The bombast register goes all the way in great Bayonetta 3 ★★★★☆

Who wouldn’t have liked to have been there about ten years ago? The meeting at Japanese studio PlatinumGames at which game designer Hideki Kamiya pitched his idea Bayonetta?

“So if I understand you correctly, Hideki, you want us to create a computer game around a trigger-happy witch who prances around in extravagant catsuits and uses insane weapons to kill the most hideous monsters. A young, hip witch who becomes increasingly naked during acrobatic battles?’

Kamiya: “Something like that.”

The first Bayonettagame left everyone so stunned in 2009 that no one believed that a successor would go over that again. Yet that happened in 2014, with bayonet 2. And it happens again with bayonet 3.

The third in the series does not make big, revolutionary leaps. The witch who traded her broom for glittery barkers is treading familiar territory in her stiletto heels. She alternates a quip here with a bang for someone’s brain there. Bayonetta is a comic disguised as a game: delicious, baroque monkey cabbage and fodder for woke feminists.

Fighting ballet

It is in bayonet 3 especially the clever combat system that has been tightened up and made more accessible to the less experienced gamer at the same time.

For novices, the repertoire of button combinations for thumps and kicks – or to dodge them – remains quite overwhelming, not to say intimidating. It is very chaotic on the screen, because every action is accompanied by more fireworks than the Netherlands sets off at the end of the year.

Fortunately, there is still the ‘witch time’, a silent moment that arises when Bayonetta perfectly parries an attack. All enemies then become as slow as snails, so that the player can measure out some more accurate stallions and estimate the rest of the battle scene.

Bayonetta is not alone. In addition to her arsenal of firearms, wimps, and kicks, she can also summon demons to beat up the opposing team.

That familiar game mechanic has undergone the biggest transformation. In the previous games, players had to watch with their hands on each other as those hell beasts attacked the opponent with special attacks. The witch could use them when it came time for the final blow towards the end of a battle. In bayonet 3 can we control the demons.

That doesn’t mean the fights have become a cinch. To begin with, the infernal henchmen only keep fighting as long as Bayonetta doesn’t take any blows himself. Which is not easy, because the witch remains fixed on a fixed point and has to perform a dance there to keep her demons going. (“Really, Hideki?”)

In addition, demons can die if their injuries become too severe. And there are enemies who need a single blow to send Bayonetta’s sidekicks to heaven.

Lean plot

In the 10 to 20 hours it takes to get the credits into view, a varied stream of demons pass by. From Godzilla-like monsters to a web-throwing spider, from a locomotive with cannons to a bat that can split itself in two. But there is also a singing frog that seems to have run away from it RuPaul’s Drag Race.

As in the previous two parts, the plot is even less than the heroine herself in the heat of battle. There’s something about parallel universes, where multiple versions of Bayonetta try to thwart the plans of a “creature” that is up to no good with the world as we know it and uses biological weapons called Homunculi to do so.

Bayonetta is surrounded by the regular supporting cast, but also by a new face. Viola is the second playable character. She is a young witch-in-training who doesn’t yet have magical powers, but can still pack a punch with a samurai sword.

Viola does not add much to the bombastic ballet of bayonet 3: she propels the story forward. But you never know what the next meeting at PlatinumGames has in store for her.

bayonet 3 was released for the Nintendo Switch.