DISCLAIMER: I am a twenty-year-old, slighty pudgy nerd stuck in a rented apartment in the middle of England with nothing but this internet connection and a slightly unhealthy obsession with Maltesers to keep him going through every day. I have no links to Capcom, Ninja Theory or any big gaming company involved with the development of DmC Devil May Cry you care to name, because I'm not cool enough for that. So there is no possible way I could have been "paid off" to say the things about DmC that I am going to say - I have always been and will continue to be an impartial speaker, with no general bias towards any perticular property, console or company that exists. Anyone who wishes to insinuate otherwise can direct their enquiries to the nearest ravenous, man-eating predator.
Right, that's that. Also, let me get this other thing out of the way - I never was a fan of Dante from Capcom's Devil May Cry series.
I was introduced to him via Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and his cocky, one-liner-shooting smugness immediately made me dislike him almost instantly. On top of that, Yahtzee Chroshaw's mostly negative review of Devil May Cry 4, as well as a mish-mash of conflicting evidence, implanted me the subconcious message to avoid any game in the series the same way I avoided Final Fantasy games back then (until Crystal Chronicles: Echoes of Time, that is, but shut up). From getting my ass handed to me to fuzzy second-hand comments about which game was the best and how technical you could get with what seemed to be dumb, over-the-top anime games, I just thought to myself for the longest time that the Devil May Cry series just wasn't for me.
So when Ninja Theory got torn apart for changing a lot of things in their reboot of the franchise, I was left kind of lost. Sure, Dante looked different. Sure, the world was different. Yes, creative director Tameem Antoniades was kind of a prick when you get right down to it. And yes, F-Bombs and Sniperbortions were being thrown around like the ball pit balls in Charlie Chalk's Fun Factory and the writing was juvenile as fuck. But I didn't really understand the outrage the fans were spewing onto the internet. Dante was still an unlikeable prick, even if he had been listening to Linkin Park for a bit and cutting his hair, and the game was still an over-the-top hack-and-slasher. What were people getting so mad about?
So today I toddled down to my local games retailer and bought a copy to see what the fuss was about.
So what's the story? Well, in this alternate-universe prequel-reboot... thing, Dante is living in a trailer and just trying to get through life with as little fuss and as much booze and angel stripper shagging as possible. Unfortunately, he just so happens to live in a city controlled by demons, who are keeping the public stupid via soft drinks and a terrible Bill O'Reily impersonator, and something about our hero(?) rubs them the wrong way enough for them to suck him into the alternate world of Limbo and send a giant monster after him to blow up his house. After dealing with that mishap, Dante is taken by a mysterious woman named Kat to meet his brother Vergil, leader of the terrorist organization known as
So going into the game, I could most definitely see why hardcore fans of the original games might bring out the pitchforks and torches. Not only has Ninja Theory seen fit to change Dante's design (on Capcom's suggestion, ironically enough), they also changed his character from a confident, self-assured badass to a whiny, self-important bellend. Tameem took every opportunity to insult the fans at every turn, claiming he had no respect for the original quadroligy and that his story would "stand among the greats" despite... well, Sniperbortions. The change from Capcom's MT Framework to the Unreal Engine was seen as a downgrade by the technical fans, who claimed that the drop in framerate would cut out the depth of the combat. And on top of that, the writing is crap even by Capcom standards, and considering Street Fighter X Tekken reduced Kazuya to spouting cliche'd villainous one-liners, that's saying a lot.
So yes, I can perfectly understand why this game should get the flak it-
I AM THE FUCKING GOD OF HELLFIRE
...Woah, I do apologize. It's just that after experiencing the combat of DmC, I've developed the uncontrollable urge to bellow such lines at the top of my voice.
DmC, in my mind, stands next to Max Payne 3 as one of those games where, if you get it right, you feel like an untouchable god among men. It's the sort of game where you can walk into a room full of slavering demons and, a minute of button-pressing later, you can walk out again completely unscathed and feeling like a badass, with only the blood stains to tell the story of how you should not be fucked with ever. It's stylish, fairly simple to grasp, and once you truly get the hang of it it's a satisfying as wrestling open a particularly stubborn bottle top, although my Darksiders playthroughs might have helped pepare me for this game to a degree.
See, the game is obsessed with style. You build up "style" by chaining together successful combos, and the higher your style ranking at the end of a fight, the more points get added onto your score at the end of the level. You also get rewarded with currency and upgrade points to spend on new abilities, and if you get struck, you have to build up the style meter from scratch, and may not get as many rewards as before. So the idea is to basically be an untouchable badass who cuts apart anything that looks at him funny, flitting from mook to mook like an enraged butterfly on a sugar rush and busting out unimaginably crazy attacks. If you seriously don't find something awesome about keeping an enemy afloat with a constant stream of bullets, then it's time to re-assess the way you look at things.
But what DmC brings to the table are the interchangeable fighting modes that grant Dante different weapons and abilities to use in combat. In his standard mode, Dante wields his familiar sword Rebellion and uses his twin pistols Ebony and Ivory for long-ranged attacks. Pulling Left Trigger activates Angel Mode, where Dante uses the Osiris scythe for crowd control and fast, multi-hitting strikes. Pulling Right Trigger, inversely, acivates Demon Mode, where Dante's attacks with the giant hammer Arbiter are slow yet can shatter any defense. Both modes also feature different grappling techniques that allow you to deal with pesky airborne or far-away enemys and extend combos - the key is switching between the two modes to build up the style meter effectively.
And when you get it right, it feels fucking amazing. Here's a combo I'm very fond of at my current stage in the game - rush in with the Trillion Stabs, pull the enemy back with the demon chain, dice them up with the scythe, uppercut them into the air, perform a special move that's basically a rising tornado of bullets, dice them up some more, yank them back again, then smash them into the ground with the axe. The length of that sentence alone should tell you that the number of ways to inflict major pain on the demonic enemies you encounter is enough to keep things Schadenfreude-tastic, and I haven't even progressed that far in the game yet. There should be a law banning this kind of catharticism in the world.
And there is a feature in this game I will happily debase myself in gratitude for in future hack-and-slashers, and that's the "Try" feature in the shop. In games that allow you to spend points or whatever on buying new moves, I tend to get flummoxed by the array of choice I have, unsure wherever to pick the arm blades or the glidy-wings and wherever it's going to bite me in the arse later. Thankfully, DmC's shop grants you the ability to go into the game's Training mode to test out the move before you purchase it, allowing you to figure out if you could naturally work this move into your repitoire. Oh, yeah, and there's a training mode as well, which is also cathartic, but more in the punching-bag sense of whaling one this one unfortunate demon over and over until your thumbs hurt.
That said, practicing flashy combos in a white void against one enemy is one thing. Trying to remember your elaborate sequence of grapples, slashes and bullet bonanzas in the middle of a crowded room full of various types of jerks is another. Due to the huge variety of nasties all closing in to take a bite out of Dante's underfed arse, I tended to panic and mash buttons like Woody Woodpecker, occasionally pulling out the chains or hitting dodge when my Spider-Sense kicked in. I guess all that gushing about the flowing and intuitive nature of the combat is invalidated now, but it's this same button-mashing instinct that tends to get me through most fighters, so it seems to be working out fine here. I still get, like, B's and A's on the style meter.
So yes, DmC Devil May Cry can be called a lot of bad things. You can call it a catastrophic abomination that takes a dump on everything that was good about the previous games. You can call it a childishly-written lump of bad dialogue that reads like a 13-year-old's fan fiction fever dream. You can even call it another in a long line of Capcom's big blunders after the whole Mega Man and Street Fighter X Tekken debacles. But there have been few games I have ever played where I can cry "Giant Hary Bollocks to story and character development" and go smash someone's face apart in a kickass manner. One of those is Saints Row The Third, and the other is DmC.
So if nothing else, I can reccommend this game on the strength of it's combat and maybe the platforming sections, but I haven't played far enough to talk much about those. Maybe my not playing the previous games invalidates my opinion and secures me a spot in that special Hell nerds condemn people to for not agreeing with their views, but I'm having so much fun right now I simply don't care, so suck it, haters. If you're determined enough to overlook the troubled development history, unsubtle social commentary and flimsy writing of DmC, or never really cared about the franchise and just want to hit things with various kinds of metal stick, then I definitely say it's worth a
EAT SWORD YOU DEMONIC FUCKWITS
...That's it. Where's my cider?
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