I can always remember when I first got my Xbox 360. One of the main features I really enjoyed on it was the ability to download demos of games to play. As a young teen, I didn’t have much money to spend on games. Through this feature, I was able to discover a little game called devil may cry 4. The gameplay of just hacking and slashing my way through enemies really appealed to me.
This may seem irrelevant to this review but its context. If I had never tried this demo, I most likely would have never bought the original Bayonetta game.
Bayonetta 2 is the sequel to one of my favourite games of all time. I originally borrowed the game off a friend on the Wii U when it first launched but couldn’t get into it because of the cumbersome size of the Wii U Gamepad, resulting in only finishing the prologue and a bit more. When they announced in December that they would be porting the games over to the switch, I jumped onto the “rebuy all the things” bandwagon and got ready to pick it up on release.
I am really disappointed with myself for not giving it a better chance sooner, or even picking up a WiiU pro controller to play this game with. The game is fantastic. It took everything from the first game and improved on it. The textures and polygons of the characters are vastly improved from the first game. One of the changes I noticed was there was a lot less walking/running in between fighting segments than the first game, resulting in what feels a bit like a boss rush. This isn’t a bad thing because the best part of Bayonetta was the boss fights.
On the subject of the boss fights, one of the things I did really like was a recurring boss fight in the game against a polar opposite character to yourself. They had the same moves, seem to be able to do their own version of “Witch Time” (which is the slow-motion mechanic in the game) and generally felt like a powerful being. A trend from the first game was that most of the boss characters were huge colossal creatures that felt like they were either weak for their size, or Bayonetta is ridiculously strong. I personally find the smaller boss fights that are more regular just so much better and I’m glad they made this decision. Except for one thing. The final boss.
Without going into details (I wanna keep this quite spoiler free) the first games final boss was massive in size. Its one of my favourite boss fights in any game. Bayonetta 2 has a smaller boss that felt stronger, albeit what it is, and was more visually impressive. But it didn’t feel as grand of a finish. This could be because I got out of bed at 1 AM in the morning to go finish the game to make sure it was done before this review, but I stand by my opinion on this.
The game overall is amazing. From the smaller details like the Amiibo support so I can run around as fem-link up to the fantastic visuals of the weapons and the final attacks. This game should be played by everyone who has any interest in button mashing their way to success.
Bring on Bayonetta 3.