She appears as a guest character in other games such as Anarchy Reigns, The Wonderful 101, the Super Smash Bros. series, and Shin Megami Tensei: Liberation Dx2.

The process, which took a full year, went through a hundred character designs and alterations, with early appearances resembling a traditional witch, with a frayed black outfit and a "veil-like look" on her head.

During this process it was decided that as she summoned creatures to attack her enemies during the game she would lose partial control of her hair and end up in more "comfortable" attire; Shimazaki noted this as one of the aspects of the character she loved.

This eventually proved difficult as, combined with the black and silver incorporated into her outfit and the game's general color palette, it did not have the sharp qualities of her former appearance.

[18] Her new guns, Love is Blue (named after the song), were also difficult to design, as making them too large or too similar in color to other elements of Bayonetta's outfit would not have fitted her.

Each of the guns, Toccata, Prelude, Nocturne, and Minuet, were given antique charms adorned with flower designs and named according to their color and the ideas they evoked to further promote and augment the new look.

[21] For Bayonetta 3, the character's English voice was recast, a decision originally attributed by co-director Yusuke Miyata to "various overlapping circumstances"; Tanaka returned to reprise her role in Japanese.

[26] Bayonetta became a black sheep among the Umbran Witches, and during the war, Jeanne, her former childhood friend and rival, sealed her away and wiped her memory to protect her from those who would exploit her power.

In Bayonetta, the witch sets out for her hometown Vigrid, where Balder is preparing to awaken the creator Jubileus and trigger the creation of a new world at the cost of the old one.

She is followed there by a now grown-up Luka, who has become a journalist and has set out to show Bayonetta to the world, as an act of vengeance for her supposed part in his father's death.

[30] Knocked unconscious by the awakening of her power, Bayonetta is sealed within Jubileus by Balder, only to be rescued by Jeanne, newly freed from the Lumen Sage's control.

Bayonetta then sets out to rescue Jeanne's soul from the realm Inferno, heading to the sacred mountain Fimbulventr to find the Gates of Hell.

Through a vision, he reveals to her that her father Balder was not responsible for the witch hunts and tried to save her mother, who was killed by an unknown assailant who looks like Loki.

Separated from the boy, Bayonetta fights through hordes of demons and successfully rescues Jeanne but finds Loki being attacked again by the Masked Lumen.

During her time training under Morgana, an exiled Umbra Witch, Cereza frequently experiences a dream that tells her of Avalon Forest, the home of the enigmatic soul-stealing Faeries that she has been strictly warned by her teacher not to venture into at any point.

Disheartened, but remembering the words of the boy in her dream, Cereza decides to ignore Morgana's warnings and go into Avalon to become strong and save her mother.

The demon is furious at this confinement and attempts to flee in order to find a way back to Inferno, but quickly discovers that the summoning drains him of his strength and power the further away he is from Cereza.

The two continue went on an adventure, following the tracks of a white wolf whilst conquering the dangerous creatures that lurk in the forest and destroying the four Elemental Cores hidden deep within the forest, where Cereza discovers confidence she never thought she had in herself and gradually overcomes her timid nature, while Cheshire's stubborn attitude eventually begins to soften as he looks at Cereza in a new angle.

At first feeling doubtful of her abilities to combat her mentor, some words of encouragement from Cheshire spur Cereza to fight on, manifesting the Witch Time to take Morgana by surprise and defeat her, destroying her Umbran Watch and knocking her soul from her body.

[32] Sega also joined men's lifestyle website Maxim.com to run a contest to find women who looked like Bayonetta; the grand prize winner was Andrea Bonaccorso.

In their review of the first game, the staff of PSM3 praised how well the character held the player's attention, stating that while every line she spoke "dripped" with sexual innuendo, "it's all very tongue in cheek".

[44] GameSpot's Mark Walton also praised her, stating, "[D]espite suffering crotch shots and blatant innuendos …[Bayonetta] remains one of the most charismatic and powerful heroines in the medium.

[47] However, associate editor Nicole Tanner disagreed, noting she did not find the character's sexuality at all empowering as "just because you give a girl an attitude and guns isn't enough to offset what she looks like".

[48] Other members of IGN's staff named her their favorite video game character, describing her as "the playfulness and versatility of Dante" combined with "visually inventive combat".

They cited her constant nudity as a point of appeal, calling the mechanic of her hair serving as her clothing both one of the stupidest and one of the coolest elements of a character.

As a result in Kim's eyes she fell flat as a protagonist, and while he acknowledged many would find appeal in her appearance and "vampish" approach he had preferred for her overt nature to be toned down.

[50] While Arthur Gies of Polygon praised Bayonetta 2 for giving the character "some much-needed development as a human being who cares about things other than herself", he was significantly concerned about other aspects of her depiction, such as gratuitous camera angles that were "frequently provided as an implicit reward for doing well.

[51] Edge stated that, although "Bayonetta's default design shows how to walk the tightrope between sexy and sexualised", certain optional costumes "range from the respectable to the cringeworthy".

Additional comparison was brought up between the character and her younger self, Cereza, and how it not only illustrated a maternal side of Bayonetta, but also drew a distinction between woman and child by giving them different names, "the sexed and non-sexed subject".

The framing of the game's world further helped support this, with the emphasis on strong women and the use of feminine imagery such as the "subtle grace of Bayonetta's butterfly-shaped shadow".