One of Bayonetta 2’s many virtues is that it introduces itself accurately and succinctly. Pressing start on the game’s first section introduces the game’s titular witch via a slow panning shot from her neckline to her crotch. Under player control, she then mauls a dozen seraphim, jumps into robot armor, and murders some hulking cherubs riding on the back of a house-sized demonic manta ray. Her world’s bizarre creation myth plays in the background the entire time, seemingly without reason. Five minutes have barely passed, but Bayonetta 2 has already expressed itself fully—here is what it is, here is what it will be teaching, here are the bizarre tics of personality that you have to push past.
It is a confident approach, and for a game like Bayonetta 2, it is also the only approach. This is a game that takes some central ideas—ultraviolence, religious iconography, female eroticism—flattens its palm on the sliders, moves them all the way to the right, and then breaks them off; we won’t be needing those again. Watching these maxed-out themes play with and bounce off each other is fascinating nonsense that gets stranger as the game progresses.
Bayonetta herself is an Umbra Witch, as is her roommate and best friend, Jeanne. While the two are out buying groceries for their Christmas party, they are attacked by the holy forces of Paradiso. The battle goes pear-shaped when their own allies, the pact-bound demons of Inferno, inexplicably turn against them. Jeanne is killed and her soul is dragged to Inferno. So Bayonetta is off to the delightfully named holy mountain of Fimbulventr, the location of the gates to faux-Heaven and faux-Hell, where she can reclaim her friend and figure out why she was betrayed.
There’s a bit more to the story—Bayonetta meets a boy named Loki on the way to Fimbulventr and gets tied up in his drama—but it all just sets the stage for the game’s frequent, excellent combat sequences. Bayonetta’s 2 fighting system is a piece of precision game engineering with a simple goal: chain punches, kicks, gunfire, and dodges into an elegant, ceaseless string of violence. The button response is so close to immediate and the battles so fair (for example, an enemy that is off-screen will never attack you in a way that can’t be predicted) that any failure can only be the player’s fault. This isn’t to say that Bayonetta 2 is a difficult game—it can be made simple or challenging to taste, and there’s even a mode using the Wii U controller’s touchscreen that is especially forgiving—but because it makes player mistakes so obvious, anything less than a perfect result claws at the mind. And when the difference between perfection and what feels like abject failure can be measured in milliseconds, the incentive to try again is always present.