Comparisons to Devil May Cry are unavoidable and completely warranted with Hideki Kamiya at the helm as Director. His ostentatious style emanates from every facade of renaissance architecture and pulses through the brilliant colors of the scenery. Bayonetta’s abilities to walk on walls and transform into an agile panther are the inspirations behind a gauntlet of mesmerizing level designs that push the envelope of three-dimensions. Bayonetta will be forced to dodge boulders while scaling the vertical reaches of a tower, speed through mazes of booby-trapped floors with meticulous precision, and navigate an Escher-esque realm of floating islands. There is no room for error and ample cause for a dose of Dramamine.

For better or worse, Hideki Kamiya’s presence is equally evident in Bayonetta’s story. Bayonetta is an amnesiac survivor from a mythological order of witches. She is relentlessly pursued by a vengeful journalist, urged toward an unknown goal by a disembodied voice, and murders an angel-a-day to keep the demons of Inferno away. The plot is an ever-expanding rabbit hole of mysteries and unanswered clues that, if not for the promise of battle, bore little power to entice me forward. I’ll leave you to decide whether the plot is unnecessarily puzzling and convoluted, or a masterful composition of allusions and hidden details.

Occasional camera-issues and an absurdly eccentric story are meaningless in the grandiose scheme of Bayonetta. It seduces with decadent aesthetics, stimulates with flawlessly smooth combat, and lures you back for more with even greater weapons of pleasurable destruction. In the vein of Ninja Gaiden, God Hand, and MadWorld, Bayonetta is neither for the meek nor the prudish. Bayonetta is a stunning orgy of sadistic mayhem that surpassed even my unreasonably high expectations, and proved that violence can be beautiful.