Bayonetta Witch of Vigrid a book with pictures of the title char

Bayonetta Witch of Vigrid, a book with pictures of the title character and an "interview" with her, was released on October 22, 2009. By then, a Bayonetta theme had been made available for the Google Chrome browser. A song entitled "Reaping Beauty" by MC Lars and featuring Beefy Devil May Cry Costumes
, Random, Tina Root of Small Halo and SMP was included on the second re-release of Lars' album 21 Concepts (But a Hit Ain't One). The song is directly inspired by Bayonetta, and heavily references the title character and many of the game's aesthetic and gameplay elements.

The Bayonetta Original Soundtrack was released in Japan on November 4, 2009. The album contains five discs with 150 tracks used in the game, composed by Hiroshi Yamaguchi, Masami Ueda, Rei Kondoh, Norihiko Hibino, Erina Niwa, Takayasu Sodeoka, Takahiro Izutani, Yoshitaka Suzuki, Naoto Tanaka, and Mitsuharu Fukuyama. It was also released on the North American iTunes Store on the same day, spanning 5 Volumes in total. The North American release of the soundtrack does not include any version of "Fly Me To The Moon". Helena Noguerra provided the main vocals for the theme of Bayonetta.

An anime film based on the game, titled Bayonetta: Bloody Fate, was directed by Fuminori Kizaki and produced by Gonzo, with screenplay by Mitsutaka Hirota and character design by Ai Yokoyama. The film was announced at Tokyo Game Show 2013 and released in ten Japanese theaters for two weeks from November 23, 2013. It was then released on Blu-ray Disc and DVD in Japan on January 24, 2014. A manga adaptation illustrated by Mizuki Sakakibara was published in two parts in Kodansha's Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine on November 9, 2013 and December 9, 2013 respectively Cosplay Shop
.

Cam Shea of IGN Australia praised the developing game in March 2009 as "absolutely stunning-looking" and "a balls-out action game set amongst glorious European architecture", and called its titular witch their "new favourite videogame character ever ... even cooler than [Devil May Cry's main character] Dante ... she has the playfulness and versatility of Dante, but wrapped up in some of the most visually inventive combat we've seen in a long while". Similarly, GameSpy's Gerald Villoria praised the game in July that year as highly original to the point that it could end up like the poor-selling Ōkami (another Kamiya-directed game) for it—"the premise, the characters, the action sequences, they're all entirely different from anything else I've ever seen," he wrote—and called its lead a "constantly moving", "remarkably multi-faceted" character "presented in an ultra-stylish way".

Matt Leone of 1UP.com said of a pre-release version of the game's PS3 port at E3 2009: "The first thing I noticed was that, at the end of a normal combo, you can hold down the final button in the string to continuously fire gunshots—which looks incredibly cool when you kick someone and then keep your leg pointed at their face as your foot pours bullets on it." He added, "I'll be amazed if Bayonetta doesn't end up being one of the best action games this year."Staff at GameSpot UK were also generally impressed with the PS3 port, which they played on June 3. They called the "Witch Time" mechanic a "cool move" and one of the two boss battles they fought were "pretty intense", and said "it's easy to see the similarities between the two over-the-top action games [Bayonetta and Devil May Cry]". They added, "Rampant violence and sexism is par for the course" in the game. 1UP's staff again played a PS3 version for 15 minutes on the weekend of August 31 that year, at Platinum Games's "Feel Bayonetta" event in Tokyo's Roppongi district Dragon Nest Costumes
. They said that it "was very blurry" compared to a 360 version displayed there, and that its frame rate "was all over the place. ... it was often hard to keep track of the action [in one scene] because of the graphical issues on PS3."