I figured I might as well share my thoughts on these games since I played them late last year but I don't have enough to say about any individual one of them to justify doing a separate post for each one. So let's take a look at them in chronological order...
So, this was actually my 3rd time replaying it, playing it on Steam now after having played both the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game previously. I'm usually more of a turn based combat guy but the combat in this in spite of having some more advanced things you need to learn if you want to do some of the challenges, is still also simple enough where you can beat the game relatively easy even if you don't bother to really learn the ins and outs of the more advanced moves. Very basic combos can handle the majority of enemies as long as you can manage to dodge at the right time to activity Witch Time which makes all the enemies locked in slow motion while you clobber them.
The only thing that left me feeling kind of meh was the magic gauge. Which is under your health but unless you grind the in game currency to unlock a bunch of expensive artifacts it isn't used for that much. It's primary function otherwise is simply to hit enemies with "torture attacks" which are essentially fancy finishing moves to get you a slightly better reward. Problem is if you get hit at all your magic gauge drops, which means in order to get the most use out of it you need to be perfectly dodging all the time.
The gameplay aside Bayonetta herself is an incredibly charismatic badass character. The overall storyline has her as a magical being who is hundreds of years old but has amnesia from something that happened. That's kind of a cliche, but it sets up the story to be able to gradually explain all the lore stuff to you over the course of the game which would be a massive overload if they just dumped it all on you at the beginning. It also leads into a kind of cliched powerful beings essentially trying to bring an end to the world as we know it storyline but ends with the most absurdly iconic moment of Bayonetta essentially throwing a godlike being into the sun to defeat them. I'd consider that last bit a spoiler but without context it's just an absurdity that should make you want to see how it happens.
All of the other characters have their own unique things about them that make them a lovable cast of crazies. They've got to be one of the most anime cast of characters ever put in a game that doesn't actually specifically have an anime art style.
Bayonetta 2
Depending on what you expect out of it, Bayonetta 2 is either the best sequel ever or it's a by the numbers sequel that didn't do enough to innovate. Me personally, I thought it was great. But I also understand some people want a sequel to be more than simply getting more of what you already got.
The combat is more or less the same as the previous game but with a variety of quality of life improvements. The biggest one for me is they did away with that annoying thing where getting hit immediately takes a chunk out of your magic gauge. That never made sense to me because you're already punished for being hit by losing health without an additional penalty. The weapon variety in this also seems to be more set up to give you a variety of different ways to approach fights so that if one style of doing things doesn't work for you, you might be able to find a different solution.
As for the story, this time someone other than Bayonetta has amnesia hilariously enough. A little guy named Loki who in spite of his name is not the Norse God of the same name. But he is mischievous and is more of less the center of everything that's going on. An interesting side note, due to some minor time travel shenanigans we learn a decent amount about the villain from the first game, his motivations, and how he ended up there makes a lot more sense after this. I honestly thought the first game's story had concluded in a perfectly fine manner but getting extra details did help explain some things.
Overall Bayonetta 2 is more Bayonetta but with some fixes for some of the issues I had with the first game.
Bayonetta 3
The 3rd game however is where my love of this series kind of crashed and burned while also making me regret buying a Switch. Since Nintendo taking over this series is really the only reason I bought a Wii U or Switch. The big problems being this game actually tried too hard to be different than the first two games.
The gameplay had a lot of weird changes to it. They took summoning of monsters that used to be reserved for finishing attacks on the boss/mid boss enemies and did a weird thing to integrate them into the combo system and regular combat. While weird enough on their own the way you select summons on the controller replaced the previous use of the dpad which was previously used for consumable items such as healing items or stat boosters. The consumable items still exist in the game but now you have to open the in game menu to access them causing an immersion breaking pause any time you want to use them in the middle of a fight.
On top of that for the first time we go an excuse to use Bayonetta's friend Jean during a stage without having to unlock access to her after you beat the game, but the level where I had to use her suddenly played like a completely different game. It suddenly became a 2D platforming stealth section that just kind of ruined my mood when I hit it.
As far as the story goes, my issue isn't what most people have with it. I know a lot of people didn't like the new character Viola but for me personally, her goth/punk look is like 100% what I considered a perfect girl in my younger years so I got no beef with her. But the story is a multiverse storyline, in a manner similar to the DC's Crisis on Infinite Earths where a being is trying to wipe out all these different realms of existence. It completely throws out the Witches/Sages/Angels/Demons story stuff from the previous games in a kind of bizarre way, where it also makes you question why the Angels and Demons themselves aren't trying to stop this from happening.
At the end of the day I actually only got somewhere from 1/3 or halfway through the game before I quit in frustration when story progression was blocked by an odd challenge that involved using a train summon where you had to steer it a way to hit 4 enemies spread out in the area in one go to eliminate them or they regenerate and can't progress. It wasn't just that the challenge itself was annoying but at that point I just wasn't enjoying the game at all and just instantly uninstalled.
Feels like a weird jumping off point for me but whenever they make a sequel, I doubt they're going to backtrack the decisions that made me lose interest.
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