Garrett AnthonyI’m going to start a little bit from afar. I’m a big fan of slashers, especially the Devil May Cry and Bayonetta series. Been through every part of each of these two series of games and several times. Was even able to knock out an S rank in Devil May Cry 5: SE for Virgil on the Legendary Dark Knight difficulty. I mean, yes, I really like slashers. But still, back to Bayonetta 3.
Graphics, performance and locations
And I’ll probably start with one of the weakest parts of this game – the graphics. In my personal feeling, the ports of earlier Bayonetta and Bayonetta 2 to the Nintendo Switch were winning in some ways in terms of graphics. Yes, there may not have been as many locations and not as many polygons, but the poor quality of the sprites, even in the chapter selection menu, is very striking. Here’s a screenshot from that menu:
The quality of both the dart hand itself and the chapter labels themselves are extremely poor. The first impression was not very pleasant at the sight of this.
The graphics in the game itself are not so striking, especially in handheld mode, as most of the time we still see highly detailed characters and you can only pick on some artifacts in the background during sharp camera turns. And then, this nuance noticed not me, but a friend who was watching the game, when I quickly moved around the location outside of combat.
The locations themselves in Bayonetta 3 are made under the stylistics of different times, cities and eras. From ancient Egypt to Paris with a slight touch of steampunk. All the locations are different and very colorful, but I personally did not have what it was in the previous parts of the series, namely the very identity and colorful.
The performance is on a very decent level and almost always produces a stable 60 FPS during combat, which is extremely important for games of this genre. There are drawdowns (I can’t give exact numbers as I have no FPS-meter on my switch), but they are extremely insignificant and appear in most cases when switching from “mini-missions” to the normal game and vice versa.
The story in Bayonetta 3… is. It’s just there, and for the most part you only remember it in the last 2-3 missions. The plot of the game is that a certain villain called Singularity is destroying the worlds in the multiverse to make them merge into one Alpha-world, where he will rule. To defeat him the heroes need to collect five Chaos Mechanisms, find Doctor Sigurd and get into this Alpha world to destroy the Singularity.
And that is, in fact, the entire plot almost to the end of the game. I may not have been following the storyline so much myself, but it seems to me there are a lot of plot holes, incomprehensibility and logical inconsistencies. You can watch how the story ends on YouTube or just pass the game, which I highly recommend to do (not because of the story).
Bayonetta has always been famous for its hurricane fights, endless combos and awesome executions. But Platinum Games decided to slightly change the arsenal and the way the weapons themselves work.
Earlier in Bayonetta we could equip the protagonist with two weapons at once: on arms and legs. Also we could have 2 sets of weapons and switch between them during the battle. Weapons were not upgraded, but certain abilities, such as turning into bats at the very last moment when dodging an enemy attack for a longer Witch Time we had to buy in the “Hell Gate” shop/bar from the demon Rodin for the Nimbas we received during the battle with angels.
In part 3 they kept the idea of switching between sets, but the sets themselves now do not have the ability to change the top and bottom to different types of weapons. But greatly increased the arsenal itself and different kinds of skills. Now each individual weapon and its demon must be pumped separately for the crystals received for performing combos.
Changed another mechanic. Now instead of Climax ability, which was an analogue of Devil Trigger from Devil May Cry 5, we control 3 demons at once, and you can switch between them during the battle. Summoning demons can be done by using the magic scale and they can help to destroy some enemies’ shields, knock them out and just quickly dispose of them. But during the summoning and control of the demons Bayonetta becomes vulnerable to the attacks of the enemy, because it cannot move and attack itself, although this point can be corrected by buying a small earring in the store at Rodin. In addition to the usual summoning, at the end of some combos you can summon a selected demon, which can attack unsuspecting enemies, giving even more damage to them.
Battles with enemies have become much more dynamic and, in part, more tactical thanks to the introduction of demon mechanics. And isn’t it cool to destroy homunculi with a huge clock tower that shoots rockets, turn into a small mech and finish them off with a fire spider-scorpion (hello from Devil May Cry 1)?