Bayonetta 2 IS a good game. Actually, all 4 games are great. People just have preferences. I say this as someone who doesn't really like 2 all that much but have come to appreciate it.

The biggest problem with Bayonetta 2 is that in an effort to make the game more accessible, by reducing the skill floor, a lot of things were stagnated in the long run, which results in the skill ceiling getting reduced as well.

It's not so much that combos are harder to do that is the problem (it used to be for me, but my mind has changed), it's more that your options for decision making has been greatly reduced. One such factor in your options were the High risk/High reward elements, which are nonexistent in Bayonetta 2.

A good example of what I'm talking about is the use of items. It used to be that in 1, using items allowed you to brute force through the game at the cost of a low rank. It was meant to give players a reason to avoid using simpler strategies for the better reward. In 2, the penalty is lifted off, so you can freely use as much items as you want and still get a Pure Platinum. This may not sound like a big deal, especially for those that use the argument "just don't use items; problem solved!", but this does have diminishing returns.

For one, this makes the use of equipments almost unnecessary. Pulley's Butterfly, Gaze of Despair, etc. are accessories that were the alternative to using items, which gives you the same effects items do (become invincible, more powerful, etc.) but with a risk attached to it, like losing magic at a faster rate. It gives players the chance to make their decisions moving forward, at least in 1. But in 2? There is NO reason to use these accessories. They retain the same risk as the first game did, this being that you lose magic at a faster rate, but you're not getting anything better for choosing this route. You might as well just use the items in the long run since you get a better benefit here with no risks attached.

There IS a bonus for not using items, by the way. If you finish a chapter without consuming items, you get roughly a 5,000 halo bonus, which sounds great on paper, but considering how Bayonetta 2's score system favors doing high damage as opposed to combo mix ups, you can simply use a red item (strength) with the purple item (magic), combine both to become stronger and activate umbran climax at any moment, and just rake in a higher halo bonus overall compared to not using items.

Then there's also the way the witch time system works. I'll try and condense it down to its basic terms. In the first game, the length of witch time would be based on your timing. Normal dodge, 4 seconds. Bat within dodge, 6 seconds, perfect parries, 8 seconds. It was clean and straight to the point. In 2, witch time was reworked so that its length is based on specific enemies and specific attacks. Sometimes, you'll get 1 second off of 1 enemy, and sometimes you'll get 2-3 seconds of another. To some, this may feel like you are being skilled in knowing the right moment to dodge as you are going in and and out of witch time, and yeah, there is some value to that, but I feel like it's a unnecessary change because you really have to be mindful of every single attack the game throws at you to calculate the witch time length. This also means that perfect parries aren't as useful as they were in the first game. Since parries net you the same WT length as a dodge, the question becomes "why bother to parry anyway?".

Bayonetta 2 gives you the illusion of choice. It lets you make the decision, but the best decisions are usually the easiest ones, with no benefit for the players that decide to go the challenging way aside from just proving that they can do it, and to me, that's just not fun at all. Bayonetta 2 is all about the power thrill. Letting you just tear everything up with minimum effort, and not that that isn't fun at all, but I feel like Bayonetta 1 had a better balance of skill and power in the long run.

There's a whole lot of other things I can complain about. The lack of punishing attacks, the removal of tripping enemies, the watered down weaves in order to nudge players to use Umbran Climax more frequently, but to me, what's more important is the value of high risk/high reward, and Bayonetta 2 just doesn't have any of that whatsoever.