I picked this up for PS3 and was utterly disappointed. I liked the DMC games and was expecting something similar, but instead, let me summarize Bayonetta by 3 words that constantly showed up at the same time on my screen:
Loading...
Saving...
Loading...
But let me start at the beginning...
I booted the game up, went for "normal" difficulty and made it through the first cutscenery introduction. By then, I already had developed a strong allergic reaction to the speaker test patterns that tortured my ears and are called "music" by some people. Admitted, this is purely personal subjective taste and I actually thought "well, just ignore it and concentrate on the game". After a bit of button mashing and getting around, I asked myself why the characters do what they do and realized that I still had no clue about the character motivations except for the small guy who is after the money. Except that there doesn't seem to be any money to be made by slaying angelic creatures, but then again that character would disappear some scenes later (which gave the game -1 to annoyance).
Later on I discovered that Bayonetta had no clue about what she was doing either due to lost memories, which did put her in the same position as I was, but didn't help a lot explaining her motivation to do what she was doing and how she got there.
Gameplay wise it took a fairly good start, except for a slightly annoying camera and a little delay with the controls (especially when evading). Getting along further, I suddenly died because of a surprise attack. It's one of those cheap moments where you got to memorize what is coming and just be prepared to do the right thing. It's nothing unusual for this kind of game, but it gets a bit annoying from time to time. Sadly that's where I realized how long it takes the game to:
a) tell you you died
b) ask you if you want to continue
c) load the last checkpoint
d) replay another annoying cutscene
Even worse, I tried to skip the custcene, just to find out that it loads again... to show me a menu where I may choose to skip the scene. Problem being, loading that menu took almost as long as watching the scene.
Now this gets really and I mean really(!) frustrating later on. Somehow the difficulty curve started to raise quickly and dying happened a lot more often... including load times.
The first time when I tried to evade while the controls seemingly did nothing, just to be juggled to death by two enemies who managed to keep me in the air wasn't fun.
The 5th time that happened, I starting to think about the aerodynamic qualities of the disc.
I might be not the quickest anymore concerning my reflexes due to advancements in age, but I do know when I hit a button too late and when I didn't. It worked for DMC, Demon's Souls and Darksiders. Also the slight camera annoyance didn't matter anymore as I couldn't see what was going on below all the flashy moves that tried to blind me anyway.
About half-way through the game I decided to chore this thing through by spamming evade moves. It did help, but not enough to avoid the horrific load times. Coupling that with surprise QTEs with instant death cutscene/load punishment wasn't going to raise my mood either.
I usually am very persistant and just wanted to "get through" that game and maybe even get some minor reward by understanding what the whole story is about at least. Actually, calling it "story" is a bit of a stretch. I did understand the overarching plotline, but when I finished the game, I felt like being ripped off by an eight year old storywriter when it comes to individual character motivation for certain events (that I won't spoil). No I take that back, it's an insult to eight year olds.
After the credits rolled, I realized that it took me 15 hours to get through the game and I could swear that 5 of them were spent on "Loading..." times.
The biggest rewarding experience I got out of Bayonetta was finisheing it, putting it into the box and on the shelf so that it may be finally forgotten.
At least until I come back to the point of testing blu-ray aerodynamics...
Sorry for the wall of text, but I had to get that off my chest.
