Sakurai has revealed a lot of things in his book, Think About Making the Video Games. Source Gaming has been translating it to English. The latest snippet that has been translated from it has Sakurai talking about the impact of the original Bayonetta title.
He speaks about how different the gameplay was to other action games. He says the cutscenes that “show off an eccentric sense of style, the rich and exciting action, the entertaining setting and enemies”. He praises how a lot of the annoying tropes of action games, such as backtracking and puzzle-solving, were not included. He later says that he doesn’t feel like a game has come close to what Bayonetta has accomplished since.
[Via Source Gaming]