We tested… “Bayotta 3”, an action game as bewitching as it is monstrous – Le Monde

“Bayonetta 3”, is full of striking visions, colors and stylistic twists. NINTENDO When the sequel to a video game sees the light of day, the habit would be to do better, bigger and stronger. Joyfully hyperbolic, Bayonetta 3 perpetuates this old convention by posing as the culmination of a series that has itself made the paroxysm its signature, like its famous “climax” knockouts, as grotesque as they are jubilant. This time, the eponymous witch travels between parallel realities to battle an evil that threatens to wipe out her entire multiverse. Along the way, she encounters other Bayonettas, as different as their worlds are shimmering and potentially endless. By exploiting the fashion of the multiverses, the game makes its pop diva, already endowed with magical powers and almost immortal, the equivalent of a Marvel superheroine. We also think of Everything Everywhere All At Once, an unexpected cinematic success of 2022 where Michelle Yeoh jumped from one world to another, carried away in a large absurd tote. For fifteen to twenty hours, the player is drawn into a flamboyant spectacle but weighed down by a principle of one-upmanship that can galvanize him as much as blaser him. Feet, fists and guns In 2009, Bayonetta was born from the alliance between the know-how of the Japanese studio PlatinumGames in terms of action and the arcade heritage of the publisher Sega. With his cartoon burlesque, he signed the birth of an icon at the same time as a refreshment of the fighting action game: with her revolvers hanging from her feet and her twirling sequences, the rebellious witch, when she was not drawing hearts with the bullets, sent hordes of deformed angels back to hell with occult powers blowing behind them. Passed into the hands of Nintendo, Bayonetta 2 (2014) experienced sales as timid as those of the Wii U which welcomed it. Already the formula might seem overused, but his unbridled posture continued to hit the bull’s eye. By returning to the charge a third time, the series can rest on its achievements (quite unsurpassable in their field) but comes up against the inevitable question of renewal. If we like to find mechanics such as the “witch time” – a vengeful slow motion that is triggered when we dodge an attack – the beginning of the game drowns us under an avalanche of weapons, powers and characters (including three playable). This profusion designates the main challenge of Bayonetta 3: to finish the trilogy in apotheosis before being able to reset the counters to zero. The recent call for a boycott by actress Hellena Taylor – the iconic voice of Bayonetta, dropped from the project amid financial disagreement – ​​speaks volumes about the state of this license, caught between the need to please a limited base of fans and the need to change to hope to aim higher. The “Bayotta” series has always played with scales to signify its madness of grandeur, a quest for monumentality that this new episode takes even further. NINTENDO The demons of the dance This episode therefore innovates, emphasizing the regular unlocking of a multitude of demonic invocations ranging from the giant succubus to the fire spider, passing by the frog god. These formidable creatures aid Bayonetta in battle and portray the witch as a master tamer. Accompanied by a profusion of spectacular effects, they give rise to game sequences each more bewildering than the next: a duel of titans worthy of a Japanese monster film, a frenzied chase, shooting on rails above the clouds, rhythm game parody, etc. From this abundance of genres, PlatinumGames produces an exquisite corpse with excessive generosity. It’s the whole game that’s a chimera. By eyeing the side of games with thematic worlds dear to Nintendo, Bayonetta 3 transports us all over the globe. The game looks like a broken record that jumps from one track to another, generating a variegated work, not very coherent but not devoid of panache. The series is thus linked to a crazy family of Japanese video games which, from the war against the giant insects of Earth Defense Force to the unkind escapades of No More Heroes, mitigates its technical limits by cultivating an aesthetic of excess with questionable taste. . Each level contains a profusion of more or less successful activities, ranging from optional combat to jumping, exploration or puzzle phases. NINTENDO But if the bloated tone of Bayonetta borders on disgust, it nevertheless constitutes its trademark. Here, the game features grand-guignolesque abominations, settings corrupted by a greenish miasma, and a new heroine, Viola, whose blue and pink “emo punk” style could have come out of an avatar generator. for Fortnite. In the midst of this ugliness, however, the witch Bayonetta finds material to dance, when she invokes her Cerberus through frenzied choreographies or indulges in a few entrechats on Frank Sinatra’s Moonlight Serenade. Basically, the struggle staged here is less that which opposes angels and demons than that which binds, through the attraction of opposites, bad taste and elegance. This is how Bayonetta 3 will wear us down and we will end up abdicating, quite drunk from having had to tame so many chimeras, our heads in the stars. The two additional characters offer other ways to play: for Viola, ruthless sword fights, and for Jeanne, fairly anecdotal 2D passages. NINTENDO The opinion of Pixels in brief We liked: a total video game that lives beyond its means; a combat system still just as rich, but sufficiently permissive for the player to choose his own challenges. We didn’t like: a certain number of failures among everything the game undertakes; a sometimes tiresome one-upmanship, as well as lengths in the final clashes. It’s more for you, if: you enjoy the two previous episodes; you don’t fear excesses of all kinds and assumed faults of taste. It’s not for you, if: you mostly play for the story; hyper-nervous action games give you a headache. The rating of Pixels: 700 megatons out of 1,000. Victor Moisan