The thing about Bayo 2 is that it's a much easier game to simply pick up and play. Love is Blue (the new gun moveset) is pretty fluid and natural to control, the way Bayonetta slides around in a dodge is slick, enemies and bosses are quite colorful and flashy, and it's an easier/less punishing game than the first as well. Musphelheims are also much, much easier than the first game, and the combo system doesn't require much effort since going for high dps combos will do the job just fine.
Under that, though, the enemies are much less interesting to deal with because enemies are more random and much more resistant to stun by wicked weaves. Especially on Infinite Climax where you are pretty unlikely to hit any full combo on a boss because they constantly phase out of your moves, parry, or counter what you're doing unless you're in witch time. And witch time is reduced on harder difficulties for hardness reasons, but is still 100% necessary to deal with bosses and some enemies effectively. This also isn't helped by the fact that enemies are far more likely to attack you from offscreen in Bayo 2, where in Bayo 1 they were basically programmed to leave you alone if you couldn't see them for the most part. This is aided by how the camera is framed pretty close to Bayonetta, which typically limited just how many enemies you were actually dealing with at once. In Bayo 2 there's usually a lot more shit to keep track of on screen in the first place, so I end up constantly dodge offsetting just so I dodge the random slough of attacks that sometimes comes my way.
As mentioned before, I also think the combat encounters all feel the same in Bayo 2. But in Bayo 1 I really think fighting something like Grace and Glory is very different from fighting a group of Joys, or Ardors, or a bunch of random angels. Fairness and Fearless is a very different thing from fighting the big dudes with the axes (can't remember the name lol). Personally, I can't really same the same as Bayo 1. Because of it, I am getting legitimately bored getting platinum trophies on the hardest difficulty of the game. It also doesn't help that I'm getting to the parts which cause maximum annoyance now.
That being said, it's not a bad game as I'm still enjoying it just enough to keep going. And ironically, I didn't really enjoy my first playthrough of Bayo 1 much, but my first playthrough of Bayo 2 was so enjoyable it made me go back to play the shit out of the first game.
I did not understand what the fuck was even happening in Bayo 1 (and I'm not sure I do after like 6-10 play throughs) so I didn't care very much about the retcon lol.
After playing Bayonetta 1 multiple times I recall being able to make some level of sense of the events of Bayo 1. Maybe that's just me and I'm weird though.
Bayo 2's story on the other hand was even more of a cluster fuck than Bayo 1 and even I couldn't work it out. >_>