Bayonetta 2 [WiiU] review

[ShadowDancer]

Speedy, if you had score Bayonetta 2 right now, how would you score it out of ten?

[speedlolita]

I gave DmC a 7, so around a 12?

[ShadowDancer]

Beautiful. I order my Wii U Friday, I'll play the demo 1st, although, the purchase is 100% as I adore the 1st game, Just something to wet my appetite until I buy the game the following week

I'm going to try and get the original run release with number 1 so I can invest some time into them :-)

[speedlolita]

You can get the SE version that comes with both games. The First Print LE is absolutely beautiful though. The demo will make you want Bayo 2 for sure though!

[speedlolita]

[MrKirov]

Completed hard then? Grats! I got halfway then ended up pickin something else up- I'll be back to it soon though!!

[Brad]

I'm 8 hours in and getting bored. I'll never master the game so that draw isn't there for me. To the sales thread!

[dataDave]

Unlike the first game there isn't that much to master. The Bracelet of Time adds a layer of depth, beyond that however...

[Brad]

I can't even read the telegraphs of some enemy attacks in time for me to hit dodge. I cheese my way through so much of it and when you're doing that you can't help but notice that the last 3 chapters I've played (

->Open Spoiler<-

I'm in Hell

) all look near enough identical, to the point that I thought the game had glitched and was making em replay a level! I totally appreciate the awesomeness of the game but I'm am nowhere near skilled enough to be able to enjoy it on that level.

[speedlolita]

Completed hard then? Grats! I got halfway then ended up pickin something else up- I'll be back to it soon though!!

Yeah, just got the Bracelet of Time too. Gonna go back and get Platinums on the rest of the stages of 3rd Climax. Should be kinda easy with Rosa.

[fishbowlhead]

I can't even read the telegraphs of some enemy attacks in time for me to hit dodge. I cheese my way through so much of it and when you're doing that you can't help but notice that the last 3 chapters I've played (

->Open Spoiler<-

I'm in Hell

) all look near enough identical, to the point that I thought the game had glitched and was making em replay a level! I totally appreciate the awesomeness of the game but I'm am nowhere near skilled enough to be able to enjoy it on that level.

Me neither, im fudging my way through like most i guess. Its an amazing game, virtually infinite in combat depth, and just brilliant all round, but ill never have time to even scratch the surface of it combat. Im having a blast all the same, this is one ill be playing on and off for years i think.

[dataDave]

Seriously, spend your time wisely and stick to mastering the first game. It's vastly superior. After you scratch the surface of Bayo2 there's nothing left.

The first game can make you feel like you're in some kind of trance once all of your senses synchronise. It doesn't take long to reach that stage, just be sure to watch Saurian's videos because he will have you playing like that in no time.

[MrKirov]

What's so wrong with Bayo 2 then? I'm enjoying it a hell of a lot and it's on par with 1 for me.

[dataDave]

There is literally no finesse when it comes to taking things down with the quite frankly over-powered Umbran Climax. You summon big stuff, and stun-lock other big stuff until it dies (that is until you reach a verse where the time requirement demands that you crush everything in under 20 seconds...). Maybe that's fun for the first few hours, especially when you can layer up the Wicked Weave phases of Umbran Climax so that you end up with screen after screen of Infernals to the point of making your console near explode - but that fun dies fast, especially when considering the fact that Umbran Climax can also spam command specials which take no meter to perform. You can just spam this stuff over and over with no penalty, even on bosses.

I prefer picking things apart one at a time in a more conventional manner, whilst evading everything else around me and utilising a skill-set I know is going to grow and mature when spanning many hours of gaming. Unfortunately there are far too many changes within the system which permit such growth - The audio cues are all the same, making evade either a complete doddle, or a confusing mess when you have more than one enemy type on the screen; Unite Bats is insanely overpowered, to the point where I'm completely invincible when spamming RT and spinning the stick. Try it!

Semi-advanced tech like jump-cancelling is gone. The various offsets (other than dodge-offsets), gone. All effectively offering zero experimentation potential.

The air-game has been completely dismantled and re-built into something which completely steers you away from any kind of experimentation, and actually chastises the player for doing so. The enemies have lost their weight class, even the enemies from the first game - and God forbid that you do manage to launch something, as earlier enemies have a combo-breaking shield which pushes you back into an unrecoverable state. But guess what, Grace and Glory (previous bad-asses from the first game who pretty much required you to learn dodge-offset if you wanted to dispatch them stylishly) are now 'light class', and can be combo'd into infinity, not only that but they are placed towards the end of the game! What!? The easier dudes from the first game are now 'heavy', and can't be launched...

Fair play, when you unlock the Bracelet of Time you can override all of these utterly bizarre design choices and activate 'light' mode to juggle near anything with the limited tools and non-vertical attacking states which remain, however playing like this will give you rubbish grades. The game wants you to mash stuff with Umbran Climax, it requires it! The scoring system doesn't even diminish over time when you spam the same **** over and over.

Witch Time has a static duration. Before you could risk perfect parries, or Unite Bats for an extended duration. This could be further extended with the amount of damage you are injecting into the phase. Now? Everything shares the same static base value. There is no need to parry stuff anymore as there is no reward, and nothing extends the phase whatsoever.

Meter management is numbed beyond belief, evading awards just the same amount of magic as Unite Bats and parrying, so again, what's the point going for the risk? Why use anything other than Umbran Climax to smash/stun the **** out of anything considering the weapons dropped from enemies, via. Torture Attacks, are all pish?

That was the beauty of the demo, you didn't have a lot of the new toys it your disposal. In order for plat/pureplat you had to trigger 'hard mode' by enraging foes with taunt before you could achieve the required score. That's actually a more novel system than what we ended up with. The Bracelet of Time makes things a lot better by trading in Umbran Climax for physics override mode (manual Witch Time). Unfortunately you have to switch back if you wish to avoid golds in some cases because getting a better score can only be done by mashing Umbran Climax...

The charge shot on the gun? The bow? The status effects given off by Undine? It's all completely useless! Besides this there is the scythe, the swords, the chainsaw... all utterly samey and very minimalist in their defining features.

It's basically DMC4 and VJ2 all over again... with a peppering of SSB:Brawl and DmC.

Don't get me wrong. I had immense fun with the game for the fifteen hours it lasted (50% through a Platinum Infinite Climax run). however after that there is absolutely no incentive to return.

After this you should go back to the first game and see the light. It's pure gaming zen like absolutely nothing else I've ever played in my life. I won't even put it anywhere near my top 10 because it simply isn't fair on everything else. The experience goes beyond the sensual offerings of the truly greater games out there and treads into territory more akin to mastering a musical instrument (only within a MUCH shorter mastery time).

The way the game engages your sight, hearing and touch is a sensory overload which after a little practice can be tamed, harnessed, and controlled. After five minutes warm-up I can 'tune-in' to the fireworks of the game to the point where I completely forget that I'm holding a controller in my hands. All this is thrown out with the sequel as their is no balance with the enemy attack design and accompanying audible signposts.

Everything about the first game is perfectly balanced; from Bayonetta's moves (forgiving the Kilgore exploit) to the enemy classes and accompanying enemy attack designs. Why they had to f**k with this balance is completely beyond me.

[wakka]

I just finished playing through both games one after the other a few days ago. Wonderful games and I enjoyed them hugely - despite not being an expert on this type of game I do agree with Dave above however.

Visually I much prefer Bayo 2 - it's far more colourful and has a more exciting look and feel than the dark browns and greys that dominate the first game's palette. However, it feels far spammier. It took me a couple of weeks to finish Bayo 1 (slow I know), but I finished the second game in just a couple of sittings. Umbran Climax is way overpowered as Dave says, you just end up smashing everything with it as there's no skill required once it's triggered. The fact that it constantly staggers every type of enemy - even bosses - is a bit silly really.

My thumb ended up aching from having to mash the X button so much, something which never happened in the first game due to the more judicious play style required. Gracious and Glorious were vastly easier to beat too, which sounds like it's at least party due to the change in weight class that Dave mentioned above.

It's still bags of fun, and particularly as I'm not a hardcore player I still liked it a lot, but it definitely feels inferior to the mighty first game. The end boss isn't nearly as epic as Jubileus, either.

EDIT: I also felt that when to dodge for Witch Time was signposted much more clearly in the second game - is that right? I certainly thought I was given more cues and more time to press ZR than in Bayo 1.