Well, it’s 2019 and I still hate DmC: Devil May Cry.
All things considered, I’m okay with that.
When on I dance it’s not over
Weave right through to get closer
Like a silver bullet piercing through
I throw myself into you
…And spoilers. Always into spoilers.
Also, I’m doing DmC again…again. Yay.
So news recently broke that development for Devil May Cry V is officially over. I mean that was kind of a given, since we mere mortals are allowed to play it now. More specifically, support for it has reportedly ended, meaning no more DLC. The Bloody Palace, at least for now, is all we’re going to get. No Vergil (without modding on PC). No Trish or Lady, which is a bad look considering how hard they got benched. A part of me was kind of hoping for more Bloody Palace floors -- even though I’ve only cleared 59 so far -- but I guess that option’s down and out. Bummer.
What a strange world it is when I’m asking and hoping for more DLC. Capcom is one of those companies that’s less than graceful about its monetization practices, even though (or, mostly because) there have been times where they desperately needed extra injections of cash. But not all DLC is created equal, and sometimes it’s for a good cause. Supporting a company you think has earned it; giving a game and its dev team a much-earned boost; added content that’s well worth the price of admission. Given how good the base game is, I’d say DMCV has done enough to justify future content, paid or not. I want to play more of it.
The same can’t be said for its bizarro counterpart.
I haven’t played DmC since I cleared it -- cleared it the one time on the default difficulty. Never touched the DLC, either; my brother did, and I watched bits and pieces of it as I drifted in and out of sleep. Neither of us bothered with the Definitive Edition. Incidentally, though, we both went through the Special Edition of DMC4 -- and put in the hours, however rife with failure, to try and clear its Bloody Palace. (Maybe V will get a Special Edition later on, though I’m torn between wanting it now for extra content, and being miffed over a potential Ultimate Marvel 3-style turnaround from the vanilla to the “full” version.)
I’m never going to play DmC again. I’ll watch videos of it -- specifically, the (former) Best Friends’ full LP, along with whatever analysis comes out and explains why Donte is a bad character. Why the cold shoulder? Part of it is because the original is back, beloved, and making some (relative) big bucks. The outsourcing experiment has failed, with Capcom executives themselves acknowledging it. Part of it is because, at the end of the day, DmC is just a bad game. Not the worst game ever from an objective standpoint. Subjectively? My feelings should be clear by now. Yet my anger toward it isn’t even as white-hot as it used to be. Now it’s ice-cold. Arctic. Two steps shy of absolute zero.
The best thing about it really is the gameplay. If your mission is to slay demons, then you’ll have more than enough tools and chances to do that. Some of the animations are good, some of the attacks have nice sound design behind them, and it’s not at all hard to string together long combos if that’s what you’re into. Considering that that was basically Ninja Theory’s third major release that generation, they should be more than a little proud they got that far.
But they didn’t go far enough. Even without the legacy of Devil May Cry looming large over it, DmC in its own right commits plenty of sins. Color-coded enemies are a pain to deal with, especially when they group up. Being locked into 30FPS combat truly does hamper the experience. Combat is often trivially easy, which would be fine if there was a ton of satisfaction and catharsis to be had -- but there isn’t, either from basic enemies or from the mediocre bosses. “Platforming” might as well be code for “filler”.
This is the part where I say “but the real killer here is the story” -- which is 100% true, if you ask me. But having rewatched the game (and laughed at the compilation), I feel like I have to take it a step further.
No matter the production values, DmC is just an ugly game.
Yeah, on some level part of that complaint comes from comparing a 2019 game to a 2013 one. Not entirely fair. Not a one-to-one by any means. But watching and rewatching the game made me think deep down, “God, why does it look so ugly?” There’s lots of color, but only when you’re in Limbo. Beyond that, a decent number of cutscenes are in the gritty, grimy, gray-tainted real world. Outside of Donte, Vorgil, and Kat (and maybe Phineas), everyone is ugly as sin -- so good on you, game, for teaching the kids that everyone ugly is inherently evil. And again, I have to harp on this shallow point: if Mundus is so rich and powerful that he can have anyone he wants, why would he choose Botox McLionface as his mistress?
Maybe the point -- the crux of the art direction -- was to make everything look as gross as possible. Fair. But even if there are all these parts that look ready to ooze and squirt all over your nice new carpet, it doesn’t change the fact that a lot of the designs are relatively generic. Or if not that, then at least unimpressive. With the exception of the Bob Barbas boss fight, I have to struggle to remember any of the creature designs besides one or two -- and I just rewatched the compilation last week. The only one who’ll stick out forever is Succubus, but for all the wrong reasons.
You knew that one was coming, didn’t you?
That one cutscene is emblematic of everything that makes DmC awful. Even without the area featured being a haven for the Slurm queen, it all looks so greasy and unclean. But if we’re going beyond looks? The writing is bad, the music is poor, the action is dismal, and worst of all, the characters are completely charmless. Have I laughed at that scene? No; I’ve smiled at it every time I see it. Not a smile of amusement or joy, oh no. It’s the sense of masochistic glee I get as the embodiment of cringe guts me with a rusty Bowie knife.
If I had to give the Ninja Theory/Capcom dream team any credit, it’s that they at least presented this game with an unmistakable sense of bravado. Confidence. Swagger. Belief in their production. Clearly, they should have shown some humility, restraint, and moderation. Even if DmC purposefully went in a bold new direction -- inasmuch as it deigned to, considering how often it name-checked and reused franchise staples -- the tone of it is beyond off-putting. Whatever fun there is to be had is hopelessly buried under several glaciers of self-satisfied, self-righteous smugness. Even if the devs themselves are the nicest guys and gals around, their collective artistic endeavor is just the worst.
I lay a lot of the blame on Donte. Which isn’t to say that everyone else isn’t terrible -- they are -- but as the main character, Donte defines the game.
And he does so in the worst possible ways.
Donte isn’t just stupid. He’s a terrible person, even with his supposed “character development”. Granted his stupidity feeds into his terrible nature; still, he does himself no favors at the start, middle, or end of the game. It’s not just about him being a societal blight whose establishing character moment is partying hard, having one-night stands with thots, and then waking up from his drunken stupor with claw marks on his back from his boudoir adventures (having seemingly satisfied the ladies of the evening). It’s not even about him refusing to think for five seconds about the consequences of his actions.
There are two scenes in particular that jump out at me, though both involve Phineas. The first is the clumsy foreshadowing of Vergil’s betrayal, where the old man asks who will take Mundus’ place if Donte and crew strike him down. Donte’s response, as properly noted by the Best Friends, is a resounding nothing. No thoughts, no reactions, no follow-up questions. Not even a joke. Just blankness. It could have made for some great characterization, or even any characterization. Something to expose us to the inner workings of his mind, beyond the punch-worthy face that many classic DMC fans have long since come to hate. Ironically, the devs did exactly that -- and exposed the sheer emptiness in their “hero’s” head.
But the worst segment comes later…by which I mean mere minutes later in what can charitably be called the story. With his powers, Phineas manages to detect the unborn child of Botox McLionface. Having suffered at the hands of Mundus and his forces, Phineas is A-OK with revenge by any means necessary -- and thus, informs Donte that the best way to hurt the demon king is to kill his family. Wife, child, it doesn’t matter. They have to die for “the plan” and “revenge” and “freedom”. Only one of those is a viable motivation for our leading man, and even then he just remembered it like a few days ago at best.
Here’s what really gets to me. Once again, Donte has no response to Phineas’ words -- only this time, he’s laying out a game plan that’s not so easy to stomach. Kill a woman and her unborn child? That’s a tall order. And while Donte himself doesn’t go through with it (merely an accomplice who, you know, merely threatened her at gunpoint on the ride to the rendezvous point), he still doesn’t have a reaction.
If it were up to me, I would have handled things differently. That was, and still is, a perfect moment to have Donte lapse out of his smarmy, DGAF attitude. Have him confront a moral quandary and assert his code of ethics, however strained. Just have him stop Phineas and say “Whoa, hey man. I may do a lot of demon-slaying, but killing some kid and his mom? That’s too much.” It could present an emotional conflict, making him question the price of the freedom he’s fighting for. Make him ponder the weight of life, and whether the demons he’s killed by the dozens actually have some semblance of humanity. And beyond that, the divide over how to cripple Mundus could jumpstart the conflict between Donte and Vorgil. Respect or results. Piety or pragmatism.
Instead he does nothing. What a hero.
It feels like the only mission statement for DmC was “don’t be like the old DMC games”. If that’s the case, then they succeeded. There isn’t a single likable character among the cast -- not just because they’re all varying degrees of horrible people, but because the grime-crusted tone of the game turns whatever ham and cheese they try to put out into rancid slime. There’s no thought behind it. No nuance. That doesn’t mean the classic games or DMCV had nuance (not in the conventional sense), but DMC said it would swing for the fences and couldn’t even bunt properly.
As bad as Donte is -- and he ruins the game single-handed, let’s get that right -- Vorgil doesn’t fare much better. Even if you don’t factor in his sniper rifle abortion sequence (and that’s a BIG “if”), he’s woefully underused in spite of being integral to the plot. Eventually. You could count on him more for exposition and laying out plans than actually being a character, at least until it was time to start hurriedly building the “brotherly bond” between Donte and Vorgil. So when it’s time for the big clash, the conflict is so hollow and undeserved that it ends up being a sprawling ocean of apathy.
Vorgil being the final enemy only makes sense if you assume and realize that it’s just there out of obligation. That’s it. Not out of artistic vision or a thirst for innovation. Just paying lip service to the original games. Treading familiar ground, but far worse than before.
I’m given a new reason to hate DmC every time I look at it. I’ve played worse games before and after it, sure, but if it were a person? It would be petty, spiteful, crass, and cocksure -- so certain that it’s got all the answers, but dumb enough to get befuddled by nursery rhymes. It’d be the Dunning-Kruger effect in a dirty overcoat and jeans. In about five minutes, it would embody pretty much everything wrong with the human race.
The one saving grace with DmC is that it helped Capcom wake up to the folly it had birthed. Between the never-ending PR disaster and the dismal sales -- originally 1.1 million, which is not only less than their third revision of sales expectations, but just over a fifth of what they originally shot for -- there had never been a greater need for a hard swerve off that road. And while I’m wary of heading back into nostalgic territory for comfort and success, for DMC it was nothing short of a necessity. Break glass in case of emergency, and such.
So they did, and now the franchise is back in top form. As easy as it would have been for the devs to take shots at DmC, they actually managed to pull the best parts of it when they could and reincorporated them into V. Some references aren’t entirely obvious the first go-round, but they’re in there without a direct acknowledgement. Fair enough. That’s probably the best way they could have handled it without dumping on a mistake that was in many ways a self-inflicted wound.
But it’s over now. Devil May Cry is back, while the pretender has been more or less banished to the shadow realm. The failures of DmC are impossible to forget -- though that may not be a bad thing. Being able to learn from the past and its mistakes can help with future adventures and endeavors. DMCV takes that to heart, doing conclusively what DmC couldn’t to overwhelming effect.
It became a sandwich.
And I’ll explain what I mean next time -- in the finale.
For real this time.
…I think.
…
…See you then.
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