Retrospective: Devil May Cry, Part 1

Words: 9955 Approximate Reading Time: Waaaaaay too long…

One of the very first essays I put together for this blog back in days long since past was a retrospective on the Mega Man Zero games. I’d recently played through the collection that had been released by Capcom earlier that same year. I ran through each game in that collection, and followed their evolution through my reactions to how they changed. I also used them as an opportunity to muse about their design and some of the flaws they created for a first-time player. Since those games were designed to a significant extent around being replayed and gaining expertise, how well did those games facilitate people wanting to play them over and over again to learn?

In the past few months I ended up playing the Devil May Cry series on my stream. I played each game in release order, focused primarily on just getting through the main campaigns. I wasn’t concerned with watching videos on advanced tech, I wasn’t going to replay to try to get the best rankings possible on the missions, I wasn’t going to replay on harder difficulties. If the game grabbed me, I’d be willing to go back and redo stuff, but this would need to be for the sake of the game itself, rather than to merely overcome some kind of challenge offered by the game.

Over a decade before I’d had the opportunity to play Devil May Cry 1-3. By this point I’d only had vague recollections to work with from that past experience: I remembered overall liking DMC1, not caring much for DMC2, and really enjoying DMC3. But even though all of these other games got released, I never made the time to tackle them. In a sense, I’d moved on. I bought all of the games a couple years back, but still never made time for them. I even made a special Steam category in my library to put them all together to remind myself to play…and just didn’t play them. Until someone finally suggested I stream them.

I bring up the Mega Man Zero retrospective not just because this essay will be another retrospective on a series, but also because there is a particular overlap between my thesis then and my thesis now. DMC, as fun as it may be, is not really friendly to new players. It is the kind of series that is built around playing over and over again. It is the kind of series designed for people to become an expert in, and that is where the “real” fun exists.

And that design…isn’t great. It can still absolutely be fun for experienced and new players. The series is not bad. But it keeps suffering from this problem of effectively being about gatekeeping. The games themselves tend to gatekeep players, and that in turn encourages gatekeeping behavior from fans. It’s not the only series that runs into this problem. The FromSoftware games like Dark Souls certainly struggle with this problem as well. In a sense, any game series that does not carefully explain its mechanics – providing players with a basic tutorial as well as letting them know about more advanced techniques as they need them – is going to hit this problem in some capacity.

So I wanted to do this retrospective to examine this series as a new player. To analyze the design for the kind of person who isn’t and may not be interested in becoming an expert. Because to a large extent, becoming an expert requires starting from scratch. So how well do the games encourage you to want to play them over and over again to learn?

Devil May Cry 1

It’s a bit tough to talk about the series because it was something incredibly new at the time. The evolution of the game is a process of experimentation and learning. Ideas may be good, but need better tuning to work properly, which means trying repeatedly.

DMC1 was originally born out of Resident Evil. Director Hideki Kamiya was tasked with making what was originally meant to be the fourth entry in the Resident Evil series, before it was determined that the action gameplay did not fit RE’s style. So ultimately the game was spun off into its own project. What that means, though, is that the basic feel of RE is still there, with a camera system that is partially fixed and changes angles as you move around a room. This camera system was originally designed for RE as a way of breaking the player’s sense of control over the game and thus amplifying the sense of uncertainty and scariness in a given room of the game.

As familiar as most fans of the game are with that camera system…it’s not good. It gets better over time as the series evolves, but the progress is fairly slow. And it hangs over much of the series for a long time. I wanted to note this background because it is relevant to how the series changes. That starting point marks an interesting starting point, but also a starting point that holds the franchise back in a lot of ways.

1) Combat

Since these games are built around fighting, talking about their combat systems is the most obvious and also the ideal starting point.

Fighting in DMC1 revolves primarily around your melee equipment. You begin with a sword, but eventually get access to two other weapons (admittedly, one is just a stronger sword with the same move set). Your input is a single button, and different moves can be performed through a combination of when you push the button (delaying your attacks can lead to different outputs), whether or not you’re locked on to an opponent, and how you move your control stick (specifically while you’re locked on).

In addition to the melee weapons, you also have access to a handful of guns for ranged combat. Most of them do fairly small amounts of damage, because for the most point the guns aren’t designed to deal damage to enemies. Instead, they are more akin to utility items – they are useful for particular situations, such as maintaining your style ranking (which I’ll talk about shortly). The variety gives you a fair number of options, but you are primarily going to be relying on your melee weapons to attack, because it’s what is most effective.

You also get the opportunity to purchase upgrades for your various weapons as you collect the main currency of the game: red orbs. These can be used at special shops or between the missions (i.e. chapters) of the game. Aside from a handful of useful items, perhaps the thing you’ll spend the most orbs on are those weapon upgrades, which unlock additional moves that you can perform. The selection is a bit sparse, but still provides a sense of progression as you keep playing.

On its own, these systems would be fine. You would have a robust melee combat system that encourages players to invest in upgrades and experiment with different moves, and you have a ranged combat system that allows players to fill in some gaps.

The issue comes in conjunction with everything else about the combat.

1a) Controls

The game unfortunately has a rather poor auto-lock system. It’s not absolutely terrible, but it does have a tendency to lock on to things that the player would prefer not to. I lost track of the number of times throughout my playthrough that I was yelling at the game because I was facing Enemy A that was right next to me, hitting the attack button, and then turning around to swing at Enemy B that was nowhere close. Probably the biggest problems would occur when I needed to attack certain special “locks” which would require multiple hits to activate – many times the system would choose to face an enemy that was on the other side of the room rather than on the lock right next to me. The auto-lock usually works properly, but usually isn’t really enough. It became such a problem that I relied primarily on my manual lock to make sure the game would do what I wanted it to.

Of course, I mentioned earlier that locking on to an enemy changes your moveset. One key element is a move that sends you charging towards an enemy, knocking them back when it connects. This move is performed by locking onto an enemy and attacking while moving toward that enemy. Since your attacks normally push an enemy back and you might be inclined to close that distance, trying to push your character forward would make sense. Only to then launch that charge attack, which then pushes the enemy further away.

I provide this example as a way of illustrating how you can often find yourself fighting the game. Each idea works well on its own, but conflicts with some other part of the game, and the more control you try to pull in one direction, the game pulls back in a different way.

The control stick method of inputting attacks is not aided by the camera. In fact, no part of the combat is aided by the camera. Because your view of any fight is mostly fixed, you are at the mercy of whatever angle was provided to you in a given space. If that space has a giant object blocking your view, is zoomed out too much to give you clear information, or is at an angle that makes it hard to see what is going on in a fight, then you don’t have any significant recourse. It is quite easy to get hit by things offscreen for any number of reasons.

But on top of that, since your inputs can be tied to the direction of your enemy relative to the camera, it runs into the problem of mistaken direction. Have you ever sworn that you were pushing your control stick to the side, only for your character to move up? Pushed the stick downwards to crouch, only for the game to not register your input and your character just keeps standing there? Often this is a problem where your sense of where you’re moving your stick is actually off. You think you’ve pushed your stick up, but actually you pushed it at an angle…perhaps even enough so that the game sees you trying to do something entirely different. It’s a fairly common issue especially when the control stick is used for cardinal directions (i.e. up, down, left, right). So now imagine that problem, but now what the directions are continually rotate depending on where your enemy is in relation to you.

1b) Style

Another important component of the combat system is the style system. Basically, you are graded on your performance during a given fight. Continuing to attack enemies, using a varied number of attacks, and not getting hit all contribute to a style score that is displayed as a series of letter ranks – D being the lowest, then C, B, A, and finally S.

The style system is not merely there for show. It also serves as a direct way of rewarding the player. Firstly, enemies drop those red orbs I mentioned before – the currency you use for buying various upgrades. And the number of orbs they drop increases the better your style rank. So the more stylish your combat, the more currency you get. Secondly, at the end of each mission you are graded for your overall performance, and the better your ranking, the more red orbs you get as a reward. In DMC1, the only things that matter for your ranking are the time it takes to finish the mission and red orbs you collect – get a lot of orbs and play quickly, and you’ll get the best ranking possible. But of course, since a better style ranking means more red orbs from enemies, there’s an extra incentive to get good style ranks as often as possible.

Now I bring this up because it becomes particularly important later, but it also serves as another component of the combat. Since you as a player understand that you are being graded, you have some desire to get better grades. Even if you don’t know exactly what it does, you might suspect that it does something.

And so how well the style system actually works is important, because it directly impacts how people engage with the game. And in DMC1 the system isn’t great and conflicts with the actual combat.

Arguably the biggest problem is that the player is left to struggle with a fundamental problem of distance. Maintaining your combo for a style ranking is difficult because your “meter” dissipates very quickly. And so if an enemy is basically anywhere besides right next to you, you are all but guaranteed to lose your style rank and have to start all over.

Now this could be improved by giving the player a way to close the distance between themselves and an enemy rapidly, thus allowing them to get back into the fight. But the only real moves for that purpose serve to push that enemy further away, thus defeating the entire purpose.

Which leaves the style system at odds with the actual functions of fighting.

It would be easy to say that since the style system isn’t necessary, this critique doesn’t actually mean anything. But the very fact that the ranks exist, are displayed prominently, reward the player directly and indirectly, and effectively insult and praise the player for their play[1] all make it a system that the player is meant to care about. It is impossible to say that a player shouldn’t care about a system when the game goes through so much effort to try and make the player care.

It is entirely possible to understand this system inside and out and excel at it. Watching videos of advanced play is really cool. The claim I am making here is not that the combat system is thoroughly unworkable, or that people are unable to enjoy the system. But that all of these core components do not fit together. You are not merely fighting the enemies in the game, but the game itself. Expertise in the combat system is a process of learning how to most effectively fight back against the game to just get the character to do what you want. It is possible, but why go to the effort to learn all of that?

2) Exploration

As central as the combat is to the series, it is not made up entirely of combat. Indeed, a good chunk of the game involves progressing through areas. That progressions involves a wide variety of obstacles – sometimes you have puzzles, sometimes platforming, sometimes battles, and sometimes a combination of the three.

And in addition to that, you also have various secrets. You can find blue orbs scattered around the levels, and by collecting them you can increase your maximum health. Meanwhile, you can also locate doors that lead to secret stages that offer unique (and generally difficult) challenges, which also reward those blue orbs.

So we are dealing with a game that definitely encourages and rewards exploration, and very much tries to be more than just running down a glorified hallway from fight to fight. How well does that work in practice? Unfortunately, not great.

Again, each individual element is good. The problem comes in when we try to put all of these things together.

Perhaps the most obvious problem is the platforming. Jumping in DMC1 feels horrible, as your character’s momentum does not feel quite right, you have no real control once you get into the air, and the camera angles are all but designed to hinder your jumping. You have the opportunity to get a double jump, which is incredibly useful – but that double jump A) is an upgrade you have to buy, B) is an upgrade attached to having a particular weapon equipped, and C) costs a significant number of red orbs. So the best way to make the platforming a bit less frustrating is by bypassing other upgrades to your character to purchase something that it feels like you should just have innately. Importantly, this problem isn’t going to go away for a while.

As for the exploration itself, the actual objectives for each mission tend to be fairly opaque. The game world is mostly designed in a fashion that it feels obvious where to go next, but every now and then you can be left unsure where your next objective is located. This becomes especially frustrating because you can go back to many places you’ve already visited, leaving you lost if you take a wrong turn.

Some portion of that design is arguably to encourage players to go back and replay missions once they know the layout so they can complete the mission faster (and thus get a better ranking). But that answer doesn’t help with the initial frustration from that first attempt. Basically, the game is built around Resident Evil-style puzzles – get a special key and put it in a special lock – but lacks the map that was important for helping the player keep track of where things were.

And then there are the secrets. These are great ways to both encourage exploration and replaying, but they each exist in conflict with another part of the system. Since you are explicitly judged on how fast you complete a mission, exploration is discouraged because it takes up time. Meanwhile, the ways in which so many of the objects are hidden all but prohibits you from getting many of those health upgrades without the help of a guide of some kind. Or else you waste who knows how much time jumping around and investigating every single corner of every single room to maybe find a blue orb.

And the actual secret missions should be called out for one element that makes them aggravating to engage with. While the missions occur in little pocket dimensions, any damage taken during those missions is retained when you leave – win or lose. This includes dying, which uses up one of your limited items for continuing through the game and forces you to start the mission over. The result of all this is that if you encounter a mission that seems tough, you should just skip it entirely. Better to avoid the secret than to put yourself in danger of failing the rest of the mission. It is a system that discourages engaging with the secrets, because that engagement is directly punished unless you already know what you’re doing.

Again, all of this is being presented through the lens of someone who is a newcomer to the series. Once you’ve played through multiple times – and perhaps looked up a guide for some of the tougher-to-locate secrets – none of this would be an issue. But the question is how the game itself invites you to engage with it. The conflict of so many aspects, the clunkiness of the controls and camera, and the ways in which it directly and indirectly punishes you for not knowing what you’re doing are all factors that drive players away.

3) Narrative

It feels a bit weird to talk about narrative for the Devil May Cry series. It’s a franchise built around intense action, and the story can to some extent be an afterthought.

It would be absolutely wrong to say that DMC1 has no story or characterization. It’s just that there’s so little to work with. In some ways, this works in the game’s favor. Advanced players in particular probably won’t care as much about the narrative, so on repeated playthroughs there’s not a lot of pausing to watch cutscenes.

But for beginners, it creates a bit of a divide. Those who aren’t interested in narrative at all can be like the advanced players – they get to just go straight into the action. But for players who do like story, it feels a bit empty. Again, there’s not nothing, but there isn’t much more than nothing.

It’s useful here to describe the basic summary of the backstory and the game.

In the prologue, you are told that demons attempted to take over the Earth. One demon – named Sparda – rose up and decided to fight back, and single-handedly managed to drive back the rest into the underworld. You are then introduced to Dante, the protagonist of the game and as it turns out the son of Sparda. Which means Dante has all sorts of cool powers.

Dante is attacked by a lady named Trish who then tells him about a powerful demon that is trying to rise up and take control of Earth. So it’s up to Dante to put a stop to that. Along the way we learn that Dante’s mother and brother were killed twenty years prior, that apparently Dante’s brother Vergil was killed by our main antagonist and turned into a minion, and that Trish is actually a minion of said antagonist and this was all an attempt to lure Dante to his doom. Eventually, Trish decides to switch sides, Dante kills the big demon, and they both leave. There’s not much more that needs to be said.

The game’s story is driven primarily around Dante as a character. And really, Dante as a character can be summed up as “he’s a cool and powerful dude.” That is, in effect, what is supposed to keep the player interested. Dante is confident while rarely being serious, giving off an air that he doesn’t really care what happens because it doesn’t affect him or his goals. Of course lurking under that is someone who has his own code and beliefs, but that only comes out in bits and pieces.

I introduce this section about narrative primarily because it will become more important later in the series. But as of right now there is just not much to talk about. Which serves as a nice point of contrast between this entry and later entries in the series.

4) Conclusion

As I’ve noted before, all of the criticisms I’ve laid out here don’t mean anything to someone who is already experienced with the game. To an advanced player, the controls make intuitive sense. They’ve learned all the cool moves and secret techniques. They can increase their stylish ranks easily. They know the layout of the map and never get lost. They can find all the secrets and never have to worry about dying. And at that point, a story would just get in the way.

But if you’re playing for the first time, every one of these problems is going to scream at you to some degree or other. The game gives you so many awkward systems that conflict with each other, and then doesn’t really help you figure out how to learn to navigate around those conflicts. The game is designed around expert play, but that means that beginners are left in the lurch.

None of this means that people cannot enjoy the game. Every expert has to start out as a beginner, and so the very existence of Devil May Cry experts illustrates that people can have fun with this game. But it is fun that is derived in spite of the systems. The game as a game – not as a challenging experience but in its basic construction as something you control – is fighting the player at every turn. While people can and do enjoy it, no part of the game is inviting the player to learn these systems. The first-time player finds a game that does not facilitate learning, but instead manufactures frustration.

All this said, it is also important to keep in mind that this is the first attempt at this game. Indeed, the first attempt at this genre. It is unsurprising that such missteps occurred, and within the context of its time it is something of a marvel. DMC1 provided an incredibly unique experience that would inspire not only its own sequels, but plenty of other games which would seek to take that same spark and improve upon the basic design. If I have been harsh on this game, it is a harshness derived from hindsight. We have learned much about principles of design that make so many of these errors feel obvious now. And yet at the time – and with the limitations of the hardware – so many of these errors might have been unknown, unforeseeable, or simply impossible to get rid of.

Devil May Cry 2

DMC2 is a game that I feel most annoyed by for two reasons. The first is that in initially attempting to draft this section, I found myself at a loss. I couldn’t remember much of anything about it. My vague recollection was that for about the first half I felt it was at least a little better than the first game, and then in the second half that opinion plummeted.

The second is that to make this section actually have something of substance, I had to replay the game…or most of it. For all of the other games, I was able to build off of my recent experiences, maybe dip in briefly to make sure I remembered things correctly, and watch a playthrough to remind myself of certain sequences. But with DMC2 I had completely forgotten the feel of the game. I had to start over and play again. Which did not help my opinion in the slightest.

Perhaps the most influential change that was introduced in this game was having multiple characters to play as. DMC2 featured two campaigns, one for Dante and one for a new character named Lucia. Lucia’s campaign is supposedly distinct from Dante’s, though meets up at several points, with Lucia having some boss fights unique to her playthrough. I say “supposedly” because I did not actually play her campaign. By the time I had finished Dante’s campaign, I was uninterested in playing more. So keep in mind as I talk about the gameplay that this only reflects a portion of the game. And yet, I wanted to bring this all up as a point in DMC2’s favor. The idea of playing the game as a different character became something of a staple for the series very quickly, and this game marks its first implementation.

1) Combat

The combat system has undergone a handful of changes. One of the things that stuck out pretty much immediately was the addition of a dedicated dodge button. When I first played, this felt incredibly useful and was part of what made me feel better about the combat. But since this dodge mechanic was tied to a number of other things – it was used for activating switches, walking through doors, and running up/on walls – it became just as much of an annoyance as any other part of the game. And since the movement is so cumbersome, the dodge feels unresponsive.

Sword attacks have been altered. In the first game, you had a few different attack combinations which were tied to delaying your attacks. If a normal combo was four button presses, then delaying after the second press would result in a different combo than just mashing. In DMC2, this has been altered so that you perform different combos by moving the analog stick during your sequence. However, these extra combos only work if you are not using the lock-on button to target an enemy, because using that button then gives you access either to a launching move or a charging move depending on the direction you move the stick.

The result of this new system is that there are more moves that can be pulled off, but at the expense of retaining the player’s lack of control over their character. Imagine, if you will, that you are in the middle of attacking an enemy, and then another one comes up behind you and is about to attack. What would you do? Most players would move the stick towards the new enemy and continue their attack string, believing that the character would then turn to face that enemy and stop them. But since the game is programmed to use that directional input for a new attack and not movement, Dante just keeps swinging in the same direction. This facet of the combat is retained from DMC1, where Dante would not change his direction during a combo, but the sequel offered a perfect opportunity to revisit that input. Instead, the control scheme now completely cuts off that avenue of action.

Moreover, the extreme limitations placed on the player that uses the lock-on button means they must rely on the game’s enemy locking. That locking was horrendous in the first game, and is bad here too. While I found myself yelling at just about all of the DMC games for picking a target I would not have wanted or really even expected it to pick, in DMC2 I found myself the most aggravated of all.

Another big change is to the guns. In DMC1 the guns did a fairly small amount of damage and had relatively little stopping power, beyond the more powerful grenade launcher. In DMC2, the guns do more damage and can more effectively halt enemies. To the point that you can keep enemies in the air indefinitely by just shooting them. It made for a rather dull experience, as it meant you could solve most of your combat problems by just staying back and shooting them. It was slow and tedious…but it was a pretty safe and sure method. And of course, it was not fun.

I’d personally already tried to stay away from guns on my most recent playthrough, but I certainly recall hanging back and shooting things when I played years and years ago. It may well have contributed to my general vibe back then that DMC2 was the weakest. Though the shift in strategy didn’t really alter my overall ranking of the games.

Another factor is the relative lack of weapon variety in the game. DMC1 introduced a rather slim selection of weapons compared to later games. Dante got access to two swords (which shared a move set), and a set of gauntlets. So Dante effectively had two weapons and two sets of moves to perform. Changing was not very swift, but it was possible.

In DMC2 Dante gets access to three weapons – all swords. Those swords share the same move set, and so rather than changing weapons because you want to vary your moves, you are basically deciding what you want to prioritize: range or damage. There’s not much reason to choose anything other than the Rebellion, your starting sword and the “average” of the options. Because you will likely have upgraded it the most by the time you get anything else.

Speaking of upgrades, one thing that should be mentioned is how absent upgrades are from the game. I mentioned that in the first game you got a set of choices for spending your red orbs, much of which was focused on purchasing moves for Dante’s weapons. You admittedly had a rather limited choice in those options, but it was something. In DMC2 that’s been done away with. Now the only thing you upgrade is the damage for your swords and guns. Dante’s move set does not change, and you have full access to everything from the start. On the one hand, this has a nice effect of streamlining the choices for a newer player. No more wondering whether a move is going to be something actually useful or not, and thus whether you’re potentially wasting your orbs that could have been spent on health upgrades. On the other hand, coming off of the first game it just feels weak, and like there is no depth to the game.

It should also be noted that at least one valuable thing that purchasing moves did was teach you those moves. So much of Dante’s move set in the first game and this one are “hidden.” You’re supposed to just intuit how to perform different combos by trying things out. Which is a terrible way to introduce newer players to how the systems work. One of the reasons that you would actually want players to purchase new moves is that they have a screen they can easily access telling them what the input for that move is. One that they don’t need to worry about searching for. Removing the power to purchase moves hurts newer players in the long run by sending them on a chase for useful knowledge – perhaps even outside of the game.

In all this, I’ve not really mentioned the style system. That’s because it’s mostly the same. The names of the ranks have been altered, with the most important being the lowest rank (D), which now says “Don’t Worry” rather than “Dull.” This change at least is not as critical of the player’s performance, which means they don’t have to feel bad when they struggle with the systems early on. But otherwise, it is still succumbing to the same problems. The mechanics of the style ranks feel unintuitive and the amount of time needed to continue a combo is far too limited for how slow the character is and where enemies are placed. It’s possible to get S ranks…but it’s not particularly fun to do so.

One meaningful change with regards to the style rank is its usage in the mission rank at the end of each mission. Previously, style rank was only something you were being indirectly graded on. The better you played, the more red orbs you got. But now you get a part of the game telling you directly how well you played in every mission, and incorporating that into its assessment of your overall performance. This now provides an even stronger incentive to shoot for better rankings, which means a stronger conflict with the game’s combat systems. Since style rank is still dependent on maintaining and varying your combos, you still need ways to close distances between yourself and enemies. The guns are meant to help in this regard, but since shooting and moving helps so little, you are still stuck with a fundamental problem.

2) Exploration

DMC2 takes something of a step forward and a step back when it comes to its exploration. In most senses, the game is constructed similarly to DMC1. The jarring camera angles and unclear directions can make navigation a pain, especially when you are searching for objects that might be obscured by the camera in some way. I recall one mission in particular that caused my opinion to plummet, which had me trying to locate four blue orbs around a small city. Some of those orbs were easy to find, but others were located on rooftops that did not look obvious as points to explore. So I ended up running multiple laps of the city before finally trying to scour every inch and locating all the orbs. It was my third or fourth lap during my second playthrough that caused me to just quit outright.

As with the previous game, you have your blue orbs and secret missions, and as with the previous game your exploration is simultaneously encouraged and discouraged. You’re still being graded on how much time it takes for you to complete a mission, but searching for those secret missions and orbs takes time. So the systems are still in conflict with one another.

The secret mission format has now been altered a bit. Rather than a special challenge (defeat all enemies without getting hit; use the enemies to kill one another; stay in the air for X amount of time), these rooms are now just fighting waves of enemies that get progressively stronger the more you locate. Not all secret missions provide health upgrades, either: you only get these bonuses every other room you complete. This change makes the rooms easier to complete your first time around, but they also make the process more boring. Since the secret missions would be used later on to help you learn more of the advanced techniques, just putting you into waves of combat doesn’t accomplish much – especially when the combat isn’t terribly fun to engage with in the first place.

Another facet carried over is the role of platforming, which is still terrible. Indeed, one boss fight involves a combination of two atrocious systems – platforming followed by shooting. It combines some of the stuff that players chafe against with the game most and forces them to struggle with those systems for an extended period of time.

However, one thing that generally helps is that missions are much more linear. This may sound bad, but it’s actually incredibly helpful. After all, the real focus of the game is supposed to be its combat, and the exploration in DMC1 tended to be unintuitive and frustrating. Indeed, when the game does not point you clearly to your next objective, the process of just searching for the next door you need to walk through is an exercise in aggravation. Once you know what to do – if you’ve played the game before and know where to go – the open exploration doesn’t matter as much because you’re not going to get lost. But starting out, these linear levels were much better – I get to engage with the actual game.

That said, the levels themselves are not terribly interesting. DMC1’s massive castle was at least visually nice in many places. But DMC2 is largely set in a city and industrial zone, which means lots of streets, basic buildings, and factory rooms. While the levels are mostly easier to get through, nothing about them really calls out to be replayed.

There’s not much else that can really be said about the exploration. Some of the later games would adopt this more linear format, but would be able to do a bit more with it by having more visually appealing environments. Finding secrets loses any of its charm because so many times you wind up traveling down some secondary path only to realize it’s a dead end, or all it has is some extra enemies. Since blue orbs and secret missions are so poorly signposted for the player, it’s easier to just give up. If you’re not struggling with the game, you can just move on. If you are, you may as well just look up a guide. Neither is a great solution for a game that wants you to keep playing and practicing to get better.

3) Narrative

DMC2 is definitely the game where the narrative is the weakest, because it just feels so painfully absent. Again, that is not to say that there’s nothing, but “there’s not nothing” was pretty faint praise for DMC1, and it is even fainter here.

The core narrative surrounds tracking down some dude hoping to open a portal to the underworld and become a super powerful demon. Dante and Lucia travel around fighting enemies until they defeat the dude and another big demon.

The major problem is that the game decided to lean into the character of Dante, hoping that his charisma would be able to carry the game. In a sense, this is how DMC1 largely operated, but DMC1 also had two major distinctions. One was that Dante as a character was more interesting. Originally he was confident but also a bit funny here and there, willing to make wisecracks in a way that audiences could find endearing without being annoying. In DMC2 Dante is almost entirely serious, making his confidence just feel boring. Effectively, Dante is just a really powerful guy, and that’s not enough for a main character unless the gameplay is really good…which it just isn’t.

Two is that there is at least some feeling of narrative progression in DMC1. The encounters with Trish and the fights against (what turns out to be) Vergil are presented in a way that gives off some hints about Dante’s motivations and background. We thus get information that just isn’t there in DMC2. So if the character is less interesting and the game is just him fighting…why care?

Indeed, after the first few missions there is no dialogue for a good portion of the game. Cutscenes occur, but they are basically silent, just showing Dante’s face as he stares at some big creature with no sense of shock. The idea is to convey that he isn’t phased by these big scary demons…but it also just comes across as Dante just being unable to express anything. Where DMC1 Dante might banter with his enemies, DMC2 Dante just stands there.

One of the reasons that I’ve been talking about narrative in these past two games is that it would eventually become a component of introducing newer players to the core gameplay. Later games would use cutscenes not merely to tell a story, but also to show off how cool the combat could be. Or as a way to encourage players to replay the game. In either case, these would be opportunities for players to learn how to learn.

The first two games would not realize this potential, but DMC2 provides far less than the first game did. If narrative is a way to encourage players to keep playing, then DMC2’s story offers nothing to players. Almost every cutscene can be pretty safely skipped without worry of missing important information. This is true even on a first playthrough. In a sense, it feels like the game doesn’t care. And as I said before, why should I as the player care as a result?

4) Conclusion

The fact that I felt that I had to replay this game should say something on its own. That DMC2 is so forgettable except for that negative impression is a testament to its failings. The game certainly tried to adapt and change from its predecessor, but it appears to have either made bad choices, or good choices that were implemented poorly. DMC1 could always rely on the fact that it was new and a first attempt at a genre to save it from some of the criticisms. But DMC2 doesn’t have as much leeway. In reading about the series to try and get bits and pieces of information on DMC2, I find so many suggesting to just skip the game entirely. And it is a recommendation I fully understand.

Devil May Cry 3

Back when I had played the first three games, I recall strongly preferring DMC3. The combat felt a lot smoother, the sound design hit the ear better, and the game’s narrative and characterization felt like it finally had some meat on the bone. I could not honestly say whether during those initial playthroughs I actually had fun with DMC1 and DMC2, but I definitely remember having fun with DMC3.

On replay, that opinion is largely the same. “Largely” being the operative word, because my frustrations still existed, they just weren’t as intense as before. DMC3 feels different in a way that DMC2 just didn’t. It came across as a genuine attempt to revisit the first game and figure out how to improve on what was there, rather than simply retread the same ground.

Like with DMC2, my recounting of the experience will be based solely on the Dante playthrough. The game features a secondary mode where you can play as Dante’s brother Vergil, one of the antagonists in the game. Vergil’s move set is markedly different, but the campaign is the same. So it’s effectively like running the same game but with different moves, rather than playing a proper new campaign. I had played it many years ago, but not this time around. My experience with DMC3 was fine, but did not inspire me to replay it.

1) Combat

DMC3 still uses a lot of the same combat mechanics as DMC1. So there’s not a huge amount that has necessarily changed from the basics. But it does make some alterations to provide a more interesting experience and give players a lot more control over the battlefield. In a system that is designed to be a bit hectic, that control is incredibly useful.

1a) Controls

The first major addition is the “style” mechanic. Which is different from the style ranking, but bear with me. The player is given an option of four different styles (with two more being unlocked later), each with a unique ability tied to the B/Circle button. These abilities include a dodge, a block, extra attacks (for melee or gun attacks), stopping time, or creating clones. As you use those styles throughout the game, you can upgrade them and thus strengthen those abilities – although it does take quite a bit of time to do so.

The different styles allow players to figure out what works best for them and adjust combat accordingly. I personally gravitated toward the Trickster style with its dodge mechanic for two reasons. One, as a veteran of Dark Souls and someone who has played a handful of other character action games, I am used to the idea of having a dedicated button for dodging, and using that dodge to escape danger. Secondly, the dodge was a good way to cover ground quickly, which helped solve one of the problems I identified back with the first game – losing your style rank because you couldn’t reach your next opponent in time. The dodge wasn’t perfect on that front, but it still helped a lot.

The other major change is how extra weapons are utilized. In DMC1 it was possible to switch weapons, but that process was slow. The player was not necessarily intended to switch weapons at a moment’s notice, but instead to find at least a brief lull in the combat. It’s not that the switching process was intensely slow, but it did take a couple seconds and could put you in danger if you timed it incorrectly. Meanwhile, DMC2’s weapons weren’t really worth switching out on the fly anyway, making the whole idea obsolete.

In DMC3, however, weapon switching is practically instantaneous. You collect several different weapons and can have any two equipped at a time and switch between them at will. It allows for a much more varied move set, and similar to the styles gives players a lot of options for how they want to tackle challenges. Some weapons are fast, some are slow, some are great for building your style meter, some are great for dealing damage. However you feel like handling the combat, the different weapons you collect give you a greater sense of control over how you approach everything.

One last change is to the camera. While the game is still relying on repositioning the camera to certain fixed points based on where the player is, the camera angles themselves feel constructed around the actual fighting. Indeed, the camera will move around a little bit to give the player better views. The player does get a little bit of control over the camera, but this control is quite limited and in many cases creates more frustration. That said, even if the changes are not massive, they are a step in a direction that makes the combat feel more intuitive and easier to keep track of. Fewer camera shifts in the middle of combat mean fewer mistakes, and that goes a long way.

1b) Style

Speaking of the style meter, two things have changed. Or rather, one bit has changed and one bit has been augmented.

The major change is the addition of two additional ranks. You still have your standard D through S, but now it is also possible to get SS and SSS ranks. Since using a wide variety of moves is necessary to keep building your rank, the new weapon switching feeds off of this change. Learning how to keep track of different attacks and how to switch weapons effectively to maintain your combo strings is necessary. And in this respect the game definitely feels like it is helping you reach better style ranks with this system.

Simply put, it’s fun to vary your combos with weapon switches. The different weapons are fun to use and the controls for switching are so simple and responsive that there’s no friction for the player. The game does what you want it to do, which as I had mentioned before was a major problem with the combat in DMC1. It’s not perfect, as the underlying system still creates problems and conflicts. But those conflicts are at least improved by some of these changes. In a way, getting good ranks feels possible and realistic in a way that it didn’t feel in the previous games. Which isn’t to say it was impossible, but that the game is continually hindering your ability to get those ranks.

The augmentation to the style system is that it’s a bit more forgiving with its timing. DMC1 in particular had such tight timings for maintaining combos for your style rank that you practically needed enemies to be grouped close together if you wanted a really good rank. If you missed a single attack, you could all but kiss whatever rank you’d built up goodbye. Now you have a literal meter that you can see increase with your attacks and decrease with time. In addition, rather than outright losing your rank, your rank degrades with time if you stop attacking. This means that if you miss some attacks or need to make your way to the next enemy, you don’t have to restart at nothing.

This meter also brings one very useful change, which is to allow you to keep track of your variety. Since a core component of building style meant using different attacks, it could be hard to know when you could “reset” and use an attack you’d already used. In the old system, you basically had to feel it out and hope that you hadn’t misjudged. With the meter, you now can know for certain when a given attack has stopped working and switch to something else.

I still came away from DMC3 with the same frustrations, but those frustrations were lessened by some of these changes. I am unsure if I’d want to play DMC3 again, but if I were to replay the series I would certainly look forward to 3 much more than 1 and 2. Which certainly says a lot about its place in the franchise.

2) Exploration

The problems with exploration are all the same, but as with DMC2 at least most of the game is fairly linear and easy to follow. Getting lost is much less likely, though still possible at a few points. Since you’re still being graded on time and still looking for secrets, you still have the fundamental conflicts between speed and strength. And with the same struggles to complete secret missions without dying or taking damage, it still feels like it’s easier to just not bother.

Perhaps the most useful change is just the limitation on the role of platforming as a method for solving problems and exploring. It still exists and still sucks – with a couple of challenges specifically aimed around platforming, but at least there isn’t a whole lot of it. Which is a sort of damning with faint praise.

I will say one element of the secrets that is actually a solid addition are the “Combat Adjudicators.” These are statues sprinkled throughout the game which serve as “skill checks” – you have to attack the statues and build up a certain style ranking, and reaching that rank provides you with one of the blue orb health upgrades. While building up the rank can take time, at the very least you have a fairly clear sense of what you’re doing, and thus your time doesn’t feel wasted. In addition, these statues serve as good ways for helping players learn to intuit the combat system and how to build combos effectively. They provide a direct incentive to improve, reward players for success, and give them a low-cost training method, all rolled together into one mechanic. And since many of the statues are easily spotted, the player’s struggle is simply with building the style rank, not with searching – they are pushed to engage with the game’s core system. I cannot stress enough how useful this change is for the player compared to just exploring random corners of a room in the hopes of finding an upgrade.

That said, there’s not a whole lot more to say in this section. There are definite improvements, but the core still feels the same. Which is good in many ways. Some of the rougher edges have been shaved off to make an experience that feels eminently more…playable. But plenty of roughness still exists, and perhaps is at this point cemented. The issues are seen not as flaws, but as features, simply because they are familiar.

3) Narrative

Here’s where we get to some real change. The Devil May Cry series has always been just a little over the top, but this game decided to build a new top just so it could send the tone even higher.

The clearest change is that there is a strong narrative thread being carried throughout the game. Each mission begins with a cutscene following either Dante, the secondary protagonist named Lady, or the antagonists Vergil and Arkham. The existence of these cutscenes not only helps players feel connected to the actual game and what’s going on, but provides a valuable aspiration for the player. Indeed, the game starts with a cutscene that shows off Dante’s fighting which includes some special mechanics that the player can perform. The idea being that by seeing Dante fight in cool ways in the cutscenes, the player should want to learn to fight like that.

The story is a prequel to DMC1, compared to DMC2 which was a sequel, and thus allows the franchise to explore a younger version of Dante. DMC3’s Dante gives off the air of an edgy teenager, which in many circumstances would be grating but here becomes endearing. Since the whole game is so off the wall, Dante’s character fits naturally, whereas a much more serious character would be strange. And of course, Dante’s own motivations as a character become clearer as the game progresses, and we get glimpses of something beyond the bravado. It is similar to DMC1 in a lot of ways, but there is now more for the player to chew on.

The narrative itself follows those three threads as they intertwine and coalesce into a single story. Arkham and Vergil have summoned a gigantic tower in the middle of a city and are attempting to open a portal into the underworld: both are seeking the power of Vergil’s (and Dante’s) father Sparda. Arkham’s daughter Lady is ascending the tower to kill her father, since he’s evil and killed Lady’s mother to attain power. And Dante joins in because he sees fighting demons as his duty, and also because he has a sibling rivalry with Vergil. The various characters meet at different points in the story, and it all culminates in Dante and Vergil defeating a demonified Arkham, and then dueling over their father’s sword (with Dante winning). Vergil is left trapped in the underworld and winds up trying to take on a powerful demon that players would recognize as the major bad guy from the first game, thus closing off that continuity loop.

DMC3 is important for the way in which it redirected the tone of the franchise. Again, while the games had always given off the feeling of “trying to be cool,” the first two games aimed for a specific flavor of that feeling. One that felt more serious with small bits of humor poking through. The third entry leaned much more into the idea that the audience and creators were both in on a joke: we all know that this is silly, and we can laugh at it together. And yet, that element doesn’t necessarily hinder the ability of the story to get serious at moments.

4) Conclusion

At the end of the day, the reason DMC3 feels so nice is this combination of a whole host of factors. The combat, the running around, and the story all feel better in a variety of ways. It is still not perfect, but it did mark a substantial step in the correct direction for the series. The game can still be antagonistic toward the new player here and there, but it feels more and more like the game is trying to get you invested in it. If I left my experiences of DMC1 and 2 feeling like I was being shunned by the game, DMC3 did a bit to make me feel welcome. Not enough, but it made the effort.

Concluding Remarks

Since this essay is already incredibly long, I can’t keep going with this retrospective here. I will need to split it into two parts. In next week’s essay I’ll be tackling DMC4, DmC: Devil May Cry, and DMC5. If my experience with the first three games was generally rocky, my experience with the latter three games will see a lot of improvements.

Because as the games go on, they get more player friendly. While they still retain their basic spirit as games built around playing stylishly, the games do better jobs of helping you learn and engage with their systems. DMC3 already marked a good step, but as the games continued they would get better at teaching players the things they need to know. No longer do you need to come in as an expert off the bat, nor do you need to replay the game over and over and learn in order to finally have fun.

I think analyzing these games from this lens is valuable because it provides us with a lot of lessons about how we see the past. Devil May Cry is beloved by a large community for a lot of reasons. Some people remember playing the games when they came out, some people love the combat and being able to play stylishly, some people love the goofy narratives, and so on. But the more invested we get, the harder it is for us to see the problems. Often we have learned to ignore those problems, or have simply found solutions around them.

But we should not use those workarounds as excuses for a game. We should still be asking to what extent a game helps the player learn what they need to learn. If a problem has a workaround, to what extent is that the player acting against the game versus with it. Good design can provide challenge, but if that challenge comes at the expense of leaving players too isolated and unsure of what to do, it doesn’t matter how many people love the game – there are still flaws that need to be addressed.

And “addressing” flaws is about figuring out what can be done better. Our objective isn’t to say a flawed game is bad. Even good and wonderful games can have flaws – in fact, they always do, because no game is truly perfect. A flawed game can still be fun. What matters is what a developer does with those flaws. Do they strive to do better and make improvements that remove those flaws, or do they lean in? Likewise, what do we as fans do with those flaws. Do we acknowledge the problems and make requests for improvements, or do we insist that those flaws are in fact good and necessary components of the game?

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[1] D ranks are labeled as “Dull,” C ranks are labeled as “Cool,” B ranks as “Bravo,” A ranks as “Awesome,” and S ranks as “Stylish.”