Bayonetta 3 Review: A Maximalist Burlesque

The witch is back, stronger than ever, and the only thing standing in her way is the Switch.

Bayonetta 3
Photo: Nintendo

Where do you take a series whose first entry ended with Bayoneta punching the unfathomable, ancient face of God into the cleansing fire of the sun? Bayonetta 2 already went the other direction, with a literal descent into hell. How do you escalate the stakes when you already treated the murder and immolation of God with the same level of chill as finding out the McRib is back? Bayonetta 3’s answer to that question is, well, you don’t. Bayonetta is, if nothing else, a hell of a dancer, and this is largely a smooth, sexy, and stylish slide to the side for everybody’s favorite witch rather than a step forward.

Like so much media this year, Bayonetta 3 is a tale about the multiverse. A man-made, self-replicating entity called Singularity wants to smash every version of reality together in order to easily wipe the slate clean and start over from scratch. It needs to take every single version of Bayonetta and her silver-haired partner-in-crime, Jeanne, out of the picture in order to do so. Of course, neither witch is taking this lying down, but the game starts with Singularity managing to make distressingly quick work out of one universe’s Bayonetta. The job isn’t as easy as it sounds.

Still, Bayonetta—now voiced admirably by Jennifer Hale, and for good reasons, apparently—certainly gives it her everything, and then some. Anyone who’s spent more than five minutes with the first two games can jump right into this with only the tiniest bit of fuss finding out that certain combos end differently. Newbies, though, can also jump in without fear, as the game continues to be as welcoming to button-mashers as meticulous combat experts. The big looming threat of the game is more nebulous, but the ways in which Bayonetta and her friends deal with that threat have never been weirder or wilder. Why take out baddies with stodgy old swords, spears, and claws when you can knock them around with chainsaws, or a demon diva’s mic stand? One weapon in the game is literally just the two sharpest chunks of a gothic cathedral.

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In case it isn’t obvious, Bayonetta hasn’t lost a step in terms of pure unfettered chaos. You may not get to punch anything more grandiose than God, but you still get to have kaiju fights in a ruined New York, fire gatling guns off the back of a demonic train that’s being chased by a monster across the Great Wall of China, and watch a mega-sized demon witch flick enemies away like flies while taking a sexy bubble bath in the upper stratosphere of the Earth.

YouTube video

The game’s multiverse concept has Bayonetta trotting between universes to see how her alternate selves are dealing with the Singularity problem. And while they don’t go full Everything Everywhere All At Once wild with the concept, there’s still quite a lot of fun to be had meeting Bayonetta’s international variants, especially their demon familiars, which have been integrated elegantly into the game’s story and combat like never before, adding even more grand spectacle and creative options for dealing with enemies into the game.

Jeanne’s stages have her infiltrating a high-tech laboratory in a lovingly crafted Elevator Action homage, complete with their own hilariously kitschy intro sequence (shades of Saul Bass). There’s something to be said about how vague and undefined the new enemies are—taking them on is certainly not as instantly gratifying as being able to punch out biblically accurate angels and demons—but Bayonetta 3 picks up the slack with a sense of play and creativity above and beyond even what the first two games were capable of. This is a game of smarter ambitions rather than bigger ambitions, and that’s unambiguously a win for the series.

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That all dovetails with Bayonetta getting some extra help this time around, not just from Jeanne, but from Viola, a scrappy pop-punk ninja whose best friend is a giant Cheshire cat who looks and acts like a demonic Totoro. Much like Nero and V brought some welcome twists to the Devil May Cry formula a few years back, Viola is a stark contrast to the maximalist burlesque that is Bayonetta. Her whole presence as a character and as a set of unique, thoughtful gameplay mechanics, is the game’s biggest inspired factor, a delightful burst of youthful, foul-mouthed, loopy energy. (Anna Brisbin’s voice work will hopefully make her a star.) Where her story arc leads her isn’t just well-earned, but probably the biggest reason for why the game goes out on a high note, which is especially vital given one particular sour note prior for Bayonetta’s arc.

The only real objective problem this time around is that Queen Bay may be a little too much woman for the Switch. We’ve forgiven Nintendo’s little system that could for being underpowered compared to even the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One for years now, but Bayonetta 3 running into such frequent stretches of slowdown, visual muddiness, and low-fidelity textures feels like Platinum Games hitting the outer limits of how conceptually complex a game can be on the system without sacrificing something big. And make no mistake, this is a game where entire cities are ripped from the ground and twisted into metropolitan Twizzlers in the first three hours. Even with the stakes being what they are, this is still a massive game, brimming with spectacle, begging for the horsepower to run free that the Switch is incapable of providing.

This game was reviewed with code provided by Golin on October 28.

Score: 
 Developer: Platinum Games  Publisher: Nintendo  Platform: Switch  Release Date: October 28, 2022  ESRB: M  ESRB Descriptions: Blood and Gore, Partial Nudity, Strong Language, Violence  Buy: Game

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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