Good News, Darlings: Nintendo Is Rereleasing Bayonetta 2
Last month Nintendo revealed the final member of Team Smash, as chosen by a worldwide poll: Bayonetta. And it had an interesting effect on the once-pokey sales of her critically praised sequel from 2014. Suddenly, thousands of gamers realized “Oh right, I need to get around to playing that,” and headed out to the store.
Up until that point, copies of Bayonetta 2 were relatively easy to find. I’ve seen the same three sitting around in a Fred Meyer display shelf for months. Then Bayo’s Smash trailer broke and all those copies vanished into thin air, as well as every other copy in unassuming supermarkets, every GameStop copy both in stores and online, and pretty much anyplace else the game was once sold. All gone.
And you can bet no one was happier than the scalpers, who bought any remaning copies in existence and marked them up on eBay to ridiculous levels.
Sometimes when this happens, Nintendo does nothing about it and all existing copies remain rare and valuable forever. This time, fortunately, they noticed the spike in sales and hit the button on a reprint. Fresh copies of Bayonetta 2 will be arriving in stores around the same time the witch herself becomes playable in Smash: February 19.
There’s one catch, though: the extra disc with the original Bayonetta in it will not be part of the package. That was always intended to be a limited-time offer, and now it’s expired. The reprint, however, will be value-priced at $30, which is $20 less than the current price of Bayonetta 2 digitally (and that version never came with Bayo 1).
You don’t really need to play the original Bayonetta to enjoy Bayonetta 2, but you SHOULD play it sometime (it’s dirt cheap for PS3 and 360 if you can’t get it on Wii U).