I've been making my way through Bayonetta 1, too, for the first time. There's a lot to love about this game with it's cheesy balls-out action movie writing and batshit angelic monsters. I dunno why I skipped over it for so long, but I'm having a blast. Finishing up chapter X right now, and I have Bayonetta 2 in tow afterwards.
I've been hitting up against one frustrating problem over and over, though. I'm gonna hide the rant to deemphasize it, since overall I am enjoying the game, but it's something I hope is mitigated in the second:
[hide]The gameplay is annoyingly inconsistent. I'm not talking about the core combo gameplay, since that works pretty well, but I've just noticed a bunch of frustrating things that keep catching me off-guard, made all the more punishing and annoying by the scoring system:
-Quick time events don't happen often, but when they do, they require a fast button press, otherwise you get a game over and lose points to it. I can never anticipate these things, because they never show up enough to really warrant that. There are chapters in sequence that have none, and then, out of nowhere, one inserted into the middle of the next. Why is it that the QTEs are insta-kill when everything else just punishes you with a bit of damage?
-Speaking of cutscenes, sometimes they drop you off in the middle of an enemy's attack. Again, this doesn't happen all the time, so they catch me off-guard when it happens. This and the last point are made worse by how the cutscenes are always action-heavy, so I'm not sure how we're supposed to differentiate between action cutscenes where you have to do something and those where you don't.
-Half of the attacks don't activate witch time when dodged and I'm never sure witch which half. Rule of thumb is dodge everything, which I try to do, but dodges can push you out of range of other dodges (especially when you unlock the cougar, which is awful and I read that the game lets you turn it off, but I can't figure out how), so I've had trouble figuring out when to optimally dodge. This has led to a lot of drawn out battles that didn't need to be.
-Speaking of witch time, sometimes the game doesn't let you? I know this is during sequences where overall time is slowed down, but it's disruptive to suddenly be missing such a core gameplay element. I guess that's the point but, again, this doesn't happen often enough for me to realize it's even happening when it does.
-Sometimes new non-recurring bits of gameplay are thrown in without warning, like most of Highway 666. I love the concept of that level so much, but stuff like suddenly having cars run into you without warning in a fight and all of the vehicle segment thrown in hurt the level for me (not to mention that it also has a few insta-kill QTEs and a segment where you can't use witch time).
-Speaking of the vehicle section, even the control scheme there was annoyingly inconsistent with the rest of the game. New controls are one thing, but the way shit is default mapped (at least on the switch): punch becomes gun, kick becomes gun, gun becomes… controls menus? So yeah, I love trying to hit the button I think will be guns repeatedly and accidentally pausing the action.
I know that this is the sort of game that you don't master on your first playthrough, but being punished by the game for not knowing shit the game doesn't tell you kind a sucks. Not all of these issues are directly connected, but the presence of inconsistency in a game that demands precision is frustrating to say the least. It'd be more manageable if this stuff didn't come at you in the middle of or the end of a challenging level, where you can't as easily restart everything and try to perfect it all. I'm hoping there aren't as many of these problems in the next game or two.[/hide]