I gotta say, when I first played the first Bayonetta, I had a bittersweet experience, because I played the PlayStation 3 port, as many of you know, the performance on said console is horrible, I don´t mind if a game from the PS3 era doesn´t look that good, I understand it was the seventh generation but man, the fps were too unstable, most of the times it wasn´t even at 20fps, getting drops to even 15 fps, it was annoying. Things changed when I played the Nintendo Switch port, 60 fps and no single issue with the performance, it was like playing another game.
Nowadays, I recently finished Bayonetta 2 on Nintendo Switch, I´m getting ready for Bayonetta 3 so I kind of did a ¨marathon¨ and I must say, this game impressed me, I wasn´t expecting this sequel to be this great, felt like they held everything that did Bayonetta good and upgraded everything.
Let´s begin from the begining, Bayonetta 2 starts not so further from the ending of Bayonetta, it´s a direct sequel. Jeanne, one of the characters from the first Bayonetta and close friend of her had an accident because of helping Bayonetta, Jeanne´s soul is taken to Hell, so everything is a race agains´t time, if we don´t save Jeanne´s soul soon, she´ll be trapped in Hell forever. In our literal way to Hell, we´ll uncover some secret about Bayonetta´s past, we´ll meet important characters to the plot, you know, an adventure.
My first contact with the game was something like wtf the game´s feeling is soooooo good, everything on Bayonetta is about making you feel like a God when you are fighting enemy hordes, so Bayoneta´s movement has to be agile and responsive, controlling her through the scenario must feel good, more if you take into account this is a hack ´n slash game, everything I´m saying is well implemented in the first game but oh my God, they did it actually better in the second game, controlling Bayonetta doesn´t feel good anymore, it feels great now.
You can feel like a sensation of speed, I mean, the game feels faster in every way, when you are attacking, when you are dodging or when you just move through the scenario, the first game felt a little sloppy and slow to me, maybe due to the limitations at that time respecting performance. There was this execution mechanic that I felt a little bit slow in the first game and sometimes killed the pacing of the fights, however, the executions in Bayonetta 2 are faster. Bayonetta 2 is a sequel, it doesn´t reinvent the wheel but does everything that the first game did but better, I mean, most of the skills and powers you had in the first game return like Witch Time, which slows down time when you do a perfect dodge or the execution mechanic I mentioned before.
One thing I liked a lot about the sequel is that I felt the frenzy was more intense, sometimes the first game had these sequences that felt more like filler or a lot of cinematics which kind of killed the pacing, it happens here as well but not as much as the first game, the action never stops, it´s always a fighting after a fighting. This is consistent with the scale of the enemies, the scale has always pointed to the epicness, more when we talk about bosses, whose sizes are enormous and usually are showy fights, this feeling of epicity increases greatly in the sequel. Personally, I quite liked the design of the bosses in the sequel, there are some that are recycled from the first game but they are not important fights, in this sequel the new bosses receive all the attention to detail, very extravagant and curious designs.
Honestly, I was quite intrigued as to what the vision of hell would be like in Bayonetta, I mean, it's already been explored in other games like God of War and Dante's Inferno, which by the way I love its hell setting. Seeing the hell of the Bayonetta 2 universe felt a bit disappointing, maybe because you can't see too much of it, it´s more the time we spend looking for hell than staying, a bit disappointing, I really would have liked to explore it more. I liked what I saw, but not too much to highlight.
On a narrative level, I prefer the sequel, many times in the first game the story was kind of heavy to follow, however, here everything is much more direct, which I appreciate. I would like to highlight the friendly chemistry that Loki and Bayonetta have, the truth is that their friendship became genuine to me and both have their respective character development. Personally, I think that the story was better for me because it is now easier for me to empathize with Bayonetta since I already know her past, in addition, there is a sense of urgency that is to save Jeanne, I really cared about saving her, and Like I say, the friendly chemistry between Bayonetta and Loki was great.
Bayonetta 2 doesn´t reinvent the wheel nor is it a perfect game, but it upgrades the negative things that the first game had and expands its good things, the game is much faster and more frenetic, the confrontations in general have a much more epic scale than in the first game, the story was way more interesting because of how direct it is. Certainly, the sequel is considerably short, since at most it has a duration of 8 or 9 hours, an amount less than its first installment, however, I think that this kind of game is not bad if it is short, lengthening the thing would have spoiled the experience. As far as I know, Bayonetta 2 is a Nintendo exclusive, only available on Wii U and Switch, if you are going to play the third one, I recommend that you do as I did and play the first installments, being more direct sequels, you probably won't understand much of its narrative without having played the previous ones.
All of the screenshots were taken by me while playing the game