Phenomenal Anticlimax; or ‘Crying Babies and Cockroaches’
There is more than a little of the artist in the art they create. Their lives, their experiences, their inspirations – all of it comes together in a beautiful medley from which they draw and source their creativity, like a phylactery. In this era of over-transparency where knowing when to separate art and artist has become only increasingly more important in being able to ethically enjoy any given work without mindlessly supporting the residual thoughts and views of egomaniacs and bad-faithers, it has become increasingly clear that Bayonetta’s Hideki Kamiya is destined to join that pantheon of narcissists and demiurges alongside the likes of George Lucas and JK Rowling.
Even as a lifelong Bayonetta enthusiast, I have the agony of declaring that 3 represents everything that’s wrong with sequels, modern game design, writing, and the kind of despotic view on art that it never quite belongs to anyone other than the creator – that regardless of audience view, the creator has final word and that they can never truly write themselves in corners or betray the tone and trust they’ve established (apparently accidentally) with fans and lovers of said work – because no part of it ever belonged to them to begin with – in spirit, in form, or otherwise. It exists solely as an ‘affirmation’ of the creators ideals and fantasises, not a phylactery to draw power and inspiration from, but a reliquary that is part and parcel the creator themselves, and that anyone disagrees or thinks otherwise can fuck off and ‘get banned’.
To be fair, as a collaborative effort I cannot fully pin the blame squarely on Kamiya’s modestly sized forehead, and I will in time take umbrage with every arm of Bayonetta 3’s creative endeavors and failures, and mete out blame as widely as I can. But as creative lead and father (now lover) to Bayonetta, Kamiya and his poor attitude towards critics and anyone who sees his creative endeavors as anything besides what squarely rests in his mind’s eye, he will be burdened with the lion’s share.
Narrative Design
Story, Themes, and Conflicts
Bayonetta 3 strangely ignores the buildup from 1 & 2 with the balance between light and dark being kept in check by Eyes of the World, and after the events on Mt. Fimbulventr in 2, their disappearance from the world. The Eyes were the driving force for the villains in the first two entries, and Bayonetta herself – propelling her to investigate the Ithivoll Group, and a secondary goal after retrieving Jeanne’s soul from the gates of hell. We as viewers have been made to believe for two entries that – aside from Bayonetta rediscovering herself, her identity, and the remains of her family and life, the Eyes of the World played an integral part in the world’s order, and kept a tight standoff between the trinities of reality, between the Angels, the Demons, and the humans gifted with the eyes in the world of Chaos. Bayonetta 2 even notes at the end, that now that the Eyes have been forever lost, that the world would fall slowly into total chaos as the legions of the divine battle for supremacy and control, a la Revelations. But then in 3 – nothing. No word of the Eyes, no big movements from Paradiso or Inferno – in fact, angels and demons are so rare in Bayonetta 3 that you’re lucky to find a single verse in each chapter that features them. The prologue starts and is fine enough for the most part, featuring Bayonetta’s apparent progeny the oh-so subtle Viola (as if she could be posited as anyone other than Bayonetta and Luka’s offspring) warping from her Alphaverse to meet another Bayonetta in New York, to reveal Singularity’s plans for the multiverse and their quest to travel to Thule and recover five Chaos Gears in order to stop the culling of worlds. It feels so removed from the first two games, both narratively and tonally, and although featuring the same characters – they all feel so flat and one-dimensional compared to the previous titles. Bayonetta isn’t buying Christmas caviar with Jeanne in a ball gown as jets fly overhead. She’s buying bread in the most sensible looking thing Bayonetta has ever been shown to be wearing, with about as much energy and dynamism as anyone who’s buying bread. The cinematic planning, the facial animations, all of it feels generations behind what was present in Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2. Nothing feels touched let alone glanced at by storyboard artists or facial rigging experts – leading to every scene feeling flat and lifeless, especially when compared to its predecessors.
There’s little energy or urgency connecting the end of 2 to the beginning of 3. Little hyperviolence or hypersexuality or even hyperbole in the dialogue or framing – the opening scenes (and on) are lifeless, poorly choreographed, uninventive, and worst of all – boring. Your main character is an eight-foot-tall, quipping, femme fatale who summons demons and brutalizes angels – and Bayonetta 3 somehow takes this concept and makes it boring. Everything is taken matter-of-factly, Bayonetta is completely unphased and uninterested in Singularity and Viola, and the attitude certainly rubs off on the viewer. As previously, Bayonetta would act sangfroid and unbothered by the threats from Angels and Demons, she would betray that coolness regularly with her genuine regard for her friends and cohorts. A playful and hyperbolic back and forth where Bayonetta always has the upper hand and last word – until she doesn’t, and it makes for a fantastically dynamic and genuine interaction with the world around her, where an angel the size of a building could assault her and she’s laugh, wiggle her bosom at it, say something delightfully vulgar, and beat it to bloody pieces, but then Jeanne or one of her ‘Little Ones’ would cry or fall and she’d rush to them with all the genuine urgency in the world – then play it off with a laugh or an eyeroll. Beautiful, pulpy, dripping with character and tension – all gone. Scrubbed unbelievably clean and straightforward in 3 where everything is just as commonplace and banal as the next thing, where she rattles off a lazy pun and acts about as sexy as anyone woman in 30s can, a lick of the lips, a ‘mmmm’ and then she’s on her way. No taught cutscenes of her clothes being shredded to pieces, no gratuitous scenes of violence where she spanks an enemy to death for even thinking of touching her, no comedic timing or juxtaposition. Just one miserable plot point to another. It plays very much as a neutering of Bayonetta – a thematic one and a literal one. She’s no longer an untouchable dream woman, completely in control of her sexuality and teasing anyone and everyone with it mercilessly. She’s now a kept woman – whether in Kamiya’s head or Lukas (aren’t they the same thing?) she’s now tamed. I think there’s even something in her dances – her rituals to summon demons that no longer feel sexy or purposeful. They instead feel frantic and jerky, like some mixture between freestyle dancing and interpretive dance.
The bulk of Bayonetta 3 takes place in the most played out of circumstances available in the modern age – you guessed it, a multiverse. Never having been mentioned or referenced before in the first two titles, it is as commonplace, uninspired, and out-of-pocket a multiverse as anyone could imagine. It isn’t different pocket dimensions where let’s say, Bayonetta is actually a man, Bayonetta isn’t a witch at all, Bayonetta and co are animals, Bayonetta and co are Lovecraftian outer gods, or made of spaghetti, or covered in eyeballs, or whatever have you – no. It’s simply represented as different eras. Bayonetta is always a witch, but each ‘multiverse’ just embodies a different era from the real-world – Modern Japan, (Ming-Dynasty?) China, Amarna-era Egypt, postmodern France, etc. Bayonetta’s always there, always a witch, and just dressed up in some relative attire from that era. It isn’t really a true multiverse, but more of an attempt to askew all of the time-travelling plot devices and conventions from the first two entries without running into any new paradoxes. It feels lazy, ham-fisted, and old – everyone has done a multiverse, it has been done to absolute death, and while there are a few examples of it being done well and with an inspired outlook on the convention, Bayonetta 3’s is not that.
It tries (I think?) feebly and miserably to reach the same hyperbolic heights of it’s predecessors, but absolutely falls flat every step of the way. It’s tone deaf – there are no highs or lows, just a single long hallway of slurry until the end. Any thematics present in the narrative elude me, unless they’re just things like ‘Family’ or ‘Destiny’ which is laughable considering that Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 explore these ideas far more clearly and succinctly than 3 ever thinks to.
Characters
Design, Development, and Dialogue
Let’s go ahead and talk about Viola. Bayonetta 3 insists that Luka and Bayonetta somehow sired this miserable character and forces both her existence and personality down the player’s throat every chance it gets. It apparently wasn’t enough that Kamiya had a game featuring his perfect headcanoned ingenue-wife-to-be, he also had to tame her sexuality, saddle her with a frankly unlikeable and genuinely baffling offspring, (who of course resembles him more than her mother) and then kill her. The perfect wife, whore, madonna, and martyr, all in one package.
Viola’s design is an amalgamation of western and eastern design influences, from her 90s/early 2000s punk tartan and leather getup, to her massive katana and overdesigned clown-makeup I can only assume is pulled from decora and harajuku. Mari Shimazaki has very rarely ever missed with her character designs, but frankly Viola’s a mess, and everything about her clashes with the general haute couture present with adults like Bayonetta, Jeanne, and to some degree – Luka. She feels out-of-place, and is likely (at least some) purposely done since she’s meant to feel a bit like she’s ‘trying too hard’ to be different. Viola is from the outset – immediately unlikeable. She clashes so much with the cast not only visually but from a personality standpoint – she wears every emotion on her sleeves, and to an obnoxious degree. She curses gratuitously (which strangely feels cheap and classless in a Bayonetta game), whines incessantly, and just generally acts like an old man’s idea of what a young-edgy-modern woman presents as – good and bad. Viola doesn’t have a chance to get you to like her – your perception and her value to the series has already been decided by her creator. That is, Bayonetta 3 maddeningly treats Viola as a successor from the outset – and it’s painfully obvious. Is Viola what Kamiya and his team thinks modern women see themselves as? That they’d look at Viola and say ‘She’s just like me! I love her!’. Part of Bayonetta’s appeal is that she’s timeless – a woman completely in control of herself and her sexuality, loved AND feared by both men and women, almost a demigod of hedonism and fertility. Something to aspire to be, and something to adore and find qualities of in others. And Viola is – none of that. She’s insecure, uncertain, inelegant, not even remotely sexual, and a completely uninteresting character to the last – and Platinum wants to make her the face of Bayonetta now?
Bayonetta as I’ve mentioned takes a backseat in this entry, both thematically and as an almost complete upheaval of her character. I would have, before Bayonetta 3, watched and played Bayonetta and Jeanne taking jobs from Rodin and Enzo hunting treasure, slaughtering angels and demons, and unravelling the mysteries of the world, the lore of Paradiso and Inferno – ad infinitum. The last thing I, or anyone, ever wanted to see was Bayonetta settle down – to stop quipping and flashing tantalizing looks onto her person and into her feelings, and instead wear normal clothes and have an awful child with that run-of-the-mill comedy-relief reporter (who to be clear, I actually liked before 3) and then die. There have always been themes of generational motherhood in Bayonetta, Bayonetta herself is still coming to terms with her mother and fathers lives and deaths and the balance they played in keeping the world whole. But Bayonetta treats her past self as Cereza and Loki more like true-blood children than she ever treats Viola (Although I think this is likely due to the degradation of Bayonetta’s hyperbolic character in this entry). And Bayonetta’s motherhood feels both completely out of character for her, and completely forced upon the narrative and the audience.
Jeanne is given a backseat as well, playing more of a supporting role in her (surprisingly enjoyable) Cutie J/Spy missions hunting down Sigurd. She is more or less unchanged, but given absolutely zero screen time to do or say anything remarkable outside of her counterpart in the Egyptian Multiverse.
Luka and his Fairie King/Strider elements come completely out of left field. He serves a larger role in Bayonetta, but a minuscule supporting role in Bayonetta 2 (and frankly the best use of Luka). There are no elements of Fairies or Werewolves or the ham-handed ‘Adam and Eve’ concept that exists in the first two entries, and here feels like more shoehorned-in justification to make Bayonetta and Luka work as an item, and as a thematic element across all of the multiverses. It feels so much like the player’s intelligence is being questioned by the creators in this entry – that you’re meant to just forget everything that happened leading up to this entry and instead be completely onboard that Bayonetta and Luka are spiritual Adams and Eves across all of eternity in spite of everything that has been said and done before – and the fact that these terms and ideas are being pulled from nowhere in this entry, seemingly to just justify the end.
I’ll take this moment to address Bayonetta and her sexual preferences, since it seems to be a hot topic of discussion among fans. I have never thought of Bayonetta in terms such as straight or gay – up until this entry, I think we are meant to see her as some secret third thing (not just bisexual). But a true hedonist or satanist – someone who does what feels good when it feels good. And that’s that. Something ineffable, something us mere mortals wish we could aspire to be, someone who is completely in control of how they are viewed, and how they view others, who for which trivial terms like ‘straight’ and ‘gay’ crash upon her shores as nothing. I never in a million years saw Luka as her husband. A conquest? Perhaps. Something to continually tantalize with tastes but never the full dish? Absolutely. Jeanne as an equal, absolutely sexually, but also the only person in the modern day that fully understands her. Even Rodin on occasion. Never Enzo. 3 trivializes this mystique that Bayonetta commanded. It cuts all of her relationships into boring, trite, commonplace, modern standards, and it’s truly one of the most deflating and sad things I’ve seen happen to a character.
Gameplay
Influence, Mechanics, and UI/UX
There is a disconcerting – but now ‘thematic’ for this title – messiness to combat in Bayonetta 3. Which by all accounts, should be one of its gravest sins, considering that these adventures are just that – taughtly paced combat challenges with a rating and combo system that emphasizes tight control, dodging, combo variety, and experimentation with arms. 3 introduces ‘Demon Slaves’ which by all accounts turns into a ‘mash these two buttons to win’ stratagem almost immediately. No longer are you reading enemy movements to learn how to perfectly execute Witch Time and punish them – instead you summon full versions of Bayonetta’s former final combo digestifs to take up the entire viewable screen and just stunlock most enemies into submission until they are dead. And there is a massive emphasis on this – every accessory, every ability, everything is tuned so that combat devolves into summoning a Demon Slave and trivializing the nuance and skill of learning and adapting from previous entries. Slaves cover the entire screen most of the time, so even if you wanted to learn enemy movements and patterns, most of the time you can’t see them – especially in the flurry of (typically) slow and lumbering movements from the demons – but even then, why would you bother? Demons can push enemies out of combos, ignore attacks, and outside of a few enemies having attacks that stun or outright kill your slaves, you have three set to your wheel for your disposal and can still summon them during Witch Time. The entire combat system of Bayonetta has been usurped by Demon Slaves – and completely trivializes almost every verse in an instant. Even the challenge verses where you have to balance on a pillar and attack are completely nullified by just summoning a slave. They’re cool, and they’re big, but they infringe upon the spirit and challenge of these games and turn them into a cakewalk the majority of the time. Bayonetta herself has again been nerfed here – she can only equip one weapon per set instead of her original two, again highlighting the emphasis the game places on utilizing these overpowered Demon Slaves instead of engaging in typical combat. And it’s not just that – combat feels slower and far less snappy and fast paced than in previous titles. Between the giant, lumbering slaves, and Bayonetta’s single weapon combat, there’s far less overall tension in combat, where everything feels slower and far more forgiving than in previous entries.
The Homonculi too are some of the most uninteresting and visually unappealing enemies I’ve ever faced, in any game – let alone Bayonetta. They are large, ubiquitous, ugly, humanoid (or not?) enemies who are particularly bad at telegraphing their oncoming attacks, partly because of their size (even though Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 didn’t have this problem with large angels and demons) and partly because their biology is so varied and strange it’s difficult to discern exactly how they’re going to be attacking you in the first place. But again, you’re likely not to notice some of these things, simply because you’re going to summon a Demon Slave that takes up the entire screen and stunlocks most enemies into oblivion.
Featuring some of the most linear and unimaginative level design in any Bayonetta game to date (though big and large, which is apparently important now), 3 litters it’s wide open areas with trinkets and items to collect similarly to past entries, but with far less friction and thought involved in actually attainting these items. These large environments seem to want you to experiment with the different traversal abilities afforded to you with whatever single weapon you have equipped, but I often found it confusing to navigate between it wanting you to use a specific Demon Slave and a specific Demon Ability tied to a weapon.
There are also large-scale Kaiju battles that are frankly so played out and slow I groaned at the end of every boss chapter in anticipation of them. Your slow, lumbering, Demon Slaves become even larger and slower and play basically a mini-game tit for tat trading blows until the enemy dies. Previously, Bayonetta herself was up against massive enemies with breakable parts that were a joy to traverse and destroy, and part of that excitement came from being so small and seemingly unmatched, but using your various weapons and traversal abilities to overcome the differences and reign triumphant. It’s just another example of 3 taking the fantastic formulas laid down by Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 and seemingly changing them just for the sake of changing them – heedless of how broken, pathetic, and unoriginal they now seem with any degree of hindsight.
Bayonetta 3 took great pains to update and modernize the UI for this title from it’s maximalist (thematically appropriate) HUD and Menus to something more typical and modern, but good-looking for the most part nonetheless. There’s an odd skill-tree that seems out of place, and a lot of poor UX work around acquiring the items needed and then having to navigate all the way to the appropriate area in the skill tree to utilize said items. It again feels like a strange, clunky, addition to a system that didn’t need any modernizing or typical modern conventions added to it. Bayonetta 3’s director is famously a new director – this is his first title. And it feels like he has been indoctrinated with a lot of conventional thinking about game design, and wanted to shoehorn in as much of that knowledge as possible into his first title – to prove that he understands theory and is competent. But if anything it has only shown how sophomoric and out-of-time a lot of his ideals are, and most of them clash with the great foundation Bayonetta was built with. I’m not sure if there was a great push from Nintendo to make Bayonetta 3 more ‘family friendly’ like most people were terrified Nintendo would do with Bayonetta 2 (which they absolutely did not), but Bayonetta 3 does feel very basic and inoffensive in a lot of its systems and ideas and executions, with the lowest possible barrier for entry, even though it is the third title in the series.
Sound Design
Acting, Soundtrack, and Effects
I loathe to bring up Hellena Taylor and the public embarrassment her lying and hyperbole brought the series and SEGA at the time, or the different industry standards between Japanese and American voice actors – which will warrant its own exploration in future, but Taylor very much nails everything about Bayonetta and her personality, and always has. But frankly, with the dialogue in 3, that talent would have been wasted anyway. Jennifer Hale does a remarkable job standing in (and hopefully replacing) for Taylor, but it is such a shame she had so little good dialogue to work with. Bayonetta doesn’t get to do or say anything remarkable or interesting in 3. She doesn’t emote in fun ways, she doesn’t say or do anything fantastic or funny or sexy, and it’s a shame. It’s also strange, that in the various multiverses portrayed in 3, that the Bayonettas of those multiverses don’t actually speak in Japanese or Chinese or French (even though often times the citizenry of the times do) – wouldn’t it have been wonderfully fun to have the various dub actresses shown off in every version of the game somehow instead of just speaking in plain english? Many of the demons summoned in 3 also speak in plain english – unlike the Angels in the original who speak in a fictionalized form of enochian. It feels sort of lazy and uninventive in a world ruled by angels and demons and amazonian witches.
The voice cast does an admirable job with the thoroughly uninteresting and tame script, with no real poor performances aside from Singularity’s voice modifiers and modulations that make understanding what he says in cutscenes impossible without subtitles, and Viola’s voice actress – who i hate to say very much sounds like a YouTuber doing a bad impersonation, and who very much adds to Viola’s general unlikability.
The soundtrack is, as you might have guessed, no better off than the rest of the production. Featuring a handful of much stronger and much more interesting returning tracks from Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 (by Rei Kondoh), 3 features a baffling variety of dissonant musical tracks that run the gamut from being completely unremarkable to being wholly out-of-place and inappropriate for a Bayonetta title. Rei Kondoh is sorely missed in this entry, lacking his swelling orchestral and hymnal boss and battle tracks that have so very much cemented themselves as mainstays and wholly necessary thematically. Rei Kondoh’s work on ‘You May Call Me Father’, ‘Red and Black’, ‘Battle for the Umbran Throne’, and ‘Aesir’ absolutely capture the emotional hyperbole and hyperviolence the series is now known for, and to make another game without him would be anathema. Bayonetta 3 suffers for his loss, leaning on rearrangements and new composers who – along with the rest of the crew, don’t seem to know they are working on a Bayonetta title. There’s no consistent thematics, no thematic variety of instrument, no emotional punctuation, just a series of discordant and detached background noise, with the odd standout like ‘Red Moon’. Even the main battle theme, Moonlight Serenade is just so ineffectual compared to the likes of ‘Fly Me to the Moon’ or Moon River’, it’s not even in the same class.
Last Judgement
Pros, Cons, and Verdict
I’m not sure what Kamiya was thinking when he wrote the scenario for Bayonetta 3. Was the idea of a sexually liberated witch traveling the world and hunting treasure with her sexy friends forever so truly anathema to him and his uniquely Japanese view of pulp fiction? Did he see how people celebrated Bayonetta as a character and a force and just yearn to dismantle that? Why did he even write her in the first place? Just to break her down and subjugate her to fit into his real-world view of women? Pluck her from her hyperviolent, hypersexual world, into one where she’s forced to reproduce and then die once she’s outlived her usefulness? If so, I wish he hadn’t given her to the world to begin with. But then again, he doesn’t truly believe he gave her to anyone. She’s always been his.
Bayonetta 3 is a maddening train-wreck of poor directorial decisions, uninspired writing, and seemingly deliberate attempts to rid the world of one of it’s more unique and interesting heroines in a genre dominated by self-inserts and ridiculous, tired, portrayals of men and manhood. To truly feel how out-of-time, unpolished, and truly ‘Un-Bayonetta-Like’ Bayonetta 3 is, one only needs pick up Bayonetta 2 to see and feel for themselves.