they’ve lost their touch.