I think Bayonetta 3 is symbolic of what can go wrong when there's too long of a development cycle. Bayonetta 1 and 2 had a vision which was always apparent even when it wasn't perfectly executed. Bayonetta 3 feels like many games at once... and leads to it feeling overcooked and overdesigned, losing a lot of what made the first two games special.
What I loved about Bayonetta was the grace and dexterity of a fast-moving protagonist, exploring the surprisingly long levels, seeing a variety of enemies in different situations, fast and frantic platforming, and some well-timed surprises. In Bayonetta 3, Platinum Games tried to one-up themselves in every aspect but ended up compromising much of these things.
The elephant in the room are the technical limitations of the Switch. Even when the game wasn't running poorly you could see how it limited the creative vision for the game. The game was based around summoning large Kaijus and Infernal Beings to take part in the fight so that every fight was a big showdown. However, this meant only a couple of enemies on the screen at a time, typically one big oversized boss and possibly some other repeated scrubs surrounding them. The drawback is you never feel quite so overwhelmed because the battlefield is never filled in the way it was in Bayonetta 1 and 2. It also makes the game feel like one large boss-rush as they are constantly emphasizing one enemy at a time in these fights. In order to damage larger enemies, Bayonetta must use the infernal beings, which hitches the frame rate and slows the pace down. The game feels balanced around spamming these summons, and as a result Bayonetta's combos feel weak in comparison and it feels like the game is constantly slowing her down. Specifically Gomorrah's fights feel painfully slow and there are a couple of sections that amount to rock-paper-scissors and are excruciatingly long. It's very clear this game values spectacle over smooth combat.
Outside of battle, there’s too much fog of death in this game, and the game feels like it’s pushing you into it constantly while you’re platforming. The worst of this is early on when you get the spider and have anti-gravity platforming, as well as any time that ‘weather’ effects blow you into the fog or a room has fog covering the floor. The other problem is that during typical platforming there aren't enemies chasing you down, so it feels like there is less danger or urgency. The exploration as well feels far more formulaic than in the past, with repeated patterns for how secrets are hidden.
I respect that they are trying a lot of new things, like the elevator action sections, door puzzles, inter-shmuptions, and the Audioshield-esque game in Paris. But combined with the ever escalating action sequences it all added up to a lot of noise and having so many different set pieces diminished the memorability of all of them. They got carried away with making everything ‘special’ that nothing feels meaningful. This is also evident in the story, which they clearly tried to raise the stakes and involve mystery but it resulted in a confusing case of "too much too soon."
The story is bad, I know many have spoken about how it falls apart at the end but it's pretty bad all the way through. The whole multiverse bullshit is over-saturated and uninteresting to begin with. I think the only way to play this game is to believe that it is “Bayonetta 3’s” game, and that it doesn’t impact the other two preceding games. Because otherwise, it means the earlier games aren’t really about anything any more. Those games were self contained and had good consistent worlds and this one just decided to make it fuzzy for some reason. Bayonetta's characterization in the final scenes is disappointing, but the story is so incoherent it blends together for me.
Overall I did not enjoy this experience, and while it's not the direction I would have chosen for this series, I understand why it is like this and what is coming next. I just think Bayonetta might not be for me.
What I loved about Bayonetta was the grace and dexterity of a fast-moving protagonist, exploring the surprisingly long levels, seeing a variety of enemies in different situations, fast and frantic platforming, and some well-timed surprises. In Bayonetta 3, Platinum Games tried to one-up themselves in every aspect but ended up compromising much of these things.
The elephant in the room are the technical limitations of the Switch. Even when the game wasn't running poorly you could see how it limited the creative vision for the game. The game was based around summoning large Kaijus and Infernal Beings to take part in the fight so that every fight was a big showdown. However, this meant only a couple of enemies on the screen at a time, typically one big oversized boss and possibly some other repeated scrubs surrounding them. The drawback is you never feel quite so overwhelmed because the battlefield is never filled in the way it was in Bayonetta 1 and 2. It also makes the game feel like one large boss-rush as they are constantly emphasizing one enemy at a time in these fights. In order to damage larger enemies, Bayonetta must use the infernal beings, which hitches the frame rate and slows the pace down. The game feels balanced around spamming these summons, and as a result Bayonetta's combos feel weak in comparison and it feels like the game is constantly slowing her down. Specifically Gomorrah's fights feel painfully slow and there are a couple of sections that amount to rock-paper-scissors and are excruciatingly long. It's very clear this game values spectacle over smooth combat.
Outside of battle, there’s too much fog of death in this game, and the game feels like it’s pushing you into it constantly while you’re platforming. The worst of this is early on when you get the spider and have anti-gravity platforming, as well as any time that ‘weather’ effects blow you into the fog or a room has fog covering the floor. The other problem is that during typical platforming there aren't enemies chasing you down, so it feels like there is less danger or urgency. The exploration as well feels far more formulaic than in the past, with repeated patterns for how secrets are hidden.
I respect that they are trying a lot of new things, like the elevator action sections, door puzzles, inter-shmuptions, and the Audioshield-esque game in Paris. But combined with the ever escalating action sequences it all added up to a lot of noise and having so many different set pieces diminished the memorability of all of them. They got carried away with making everything ‘special’ that nothing feels meaningful. This is also evident in the story, which they clearly tried to raise the stakes and involve mystery but it resulted in a confusing case of "too much too soon."
The story is bad, I know many have spoken about how it falls apart at the end but it's pretty bad all the way through. The whole multiverse bullshit is over-saturated and uninteresting to begin with. I think the only way to play this game is to believe that it is “Bayonetta 3’s” game, and that it doesn’t impact the other two preceding games. Because otherwise, it means the earlier games aren’t really about anything any more. Those games were self contained and had good consistent worlds and this one just decided to make it fuzzy for some reason. Bayonetta's characterization in the final scenes is disappointing, but the story is so incoherent it blends together for me.
Overall I did not enjoy this experience, and while it's not the direction I would have chosen for this series, I understand why it is like this and what is coming next. I just think Bayonetta might not be for me.