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I loved Bayonetta. The 2009 original was a whirling dervish of a brawler, throwing out a hundred punches every which way, with every single one of them hitting the spot. It was Platinum's technical brand of fighting sped up into an absurdist blur, every bit as inventive as a Tokyo EAD Mario game where new ideas and preposterous set-pieces are thrown in as quickly as they are thrown away. It makes sense, then, that the sequel has ended up on a Nintendo platform.I still adore Bayonetta. As sharp as a scythe and with putdowns that slam down with the sharp crack of a pistol-equipped boot, she's a phenomenal character: strong, empowered and not about to take any crap from any of the dolts that surround her. In Bayonetta 2 they're as roughly drawn as before; Enzo, Rodin, Luka and now Loki, a child with silver white cornrows and an accent that sounds like an Etonian who's spent their gap year in the West Indies, are a quartet that toe the line between vulgar caricature and parody, and you can feel Platinum playing heavily towards the latter. Bayonetta's a game that puts as much energy into sending up other games as it does into its combat, and it's an odd, frequently foul-mouthed concoction. Not every swipe lands at the target, though.
Bayonetta 2's pretty much everything you could expect from a sequel. I've played through a significant amount of the whole thing, but am only allowed to tell you about the opening third. Know this, though: the combat crackles as satisfyingly as before, the jokes fall flat just as often and the narrative that drives the whole thing, well frankly I haven't a clue what's going on. The energy, though, is remarkable.
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