every gameplay decision and story beat is baffling until you remember that hideki kamiya spent a decade trying in vain to create his dream game about the scalebound dragon, all the while enduring the glowing praise of yusuke hashimoto's bayonetta game over his. every day he spent painstakingly planning his doomed magnus opus was marred by his fanbase showering his former producer with adoration for the character, the genre, that he had invented years prior. the year bayonetta 2 was announced for the nintendo switch, under the deafening fanfare of smash bros fans who had only just learned of her existence, microsoft forced kamiya to bury his dream. scalebound was dead, and another man's bayonetta stood in its place. mocking him. his vision. his legacy. my god. they even used an audbrey hepburn song.

but if kamiya couldn't have his dream, he would at least have his revenge. as executive director on bayonetta 3, he would make a new game for his scalebound dragon. a game where even when you are mercifully granted the privilege of playing as bayonetta and not some half baked side character, you are still never really playing as bayonetta, because her true strength lies in the scalebound dragon. all combat will revolve around the scalebound dragon. the gorgeous cities of vigrid and noatun will be muddied over and stretched into drab, lifeless open worlds to accommodate the scalebound dragon. enemies that get too close to the camera will morph into indecipherable blobs of grey and green sega saturn dithering so that they can fight the scalebound dragon. you will love the scalebound dragon. and bayonetta will be utterly obliterated, every version of her, across time and space, until the witch hunts are over forever.