MadCap's Game Reviews - "Devil May Cry 2"

So, apparently, Devil May Cry is not in chronological order.  Like Memento, like Pulp Fiction, the story is out of order.  Because of this, the second game is actually the third, the first game is the second, and the third game is a prequel to the original Devil May Cry, making it the first.

Confused yet?  Don’t be, just roll with it.

This time, Dante is found entering a museum - once more being a complete badass – as he meets up with his partner, Lucia.  He follows her to Dumary Island, where Lucia’s mother sets up the Dragon for the game, a businessman named Arius who is using demonic powers to - you guessed it - take over the world.  Dante literally flips a coin on it and decides to help based on the result.

Apparently you can pick to play as Lucia. Why someone would want to play through this twice is beyond me...

What follows is a battle of attrition that is nightmarish.  The game isn’t particularly difficult.  No, in fact, most enemies don’t even attack Dante before he’s had a chance to repeatedly bury his sword in their chest cavity or riddle them with bullets from his guns.  They’re amazingly easy…the problem is that there’s just so many of them!  This is especially true with the boss battles as well.  They feel padded out to a ridiculous extent!  The first game didn’t need this.  I mean, alright, Nightmare showed up two more times than he actually needed to, but it still didn’t feel like they were just padding out the game when he showed up again for another bout.

Prime example of that being a section where Dante has to hold of a bunch of horde of enemies while a transport movies into an Oil Field.  In close quarters, of course, the enemies are even more useless, but there’s just way too many.  Making me repeat the same thing again and again isn’t any test of skill, it’s wasting my time.  Whether its puzzles (which DMC 2 has suspiciously few in comparison to the first) or combat.  This becomes even worse in one particular stretch of the game where enemies are constantly spawning and you had to hit certain markers in order for Dante to progress.  Apparently, Dante has been hit with the Doom Guy ray and can’t resist the urge to rip and tear their guts.  This wouldn’t be too bad except for the ever dropping time limit before the building he’s in explodes.

Clearly, this is man who has his priorities in order…or the ability to target specific enemies is just complete garbage.

Even the bosses are ridiculously easy once you get the hang of their attack patterns, they just have health bars padded out to a ridiculous length.  I really liked it better in the first one, where it actually took some skill and careful maneuvering to get the job done.  But here, the bosses never really differentiate from their attacks and once you find the exploit, it just becomes a matter of time before they’re defeated and you move on.

Devil Trigger mode returns with cool new aethestics, but is pretty much a "kill faster" mode.

Another particularly jarring change from the first game is the environment.  Instead of the creepy and atmospheric corridors of the Castle on Mallet Island are now replaced with more open urban environments (for the first half of the game, anyway) that are more indicative of platforming.  It’s rather disappointing after the Castlevania­-esque Gothic style scenery and locations of the first game, which really helped to set a more dark and ominous mood.  Some of this comes back in the second game, but it doesn't really create the same feeling.

Of course, and I know this was a complaint I had about the first game – I still can’t see anything in certain areas.  This is especially terrible during the aforementioned exploding building scene when I go into one room and find a door to attempt to progress in leaving the place and between the poor lighting and the fixed camera angles (again, why the hell did people think that was a good idea?!), I can’t make heads or tails of where I’m supposed to go by anything other than trial and error.  And this, by the way, is me playing the HD remake!  Could the restoration team not have gotten in here and given me something I can actually see?  Or, better yet, how about a brightness setting, Capcom? Yeah, the menus still direct me to adjust the brightness on my TV, and it still doesn't help!

But hey, let’s take a look at the items, shall we? We have the same assortment of goodies from before – Vital Stars, Devil Stars, etc. – though, strangely, Vital Stars and Devil Stars now come in small and large varieties.  Why even bother with the small ones? Who’s going to buy a cure light wounds potion when one of heal is readily available?  Nobody, that’s who.  Then again, there’s really no reason to even bother with either of them.  Your health will pretty much remain full since your enemies rarely, if ever, actually get an attack on you (except for bosses, and even then once you get the pattern down you can’t be touched) and the amount of fighting you do grinding through wave after wave of enemies will see your Devil Trigger gauge stay fairly full on a consistent basis.  Of course, grinding is actually a pretty excellent term for it.  Red Orbs, also immigrating from the previous game, are dropped by fallen foes and can be exchanged at the “God of Time” stores for weapon upgrades, power ups, and other items on your quest.  However, we come to a problem.

Everything is too damned expensive.

Literally, your first weapon upgrade for either Dante’s pistols or his sword will set you back ten thousand, and the number only goes up as you go on (it stops after a certain amount, but geez!).  This means if you want to improve anything, you’re going to have to grind a lot.  Again, something that the first game didn’t have and didn’t need, and it worked fine there!  However, I managed to get through most of the game with only an upgrade for each, so that tells you how utterly useless that is in addition with the Stars – all of which increase in price as you buy them, and don’t bother to lower in price again afterwards.  Why? Why keep a vital item out of player hands and make them do more grinding?  If I wanted to do that, I could play World of Warcrraft.  Hell, I could go back and take another shot at The Sacred Cards.  And the game actually expects you to waste your time with this!

Don't even think about it, the game won't let you jump...

This games boils down to having too many problems for it to be any good.  There are way too many differences from the original, something that can be chalked up to a different development team, which I really just have to shake my head at.  The first game wasn’t perfect, but it was at least workable and enjoyable as a game.  It had good atmosphere, a decent difficulty curve, and didn’t make me feel like I had just spent several hours wasting my time when I finally finished it.  I can only hope that the third entry into the series – which is really the first – will be better than the second, perhaps something closer to the first.

I can only hope.

Devil May Cry 2 is now available on Playstation 2 and is collected in the Devil May Cry HD Collection for Playstation 3 and Xbox 360, from Capcom.

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