Bayonetta Origins is one of those games I knew I was going to play, but had no idea what to expect. I was pretty confused when it was first announced but figured I'd just see how it goes once I played it.
Admittedly, despite the lack of real expectations, I still felt pretty disappointed when I first started the game. The beginning I found pretty slow and it felt like maybe the game was just a matter of wandering around solving very minor and simple rhythm sections while exploring the whimsical world. That just didn't sound very engaging even for a very short game, but would definitely grate on me over the 15 hours or so I heard I should expect. Not far in, you get Cheshire and the gameplay becomes clearer as you're able to actually brawl with enemies somewhat more like you would in other Bayonetta games. However, the combat still felt super simplistic, despite the unique control scheme, you mostly just move toward the enemies with Cheshire and hit the attack button over and over. You can also maneuver Cereza into stunning the enemies and locking them down.
While I still think the beginning was too slow, it was really just an aim to ease the player into a game that, while it remains too easy, actually has a pretty interesting style for both combat and exploration/puzzle-solving. As I hinted, there's an odd control scheme. You control both Cereza and Cheshire for pretty much the whole game, at the same time. You can pull Cheshire to you in his stuffed cat form in the adorably-named "hug mode," which allows you to not worry so much about the independent controls, but that's pretty much just something you do when wandering somewhere new or recharging abilities briefly in combat. The rest of the actual gameplay of exploring and fighting you have to use both at the same time. This is made possible by essentially splitting the controller in half: the left stick, left shoulder buttons, and d-pad control Cereza while the right stick, right shoulder buttons, and ABXY control Cheshire. Theoretically, I suppose you could play this couch co-op each with one joycon, but I found a lot of the depth to the game came from training myself to actually move both characters at the same time, as much as my brain vehemently protested. Both characters also work quite differently as well, even if their abilities were relatively simple. Cheshire does acquire various "elemental" forms that you swap between with ABXY which changes his moves a bit and later power-ups enhance both characters to some extent so while most enemies were pretty straight-forward, there was much more to the game that initially meets the eye. And you never quite get fully comfortable with the rubbing your stomach and patting your head style of it. This was far and away my favorite part of the experience and the depth of this gameplay really demonstrated to me that as odd as this game is in the context of the series, it was by no means a thrown-together money grab game, but has a lot of interesting ideas and heart in itself.
Despite enjoying that gameplay and the challenge it imposed on my playthrough, it is also likely to blame for my biggest issue with the game. That's that the game is simply way too easy pretty much the whole game. I 100%'d the game, requiring a full playthrough then another on the harder difficulty you unlock. In all that time I probably died a total of maybe 15 times and almost all of those were on the final boss that I went into without making any healing potions and really should've (by comparison when I played it on hard mode, I didn't die once with even a little prep). I don't really measure my enjoyment of most games by how many times I die normally, but it does mean that the game doesn't push its more interesting mechanics, or my mastery of them, to the limit. There are definitely some pretty complex puzzle-platforming sequences that require simultaneously using both characters against a timer, which is most confusing when Cheshire is on the left of the screen from Cereza and my brain wanted to use the left side of the controller for him. The time trials also offered a really steep challenging that was fun for pushing me that much harder. But all in all, still the bulk of my game felt like too much of a breeze. I realize this game is supposed to be a Bayonetta game for a younger audience as it's much more "innocent" for the most part, but it was just way too easy and now that I think about it, I believe I only died once on my hard mode playthrough and that was during a "one hit kills you" challenge where I misstepped. It didn't ruin the game by any means, but I think it would've been way better if the game really pushed me to master the maneuvering. Unfortunately, I say this is related to the independent character controls in that I expect playtesting suggested that it was just too hard to competently control both characters at a high level so they hesitated to make most of the encounters have much difficulty to them. Given the game has a hard mode, I wish it had been selectable at the start as with one playthrough behind me, even it was really easy after all my training in the time trials.
The boss fights, at least some of them, I found to be a bit of an exception to this, and were some of my favorite parts of the game. Most of the boss scenes are a good climax of story and spectacle, especially near the end of the game. When I got to the Jabberwock boss fight was pretty much when I was hooked on the game. It's such a cinematic fight and despite not being to the same level of violence and wild as the mainline series, it felt like that point I was finally getting how this is very much a Bayonetta game. The game pretty much continued to amp up from that point on and led up to a really awesome finale that is fully up to the bar set by the outrageous finales of the mainline games.
I found the story of the game pretty compelling in a lot of ways. It's quite simple and in a lot of ways pretty predictable and straight-forward, something the mainline series is not known for. It's not really as clever as some of the convoluted plots of the main games, but in my opinion, that's a good thing as I haven't been a fan of the games' previous storylines and how hard they are to parse at times. I think the story execution was weirdly overall just plain better because of this. This game also serves as a story and lore companion to Bayonetta 3 and serves to fill in some holes and explain some background 3 doesn't really go into. Personally, I think it's kind of whack to have separate games fill in somewhat necessary backstory for another title in the series and while I do appreciate the holes it filled in, I must admit I felt those holes were just really confusing when I played Bayonetta 3. As an interesting bit of trivia, I did hear that they weren't actually sure for a while which of these two games was going to release first and I think aside from one fairly big spoiler for 3, you might do better to play this game before 3.
A lot of the presentation for the game is just good. While the aesthetic isn't generally my favorite with the dreamy faerie land look, I always appreciate when a game commits to its concept and does a good job with it and I think this game is absolutely that. There is the awkward fact you're watching a child's coming-of-age narrative with the background in mind that she's befriending a demon trying to return to hell, but that is just a contributing piece of the ambiguously whimsical-yet-dangerous tone the game doesn't shy away from as Cheshire's demonic nature is an important plot point. The sound design is also quite good. While the music's not my favorite style either, again, it fits well what it's going for, and there are some bangers in there and multiple tracks with nods to some of the best songs in the mainline games. I'd still consider it the weakest soundtrack of the Bayonetta games so far, but it's still quite good for what it is.
As a last note, for one of my classic ambivalent notes, I found the map design to be really good in some ways and really awful in others. You are exploring Avalon Forest throughout the game, a winding forest full of faeries and trickery. It makes sense that it would be full of winding paths, forks in the road, and unexpected passageways. They delivered pretty well on this and dodged it being too confusing for your playthrough of the story: you can see little bright blue wolf tracks pointing which way to continue the story from wherever you are so it's very hard to not know where to go for that. However, when it came to wanting to explore for map completion and picking up power-ups and the like outside of the story, the maps were a nightmare to navigate. You do have a map menu but while not quite useless, the layers and the pathways are way too complicated to navigate pretty much at all using the map. Additionally, the game has several one-way paths where if you hop off a ledge, you may have to run a good 5-10 mins to get to a way to go back up that ledge if you wanted to explore more up there. Many games have one or two of these around the map, but this game has a bunch of them and I found them super annoying. There are also several power-ups that appear to be in one zone, but you can't actually reach them unless you take a passage from another zone, meaning you may bang your head against the wall looking for something in a given zone only to discover that to get to that item that is clearly on your map, you have to go to a totally different zone, often in a random direction with no real clue to suggest that. This was definitely the part of my playthrough I found the most frustrating, but thankfully there's not that many items you'll likely have missed during a standard playthrough so I just used a video guide for the few I just could not figure out.
For the vast majority of my time with Bayonetta Origins I was leaning toward 4 stars as I did enjoy the game, but the map issues and the ease of play made it feel like it was falling short of 5-star status. Admittedly, those factors are still somewhat significant and this is probably something like a 4.5 I'm rounding to a 5. But I still was charmed by the game's strengths, especially in the second half, and found myself actually hoping they make more of these, showcasing how Bayonetta met others of the colorful cast of infernal demons who assist her. I think despite the tie-ins to Bayonetta 3, you could probably play this with no prior knowledge of the games, but you would miss out on some of the foreshadowing and the fun references that I wouldn't ultimately recommend it. Still, I'm glad that this game works really well as a relatively independent spin-off game. it fleshes out the world, experiments in some really interesting ways, and manages to still somehow feel like a Bayonetta game. I had a lot of qualms with Bayonetta 3, but this game gives me some hope for whatever they choose to do next, whenever that may be.
