Bayonetta 2 review: A leading lady worth rooting for

It’s Bayonetta’s world, and we’re all just living in it. That much was clear after watching her dispatch wave after wave of enemies in divine style in her first game. Nobody could possibly strap a pair of flamethrowers to their feet and breakdance the propellant over a crowd of hostile angels if they weren’t 100 percent confident that they were completely in control of everything that happens next.

That sense of control is the most easily accepted facet of Bayonetta 2. Hooking dragons out from hell and launching them at your enemies is as basic in this game as firing bullets from a gun is in a Call of Duty title. When Bayonetta 2 steps past that baseline and actually tries to put on a show, it somehow gets infinitely more absurd, and entertaining.

If you played the first game in the Bayonetta series, you know the titular character gets her witchy powers through a pact with the aforementioned hell-spawn, giving her the canvas to express herself through a unique combination of magic, violence, and dance. The result isn’t just ridiculous, but incredibly fluid and responsive. Bayonetta is a force of nature in combat, sliding effortlessly into battle to land blows with guns, fists, and any whatever weapons she can collect. Complete a combo uninterrupted, and Bayonetta calls forth a “Wicked Weave” demonic summon finisher before stringing the tempest over to another heavenly target.

It’s explosive, colorful, and tuned to tight perfection even on the Wii U’s gamepad, a controller which until now I’ve always felt too spacious and unwieldy for this kind of precision combat based around a dichotomy of light and heavy attacks. Precision is important, too. “Witch Time” (it’s like bullet time, but more magical) activates whenever Bayonetta dodges an attack at the last second, opening a window to land Wicked Weaves and keeping her temporarily safe from harm. It’s an invaluable tool for surmounting the seemingly endless stream of boss-tier foes, not to mention especially rewarding: both psychologically and literally in the form of in-game “halo” currency.

Perfectly timed dodges are an important part of the gameplay.

By mixing and matching various weapons to her hands and feet, you can alter the flow of any standard combo for incredibly different results. Of course, you could stick to Bayonetta’s signature handguns (as well as foot-guns), but there’s no reason you should when each weapon feels uniquely and finely tuned for specific encounters.

It’s a refreshing kind of reward to find in a once-popular action genre that has lately fallen into obscurity as publishers put down their virtual swords in favor of fully automatic rifles. The most recent game I can draw comparisons to is DmC: Devil May Cry, the early 2013 reboot of Hideki Kamiya’s PlayStation 2 opus. Incidentally, Kamiya also plays director for both games in the Bayonetta series, making him one of the last remaining standard bearers for the genre. The similarities between the two series are hard to miss, chief among them a penchant for air-juggling foes, but Bayonetta 2 turns the craziness level up further than any in the past.

Everything from the star’s redesigned costume to the outlandish arenas she rules looks incredible at a (mostly) stable 60 frames per second on the Wii U. Things slow down considerably during the static, “motion comic” cut scenes, but these only matter if you’re paying attention to the appropriately ludicrous plot—a rescue mission plotted through heaven, hell, and Northern Europe—and not the battles that should rightly be the focus.

A sexualized power fantasy

Let’s go surfing now, everybody’s learning how…

Bayonetta 2’s gameplay and controls provide the player with a sense of immense, fantastical potency, but it’s the visual treatment of the main character that contextualizes the game as a much more direct sexualized power fantasy. When Bayonetta’s coiffure isn’t being used to summon monsters and bash boogeymen, it serves as her only clothing. Inversely, when it is being used to crack skulls it does not serve as clothing. This ensures plenty of brief hints at partial nudity that are only a part of Bayonetta’s very obvious, almost clunky sexuality, alongside the odd nod to pole-dancing and BDSM.