Bayonetta/YMMV


 * Alternative Character Interpretation:
 * Bayonetta herself gets a ton of it.
 * Moviebob, in his guise as The Game Overthinker, believes Bayonetta is not so much sexually appealing as much as she is sexually intimidating, and feels she is unique in this regard.
 * There is quite a debate on Bayonetta's sex appeal nature. Is she blatant adolescence pandering, or is she a satire of said pandering? And if it is the latter, does it fall into the Do Not Do This Cool Thing problem? The way she's characterized and framed by the narrative is also called into question often; unlike most videogame characters, we don't get into Bayonetta's head much. Critics have described her as being "kept at arm's length"—basically a character to watch and ogle, but not one to identify with or understand.
 * Bayonetta is a witch who is allied with the forces of Hell, the type of character that is usually evil, but in a setting, lampoons the traditional concepts. So in this camp setting, she's likely supposed to satirize the Evil is Sexy cliché.
 * She might also be a Stepford Smiler. Think about it, how do you cope with the fact you're doomed? You've entered a bargain with the Devil, you've accepted eternal damnation in exchange for your powers, you have no way out, and sooner or later, he's going to come and collect. Maybe her dry wit and sex appeal nature is her way of keeping sane and blocking it out of her mind.
 * The lyrics to her theme song "Mysterious Destiny" support this, claiming that she buries her loneliness deep down in her eyes and that sadness lies in her smile.
 * Enzo, Butt-Monkey, perpetual goof, but knowledgeable informant and assistant working for two of the most powerful and dangerous people in existence, a human face representing some of the strongest of Hell itself. If he was among his peers instead of hanging around Physical Gods, would he transform from the comic relief into a feared mobster?
 * Boss in Mook Clothing: Gracious and Glorious are exactly the same as Grace and Glory but are faster, more agressive, more damaging, and you can't normally get Witch Time off of them. Expect to see the four of them a lot in hard mode.
 * Plus they have no problem with breaking out of your combos, while theirs (particularly their midair ones) require equal parts perfect timing and sheer luck to dodge out of.
 * Or you can block them with the Moon of Maha Kaala.
 * Broken Base: The motionless models used in certain cut-scenes. Some argue that it was a creative way to make the game stand-out, as well as likely a way to save large amounts of the budget for actual gameplay sections, not to mention a great way to slow down the pace to allow the over-the-top fight scenes to seem even more impressive. Others, however, argue that it comes off as more lazy than a style choice.
 * Complete Monster: Father Balder seems like a pretty straightforward example given that he was responsible for the genocide carried out against the Umbra Witches,.
 * Crosses the Line Twice: Asides from...everything else in the game, there's one cutscene where Bayonetta has just defeated the boss and elects to blow it up by shooting a stream of gasoline coming from a peeing baby angel statue. When it fails the first time, she shoots the statue in the spout. When the head flies past in the ensuing (huge) explosion, it's crying.
 * The first time we meet Joy, cue the gentle laughter when there's a little impromptu dance off. Drop your jaw in shock/horror/hilarity when Joy chooses to finally... reveal herself. And then the line is tossed out of the window when you perform the torture attack on her.
 * Crossover Ship: Dante/Bayonetta is a surprisingly popular one.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: It's even inspired this song by MC Lars.
 * Hell, the BATTLE THEME itself probably is better to listen than Frank Sinatra's version.
 * Let's dance!
 * The music being played when fighting Jeanne for the second time, an awesome, fast song with some killer piano and a cooing breathy girls' chorus in the background.
 * Blood and Darkness during the final battle with Jeanne is even more awesome.
 * Climatic Battle is incredibly memorable as well, if for no other reason than it's the song that plays right as you're about to literally take apocalyptic horrors calling themselves angels apart in the most gruesome-cum-awesome method physically possible.
 * The Greatest Jubilee and You May Call Me Father are the second and third best boss themes ever.
 * The music that plays through most of Chapter 8 makes it one of the best parts of the game.
 * The track that plays in the first sections of the Epilogue chapter, Friendship. The tracks for the Cardinal Virtues, Fortitudo - In Labors And Dangers, Temperantia - In Foregoing Pleasures, Iustitia - In Giving Every Man His Due, and Sapientia - In The Choice Between Good and Evil, may not have the general awesomeness of some of the other tracks that makes them as enjoyable played seperately, but while fighting the bosses in question, you'd be hard-pressed to imagine a more appropriate track.
 * Demonic Spiders: Fairness & Fearless. Grace & Glory. Inspired. Joys. Braves. Kinships. This game is a giant nest of Demonic Spiders that have a shameless disdain for the Mook Chivalry code.
 * Difficult but Awesome / Simple Yet Awesome: "Dodge offset" doesn't sound all that complicated − continuing an interrupted combo after dodging by holding the attack button − but in the heat of battle it requires quite a bit of coordination to pull out spontaneously. If you master it though, it becomes extremely useful in situations where you can't use Witch Time (like the Gracious & Glorious fights or the entire Infinite Climax Mode). It looks pretty sweet too.
 * Evil Is Cool
 * Evil Is Sexy: Hoo boy.
 * Excuse Plot: Not that the overall story is bad, but the whole deal with Bayonetta looking for a stone is only there to keep her moving from point A to point B. The story manages to remain interesting due to character interaction and Bayonetta's returning memories. Plus, of course, the several Crowning Moments...
 * Fan-Preferred Couple: Some fans don't seem to like the Bayonetta/Luka pairing. Luckily for them, two Bayonetta/Anyone pairings have emerged from the fandom.
 * There is a decent amount of artwork featuring both Dante and Bayonetta, often as a couple, and has been around even before the game was released. Not surprising, considering many things. Both characters are the brainchild of the same guy and feature the same sort of gameplay. They could even be considered the Distaff Counterpart of one another, as they are equally Badass while one fights demons and the other fights angels, but both are mostly on humanity's side. Even more interestingly, and also featured in fanarts, is that this contrast could lead into them facing one another - which would be indisputably awesome - but be it Opposites Attract or Foe Yay, the chemistry needed for Shipping would be there, and it would be more than enough. There's arguably a bit of Ship Sinking with Bayonetta claiming to not be fond of the talkative type, but then again, her way of treating her talkative enemies is the same way Dante applies to his.
 * Bayonetta and Jeanne appears to be a popular pairing as well, thanks to their Foe Yay-ness. It doesn't help that she resembles Dante.
 * Fashion Victim Villain: Jeanne is pretty bad with her red jumpsuit, poofy purple collar, and fuzzy gun tassels. is even worse.
 * Jeanne's weird eyelashes are somewhat unfortunate too, and her jumpsuit makes her look almost deformed. For, though, this trope probably was intentional.
 * Oddly enough, Bayonetta can get in on the fun with the d'Arc couture bullet, which puts Bayonetta in a black version of Jeanne's dress, and it's sexy all of a sudden.
 * Fetish Retardant: Maybe it's the beehive hairdo, maybe it's finding clothing made of hair less than appealing, etc.
 * It's odd that Bayonetta's proportions and actions can end up so amazingly over-sexualized that she can become largely unsexy. Sort of like a sexy version of the Uncanny Valley: she's too sexy to be taken seriously, but not sexy enough to overpower the ridiculousness.
 * Game Breaker: The Durga-Kilgore glitch.
 * Let's put it in perspective: The second-best halo-farming method in the game only nets around 1 million halos per run, and can take upwards of 4 minutes each. The Durga-Kilgore combo? not only does it blow that 1 million out of the water with upwards of 13 million (Take That, Adam Smith!), It also maxes out the combo score in a lot of the scenes.
 * An officially recognized gamebreaker is the Climax Bracelet, normally unlocked by obtaining every achievement/trophy AND collecting every crow on one save game. Equipping the accessory invalidates any score made on a level where the accessory was equipped. When you can Pure-Platinum the penultimate boss without a sweat using something, you know it's a game breaker.
 * Genius Bonus: All of Bayonetta's summons and torture attacks are evoked in Enochian, the language of angels.
 * Goddamn Bats: The Decorations and Enchants are this, sort of. Although they are not the worst examples.
 * Guide Dang It : The Alfheim portals often (but not always) require backtracking through entire portions of a level, as they appear only after you get past a certain point or have done a certain action, without any indication whatsoever. One of them only appears if you shoot a specific trash can. And a few Alfheim challenges can let you clueless; like staying in the air 30 seconds with nothing to help you but an agressive and uncooperative pair of Grace&Glory.
 * Also, finding all the crows that carry the Umbran Tears Of Blood without a walkthrough is quite a feat. Not only are they ridiculously difficult to spot and sometimes perched in the most uncanny places, their location changes depending on the difficulty mode.
 * Good Bad Bugs: You can save at least 2.8 million halos (and a lot of effort) by spending 5 million halos to unlock the Climax Bracelet before finishing Normal Mode and then use it to finish off Normal mode. The game will give you a total combo score of 9999999 and a total time of 00:00:00, unlocking the Bracelet of Time with no additional effort.
 * And again, the Durga-Kilgore glitch, but one can debate if this is really a glitch or if it was deliberate.
 * HSQ: Most, if not all, of the cutscenes will have you saying 'Holy shit' about as often as you say 'What the HELL is going on? And why is it so AWESOME?'
 * The first ten minutes of the game will lock the visual cortex of your brain into visual overload, but it's so awesome you won't care.
 * Informed Flaw: For someone so afraid of their fate, Bayonetta sure doesn't show it.
 * Les Yay: Between Bayonetta and Jeanne, thanks to some rather . . . close quarters style fighting.
 * Luck-Based Mission: A minor example, but getting the "Touch it and it will really hurt" Tear of Blood (counter-attacking 3 times in a row with the Moon of Maha-Kaala) is basically this since, neither in the game nor in the manual is there any indication on how counter-attacks work. You actually have to counter with a pixel perfect timing, like when you activate the bat form, but most people will just succeed by chance, without knowing how the hell they did it.
 * Narm Charm: Par for the course.
 * Porting Disaster: The PlayStation 3 version of the game is inarguably inferior. Platinum Games handed over the code to Sega for the finalization process on that platform, which lead to noticeably reduced frame rates, poor textures, extremely intrusive and long loading times, and other technical issues.
 * However, the Play Station 3 version recently recieved a patch that allows you to install the game to the Play Station 3's hard drive, largely cutting the loading times. However the other most glaring issues with frame rates and textures remain unaddressed.
 * Scrappy Level: For some, the rocket ride section goes on just a bit too long. Combine this with the fact that it's the only place in the game where you can't un-invert the camera, and well...
 * Start. Options. Controls. Scroll over to the rocket icon. Switch up and down. problem solved.
 * The double Kinship fight. Dear God, those fuckers take Bullet Hell to a whole new level. It takes a good level of Witch Time skill if you don't wanna be pelted by a dozen missiles at the same time. To make matters worse, they tend to stay outside of the path you are standing on, so your best bet is to keep shooting, which takes a long-ass time.
 * Unlike other enemies in the game, you can actually Board the kinships and smash their wheelhouses. Even if it dies, the corpse will remain as a platform. You jump from ship to ship, smashing all the while.
 * The beginning of chapter 8 and the "disapearing platforms" part in chapter 15 also qualify on Play Station 3, mainly because the framerate operates a breathtaking drop in these two specific parts.
 * Scrappy Mechanic: Out-of-body fights. They're tolerable in the story mode, where you're given tools to wail on angels with and Cereza isn't constantly in danger, but when they're made an Alfheim challenge, you have to leave your body behind to fight; that won't stop the angels from going after it anyway (which will hurt your regular lifebar), unless you waste one of your two accessory slots on an item that forces Angels to attack you... but also makes them stronger.
 * That very mechanic forces you to use a lightpole to fight Affinities while protecting Cereza, since they are not in the same dimension. Not only is the "weapon" painfully slow, it slips out of your hands if you stop to dodge an attack. Granted, you can use to attack them directly but the thing is not exactly easy to get...
 * The mini-game to send Jubileus into the sun isn't so bad in Normal mode. In Hard and Climax mode however the planets are much harder to avoid, and failure is counted as a death, which can completely ruin an otherwise perfect score. Considering how long and difficult this fight can be, this is frustrating to say the least.
 * Insta-Death Quick Time Events in general, because it's sometimes damn near impossible to know exactly when to push Square button, and each death counts against your score.
 * Scrub: One of these may come out in video comments to signal that using the Kilgore glitch is cheating and that if you do you're not really skilled.
 * Squick: Joy's Torture Attack. Completely gratuitous and kind of unsettling.
 * That One Attack: Jeanne's goddamn missile during the third fight! The QTE requires a hyper-fast reaction time and failure causes a lot of damage.
 * Wasted Song: Battle For The Umbra Throne only plays during the flashback fight with Jeanne, and it's EPIC.
 * Wasted Song: Battle For The Umbra Throne only plays during the flashback fight with Jeanne, and it's EPIC.