Madcap's Game Reviews - "DmC: Devil May Cry"

Good God, this game…

So many people hate it, and I can understand why.  If you look at the original quadrilogy for Devil May Cry, this game is about as far away from those as you can get…at least in appearance.  In mechanics, it’s not that different from the first four games.  Dante hacks, slashes, and shoots his way through various levels of monsters and mayhem.  The only problems in this stem from…well, Dante…

I get that it’s a reboot.  I get that the development team, Ninja Theory were trying to do something new and original.  I honestly do.  But one of the big problems in this stems from Dante himself.  From how he looks to how he is portrayed, they really took too many steps too far in the wrong direction with him.  In the previous games, Dante was a good-natured half-demon who had taken it upon himself to continue his father Sparda’s mission to rid the world of demons.  He loved a challenge, was snarky and made quips as he did just what he lived for – and he was absolutely crazy about it!

Jesse Pinkman is your savior...bitch!

New Dante, though…he’s just…awful.  For starters, he looks like a meth addict.  Not from the choice of clothing, but just how his face looks.  I know they were going for an “emo” look, but he just looks like a strung out junkie who really is just about as cranky and psychotic as you’d expect.  Unlike the fun-loving and snarky Dante, New Dante is really just a nihilistic asshole.  He doesn’t care about anything beyond women, wine, and song.  And just to demonstrate this point, the opening cinematic details him going to a strip club and taking two strippers back to his trailer – yes, that’s correct, trailer – for a fling before the actual plot picks up.

Because, much like Hal Jordan in the Green Lantern movie, we couldn’t possibly respect Dante as the hero unless he woke up next to a naked hot chick.  Or, in this case, two naked hot chicks.  Suck on that, Hal!

But the plot picks up with the arrival of Kat, Dante’s sidekick/love interest who is able to warn him about a Seeker Demon sent after him literally moments before the thing actually shows up and pulls Dante into “Limbo”.  Not Hell, “Limbo”.  Remember when this series had atmosphere? And…y’know…balls?  I do.

However I won't be giving Ninja Theory grief for this as Capcom told them to get Dante as far away as possible from the classic version of him.  So, Ninja Theory, no grief for you.  Capcom, doing something to appeal to a younger demographic and pissing off your die hard fanbase is incredibly stupid.  Stop doing that.  Also, no, I don't care about the fact that he starts looking like classic Dante by the end.  It's stupid and so are you people.

But regardless, the story begins and Dante begins to learn of his heritage as a nephilim, one of the only two beings who can defeat the legendary demon Mundus.  Oh, that’s right.  Instead of just being a half-demon, all semblance of Dante being somewhat human - something, I remind you, was cited as a good thing even back in Devil May Cry 4 - has been removed thanks to the development team deciding to make him a half-angel, half-demon hybrid.  This would be an interesting change if anything was actually done with it, but nothing ever gets done.  Besides Dante receiving some weaponry that is claimed to be “angelic”, there is no real impact on the character in the least for finding this out.  No actual angels, and possibly not even a God...though considering the guy who thinks he's God, this might not be a terrible thing.

Also, I’d call BS on nephilim being half-angel and half-demon, rather than being half-angel and half-human, but since Darksiders did the same thing I’ll give it a pass.  This once.

It’s breathtakingly stupid, but I’ll give it a pass.

The storyline is mixed for me, though leaning more towards insulting in a big way.  It’s a mixture of the storylines of Devil May Cry and Devil May Cry 3 but flipped on its head and given a more Western influence than the Eastern one of the original games.  In some cases, this works well and provides with some interesting situations and developments.

Unfortunately, not often enough to save the whole.  I will say that I enjoy the parodies of both American commercialism and a certain news network that I won’t say by name, but everyone should pretty obviously make out what it’s lampooning.  I do enjoy the idea that Mundus and his demons control the human world through debt.  These are things that make a lot of sense.  After all, if you were going to corrupt the heart of man, why not do so through his vices and the excess created by them?

Angel power ups come from...this place.  Whatever the hell it is...

The problem is, again, that the game essentially boils down beyond the aesthetics to being Devil May Cry and Devil May Cry 3 in a mixed pile…and not really being as good as either of those games, just in terms of story.  And, to be fair, not being as good as a Capcom story is like not being very talented at the Yearly Marianas Trench Skydiving Competition, so let that sink in.  Honestly, the real problem comes from the attitude of the new Dante.  Again, he’s a nihilist and a complete and unashamed asshole.  A far cry from the snarky, sometimes smug, but loveable half-demon hunter with a flair for the theatrical of the original four games.  From the beginning, he’s thoroughly unlikeable and just doesn’t care – thereby taking away our ability to care.  And yes, while he does get better later, it doesn’t really seem all that concrete for me.  Even so, Dante is not even close to the worst-treated character from the original games.

That “honor” goes to Vergil.  If there’s any way to more quickly and efficiently not get a character I don’t have a clue what it is.  The game builds up Vergil to be a very reasonable human being (well, half-angel, half-demon being, but tomato tomahto), which he is for a while.  He loves his brother, wants to help humanity fight off the demons, and has set up a terrorist organization known as the Order to do so.  This is all well and good, but then we get a particularly jarring scene where he wants to leave Kat behind to die when the Order’s base is about to be seized.  Following this, we get a scene where he unashamedly shoots Lilith – the concubine of Mundus – through the back and killing her unborn child before putting a bullet in her head as well.

Why are these actions wrong? Because Vergil in the original games had honor.  Even when turned into Nelo Angelo in Devil May Cry, he refused to attack an opponent when their back was turned (something the player could exploit).  But there was a reason behind it, mostly that he held himself up to a higher standard than the demons he was trying to exterminate.  Leaving not only an innocent woman, but a woman that has been helping you (something which Dante rightly calls him out on) and shooting an opponent in the back?  Pretty damn dishonorable, really.  Though it really goes even beyond that.  In Devil May Cry 3, Vergil wanted to take the power of Sparda to help exterminate demons and assure that what happened to his and Dante’s mother, Eva, never happens again.  In fact, her death was a major driving force behind his motivations in that game.

Here, Vergil’s turn to the dark side is actually…done.  I won’t say well done, because classic Vergil was never exactly a nice guy himself.  But there, it at least made some sense for the sudden turn.  New Vergil could have been just an asshole as he’d been in Devil May Cry 3.  A misguided anti-hero, to be sure, but you could at least understand where he was coming from with his idea.  New Vergil, however, goes right from Well Intentioned Extremist to Eviler than Thou as soon as Mundus is pushing up daisies with virtually no warning, leading into a boss battle.  And that’s not even getting into his dishonorable and underhanded actions in the game itself.

Not that I couldn’t see a logical way for this to happen, but it goes way too fast for it to be remotely believable as a shift in character.  Really, for a game where he actually received more development and even something as seemingly simple as more spoken lines, DMC really doesn’t do Vergil any favors.

And then we have Kat.  Kat, a witch-psychic-magical girl with powers as the plot demands who serves as a supporting character and love interest to Dante.  She’s not really memorable, brings out a type of spray that involves squirrel semen as an ingredient (don’t even want to know how she got that) and pretty much is a pair of boobs to have running around during the events.  Out of Dante’s leading ladies, I rate her third behind Trish and Lady, and before Lucia.  Why before Lucia?  Kat didn't make me play the game twice.  Not to say that she's bad per se...just that her purpose is to sway Dante more towards wanting to protect humans and it just kind of falls flat...more because of Dante than her, however.  Had it been classic Dante and this had been a prequel, I could possibly see it working.  But with New Dante? No. Just, no...

Laziest.  Devil Trigger.  Ever.  And a poor attempt to appease the fanbase to boot...

Now for some actually good things I like about this game – the combat.  The box art for the game has a quote from G4 of all critics talking about “…the combat here is as refined and precise as ever.”  Which I think is accurate.  Dante gets an arsenal to rival all he had in the previous games put together, and unlike the classic games, Dante can use and flow between each one with the less delay.  Whereas in other games it required going to a menu to switch out weapons, now all it takes is the click of a trigger or the press of a button.  And the variety is really awesome too.

Dante can also use the chains created by his angelic or demonic weapons to either pull himself up to the level of his enemies or bringing them down to his, which is immensely useful against flying enemies and disarming enemies with shielding.  However, the firearms are a little lacking for me.  In previous games, Dante had variety from his classic Ebony and Ivory to a shotgun to a harpoon to a rocket launcher and beyond. Now…he just has Ebony and Ivory, as well as the classic sawed-off shotgun (always a classic) and a new gun called the “Kablooie”, which attaches little mines to enemies that Dante can then detonate…provided he does actually hit them with it, some enemies just have to deflect them.  Assholes.

But that’s all that DMC:  Devil May Cry boils down to.  Good mechanics, arguably the best that have ever been in a Devil May Cry game; but what keeps it down is the jarringly bad aesthetic choices, a storyline that a ten year old could be critiquing to the point of graduate thesis, and not even a single likeable character.  Even by the end, Dante’s conversion from nihilistic asshole to a defender of humanity isn’t exactly the most well done or even believable – though it’s closer to the original character and a damn shake better than Vergil got in this game, limping off angry and mortally wounded after his battle with Dante for his DLC.

This was just uncalled for, Ninja Theory...

Really, when it comes down to it, why did the franchise need a reboot?  Besides being of a higher difficulty, Devil May Cry 4 wasn’t a horrendous game and left the door open for Devil May Cry 5 easily…so what gives, Capcom?  Didn’t feel like you were fitting in with the young and hip crowd without some Combichrist, Jesse Pinkman without any likeability, and deliberately flipping off people who liked your games before?

What the hell is wrong with you people?

DMC:  Devil May Cry is now available from Capcom and Ninja Theory for Xbox 360, Playstation 3, and PC.

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