Im deciding if I should get it, how does it compare to other action games this generation?

Superior to all of them.

@glabal500: Pretty good. It's just plain fun and bombastic. It works well and gets the job done.

It is probably the best this generation. But I still think Ninja Gaiden Black is the best game in that style that has been done yet. (yes "character action")

It's hands down the best character action game of this generation in terms of mechanics - the story and characters are an acquired taste for some.

Like the other dudes say its the best this generation.

I still think Ninja Gaiden plays better, once you get used to the weight. Bayonetta is a very close second.

It's super fast, responsive and you have dozen's of moves you can do at anytime and combo into and out of virtually anything.

Blows the other games in the genre away.

Agreed. I would put NG over Bayonetta too but in the end it just comes down to personal taste. Both are great.

As someone who beat the game despite not enjoying the genre, I can say the controls did nothing for me. I'm sure there will be folks who are fans of the genre who can say otherwise, but as an outsider it didn't seem any different then any other action game.

The thing I praise Bayonetta is actual active rewards for successful and effective evasion. In other combat action games your only reward successful dodges is "not losing points/health/whatever" while in Bayonetta you get bonus slow/speedup.

As for the game as a whole, I think it there are flaws in the game where I would recommend instead buying it used or borrowing.

It is the best of all the games in the genre I have played. The highest skill ceiling and the most fun.

It is the best in the genre.

You can't really compare Bayonetta to other games in the genre. Platinum games are on an entirely different level. There is Bayonetta, then Metal Gear Solid: Revengence, ... then kind of everything else in a sad pile.

The best , in my opinion .

I really liked it. The combat in Bayonetta was always fun.

Its ok, played it last year to get it off my backlog and he best part of the game is the crazy story and cutscenes. Combat was hit or miss with me but I'm not the biggest fan of the genre. Boss battles were pretty epic though.

I prefer the combat in Devil May Cry 3, but once you get a handle on it Bayonetta is very good.

It's alright.

Perfectly. Attacking and moving is responsive and given higher priroty than animation. It rewards creativity and learning while ensuring you can fall back on simpler moves if you need to. It is, in my opinion, the greatest character action game ever made.

Yes.

It's the best spectacle fighter out there. It's more in line with Devil May Cry than Ninja Gaiden, so it's more about cool looking combos than extreme difficulty. (although "non-stop climax" is no joke!) It's definitely worth picking up, especially since it's dirt cheap now.

the most enjoyable and gratifying combat i think ive ever been in control of. that game was just so damn good top to bottom.

It's really good.

It's great once you dig into it. But luckily for you, Bayonetta introduced something amazing to character action games: a practice mode during loads screens!

I can't think of 10 action games better than Bayonetta.

How good? So good.

Not as good as Batman.

Better than DMC: Devil May Cry. That's all you need to know.

It's fucking phenomenal.

It's excellent.

Looks like I'm the odd one out here, but I thought that the combat was average at best. It was a little too button mashy for me. I never felt like I had to be deliberate in my moves, nor did I ever feel like I was in complete control like in, say, God of War or the Devil May Crys. Don't get me wrong, I can have fun with button masher style games, but this one just didn't do it for me. It's important to note, however, that I only played the demo, and judging from that, I didn't buy it.

It's fucking great. Awesome controls, including stuff like: Dodging has priority over literally EVERYTHING. Continue combos after dodging. Dodging at the right moment let's you slow time and counter. Hold either attack button down in the middle of a combo to fire your equipped projectiles.

Plus the weapons are really cool. Like tonfas that are also grenade launchers. That you can attach to your feet.

If anything, my one complaint with the game is that there were long stretches without ENOUGH combat to satisfy me. That means a lot coming from someone who isn't a huge fan of these types of games.

I have to chime in here and say I thought it was pretty average at best. I S-Ranked it at it took a play through and then some to wrap my head around what was going on and even then when I had everything down I found it to be a whole lot of crazy and not all that much behind it. I ended up completing the subsequent playthroughs using 3 or 4 combos nearly exclusively as they were by far the best in nearly any occasion.

Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Gaiden 2 are 3 times the game Bayonetta is in my opinion.

Bayonetta is arguably the deepest character combat system in gaming. You can play it with any style and at any level, from button mashing at the lowest difficulties to split-frame combo coreography. This might be the reason why some experienced players consider it "easy". It's actually as easy or as hard as you make it, until you make some progress in the game.

Then you get to the advanced challenges, and some of those are brutally hard. Only an elite player who's acting snobbish could ever call them "easy". I know that some people have faster nervous systems, but if you think that the fight with Rodin is easy, then stop gaming now and start a career as a fighter pilot.

Even as a programmer, I find the system a monumental achievement. It has amazing flow. Pretty much every button you press opens multiple options, the hundreds of possible actions are beautifully cohesive, and the sheer variety of weapons and techniques is mind-boggling. Unless you're already an expert at this kind of game, you'll keep learning radical new techniques and mixing commands in novel ways even after hundreds of hours of playing. It's as unlimited as learning to play piano - you could go on improving forever.

I can see how some players prefer the Nija Gaiden system - at some point it becomes a matter of tastes. But for me, Bayonetta is still unbeaten. The more I play it, the more it fills my brain with pleasure juices.

I think the combat system is unparalleled in a game of it's ilk. For me, Bayonetta is easily one of the best games of that generation. I may not have poured as much time into it as other games, but it's still way way up there. Just phenomenal stuff.

So good. I played Bayonetta before I was able to play Batman Arkham Asylum that year, and I thought everyone who said Batman did combat right was out of their goddamned mind. Bayonetta is so much more engaging and satisfying, by miles.

I haven't come across anything better yet.

It's as good as you make it. You can probably find success with the same 3-4 combos, but if you wanna use Bayo's entire arsenal and style on the your opponents, you can do that too. Easily one of the best games of its kind.

It was awesome. Some of the best I have experienced. Really fast and silky smooth (atleast on 360). I wasnt even very good at the game and relied on a small number of techniques and still liked it.

probably most enjoyable controls in a game for me. im definitely going back again after getting the art book recently. its such a great game and its so very approachable by anyone.

Eh, technical action game good? I hear it has a lot of dept but you've got to be very memorizing complexe button combos and be flawless in your dodge timing. Had a much better time with DmC: devil may cry and metal gear rising. Found the control scheme in those to be much easier to grasp and I was able to execute cool chain combos by the end of both of them on the highest starting difficulty. Got 75% of the way trough bayoneta on the highest starting difficulty and I was still kinda button maching since I still didn't get what you were suppose to do agains multiple giant unflinshing ennemies aside from ''mash, mash, mash, mash, mash, mash, dodge, mash, mash, mash, mash, mash, dodge, mash, mash, mash, mash, dodge, oups my timing was 1/10th of a second off, lose 25% health''.

@pyrodactyl: the dodging is not that hard on normal but yeah you should expect more difficulty on a higher difficulty. thats sort of inherent. i think most people's problem is not realizing you can interrupt a combo and resume it after dodging. also coming from a person who has a really hard time with memorizing combos in any game, this was not hard at all. even pulling off one of the most devastating legit combos was pretty simple once you knew what to do. mashing is what you dont want to do especially on higher difficulties. if you want to mash and enjoy the game, dont play harder modes. the game expects that you have a better grasp on how to do maximum damage and keep combos going even while dodging.

Lemme talk for a second about why I think the combo system is so good. I'm not a highly technical player, but this particular part was simple enough for me to wrap my pea-brain around. The key is the dodge-offset move.

Nearly every combo in Bayonetta can be extended by holding down the attack button, for every single attack in the combo. So a bread and butter sequence is punch-kick-punch. If you do puuuuuunch kiiiiiick puuuuunch she'll fire off a bunch of extra bullets in between every hit. This is cool as is, but it comes into its own with dodge cancelling. If you just tap (or mash) buttons and do PK(dodge)P she'll start the combo over again after the dodge. If you do P,hold K, dodge,P, the last P will be the combo finisher instead of starting over. This is true for (I believe) every combo in the game! So if you're in the middle of something really complicated like PPKPKKP or whatever (not a real combo) and you see an attack coming, you can hang onto whatever button you're pressing for an extra half second, dodge, then keep right on trucking. This also leads to higher combo multipliers.

Yoshesque from SA tells it best: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NOVVmm4KOm4

What makes Bayonetta the best action game ever made is that at no point does it ever expect you to memorize combos. Instead, they want you to memorize the dodge button. Every attack in Bayonetta can be dodged. What happens when you get good at dodging? You are rewarded with a few seconds of bullet time (well, the game calls it witch time). What all this amounts to is a game that gives you complete freedom to experiment in combat. No other game does this.

If you put the work into it and get good at all the weapons and combos then it's extremely rewarding combat as you will feel godlike, but if you're on medium tier and only know a few things here or there you will feel special but if you're a beginner and have no plans on learning the ropes of the game then you will feel like shit as you will be spamming random buttons and probably dying a lot, so it has amazing combat but only if you make it amazing. I made it amazing. *whips imaginary hair back* Just enjoy yourself and ignore the end level ratings until you get better, even though it's kinda hard to do.

I remember this thread!

I remember saying that!

The necros! Bayonetta is the best in its genre, Arkham City is better at combat but also better at not being a character action game.

Perfection.