Bayonetta - ★★★★★

(NSIC no items. Thanks to all who helped me learn this game)

Bayo is an offputting game at first. Your moveset is overloaded with strings, key abilities are locked behind the shop, sudden instakill QTEs and awful minigames pepper the campaign, secrets are hidden in obnoxiously obscure ways, and the story is bloated and nonsensical (I recommend skipping the cutscenes). The aesthetic and theming in general is... complicated, others have discussed it enough. Enemies run you over as you fiddle with your buttons, then get effortlessly comboed on in Witch Time. Bosses are giant punching bags with annoying movesets, except for Jeanne who also runs you over. I'm sort of shocked the broader public likes this game, because it doesn't seem to like you back.

How strange then that the single word I would use to describe this game is "thoughtful". Once you get past an initial learning curve and start exploring Hard (significantly faster enemies) and NSIC (no Witch Time), the deeper Bayo begins revealing itself, one made by experienced designers with strong intuitions and a nuanced vision for what a 3D action game should be.

That attention to detail is evident in the way the player moveset is constructed. The sheer complexity of what's available to you is overwhelming, but much of this is tamed by the intuitive way they are laid out. Most strings start with a punch or two. You can add a kick to enter a more specialized string, then follow with more kicks for a horizontal Wicked Weave, or a punch for a launcher. Knowing this reduces the amount of memorization burden, and lets you play with intentionality sooner. Pauses in strings are a bit tricky to use, but they thought of even this: Bayo's dodge animation has a small bounce at the end, which can be used to help time your button presses.

As you get more comfortable, the utility of the guns also naturally reveals itself. Pistols are easy bonus damage, but can also juggle enemies midair, so a launcher comboes nicely with Heel Slide's quick burst of shots. Shotguns hitstun enemies easily, so they work well to start a string, or you can use PPPPK's burst of three leg shots to do huge damage at close range. Rockets provide an explosion of AOE hitstun which is useful by itself. But combining them with PPK, where Bayo slams with her heel, has her shoot the ground and create an explosion around her, hitstunning nearby enemies. The whole game is filled with this type of intuitive, multiplicative scenarios which paradoxically expands the moveset while making it easier to understand.

Beyond just sheer variety of moves, much of the point of DMC-likes (and where their imitators usually fall short) is in the fun, tactile interactions of states, hitboxes, and velocities. This is difficult to articulate, but easily felt in how the brisk run of Bayo flows into the quick, bouncy displacement of a dodge, flowing into Panther's burst of speed and momentum, yanked back and held midair by Crow's sudden slowing. Enemies can be hitstunned, launched, juggled midair, knocked down, blasted backwards, and swept off their feet, all of which have different timings and properties. Bayo is a legendary combo fiend game for this reason, but even for regular players, that joy is easily felt due to the variety and ubiquity of these states and the player actions that induce them.

The main enemy designer in Bayo was Kazunori Inoue, who wrote a short blog post about his work on the game where he describes himself as a "third-rate programmer", then lists himself as responsible for 1/3rd of DMC1's enemies and all of the enemies in RE4 and God Hand (!!!!!!). Bayo's enemies live up to this high pedigree. Bayo is an extremely fast and evasive character, so enemies too attack quickly and aggressively to contest her. The more basic angels don't move much, but it's easy to get caught by their quick swipes if you aren't careful. Larger enemies like dogs and shield angels control more space using wide sweeps and anti-air attacks, frontal defense, and a small amount of hitstun armor that has to be broken off with damage. At the top of the food chain are the famous Grace and Glory duo and the Jeanne-lite Joy, who relentlessly rush you down while covering each other with AOEs and projectiles. Outside of a couple duds (flying ships, wheels, non-Jeanne bosses), this is a roster who can pull as the player pushes, presenting meaningful threats even at blistering speeds without being oppressive. It even creates some true crowd control dynamics, rare for 3D games and easily seen during Out-of-Body Alfheims.

Even among this elite company, Jeanne stands out; it's hard to comprehend just how far ahead of its peers this boss is. Vergil from DMC3, beloved by most of the action game community, is the obvious comparison point as a rival battle. While as a story and setpiece event he is awesome, as a fight he mostly uses a call-and-response flow: Attacks with moves similar to yours, which you dodge, then retaliate against with some hits of your own until he breaks out of hitstun and the process repeats. For me, the most interesting part is when he activates Devil Trigger in the final fight, which speeds him up massively, turns off his hitstun, and slowly regenerates his health until he takes enough damage to exit the form. This forces you to find and capitalize on small openings weaved into his offensive, and the sheer speed of what's happening amplifies small differences in positioning and timing, creating a dynamism that's lacking in the other phases.

Jeanne is this cadence, all the time. She has many more moves, which still broadly mirror the player's own so their properties can be intuited. She has a working hitstun system that rewards good combos, without trapping her for long periods or feeling rote. She can easily keep up with the player using Wicked Weaves and Panther form movement, which allows a natural push and pull instead of simply forcing instant engagement with teleportation. She is far less pattern-based, but still broadly predictable in the types of things she can do at different ranges. If this were the only boss in the game, you would have a convincing case for the best character action boss roster ever.

There are many higher level faults one could find with the game: there are clearly some overpowered moves such as Shuraba's PKP, some other moves are relatively useless, Alfheims are annoyingly gimmicky for being ranked challenges, Moon of Mahaa-Kalaa parry has extreme power and utility, some cheese strategies exist for both survival and scoring, and perhaps Dodge Offset permits too passive and safe a playstyle via constantly running away from enemies and sniping them with Wicked Weaves. But frankly the amount of polish and consideration in even that is above most other games of this type. Bayo may not have a moveset as expressive as DMC4, or enemies as relentless as NG2, or even the diamond-crushing crowd pressure of traditional 2D beat-em-ups. But Bayo is very good at all of them, and in that sense, it's better than everyone else.