Per wiki policy, Spoilers Off applies here and all spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.
- The very last entry in Antonio's Notebook:If you find this page undestroyed and in the hands of another, that means something has happened to me. I wrote these notes in case that very “if” should come to pass; however, it still makes me wonder how far I will have gotten on my journey. Maybe I've been able to grasp some sort of truth from the darkness of confusion; maybe I've been able to give my son the understanding of what it means to truly believe. To the son I love more than anything in this world, if you are the one to read this, forgive me for throwing myself into work and thinking little of our family.I am a foolish man, much too attached to my beliefs and entirely unable to change. I am sure this has caused you immeasurable trauma. Now you set off on your own journey down this long hard road we call life. However, as a father, I have nothing I can teach you and even less I can leave you.Hopefully, you will remember the short time I spent with you as a token of my love. I pray that it will become for you a roadmap to a life of substance.
- The very premise of this game is a Tear Jerker. You have one of the last two members of her race sealed away for 500 years, only to awaken to a man getting murdered by angels in front of his son while you can't save him. Then she spends 20 more years afterwards luring and killing angels to avoid being Dragged Off to Hell, just looking for answers. She returns to a place where she used to live and starts to remember her life before she was sealed away, but it's been overrun by Angels. It's very clear that it's not the same world she grew up in.
- Bayonetta's interactions with Luka in Chapter II, Verse III, when he accuses her of killing his father. Her first instinct is to handle him roughly, spook him, and otherwise treat him as an annoyance before killing the angels that show up, but when the fight's over and Luka accuses her again before exiting, the camera lingers on her face
... There's nobody around to see her, and she's in Purgatorio, so Luka doesn't even know she's right next to him. There's nobody around to see how Bayonetta reacts to this. In later chapters, we see Bayonetta either ignoring Luka's accusations or trying to address them with some level of genuine care for how he sees her, but here, we see that she has no clue how to process this when she's alone. Luka is the first person Bayonetta shows kindness to in the series, admittedly through teasing (and through giving him the same name she gave her beloved childhood stuffed animal), but when she meets him, she realizes that the innocent child she saw during her revival has spent the past twenty years hating her for killing his father, even though she was really trying to save him from the angels Father Balder had set loose. Even though she slays angels by the dozens on a regular basis, she never kills an ordinary human being, and she would never let a "little one" go without a parent — yet in here, "Cheshire" is totally convinced that Bayonetta killed his father and determined to tell the whole world she's a murderer. She refuses to show it to him, but it hurts. - Jeanne revealing to Bayonetta that they were very close to each other when they were children.
- Balder's "murder" of Luka. Bayonetta just kind of lays there for a while after that diving leap to save him, which is kind of weird: This is Bayonetta we're talking about, she can shake off attacks from angels with no problem and she perhaps had twisted her ankle all of a sudden? And it's not some gratuitous fanservice of her laying on the ground, considering how most of the time she's down, the scene is focused on Balder: we get exactly one shot of her getting up for only two seconds, and it doesn't even focus on her butt or boobs, but rather her expression. She's utterly livid. Seeing Bayonetta, of all people, just smacked in the face like that? It hurts.
- A moment that counts as both Heartwarming and Tear-Jerker is the scene where Bayonetta takes little Cereza back to her own time and lays her down to rest, says to her, "No need to cry, little one. The nightmare is over now", and then starts singing Fly Me to the Moon to her. Then there's the scene that follows this. Little Cereza continued to believe that future Bayonetta was her actual mother, and future Bayonetta was a huge influence on her, so then when she sees her (real) mother die during the witch hunts, she says "I'm not afraid anymore, mummy." If this doesn't get you choked up, then nothing will.
- When fighting against the Final Boss, Jubileus, Bayonetta has fought through several of her various themed attacks and at the end, she decides to end it by summoning Queen Sheba. The Queen of Inferno that is explicitly stated in the book of Demons to kill the Witches who try to summon it because it drains so much magical power from them. Besides doing this summon, think of it like this: Bayonetta had remembered her own father that she once belovingly called "Daddy" as a child, had been responsible for killing the rest of the Umbran Witches AKA her comrades. She was rescued by Jeanne, her last Umbran Sister and best friend only to watch her begin floating away in Outer Space, most likely to float away in the vacuum forever or at least until Madama Styx pulled her to Inferno. By this point, Bayonetta has practically lost everything, so her use of Queen Sheba is most definitely NOT because she that she knew Jeanne was still alive. She was fully intending to kill Jubileus even if it means it would kill herself. It's slightly heartwarming and fortunate that Jeanne was still alive and contributed to Queen Sheba's summoning, but still... Bayonetta's plan of pulling a Heroic Sacrifice would have happened if not for Jeanne.
- On your first playthrough, it's practically impossible to hold back tears during the scene at the end where almost everyone, especially Luka, believes that Bayonetta is dead. The first scene shows that Luka thinks Bayonetta is going to sneak up on him as always, but then he turns around, realizing that she's not there. Then at the "funeral", he brings a huge load of flowers to her grave, telling her that they're rosemary, and hopes that they will help her in the afterlife. Even though the player knows in the back of their mind that she's not really dead, it's still pretty sad... but when she comes out of her coffin and makes remarks on its poor conditions, you won't be able to stop laughing.
