Bayonetta is a witch with no memory, four guns, and hair that turns into demons. She wakes from a casket at the bottom of a lake, heads for the holy city of Vigrid, and shoots her way through an army of angels to find out who she is. PlatinumGames built the whole thing around that idea, and it holds up as one of the cleanest action games of its era.
Trailer, via IGDBcom.
A Witch Who Fights With Her Hair
The combat is the point. Bayonetta carries firearms, but her real power runs through her hair: she shapeshifts, summons demons, and finishes fights with “Wicked Weave” attacks. “Torture Attacks” let her call up chainsaws and iron maidens to wreck whatever is in front of her.
The signature mechanic is “Witch Time.” Land a well-timed dodge and the world slows, enemies crawl, and Bayonetta gets a free window to unload counter damage. It is a simple rule that rewards attention over button-mashing, and it never stops being satisfying.
Ranking Every Fight, Not Every Second
PlatinumGames came out of Clover Studio, and Bayonetta was the studio’s third project. Development began in January 2007. The team built five difficulty modes, from “Very Easy” up.
Where Devil May Cry grades you live, Bayonetta grades each arena after the fight, weighing time, combo points and damage, then tallies everything at the end of a chapter. It is a colder system on paper. In practice it pushes you to replay chapters instead of grinding through them.
Lollipops heal Bayonetta, refill her magic, grant invincibility or boost her strength — but using them, or dying, drops your chapter score. Halos dropped by enemies and destroyed objects buy weapons, techniques and upgrades.
Vigrid, Jeanne, and the Eyes of the World
Vigrid is fictional, but it carries real weight: the ancestral home of the Umbra Witches, who follow darkness, and the Lumen Sages, who follow light. Both factions guarded the “Eyes of the World” — the Left Eye of Darkness and the Right Eye of Light — and both vanished under circumstances the game does not explain up front.
Bayonetta wears a jewel she believes is the Left Eye. She hunts the Right Eye, gets flashbacks, and follows a voice. Jeanne, a rival Umbra Witch with four guns of her own, fights her. Luka Redgrave, a journalist who met Bayonetta when he was a child, tags along. So does Cereza, a young girl whose appearance may tie into the missing memories.
Hellena Taylor voices Bayonetta, with Atsuko Tanaka handling the other language track. Yuri Lowenthal and Daisuke Namikawa play Luka; Grey DeLisle and Mie Sonozaki play Jeanne.
What Bayonetta Gets Right
The game is single-player, third-person, and proudly over the top. Bayonetta double jumps, backflips, rotates the camera, locks onto targets, and switches weapons mid-fight. She can transform into a panther or other creatures to extend her abilities.
The hard numbers
- Released: October 2009 in Japan; January 2010 in North America and Europe
- Platforms reviewed: PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, PC
- Developer: PlatinumGames (with Nex Entertainment)
- Publisher: Sega
- Modes: Single player
- Our score: 9.1 of 10
How Bayonetta’s ranking compares
| System | When it grades you | What it weighs |
|---|---|---|
| Devil May Cry | Live, during combat | Style in the moment |
| Bayonetta | After each arena, tallied per chapter | Time, combo points, damage |
That delay is the smartest call PlatinumGames made. Live style meters reward showing off. Bayonetta’s arena ranks reward finishing cleanly, and the chapter tally makes the punishment for lollipops and deaths land where it should — on your record, not your reflexes.
The angels reach absurd proportions, the finishing moves stay balletic, and the stages play like a theme park of set pieces. Seventeen years on, the dodge-timing loop is still the reason to play it. Bayonetta is not a game about restraint, and it never pretends otherwise.
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