It’s no secret that Bayonetta’s fanbase has been literally starving for this game for a while now (the 3 years between the announcement and the second piece of news didn’t help). After finally getting my hands on the game, and having a month to digest what I played, I can now put some thoughts together on this game and what the internet has been calling one of the worst endings ever (spoiler: it isn’t). 

But before we get to the story stuff, let’s touch on the real meat of the game: the gameplay. Unsurprisingly, it’s still fantastic. Bayo’s moveset has been expanded upon with the ability to both control some of her demons as giant summonable beasts, and to merge with them for new moves and alternative mobility options. These new systems rely on a selection of 3 demons you can pick from on a quick-select menu using the D-pad, with 12 total demons who can be assigned to the quick-select from the pause menu. Each of them has an associated weapon tied to their fusion (with long-time patron and best friend Madama Butterfly on Bayo’s usual four gun set). While you can have two prepicked weapons to switch between, this new setup comes at the cost of the old limb system. Instead of equipping different weapons to each of Bayo’s limbs, you now just have one weapon equipped at a time, though I found this allows each weapon to be far more fleshed out than they were in past games. Most people will pick 2-3 favorites to swap between (Color My World, Phantasmarene’s Yoyo, and Baal’s Mic Stand for me) for the whole game, but this allows for different players to really put their own spin on the game’s combat, depending on how they feel like customizing their loadout of 2 weapons, 3 demons, and 2 of the accessories from past games. 

The game’s combat does take some adjusting, as the new Demon Slave mechanic (summoning something to fight alongside you) takes some getting used to, as most players will initially think they have to just control the demon at first. Eventually though, you’ll pick up on the fact that this really works by queuing up actions for the demon to take, and then doing your own combos while they run through the actions you’ve programmed them to take. Bayonetta’s basic moveset is much the same as always, though there’s a few conspicuously missing options, such as Umbran Portal Kick, Witch Twist, at-will torture attacks, and most of the animal forms. Regardless of what’s been lost, this is potentially the best combat has been in the series, returning to the violent choreography of the first game, as each enemy has reworked tells and combo breaks more in line with the first game’s enemies, and Bayonetta’s ability to dance through a battlefield in the most vicious way possible while her pets lay waste to anything she can’t immediately reach has never been smoother. If you’ve played the first two games, you know what to expect here. The only major change is that the new customizations of the demons have replaced the gamebreaking Umbran Climax from 2.

Of course, all that’s just talking about when you play as Bayonetta. For certain levels, you can also take control of Jeanne, who has a minigame-esque set of 2D stealth segments, wherein she navigates a military weapons lab while pretending to be in an old arcade game, or new character Viola. Viola’s gameplay is similar to Bayonetta’s, except she has precisely one weapon in her sword, and one demon in the giant cat Cheshire. Viola’s an all-out offense character, as she lacks the ability to control her demon, but can summon him to do whatever his AI wants while she fights by just holding one button. Additionally, she forgoes the usual Witch Time mechanics in favor of a parrying system (think Sekiro) that triggers Witch Time on a success. She’s really hard to play as for precisely this reason, as her parries are probably the single most frustrating mechanic in the game, and she is, purposefully, not as good as Bayonetta at pretty much anything. Her throwing darts are less accurate than Bayo’s guns, her grappling hook won’t carry her as far as Bayo’s wings, and Cheshire has a tendency to steal her sword whenever he’s summoned, leaving her to box with humanoid bioweapons while praying he targets a different enemy than her. She’s a fun experiment, all things considered, and I think she’ll make for some very interesting replays for those who learn how to parry reliably. That said, she’s more of a diversion from the usual gameplay, and often feels weaker than Bayo.

Between combat, this game also has the most variety in gameplay of any title in the series. Aside from the three characters, combat is broken up by the occasional bit of puzzle platforming, with a staggering number of secrets hidden throughout each level. This game really encourages players to explore the entirety of an area, as you never know when a secret path will yield access to health upgrades, concept art, hidden lore documents that explain holes in the story, rooms with bonus combat challenges (sometimes featuring enemies from the first two games), or the familiars that unlock bonus challenge levels in the post-game. The game also dips into brief vehicle (or demon riding) segments with no warning, such as driving an off-the-rails train along the Great Wall of China, or the show-stopping bosses of each area. These special fights start as normal, then when it’s time for phase two, Bayo breaks out some new magic to supercharge her demons into their Prince(ss) of Hell forms to lay down the hurt with their own signature mechanics. These cause the game to briefly shift genre into rail shooters, WWE mechanics, or in my favorite instance, a surprise rhythm game. The constant mechanical shifts of all this keep you on your toes at all times without ever letting the constant fighting get stale. Some will complain about gimmick sections forcing them off the series’ typical high octane gameplay, but I think these gameplay shifts are necessary to keep the primary mechanics from getting stale after three games.

Accompanying all this is a gorgeous set of visuals… on the characters and enemies. Our favorite witches and their pets look as great as ever, and the Homunculi, Buddhism-inspired bioweapons with Cloud-theme naming, are beautiful creatures to fight against. The settings of this game lean a little towards bland at times, which is weird for a multiverse plot. Individual setpieces like the Cruise Ship opening and the MIRROR DIMENSION look great, and there’s never a dull environment you get time to focus on during combat, but the locales of Bayonetta 3 do get dull at times. We visit 6 dimensions, and three of them are gray cities filled with dying soldiers. The biggest letdown of this plot is that it feels less like visiting other worlds than it does a world tour. Sure, we encounter alternative versions of Bayo, Jeanne, Luka, and Enzo here and there, but most of them suffer from fairly limited interactions. I’m also shocked they didn’t take the opportunity to show us a world where Bayo was raised by the Lumen instead, because that just seems like such an obvious pull. Still, the game knows how to make each and every one of these things into a grand setpiece somehow (can’t complain about using a cruise ship as a surfboard on a tidal wave that’s destroying New York).

While I’ve heard some complaints that Bayo’s not as sassy as she usually is, I assure you all, the rest of the cast is more than making up for her softer portrayal here (especially the demons). The overall style of the series is still unchanged, and you can expect the crew to pull off acts of abject insanity every twenty minutes instead of handling things in a practical manner. Anything can be a setpiece in the world of Bayonetta, and just about everything is in this game. Cementing that sense of style is the wonderful soundtrack, which I haven’t stopped listening to yet. Personal favorites include the punk-rock Gh()st, jazzy Moonlight Serenade, operatic Fertile Rondo, and whatever type of ballad we classify Whispers of Destiny as. Per Bayonetta tradition, any music can be fight music if you put it in the right scene, and I would dare to call this the best soundtrack of the trilogy.

As for the story (no spoilers), it is messy. That much is for sure. Viola hops dimensions after her world is destroyed by someone named Singularity, who was able to beat her universe’s Bayonetta. Playing the role of Future Trunks, Viola explains that this guy has been absorbing the multiverse for some time, and that their only chance to stop him is to collect some mechanical orb things from five universes and bring them to a specific scientist so that they can warp directly into Singularity’s house and beat him to death while there’s still time. This serves as a framing story for Bayo, Viola, and Luka (who somehow crossed dimensions by himself, without being told about the plot) to visit such alternate universes as: Tokyo, Imperial China, A Chaotic Rift of Nothingness, Egypt, and Paris-Except-Everything-Is-Lupin-The-Third. Meanwhile, Jeanne goes to kidnap the scientist, Singularity’s universe destroying AI bioweapons are already flooding everywhere, and Rodin continues making cocktails at his bar as if nothing was wrong. Each world features a brief appearance by its Bayonetta, who will inevitably fail to save her dying world and resign herself to assisting Bayo-Prime while Viola and Luka get clowned on by the entire multiverse in their quest to figure out what that fairy-werewolf thing stalking them is. While there could have been a great story in all this, it stumbles a few times. Namely in that it makes a big deal of questioning who Singularity could actually be, only to result in the most disappointing answer. It also doesn’t help that Viola ends up disconnected from her own plot for a while, and that some very important bits of the story (such as Strider’s entire backstory) are hidden in those optional collectibles I mentioned earlier, rather than explained when they would be relevant. This is primarily a series about amazing combat and rule of cool setpieces, so while a few story beats could definitely have used rewrites, they also weren’t the reason I was picking up the game.

Bayonetta 3 is a game with flaws. It is also the most fun I’ve had with a game in quite a while, and I actually played the last hour of it standing up because there were too many “jump out of your seat” moments for anything else to be an option. I haven’t been able to get myself to sit down and play through a single player game in nearly two months, and Bayonetta 3 was good enough to put an end to that streak. If you are someone who appreciates high octane combat and fast paced, action oriented gameplay, you owe yourself the opportunity to experience the Umbran Witch’s latest outing.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I still haven’t finished the last set of Witch Trials, and I fully intend to do the postgame for this one. This is the most fun I’ve had with a new game in the last 2-3 years. I give it an A-, acknowledging that it could have soared just a bit higher if the plot had hit all its marks.