A game that desperately wants to evoke Spider-Man: No Way Home but more readily brings to mind Spider-Man 2 - specifically, the moment where the community comes together to protect the identity and reputation of a hero in the aftermath of an excessive strain beyond their means. A testament to the character of Bayonetta is what’s singularly heartening about this: in your thirties it’s rare that all your friends will participate in a simultaneous video game zeitgiest, and only a character with her generational gravity can bring us all together at once, once more, to wilfully overlook myriad flaws with presentation, performance, coherence and competence, united in our defence of something that so so often does not deserve the slightest of kind words. A game that no one - not even the developers - expected to exist; a game that generates such powerful gratitude to the gods of gaming that we can all overlook a bereft of almost everything that made the original a bulletproof classic, appreciating instead the offering made in lieu to us, a fucked up little frankenstinian Marvel vs Capcom 2 equivalent in the CAG set, incoherent character action that’s so broken by virtue of its gilded broken pieces that you can’t help but be glad they were able to stitch together something, anything at all, from bloated shit-pressed platinum non-fungible giblets found floating in the latrines behind the headquarters of Microsoft and Square Enix. I didn’t start enjoying this until it was over forever.