How cool is Bayonetta 3? There are a lot of candidates. Bayonetta is a witch with homicidal hair and handgun stilettos. That’s not bad. Lastly, there’s Bayonetta, who wears hot pants, kneepads, a denim jacket, and four bladed yo-yos. As well as Bayonetta, dressed in white, trimmed with gold, and troubled by conflict, we find her in the desert. But she’s not that great. I’d nominate Bayonetta, who runs people over with a demonic train, called the Dead End Express, in ancient China. How’s it going?
It’s set in a multiverse, if you didn’t know. Recently, fractious narratives have become popular – I guess it speaks to our Plath-like appetite for regret, our curiosity about What If? And our hunger for a big life. It tends to slip into the frenzied and cracked. The pale skin of Bayonetta’s face crazed like an eggshell, with a crimson glow underneath. It’s the signature image of the game: she’s just as devilled, scrambled, and fried as the narrative, but it’s still cohering with her.
The Bayonetta games have always been about combat. Despite the plots and haircuts, our heroine’s abilities haven’t changed. Once again, she summons monsters to savage her enemies. As always, she shoots, kicks, and kills. The best part is that she still cartwheels free of harm and activates Witch Time, plunging the world into purple and letting you whack your enemies in slow motion. A phrase like that would make a good tag line, title, and product description for the entire Witch Time series. Like Active Reload, from Gears of War, it’s a great mechanic: simple, laced with difficulty, rooted in the ideas of the day, and all about time – how a fleeting moment can stretch into an eternity.
These cheering constants are paired with a few new tricks. Now Bayonetta can hover like Kameo: Elements of Power’s buzzing star. Besides summoning demons, she can now pilot them as well, laying waste to her enemies and generally having fun. When she’s embodied as Gomorrah, a dark lump of Godzilla-shaped fun, she romps around downtown Tokyo. What’s the problem? There’s always been a spirited too-muchness to the series, and Yusuke Miyata, along with Yuki Suda, keep it going. In a blink, Bayonetta goes from dripping cave to subway car in Shibuya, then chases a flying whale along a curving highway. There’s a lot going on in Bayonetta 3.
Even so, Bayonetta 3 doesn’t sag. For one thing, it has too many selves, and it’s too busy playing other games. As Shibuya does a low-poly impression of New York in Marvel’s Spider-Man, you go from a giant spider swinging on a silky thread to Viola, staggering through a desert like Nathan Drake in Uncharted 3: Drake’s Deception. Oddly enough, what lingers is a faint sense of relief and wistfulness. Hosannas to any game that manages to get made, not mindless homages. The Devil May Cry series came out of Kamiya’s failed attempt at Resident Evil 4, and it was only a needy Nintendo that got us a sequel five years after Bayonetta. There are universes where Bayonetta 3 didn’t exist, but it’s glad it exists, and it’s all too aware of them.
