Witch Time: Interesting against us. This is what all of them try to do in order to net an easy kill. For all of you who don't know the MU, this is really intimidating since our moves are slow and easy to see coming. However:
The move is laughable if a multihit triggers it since pretty much any move in the game stops Bayonetta's smashes (a lot of our moves are multihits). It's still good to exercise caution against it, though. Like Corrin, we do not want to punish landings with farore's wind. The move is slow and easy to see coming and will get witch timed easily.
Recovery moves: These are her side b and up b when she's in the air.
If she goes for combos with these, always use some form of DI away from her. These moves are what allows her to get easy 0-death combos. On the plus side, however,
every combo she has is awful against anyone light weight and/or floaty. Zelda is both of these, and tends to fall out of Bayonetta's combos with little DI required (I'd try down and away from her, but up and away or just simply away might work too.)
Now for recovery, it's interesting. Our d air pokes Bayonetta out of both side b and up b. Bayonetta gets an extra side b when she gets hit/if she hits someone with it in the air. However, neither of her recovery moves give her much vertical distance, so it's possible to shut her recovery down at low percents. (NOTE: She has a triple jump glitch involving her recovery moves. I haven't played one that's exploited that yet so I'd like to know if it has any impact on gimping her.) Always pick a stage with no walls against Bayonetta, because her recovery is near broken with walls (this means always ban duck hunt and don't allow omegas if you can.)
Kill moves: Bayonetta's kill moves are (against Zelda):
- All of her smashes (Extremely unsafe! If we shield any of them, we can get easily punish her with a lot of moves.) She'll likely be saving these for hard reads and witch time. (Nayru's Love is like the one move in the game that DOESN'T BEAT HER SMASHES. It's dumb, I know. Be careful using it due to this since she'll happily smash you out of it.)
- D air. This move has ridiculous knock back and I believe it can kill you before 100%. It also has a meteor, and the endlag is pretty low on it too, but not unpunishable on shield. (Can we stop this move with u smash, maybe?)
- F throw. Has nice KB, but will usually only kill at the ledge. I believe we'll die to it at the ledge around 120 to 130%? Not sure.
- B air. Annoying. Weaker than ZSS's, but like ZSS, can short hop spam it against us safely. Easily predictable, though.
These are seriously her only kill options against pretty much any character.
Specials: Her side b is easy to interrupt and a bad approach option against us. Her down b isn't the greatest against us either. Up b is actually possible to SDI out of in the air and on the ground, and is a little situational. Neutral B is her projectile. We can choose to reflect this or just crouch it. I think it might even be possible to snipe it with Farore's Wind. If she tries to gimp us with it, either reflect or fast fall and dodge at the same time.
Bat Within: This is a neat mechanic from her games. It activates on all dodges at frames 1-4, and at the end of witch time. What makes it annoying against us is that triggering it allows her to get out of any d throw set ups easily (she might punish us for them too). It's a little iffy to trigger, though, so I wouldn't worry about it too much. When activated, she can control where the bats go, but in my experience using her, it's always a surprise activation. If you use a grounded multihit by her and she doesn't activate bat within and move away, she'll get hit by the rest of the move.
Ok, Now onto Zelda's moves
Nayru's Love: Be very careful with it. If it doesn't hit her shield, it will get punished really hard by a smash. Use this to stop approach options and her projectile.
Din's Fire:
Phantom: Ok, here's the thing about Phantom in this match up. Witch Time is actually an AoE counter, meaning if you're in the radius of an activated witch time, you're going to get caught in it no matter what move you used.
Phantom 1 and 2 will activate witch time. Phantom 3 will not. You can also use Phantom to force her to recover low. A lot of her moves are low damage output too, so Phantom probably won't be dying much here.
Farore's Wind: Only use it for recovery and elevator. Will get witch timed.
Someone should test and see if she can activate bat within on the second hit of elevator. I think she actually dies pretty early to elevator and some of her moves might be easy to punish it with.
Regular moves
All multihits are pretty much safe on witch time since hitboxes remain active in witch time and almost all moves stop wicked weaves (her smashes). I don't know if this applies to n air, though. Multihits might also stop her hilariously low priority moves, including her approaches. D air is good for gimps here and it never hurts to try since a trade with give both of you very minimal chip damage and send you up and her down. Try using d smash or dash attack on her recovery since her up b doesn't ledge snap and can be interrupted by a majority of our moves. We can do u throw to u smash at 0%. We can also juggle her a little at low percent with u tilt and get at least 3 or 4 hits off, but personally, if you land the first, I'd go for 2 or 3 and then use up smash to maximize damage output. Other than this, our range and disjoints help enormously here and aid in keeping her out.