Forum - View topicGAME: Bayonetta 3
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TranceLimit174
 Posts: 963 |
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I seem to be in the minority in that I think the various minigames are one of the saving graces of Bayonetta 3. The game is unapologetically a video game and so I got a real kick out of the Jeanne stealth missions and some other choice moments. I also didn't think the controls were an issue at all when it came to platforming; Bayo has got a lot of movement options she can abuse.
I do agree in that when it comes to Bayonetta herself and the Demon Slave mechanic, game handles like a dream, but the ending to the story damn near ruins the entire experience. This is my problem with the ending: spoiler[I've always viewed Bayonetta as a rare modern example of feminine power; she is sexy and powerful without being exploitative. Because of that I'm not a fan of the idea of shipping her with anyone to begin with. And so, to give her a love interest in the form of Luka, and at the expense of Jeanne fans out there, I think does a real disservice to what the character represents in my mind. Also, while I do agree that Viola is actually a well-conceived character that walks a surprisingly fine line (she easily could have been annoying as hell but actually is endearing), ending on her as the successor to the name "Bayonetta" was completely unearned. I was happy with the final boss...but then we get our titular character killed, and are then thrown into a last-minute boss battle to play as Viola with her sub-par gameplay. I could go on and on but the bottom line is the way this game ended left me gutted.] I think the score is a bit harsh considering the core combat gameplay, but I don't blame the reviewer for it and understand where they are coming from. Love the game, hate how it ends. |
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Vanadise
 Posts: 534 |
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I've been enjoying playing as Viola a lot, and after seeing a lot of people who hate playing as her, I think I've figured out why: you have to play differently than you do as Bayonetta. Bayonetta has a very reactive play style where you're supposed to bait enemies into attacking you, then dodge to get Witch Time, and a lot of people play the same way with Viola but substitute blocking for dodging... which is a big problem since her activation window is smaller, she gets less WT (unless you time it perfectly, and her perfect timing is different from Bayonetta's), and if you don't get it right, you're stuck in place for a while.
My advice is: stop worrying about WT. Even though she doesn't get WT from dodging, she's still invincible for most of her dodge animation, so it's a good tool for getting away from enemies. Hold L2 to summon Cheshire, who does a ton of damage and distracts enemies while he's raging around, and concentrate on picking on isolated enemies who are focused on Cheshire. When you're out of magic, use Viola's Circle+Kick attack to throw her sword in a circle around her, which will stunlock smaller enemies so you can combo them, and it still does good damage to larger enemies. Also, the Evil Harvest Rosary is a great accessory for her, since most of the time her WT is so short it doesn't matter anyway, but getting an explosion that deals damage and knocks enemies away is much more useful. If you do want to use WT with her, the Moon of Mahaa-Kalaa and Earring of Time are basically must-have accessories; the timing for the Moon feels much more intuitive, and the Earring actually gives her a decent duration. |
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ronri
 Posts: 86 |
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spoiler[Maybe it helps that I tend to avoid a lot of the fandom discourse, but while I myself am neutral on pairing Bayonetta with someone, I will say that the choice of love interest isn't really out of left-field as the review claims, especially if you recall how the first game handled their dynamic. There were enough moments throughout that teased the idea of something more between the two in the long run and even more telling is how the final dialogue in the first game was an intimate exchange between the two that rounds out Bayonetta's character arc. Now how well Luka was handled in Bayo 3 is a different matter but again, to say that their eventual romance wasn't ever hinted at is rather untrue especially when the first game had plenty of flirting and intimate interactions between the two.]
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Stelman257
Posts: 315 |
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Completely agree with almost everything in the review (I've had Al Fine on repeat on my end), though call me harsh but I just couldn't get into Viola as a character at all. Not a single bit, maybe it's because I hated playing as her that much, and the game demanded I forget 3 games worth of learning and muscle memory for a dumb, completely undercooked gimmick character that had none of the finesse or joy of playing as Bayonetta, but man was she frustrating and I just was not endeared to her at all.
And yeah the story was absolutely atrocious, such a dang shame and honestly the real reason I'll probably never return to this game. It's funny because right after this I played Sonic Frontiers, and while the games themselves are probably about on par with each other quality wise, and that's also a game that suffers from a few too many mini game problems, narratively the characters are the best they've been in a long time and that really helped! It probably also helped that I expected much more from Bayonetta 3, and it disappointed me, while Sonic Frontiers I feel like most expected to be a disaster, and it sincerely surprised me.
They might have been better received had they not been so constant and never ending. Also for some insane reason the game grades you on them like with normal combat sections. If it made them optional (on replays), and didn't grade you for them people wouldn't be so harsh on them but those aspects make them so constantly annoying, and more importantly, not fun to play, that yeah no one likes them. Were they well designed and not so throwaway, in addition to the optional/skippable and not graded points above, people wouldn't hate them so much, but as it stands I can't blame them at all.
It's not even that in itself really, and bringing up the first game technically isn't even relevant given spoiler[EVERYTHING IS ALTERNATE UNIVERSES], it's just how poorly everything is handled that it makes that so much worse by association as well. Here's an article that's harsh but to the point in many ways: https://gamerant.com/bayonetta-3-women-empowering-lgbtqia-representation-relationships-luka-jeanne-sexualization/ |
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Guile
Posts: 595 |
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I'm really confused right now. For years Bayonetta was called sexist, male pandering garbage by game journalists and activists. It was one of the main platforms people like Anita Sarkeesian made their entire careers on. I'm not sure when exactly Bayonetta shifted from being called male-gazey trash to some kind of gay hero, but this is certainly news to me so I apparently missed it. She flirted with Luka a lot in the first game from what I remember and even talking about how fun making babies was with men. I assumed that was part of why certain people hated her since she was the kind of the sexy female action hero who would totally have sex with you, the guy playing the game, and seen as wish fulfillment and pandering. |
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Vanadise
Posts: 534 |
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She's always been both. People who have surface-level takes and tend to be sex-negative look at Bayonetta's character design and assume that she's purely fetish material; people who are willing to dig a little deeper realize that she's the strongest, smartest character in the series, and she has complete agency over herself and is never exploited for the viewer's titillation. Her relationship with Jeanne and drag queen-inspired dances also served to make her quite popular in certain LGBT circles. Of course, there definitely are a lot of straight male fans who are primarily interested in the series because they think Bayonetta is sexy, which has been made incredibly obvious by how many people say they hate Viola because they don't find her attractive. So, there's all kinds of people out there. |
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ronri
Posts: 86 |
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I wouldn't say it's wholly irrelevant though and that seems more an excuse for people to dismiss the events of the new game even though Bayo 3 makes a point in calling back to past story elements in previous games. spoiler[The fact that it acknowledges Bayo 1 and Bayo 2 as separate timelines doesn't really diminish how Bayo 2 obviously works off of Bayo 1's events, and the same could be said of Bayo 3 respectively.] Still, I won't say the game is perfect. Viola's role being similar to DMC's Nero while not being as carefully thought out comes into mind (be it gameplay-wise or how well she embodies the franchise), even though her place in the story isn't inherently terrible. |
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Stelman257
Posts: 315 |
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Honestly? I will simply quote what’s written in the review itself since it sums it up quite nicely.
It’s a mess at best indeed. |
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Vanadise
Posts: 534 |
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While I found Bayonetta 3's story overall to be pretty disappointing, I don't find myself to be as completely demoralized by the ending as I've seen a lot of people. I mean, this series is known for its completely wild, nonsensical asspulls; the next game could easily just say that spoiler[killing Singularly restored all of the destroyed worlds or Viola found some artifact that revived all of the dead Bayonettas], and either of those things would make as much sense as anything that happened in this game. |
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Cecilthedarkknight_234
 Posts: 3820 Location: Louisville, KY |
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I truly don't know how to feel about Bayo 3, while it plays great the story is just lacking in quite a few departments.. Also the frame-rate/visuals chug a bit showing the age of the switch hardware.
Even with all of that said I did enjoy the game but it has a quite few flaws holding it back from being "perfect". |
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Stelman257
Posts: 315 |
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Yeah that would be fantastic, and if a 4th game comes along and we get another Bayo 2 like opening with Bayonetta and Jeanne going shopping together and planning their Christmas date I’m sure everyone will celebrate, but until then what can we do but take the ending at what it presented us with? Especially spoiler[that extremely poorly handled “passing the torch” moment, which just like so many other things, no one liked because of how they executed it with everything else.] |
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Philville
 Posts: 163 |
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Exactly. I'm not sure why some people are reading into all of this as though there were some kind of hidden agenda here (whether they're favorable to it or not). I do recall the controversy of the interactive Bayonetta subway poster in Japan allowing passersby to "strip" her clothes off, which showed a pretty big divide between the sensibilities of Japanese and Western fans, but I'm pretty sure Bayonetta has always been perceived as both a sexpot and a campy queer icon (and I will say that, aside from the character design, Hellena Taylor's VA went a long way to contributing to this, whether that was deliberate or not). As a straight male I have no problem saying that I wouldn't mind her stepping on me, and that she can still be a queer hero to others, if that's what they choose to see. 
I agree, but then again I'm the sort of person who doesn't mind the quirky minigames in the No More Heroes series (which are pretty bad by objective standards, if we're being honest). I'm sure NMH3 would have been far less niche if it were a straight-up action game without all of the meta video game and otaku elements (in which case it would, frankly, lose all of its charm and be an utterly lackluster action game). I'm increasingly finding that it's only Japanese auteur titles that are still prepared to embrace being "unapologetically a video game", as you put it (aside from maybe some Western indie games), since "realism" is becoming the be-all and end-all for many AAA titles. The Yakuza games are among the only major video game series I can think of that gets the balance just right (and I'm sure many will disagree with me there). It's the perfect blend of the "realistic" and the videogamey. |
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AQuin1904
Posts: 270 |
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I can see defending the minigame sequences in a one-time playthrough, but all the Bayo games are designed to be replayed to perfection. And while the core gameplay has the depth to support that, the minigames don't. The original game made you play through a bad clone of Afterburner every single time you replay its best boss fight, and after the first time, that might as well be a two-minute-long loading screen. The games also tend to lock content behind a pure-platinum run (it got you a whole unlockable character in the first game, although she mostly functions as a skin + difficulty modifier).
If these things are going to be frequent and unskippable, they need to be better. Wonderful 101 had you play a decent version of Punchout. Nier Automata went for fairly polished twin-stick shooting. Yakuza offers almost comically in-depth minigames (including some full arcade releases) that you aren't even required to play. All of those deliver on fun in a way that none of the Bayo minigames have ever managed. |
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Hal14
 Posts: 727 Location: Heart of africa |
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Bayo 2 also had this problem. I loved the final boss fight for that game but the level starts with a jet plane mini-game that can't be skipped. Same with Bayo 3: Kaiju mini-game at the start of the final chapter. I don't hate most mini-games but they're just not as fun as regular combat. The best one for me was the rhythm game in Bayo 3. The absolute worst one in the entire series was the turret gun in Bayo 1. |
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LinkTSwordmaster
 Posts: 561 Location: PA / USA |
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Bayonetta 3 is one of the few times in my life I've had something shoot from the top of my "play it NOOOOW" list to absolute rock-bottom (VTM Bloodlines 2 now has a friend). I think the internet has been over & over how disappointing the story is itself, but even on a tech level, it feels like Platinum was expecting a Switch Pro in every level of their production and design to boost performance and what the game would be capable of... and then started having to chop things out to make the game function at all. I already have the first two games, I'm fine with playing them over & over as-is. It is unthinkable that a franchise would tank a beloved character SO hard as this, but then look at what happened with Star Wars Ep 8 and how underwhelming its followup left people feeling.
I think it is actually important to note though - that Bayonetta has practically no rules when it comes to storytelling. They literally could have done anything they could have dare wanted with the story, and I think it says everything that the ONE story they did choose to tell has soured everyone so hard, that I legit hear even mega-fans questioning if they'd even be interested in a 4th game. Was it the lack of an expected console upgrade? Hubris on the part of the devs/scenario writers? It really doesn't matter, because at the end of the day, it sounds like enough people bought in that Platinum got their money. And it's not that you're wrong to have fun with Bayo 3 if you like Bayo 3 - it's more a me thing - I'm fine to just pull up the movies on YT and then watch streamers go punching ankles. |
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