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Last week I started up a retrospective of the Devil May Cry series. I had played the first three games nearly a dozen years ago, but never touched the later entries. So one day I wound up streaming the entire series, one after another. And that journey was filled with frustrations that led to me deciding I should put together an essay on the topic.
My goal was to examine the design of these games through the lens of a new player. If you look up gameplay of the series, you can find tons of videos on incredibly high-level combat. People playing near-perfectly, never getting hit, and absolutely decimating enemies. And that gameplay looks really cool. I’m sure it also feels really nice to pull off.
But for a new player – especially one going in blind – this high-level gameplay is out of reach. It is not skill you get from the start, but something you need to build up to. And I wished to pose a single question: how well are the games made so that you want to learn? How much do the games encourage you to learn and play better so that, when all is said and done and you have options to keep going or move on to something else, you as a new player say “I want to stick with this game for a while longer”?
And the answer I came up with in examining the first three games was that it doesn’t do a very good job at that. The controls of the game are intensely frustrating to deal with as a new player, and in many cases you are fighting against the game itself as much as with the enemies. My experience with Devil May Cry 1 through 3 was one that discouraged me from playing further. I did not look forward to the sessions, and I was eager to get done with the games so I could move on.
That said, things were also getting better as I moved through the series. DMC3 marked a lot of changes that were welcome, though not enough to fix the underlying issues. But they were steps in the right direction nonetheless. So I had slightly higher hopes as we kept moving through the franchise.
However, those thoughts ballooned and got tough to contain in a single essay. So I needed to split them up. I covered the first three games in last week’s post, and here I’ll cover the other three.
Because of the way these essays are constructed, a lot of what is here will presume you are familiar with the series and have read the prior essay. I will be generally trying to stick to a similar structure in the sections, and noting when I’ll depart from that structure.
Devil May Cry 4
Playing through so much of the series has made so much of the franchise feel like a blur. But the more an entry has something to set it apart, the easier it is for me to cling to something and remember it. Which is why I struggled a lot with DMC2 – it just felt so much like a retread of the first game. DMC4, on the other hand, really tries to change up quite a bit. And for that I really appreciated it.
One thing I will note is that the edition of DMC4 that I played had three different campaigns. The primary campaign split the player between Dante and a new character named Nero. Later editions of the game added in a campaign for Vergil, and then even later additions added a third for Trish and Lady (characters introduced originally in DMC1 and 3 respectively). Both of these extra campaigns are the same as the primary story mode, just played with a different character using a different move set. So it’s the same as the Vergil playthrough in DMC3. I wound up quickly running through the Vergil campaign, and then starting up the Lady/Trish campaign before stopping almost immediately. While these other modes exist, I am going to focus exclusively on the primary mode with Nero and Dante.
1) Combat
Probably one of the most interesting changes to the game is the addition of a new main character. The Devil May Cry franchise has already had different characters, as mentioned above with the extra campaign modes. But now the different characters are rolled into the main story, and you are compelled to use them. You play the first half of the game as Nero, and then most of the second half as Dante. Each character has different mechanics that make for genuinely distinct playstyles, though there will be significant overlap. Of course, that also means that having spent a maybe two to four hours getting used to one character, you now have to adjust to another.
Thankfully, the game does a few things to help smooth over that switch. I’ve mentioned multiple times that the player can collect a currency called red orbs to purchase new moves for your weapons. That same currency can also be used for items, such as healing, revives, or even permanent health upgrades. In DMC4 the weapon and item currencies have been divided. You still collect red orbs which are used for items, but moves for weapons and the like now use a currency called “Proud Souls,” which are awarded simply for playing through the game. The currency split is important because when you switch over from Nero to Dante, Dante has no abilities – you start from nothing, halfway through. But thankfully, every Proud Soul you’ve collected with Nero gets transferred over, so you can still buy plenty of upgrades for Dante. This all makes the change over midway through feel viable.
The most valuable change to the whole game is the camera. While before so much of the series relied on largely static camera angles where the player had minimal or just no control, here the camera more often tries to focus on the player and gives the player freer control. That control is not complete – a fair amount of the game is still built out of angles that change as you move around. But DMC3 started the trend of giving you a camera that felt actually designed around the core gameplay the player was engaging in – combat. And DMC4 has made some significant improvements. It could be better, but it could be (and has been) far worse.
That said, rather than talk about the mechanics in terms of controls and style, I think it worth breaking down the systems according to each character. Because the core combat and style systems are roughly the same now as they were in DMC3, and many of those conflicts still exist. Although certainly one big one has gone away for part of the game, because…
1a) Nero
…you have a pull ability. Well, you have a pull ability specifically when you’re playing as Nero.
Nero possesses a sword and gun much like Dante does, so that element of the combat feels largely the same. But there are two core differences.
The first diffrence is that Nero has a special arm called the Devil Bringer, which serves two functions. The first, as I mentioned, is pulling enemies toward you. This allows you to continue combos more easily, especially if one of your attacks pushes an enemy away from you. I’ve been complaining about the absence of this functionality since the first game, and having it presented early in the game felt like a godsend. The second function is to perform a throw move on enemies. This gives you an extra attack to perform as part of your combos, and does a good amount of damage.
The second difference is that Nero does not get additional weapons, in the way that Dante did in the earlier games. You have the same equipment throughout all of Nero’s missions. Instead, he gets a couple of extra abilities (beyond the Devil Bringer). His move list has a bit more to work with – he gets a few more combos to buy. Nero’s sword also has a special power-up functionality. By pressing the back left trigger (LT/L2), Nero revs up the engine attached to his sword. Once it is charged up (taking two to three revs), the next attack will perform a special move which will do extra damage. You can eventually store up to three charges of this.
The variety in Nero’s attacks was decent to make up for the lack of additional weapons, but the charge function felt awkward to work with. Because charging requires not attacking, you are losing style points as you charge up. Which means that aggression and the reward for aggression conflicts with the incentive for doing damage. Moreover, since you don’t get any damage numbers, there’s no feedback for knowing whether stopping to charge and then using those special attacks is more powerful than just attacking regularly. So the incentive for using this charge move feels absent. It likely provides an effect, but the game isn’t offering the feedback needed to know when and how to use it properly.
There is a skill to fill up one of the charges by pressing the rev button at a specific moment after landing an attack. You possess this innately, and you can later buy a skill to fully charge the weapon if you time the button press right. This system gives the player a bit more incentive to use the charge, but since the timing is precise, it requires a lot of practice that the game doesn’t really offer – since there’s no training mode in the game, collecting the information you need is tough.
Criticisms aside, I would rather replay the Nero sections in DMC4 than any of the previous games. The core functionality of the pull mechanic did so much to address my issues with the combat that I am willing to forgive so much just to have that ability.
1b) Dante
Dante is, for the most part, the same bread-and-butter you’ve gotten used to over the past three games. Of course, Dante does not have Nero’s pull ability, which was a massive disappointment. So we’re back to the same problems I had before. They do retain the Combat Styles that were introduced in DMC3, which as I had said then at least improved the problem somewhat (and also gave players a lot of options for how they wanted to play). A big change to that system, though, is that those styles are now changeable in mid-combat by pressing directions on the D-Pad. Before you selected which style you wanted to use as part of a loadout, which means you could only change at certain points in the game. That you now not only have options, but also can change more frequently, gives players more incentive to try those styles out. Assuming that those systems are ones that you find appealing. Unfortunately, several of the special abilities are built around more expert play, which means only a couple are actually going to be useful to newcomers.
Another significant change is to the weapon selection. Any player familiar with the series at this point would expect Dante to accumulate a bunch of different weapons, and certainly DMC4 does have some offerings. You begin with a sword and Dante’s classic pistols, and then gain an additional three melee weapons to choose from throughout the rest of the playthrough, plus two additional gun weapons. It’s not much in comparison with DMC3’s offering of five weapons in each category.
The reason you get fewer choices is to accommodate a new weapon switching system. Rather than selecting two melee weapons to use at a given time and swapping between them, you can now swap between three, and then select your fourth by hitting the button for your Combat Style a second time (which is somewhat awkward, but also you don’t end up playing with this awkwardness for very long). The downside, though, is that most weapon swapping requires cycling through your three options. You have your sword, a punching weapon, and then a strange spider-like weapon that summons exploding swords (I…uh…didn’t really like this third weapon).[1] If, to take a purely hypothetical example, you didn’t like one of your three weapons, then trying to switch in the middle of combat requires you to remember that you need to perform extra button presses. It’s a minor annoyance, but it’s also one that builds up over time. But even if you do like all three weapons, where a given weapon you want to use in the cycle may require two presses, rather than one. An extra weapon and a different input method for selecting weapons would have been much more amenable to newer players, and probably also to expert players. It would have provided a lot of the variety that was the obvious aim of this new system, while making sure it was something that players could more easily access.
Dante ultimately feels like a sort of step backwards. Not just from Nero’s playstyle, but from DMC3 as well. In some part this is likely also tied to the fact that the player gets much less time with Dante. If you’re only playing half of the game as him, then you don’t get as many opportunities to fight bosses and get new weapons. But all of that still means Dante’s combat comes across as underwhelming compared to what we’ve already had.
2) Exploration
DMC4 is technically built along the same lines as previous games, with a somewhat open area that you can freely explore. I’ve spoken before about the frustrations with this system, as navigation was never terribly intuitive and it required a fair amount of trial-and-error as you just wandered to find the right door.
However, the actual design of the levels is just…better. The areas are designed much more to be corridors that funnel you to where you need to go, and when you need to backtrack the game is at least trying to clearly direct you. I only got seriously lost at one point, and that was something I am freely willing to admit as my own error.
Probably the only exception is when the area is deliberately designed to confuse the player. One section of the game features teleports which mess with the basic screen transitions as you backtrack through the area. That section in particular is annoying, but most of the rest of the level design works fine.
A slight downside, though, is that there is a bit more use of non-combat elements to progress. These elements were always present in the series to different degrees, but here the “puzzles” rely on mechanics that are just dull to deal with. These include platforming, using Nero’s pull ability to move around, hitting statues around, or a minor puzzle involving looking at shadows. And then of course there’s a rather annoying dice-rolling room that is fairly easy to manipulate, but that easy manipulation only makes the whole sequence more frustrating. These systems aren’t really fun to engage with, and the fact that they are necessary tends to highlight that problem.
Secret missions are still here, but there are a couple of nice changes. The first is that those missions stand out a bit better as secrets. While a subtle change, secret missions are marked with a piece of paper that slightly stands out in the world’s background. At the very least now it’s easier to know when you’ve found one of those secrets. The second is that at a certain point in the game, Nero gains the ability to “track” secret missions – his arm will glow when you are nearby. This ability is incredibly useful, but suffers from two major problems: it is gained after secret missions become available, meaning you can miss some unless you go backwards or replay the mission, and this ability only applies to Nero. Given what I have said before about how annoying these secret missions can be to locate, that this ability gets such limited utility is itself rather annoying.
That said, they still suffer from the basic problem of involving a risk of losing health or items to get through. Since any damage you sustain in those secret missions carries over, you have to make a choice about whether you think it’s worth trying to complete it for the upgrade you’ll get. Often the answer feels like “no.” You may as well just keep going, because if you’re good enough to beat the mission, you’ll be fine without its reward.
I should also mention that a good amount of the level design involves going backwards. When you switch characters to Dante a little over halfway through, you then basically wander through the game in the other direction. A few things change to help you, including giving you some direction of where you shouldn’t go, but it does mean a fair amount of the exploration becomes pointless (though not entirely, as you can still find secrets as Dante). On the one hand, this system is a good way to put old areas into a new context and accentuate the distinctions between Dante and Nero. On the other hand, it does mean that the levels start to get boring, because you’ve seen them already.
3) Narrative
DMC4’s story continues the trend initiated in the previous game. Rather than trying to play with a mostly silent protagonist that just looks cool, the series has turned more towards an over-the-top action story with lots of cheesy dialogue. It gives a very different feel, and that feel seems to fit much better with the gameplay. And they take it to even greater extremes: we even get a scene of two characters soliloquizing under spotlights as though they were in a theatrical play.
Of course, one of the major changes is the new character Nero. As I already talked about, you are introduced to this character who possesses a lot of combat abilities and a strange arm. And the introduction of this character has him fighting against Dante, as a way of indicating that they are on roughly equal levels.
The storyline follows a cultish organization that worships Sparda, Dante’s father, as a god. To recap, Sparda was a demon who turned against his own kind to save humanity from a demonic invasion roughly 2,000 years before the games. He eventually disappears – presumed to be dead – but his name lives as a legend.
Though it turns out that the cult doesn’t just worship Sparda, but is trying to attain his power. Which means researching demons, harnessing them, and then turning themselves into demons – which they presume to be angels because they think they’re the good guys. So our job is to put a stop to that, for rather obvious reasons.
The primary focus of the story is on Nero, since he’s new and is originally a member of the cult. When the game begins, Dante breaks into a church service and basically murders the cult leader, leading to a confrontation between Nero and Dante. Dante ultimately wins the clash and then leaves, and Nero is tracked with hunting Dante down. As Nero goes through the zones, he learns more about the cult’s objectives, and eventually teams up with Dante.
Two nice things happen as a result of our new character. First, we get an effective transition between the teenage Dante of DMC3 and the adult Dante of the earlier games. While Dante still is more akin to the teenage version, the very fact that he isn’t on screen as much means he doesn’t talk all the time, giving us the illusion of maturation. Second, we still get to retain that teenage Dante by way of Nero, who serves are our primary focus.
Much like DMC3, the game is also much more focused on telling a story. Whereas the first two games were very light on actual narrative, the latter two have featured a lot more in terms of cutscenes and dialogue that convey information to the player about what’s going on. As I said when looking at DMC3’s narrative, the first two games didn’t have nothing. There just wasn’t a whole lot there. But these later games have provided something that makes it much easier for newer players to get invested.
And just as valuable is the way in which these games have been using cutscenes to convey what “stylish” play looks like. I mentioned this with DMC3, but it bears repeating – showing off your characters performing cool moves, especially moves that the player can actually do, gives the player an incentive to try to pull off the same stuff in actual combat. It’s a fantastic way to introduce players intuitively to the style rank system and get them to want to pursue stylish combat. So the newer emphasis on cutscene fighting serves a nice purpose in onboarding newer players.
4) Conclusion
As I’ve been going through the series, I have been having more fun. By the time I got to DMC4 I still was experiencing a lot of frustration, but things were definitely getting better. On a whim I replayed the game on the Vergil campaign, which did a fair amount to be what I wanted out of the game – a decent combination of Nero’s and Dante’s gameplay. But since I had already played the game, running through all the missions again just felt dull.
But the series has been getting closer and closer to what I want since its inception, and like with DMC3 it feels like the development team has been trying to figure out how to work within the existing structure to make an experience that is more amenable to what the game is. What started out as a combat-oriented Resident Evil game has turned into a proper combat game period. I’m not quite enjoying my time yet, but it feels tantalizingly close.
DmC: Devil May Cry
We now get to the first game in the franchise that I really and truly had fun with on a continual basis. Which is quite a while to get there. It’s not that every game leading up to this was terrible, or that I had no fun whatsoever. But rather each of the frustrations that I talked about kept getting in the way, and even as the systems improved the fundamentals still kept getting in the way.
The rather unfortunately named DmC: Devil May Cry (while I’ll stylize as DmC to at least try to make it a bit clearer) was developed by Ninja Theory, as opposed to the normal internal Capcom team. That game was meant to be a reboot or reimagining of the series – a new combat system, revision of the lore and characters, and so on. The core elements are still meant to be there, of course. It’s just all redone.
The game is also impressive in its visuals and sounds. Where the normal series takes place primarily in the human world which keeps getting invaded by demons, DmC takes place primarily in “Limbo.” This allows for all sorts of weird levels that wouldn’t be possible in a “normal” world. The combination of these strange and disorienting environments with a soundtrack that doesn’t repeat the same song every 90 seconds made for an experience that didn’t just feel incredibly fresh, but so much more interesting than anything that came before.
1) Combat
Every core component that I’ve been talking about so far has been changed to a pretty significant degree, and combat takes the top of that list. So much of the combat and weapon switching has been retained, simplified, and then expanded to allow for much more variety than before. Although with that said, really taking full advantage of that variety requires mastery of the controls.
But the objective here was to analyze these games from the perspective of the new player. How well does it feel to control if you’re just starting out? And the answer is very well.
1a) Controls
Before getting into the changes on the controls, I do want to mention an important addition to the player’s relation to the combat: practice. In every other entry so far, if the player wants to practice particular moves, they need to do it in the middle of the game. Go find some real enemies and just try things. But that kind of practice isn’t necessarily helpful, since you have so much to deal with. DmC adds a practice mode where you can take your Dante and just…attack. Try moves and figure out the controls as you like. For experts, this addition probably isn’t too important. But since we’re talking about each game from the perspective of a new player, this addition is incredibly valuable, if for no other reason than it illustrates a concern for players trying to figure out the systems.
The first major change to the controls is the elimination of the control stick as one of your primary methods for performing certain moves. The only exception are dash moves, which require a double input toward an enemy to perform (this at first felt odd, but eventually became a pretty core part of my move set). But now you can freely move your character around during combat without worrying about accidentally triggering a move you didn’t want. Which in turn means that one thing that the control stick can be used for is to aim your attacks. Is an enemy behind you about to attack you while you’re in the middle of a combo? Then just turn around as you continue your attacks, and the enemy gets interrupted. It creates an intuitive feedback flow for the combat that is much more friendly to newcomers.
Instead, three elements of the game combine to allow for different moves. Firstly, delayed button presses. This is carried over from previous games, and while it’s limited in comparison to DMC4, the new systems are able to make up for that limitation. Secondly, you now have a secondary button for performing melee moves. The B/Circle button is now your “launcher” – the attack that sends enemies into the air – and was a move originally mapped to targeting an enemy and attacking while pulling back on the control stick (relative to the enemy’s position). This simplification makes transitioning from ground to aerial combat much easier, if for no other reason than it’s much harder to screw up.
The third element is the weapon switching. Rather than manually switching between one weapon at a time, you wield three. You have your standard sword, and then a “Demon Mode” and an “Angel Mode.” Each mode is activated by holding one of the two trigger buttons (RT/LT/R2/L2), and doing so activates your selected Demon or Angel weapon. As long as you continue to hold the respective button, you’ll stay in that mode and continue to use that weapon. You get two weapons for each mode throughout the playthrough, which can be switched fairly quickly by using the directional pad. This means chaining attacks with different weapons is much easier than before (and it was admittedly fairly easy in DMC3). It also gives the player more control over what they’re using at a given time. Unlike in DMC4 where you cycled weapons and might have one you didn’t like, this system allows you to go seamlessly from one attack into another.
The downside, of course, is getting used to controlling it. The attack functions are always the same, but mentally remembering when to activate your Demon/Angel Modes and not accidentally activating the wrong one is easier said than done. So it requires building muscle memory, but that in itself is fine, as long as the game encourages you to work with the systems and learn. And so many little things the game does, like show you high-level play during loading sequences (thus giving you ideas of what you could try out), giving you enemies that are resistant to certain weapons and weak to others, and a handful of other design elements are all designed to encourage you to engage with these systems and practice.
Two further additions are very important to note here. Firstly, distance closing. I’ve complained about this multiple times now, but one core conflict within the Devil May Cry combat system was its insistence that you needed to remain aggressive to maintain your style meter, but it gave the player very little to close distances and maintain that aggression. Your best options were guns (which might not be enough if your next enemy is far away), your dash moves (which would push enemies away, not really solving the problem), or the dodge function in DMC3 (which might not close enough distance). Nero’s pull mechanic in DMC4 finally addressed this problem, but only temporarily, since Dante didn’t possess it.
But now DmC offers not one but two distance closing mechanics. Firing your gun with your Demon Mode activated causes you to pull enemies toward you, and conversely firing your gun with your Angel Mode will pull yourself towards enemies. Whichever way you prefer to fight, you now have a permanent option for making sure that you can reliably get to the next enemy quickly before your style meter depletes too much. It was the biggest thing missing from the series, its addition to Nero’s move set in DMC4 made me so happy, and the fact that it was a core feature in DmC is part of what sold me on the whole game.
And the last bit is dodging. There is now a dedicated dodge button, mapped initially to the Right Bumper/R1 button. No more needing to awkwardly jump away from attacks or limit the rest of your move set (i.e. the Trickster Style in DMC3 which gave you a dodge ability) just to be able to avoid attacks. The mere existence of a dodge makes combat feel a bit more natural for its fast-paced systems. While the player always had some methods for avoiding attacks, those methods usually felt slow and awkward. Sure, you avoided damage, but it didn’t quite feel right. The dodge, coupled with those distance closers, mean that the player has a clear response to incoming attacks, and also a way to get right back into the fight.
The major problem with the dodge is where it is located. Because it’s mapped to a shoulder button, that means it will mainly fight with Demon Mode for its usage, since most people use their index fingers to switch between the buttons on the top/back of the controller. While technically there’s nothing preventing the player from using their middle and index fingers together, it isn’t really reflective of how people normally play, and most players – especially newer players – are disinclined to adjust their controller grip unless the idea is explicitly given to them. And so the button placement forces the player to choose between dodging or attacking effectively, which isn’t a great choice. It’s admittedly tough to say where the dodge button should have been mapped to, given how everything else is used. But this implementation ends up giving with one hand and taking away with the other.
1b) Style
While not a lot has changed at the foundational level with the style ranks, it is worth addressing a couple of minor tweaks.
The first is that the game now shows you the number of “points” that moves are worth as you do them, as well as other bonuses like not taking damage and defeating multiple enemies quickly. This addition might seem minor, but it gives a nice bit of feedback to the player about what “stylish” gameplay involves. The game doesn’t have a massive running tally that you can constantly refer to, but rather only a few entries based on what you’ve done very recently, so there’s not any opportunity to dig into the details. But as a first-time player you can at least get direct information from the game about what kinds of moves give you lots of points, which ones don’t give that many, and what you can do to maximize your style rank.
The second is an audio cue as you get to the higher ranks. For S, SS, and SSS ranks, a voice yells some word to accompany your accomplishment. Tied to the overall sound design, the voice gives a very visceral feeling of “you’re playing really well.” It’s a very minor change, but it is another good way to give feedback to a player that they’re doing well, and the more feedback a player gets for that, the more inclined they are to keep doing well.
The last and biggest change is how the ranks actually affect the flow of combat itself, although it is also one I am unsure if I want to bring up. As you increase your style rank, the actual speed at which Dante moves and attacks will increase. So the better you play, the faster you get to play as well. It’s an interesting feedback mechanism, but I am hesitant to bring it up simply because it is something that the game does not inform you of, and the actual speed increase is one that you may not notice. In other words, it is information that might be of value to an expert player, but if you’re a first-time player and you don’t notice it, then does it really matter?
Although certainly a nice element of the increased speed is that as you get better ranks you’re more likely to keep those ranks. Faster attacks mean more points, and also less time spent waiting for attacks to happen so that you can dodge or jump or do something else.
All of this means two things. One, the style system is a bit more user-friendly for newcomers. Not by a huge margin, but the tweaks are nice. Two, the changes to the underlying combat make getting and keeping good ranks much easier. I don’t know enough about the underlying mechanisms of how ranks are calculated to say whether one game’s system “inflates” scores relative to another. But none of that matters – newer players able to get better ranks more consistently is good for them, because it gives them the feedback that they are doing well and makes them want to keep playing.
2) Exploration
It is at this point that I am going to introduce a concept that any expert of the series might find frustrating that I haven’t mentioned yet: replaying missions.
The Devil May Cry games can be pretty tough. While they have multiple difficulty modes (including multiple “extra hard” modes that require beating the game first), most players will be inclined to start on what is effectively “normal” mode. In DMC1 you could switch to an easier difficulty if a mission was giving you trouble, but you couldn’t switch back. Most of the games in general would offer you an opportunity to switch to an easier mode if you died a certain number of times. These are definitely helpful, although a good chunk of players would certainly ignore the offer.
So let’s say you insisted on staying in normal mode. What opportunities do you have for overcoming a given obstacle?
In the first two games, your option was “get good.” Not exactly helpful to most new players.
But starting in the third game, you were offered an opportunity to go back and replay missions you had already completed. This could be done to acquire currency for upgrades and items, or to find health upgrades that you might have missed. It was a decent addition, but one that also wasn’t implemented terribly well, because the game never really gives you a strong reason to go back and replay. If you’re struggling, your inclination may be to keep pounding your head against the wall.
Now the reason I bring this up is that DmC designs its levels around being replayed. Specifically, the various secrets of the game are locked behind barriers that can only be opened with equipment and abilities you acquire later in the game. Many of these are placed in spots where you are likely to encounter those barriers first, and then in a later level encounter the key. Which means you then know intuitively that you can replay and unlock those barriers. In a few easy design elements the game actively encourages you to replay, which both gives you more opportunities to practice the combat and more opportunities to acquire currency for buying upgrades. So if you find yourself stuck, you can go back and replay a mission to try to get some new stuff. And that replay doesn’t even have to feel like grinding, because you know that it is baked into the game’s systems. You feel like you’re doing the right thing by replaying missions.
Okay, but let’s look back at those core issues with the exploration from the older games.
Firstly, how easy is it to get lost? Almost impossible. Rather than exploring a large space such as a castle or town, the levels are self-contained and effectively glorified hallways. This would seem boring, but the value of this system is that it cuts out the filler. Since the focus of so much of these games was on combat anyway, the exploration was always secondary. And often trying to find secrets or your next objective got frustrating because the game could either be coy about your next objective, or it might try and fail to properly communicate where you should go next. Now those problems are gone. You know where you’re supposed to go next at pretty much every moment. Instead, you have fighting segments broken up by brief periods of level navigation as cooldown periods. It was the least frustrating experience of all the games so far.
How about platforming? Is that still around? Yes, it is. In fact, this game probably has the most platforming out of all of the games. But, the platforming actually feels fine. Especially since the game gives you a lot more movement mechanics (and a good deal of the platforming involves using your pull abilities I mentioned earlier). The platforming segments aren’t perfect – sometimes the game can have trouble properly targeting the hook points that you use and thus send you plummeting into an abyss. But the platforming feels leaps and bounds better than anything else in the other games so far. If platforming in the remainder of the Devil May Cry series felt painful, in DmC it feels fine.
And the secret missions? Two valuable changes occur here. One is that secret missions now properly take place in their own space of the game. By which I mean that unlike in previous entries, if you die in a secret mission or take damage, that doesn’t impact the rest of your game. You have a much stronger incentive to stay and keep trying, because you know that success brings a reward, while failure does not penalize you.
Additionally, the game now provides a helpful indicator for when you’ve missed secrets. The game now has three different secrets you encounter throughout the missions – keys to open doors, the doors themselves, and “lost souls” which provide a bit of red orb currency when defeated. Finding these secrets are tied to your overall mission rank, with each completed secret being permanently unlocked (thus if you’ve found everything in a mission, you don’t need to go out of your way if you replay it again – you just get max points for it at the end of the mission). Since you now know what you’re missing in a mission, you don’t need to just randomly search missions hoping to find something. This was something I had briefly mentioned before – not every mission in a game had the same set of secrets for you to discover. But now that problem is just gone – you know what you’ve missed in a given mission, and therefore whether it’s worth revisiting. You could still find yourself poking through every corner of the level, but at least you know when there’s something to poke around for.
3) Narrative
Alright, let’s dip into the story.
As I mentioned above, DmC is effectively a reboot of the franchise. So it doesn’t just reimagine the combat, but it also revises the story elements and Dante’s character.
Several of the core components are still there. For instance, Dante is still the son of Sparda, a demon who betrayed the rest of the demon world. But all sorts of other things differ. Dante’s mother is an angel, rather than a human woman – hence the Demon and Angel Modes mentioned earlier. Sparda never beat back the demons, but was instead captured. Dante’s brother Vergil is still present, but he is now less of a power-obsessed antagonist and instead someone who has…well…an actually interesting motivation.
Certainly for anyone invested in the original story, even a new player, this would all be a fairly jarring change. Whether it’s really welcome is a different question. But at the very least much of the game’s storytelling is similar to previous games. It relies on a lot of “trying to be cool” in a way that the player is meant to find the game funny to some degree – we are all in on the joke.
That said, Dante’s character is meant to appeal to a slightly different version of the “cool and edgy” stereotype. Both make wisecracks, have a rather blasé attitude toward things with opportunities to be more serious now and then, and both exude an air of confidence in their abilities. And yet, there is something undeniably different in how the character is presented in DmC versus the other games.
That said, whether someone new to the franchise would care is irrelevant to this topic. What matters is that DmC is very similar to DMC3 and 4 in having more meat on its narrative bone for the player to chew on.
Perhaps the most useful element of all this, though, is that it provides an opportunity to dip into worldbuilding in a way that the earlier games didn’t, or didn’t nearly as much. Since the earlier Devil May Cry games either were narratively light or had already inherited a large amount of backstory, the narrative was always zipping between trying to provide details and trying to not get too into the weeds. How do you effectively catch a brand new player up on the state of the world, without also just losing them because you have to explain what happened in the previous games? While the DMC2-4 usually walked that tightrope, now and then they would simply have to just assume that people were coming in with the necessary foreknowledge.
Since DmC is specifically aiming for a rewriting of the lore, it needs to draw attention to the changes. Which means those details have to be brought to light and made explicit. All of this serves to make sure that players are more aware of what’s going on in the story.
4) Conclusion
It would have been extremely interesting to see another game in this series, whether or not it meant the end of the “standard” franchise. The reimagining of the story, the environmental and sound design, and the combat systems all made this my favorite in the entire franchise. In playing through the games, I had reached the end of the campaign and decided to stop. With DMC4 I had decided to play the Vergil campaign on a whim, but was glad when I was able to be done with it. With none of them did I really feel interested in playing more than the bare minimum.
With DmC I finally wanted to play more. I looked forward to the sessions when I would play it on stream, and I replayed most of the game to hunt for secrets of my own volition afterwards. I can fully and genuinely say I had fun with DmC. I feel like that in itself says a lot.
Devil May Cry 5
When I started playing DMC5, I was blown away. It felt like everything I had wanted from a Devil May Cry game from the beginning. Well, almost everything. But so much of the frustration I had been feeling over those past weeks started to melt away. I was having fun. About as much fun as I’d had with DmC. Nearly 20 years of trial and error had led to this, and it all finally felt worth it. Mostly. There are still a handful of little quality of life elements that give this feeling of backsliding from DmC, especially in relation to the game’s exploration. But if this game had been the only follow-up to DMC4, I would have at least finally been happy with the series.
However, things started to take a turn in some ways. The more I tried to engage with the game, the less I found to like about it. Every change that seemed neat on its face turned into something that felt poorly implemented. I am not sure how I’d rank the game compared to the others, but what had started out feeling like a close contender to DmC started falling the more I played it.
And it’s important to keep in mind that the entire purpose of this retrospective is to ask how well these games get a new player to want to keep playing. If so much of how these games work is based on the idea that the game feels really good and looks really cool at high-level play, then the game needs to get players to reach that high-level play. Which means either teaching players directly, or else encouraging them to spend time with the systems. But the fact that the game keeps creating all of this friction for the player is precisely the ingredient that keeps them away. For long-time fans and experts, none of what I have said or am about to say will be a problem. But the problem has never been whether these systems are “learnable,” but how good of a job the game does in getting players to learn.
1) Combat
We’re back to the standard input system, focused on using the single melee button, the control stick, and timing of attacks to put out different combos. The criticisms of that system don’t go away, but a few elements of the system do make it a bit better.
Firstly, the camera is just better. Having significantly more control over it and having it focus more intently on the character allows you to more easily pick apart your character from the mess that goes on around you. That said, it does come with a major drawback: anticipating what is attacking you is much harder. There were numerous occasions that I was hit by something offscreen that I wasn’t able to anticipate because the game provides no warning system, nor do enemy attacks get cleanly telegraphed when they are nearby. So you are at the mercy of the enemy AI and a bit of good luck.
Secondly, the lock-on system works much better. In every standard entry I have found myself yelling at the game for how it locked on to an enemy I didn’t want it to, and didn’t expect it to. In all of my hours with DMC5, though, I never experienced that problem. In fact, at a few points the game would soft-lock in ways I would want it to even when I was hard-locked onto other enemies – it is a rare occurrence, but that I found myself in that circumstance and the game worked the way I would want it to felt so freeing.
That said, the core systems are the same. That is true of both the controls and the style system. There are little alterations, but like with DMC4 I think for this section it is more useful to tackle the combat systems of the three characters that you get to play as during the game: Nero, Dante, and the new character V. Because their individual mechanics mark interesting distinctions in how they play. This will be akin to the differences in Nero’s and Dante’s systems in DMC4, but now we have some more to work through.
1a) Nero
Nero’s playstyle is largely the same as in DMC4, which gives a nice sense of familiarity. He still has his motor sword which can be charged up, his gun can also be charged up, and most of his combos are the same as in the previous game. So if you’re familiar with Nero’s playstyle in DMC4, you have a good basis for knowing what to expect in DMC5.
Nero begins the game without his special demon arm, but quickly gains a replacement. The new machine arm he gains has two functions. The first is to retain the pull mechanic from DMC4, which as I have mentioned multiple times is a great way to close distances and maintain aggression, thus allowing you to maintain your style meter.
The other function is to a “punch” mechanic which serves as an extra move. This is similar to the grab attack from DMC4, but the key difference is that Nero now has a multitude of different possible attacks he delivers depending on what arm he currently has equipped. Sometimes it’s a basic punch, sometimes he launches out his arm to fly around and punch an enemy multiple times, sometimes he shoots out a beam, and so on. There are a number of different arms available, so a lot of variety is possible. The player is allowed to equip up to three arms at a time to start, but eventually can have up to eight at a time.
However, arms are cycled by being destroyed – either by being used up (charging your special attacks will usually result in losing your arm in the process), or by getting hit while trying to use your arm ability. Once all of your arms are gone, the functionality is taken away until you get one back.
Regaining arms is done in two ways. Firstly, you can purchase them from the in-game shops using the red orb currency. Players can purchase as many of these as they like in whatever variety they like. If there’s one particular arm you really like, you could just buy a dozen of them and never bother with anything else. Or you could switch up the choices to have variety or to tackle potential challenges in your next mission. Secondly, you can occasionally find one of these arms spread throughout Nero’s missions, which you can pick up as long as you have an empty slot in your current inventory.
The basics of how the arms work is interesting and makes for a nice variety that could be compared to Dante’s different weapons (though admittedly much more limited in their move sets). But they do run into a major problem: they break.
The conflict arises because of the confluence of three facts. Firstly, the only way to switch between arms is to destroy them; secondly, arms can be destroyed accidentally (by getting hit); thirdly, if you lose all of your arms then you lose all functionality until you get a new one (which could be a while).
For expert players this may not matter, but for newer players the incentive structure pushes towards safety. Because you absolutely don’t want to run out of arms. Which in turn means not using those arms for anything particularly fancy. So the charge moves that result in your arms breaking are going to be avoided. In addition, it creates a pressure to use arms that are “simpler” and less likely to break – an arm that has a quick punch is going to be much more valuable than one with a long attack just because you’re less likely to get hit during the attack.
While it’s possible to purchase more slots to expand your inventory – thus meaning you are less likely to run out – the upgrades are fairly expensive. So that means a bunch of grinding, or else you play extra carefully to avoid losing those arms.
Add on top of this that while there are a wide variety of arms available, switching to the next arm requires destroying whichever arm you have currently equipped. So do you have an arm with a particular ability that would be really useful in a boss fight? If it’s on your last slot, then you have to destroy all of your other arms to cycle through it, and then you have to worry about losing that arm. Which all means why bother with variety? Just find one that works and stock up on that, so at least you’ll always know what you’re working with.
The base system is incredibly interesting, but would probably have benefited from a sense of permanence and a better selection system. If players could choose a smaller set to take on a given mission and switch between them fairly freely, and those arms did not break, then players would have a stronger incentive to make full use of those moves. The existing limits are all great if you are an expert, but anyone who doesn’t start out with all of the knowledge and intuition of how to best use those systems are going to just choose to not really engage with those systems in the first place.
1b) Dante
After experiencing Nero – and V, which I’ll talk about in the next section – I was excited to try Dante. I had expected that with so many of the fixes to the core systems that I had felt with Nero, I would get a chance to finally play a Dante I could feel comfortable with. Something closer to DMC3’s style than DMC4’s. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Dante pretty quickly became my least favorite character of the trio.
Dante’s basic move set has always been limited compared to Nero’s. This is to accommodate or balance the number of different weapons you get with Dante. Where Nero has just the one sword and thus needs a lot of different moves to maintain variety, Dante can just switch weapons and start a new string of combos. It should theoretically feel good, but so much of it just felt…off.
One of the key things carried over from DMC4 is the ability for Dante to switch between his different Combat Styles at will, giving you access to a variety of skills. However, one factor of limiting Dante’s move set is that it basically demands usage of the Swordmaster style at most times, making the other styles feel a bit useless unless you are already well acquainted with all of the tricks related to them – and again, we’re looking at this from the perspective of the new player.
If Nero’s combat made me think that maybe the issues with the core combat had been fixed, Dante’s combat dashed every last one of those thoughts against the rocks. Every last complaint I had before – the awkwardness of the control stick for delivering attacks, the lock-on that sometimes just doesn’t work the way you want it to, and the lack of a good system for closing distances between Dante and enemies– all of those came crashing back in and made for an intensely frustrating experience. So many of the things I want to be doing are just not possible with Dante. I want to be able to keep enemies in the air as a way of both maintaining my style and avoiding damage. I want to be able to isolate enemies quickly so I don’t wind up in the middle of a pile that makes it difficult to see and anticipate attacks. I want to be able to focus on one enemy at a time while occasionally breaking focus to prevent a different enemy from hitting me. Dante just isn’t built around this. Enemies crowd around easily, Dante gets lost, and I need to jump out and start over in reorienting myself in relation to the fray.
The game does very little to introduce you to the actual techniques you need to know about your weapons. Whereas Nero’s tutorials teach you how to perform basic combos and the upgrade stations inform you about what new moves you can buy and how to use them, much of Dante’s move set is presumed to be known. Which led to complete confusion and needing to stop to look at the move list just to figure out how my weapons worked. DMC5 presumes that you will either stop to look at this info, or that you already know what you’re doing. Both terrible ways to introduce someone to new concepts, since this has not been required before.
Another issue with Dante’s moves is how frequently they change on you. One of the weapons that he begins with, Balrog, has two modes: a punch and kick version. Each has their own unique move set, which theoretically means you actually get two weapons in one. The unfortunate problem is that the method for switching between those modes is to hold the lock-on button, press backwards (relative to where you’re facing), and then hit the attack button. Since this is something that would resort in a normal attack for any other weapon (in fact, it would be specifically be an attack designed to launch enemies into the air so you could begin an air combo), this can lead to frustrating moments where you wind up with a completely different weapon and moves than you’re expecting just because you pressed the wrong way on the control stick – something very easy to do, because it’s all relative to where you are currently facing, not in any universal direction (the same it’s been since the beginning). If you like both modes, that’s great…but if you’re like me and happened to enjoy one more much more than the other (I loved its punch mode and all but hated the kick mode), then the switches are something you avoid and any unintentional switch becomes maddening.
I likewise found myself frustrated with how the primary sword weapon changed on you throughout the playthrough. You begin with Dante’s basic sword, named the Rebellion. This sword has most of the basic moves that Dante has acquired throughout the games, with some limitations. Eventually this gets upgraded to a sword called Sparda, which appears to be just the same sword but with a different model. But then you barely even get to work with that before the sword changes again to one called the Dante, which then retains the same move set for the basic attack button…but completely changes the special attacks performed with Swordmaster Style. And you’re given very little warning about this, which means if you’d invested in that particular Combat Style already and gotten used to the moves, you now need to start over.
There is at least a bit of a silver lining regarding all of the different weapons Dante gets. Dante’s weapon switching borrows again from DMC4 with the single list that you cycle through, but with two changes that are helpful. Firstly, you can choose the order of the cycle, in case you have a particular combo string memorized for launching from Weapon A to Weapon B to Weapon C. Secondly, you can unequip weapons at your upgrade stations. Don’t find yourself liking a particular weapon? Then just remove it entirely, so you don’t have to worry about cycling past it. While it might be ideal for every weapon to feel good and useful, certainly a good compromise is giving players the choice about which weapons they carry with them.
Even though I could generally get better style ranks with Dante than I could with Nero, I found myself preferring to play as the latter over the former. Mastery of the systems would no doubt make for incredibly interesting and fascinating gameplay to both perform and watch. But every bit of actually engaging with those systems as a new player gave rise to frustration. I just wanted something with Dante’s variety and Nero’s snappy movement and pull ability. Going back to replay missions with Dante just created more annoyance, and basically started to kill any enthusiasm I had had for the game. Every moment of playing Dante in DMC5 made me wish I was playing Dante in DmC instead.
1c) V
The new character for this game is named V. V’s combat systems are the most interesting of all because they are the most different from your “traditional” setups, and yet those changes are also points of frustration.
Unlike Nero and Dante, V does not engage in direct combat. Instead, V has three familiars that he controls. The melee button is tied to Shadow, a panther-like demon that is reminiscent of the Shadow enemy from DMC1. Shadow will try to get close to enemies and then perform attacks when directed, performing different attacks according to the established rules of the system – locking on, delaying inputs, and moving the directional stick can lead to different combos. The gun button is tied to Gryphon, a bird that fires electricity and is reminiscent of one of the bosses in DMC1. Gryphon fires bolts of lightning, and also has different electrical attacks according to the same rules as melee combat. The combination here means that V has the most expanded move set of the characters.
The third familiar is Nightmare, which is temporarily summoned by activating your special power known as Devil Trigger (something that I haven’t brought up before, but has been a consistent components of the games from the beginning). Nightmare mostly attacks on its own, though you can purchase abilities to ride it and control its attacks more directly. But for the most part it appears to be something that can be trusted to handle things without your input.
Since your familiars will target and try to move towards enemies, V is able to hang back and direct the battle from a comfortable space. But there is a caveat: the familiars aren’t able to kill enemies. Instead, you need to perform the killing blow. When an enemy is in a weakened state, the enemy and its health bar will change colors and the enemy will be stunned. During that time period (eventually the enemy will get out of the state), you need to use your special button (B/Circle) to perform a killing blow. So you can’t just hang out in a corner.
But wouldn’t the familiar system be super easy because the enemies are focused on those allies? The catch is that your familiars have health bars. They can “die” temporarily, and if they do then they enter a recovery state and can’t be used. They will revive with time, but the process is slow and to speed it up you need to stand close to your ally – which of course means putting yourself in danger. So there’s a tradeoff designed around playing aggressively.
V’s systems are intriguing, but they run into two major problems.
The first is that since you are relying on the game to put your familiars – particularly Shadow – in the right spot, you don’t get nearly as much control over your attacks as you do with Nero and Dante. It’s not terrible, since the AI does its best to try and close distances to set themselves up for attacks. But you can absolutely run into occasions where they just don’t track properly. This appears to be most prevalent in exploration – sometimes you can be right next to a thing you want to hit a piece of scenery and get some extra red orbs, and pressing your attack button accomplishes nothing because Shadow was just somewhere else. I should reiterate that this isn’t a constant problem, but it is enough to notice.
The second and I think bigger problem is that combat is pretty easily trivialized. Very early on I realized that I could just lock on to an enemy and mash the two attack buttons (X+Y) on my controllers, while occasionally moving my control stick in basically random directions. This process not only resulted in consistently successful combat encounters, but a lot of style. I could pretty regularly hit SS and SSS ranks in combat with V that I would struggle to do with Nero or Dante. It…didn’t wind up being much fun.
Now the obvious response here is “well, don’t mash the buttons, then.” But that misses the core problem – the game is rewarding me for that behavior. Why should I play more consciously when not only do I win battles, but also win them “stylishly” according to the game? The game is directly telling me that I am not just doing fine but doing a great job with this strategy. If that’s true, then abandoning that strategy may lead to more fun but less rewards.
The issue here isn’t that mashing is the “optimal” way to play, but that there is a divergence between the mechanics of the gameplay with V and the player’s fun. An expert player can likely find a way to make these two components harmonize again, but for a newer player a strategy that doesn’t just work well but works great is going to become a dominant strategy – players will often tend towards paths of least resistance in gameplay. In short, sure I could change my strategy, but why would I want to?
All of these foibles of the individual characters aside, the combat was mostly enjoyable. I did not have the purely visceral fun that I did in DmC, but at least I had far more fun than I did in any of the prior entries. So much about the combat has just been fixed now that I feel like the game is actually just worth playing.
2) Exploration
DMC5 finally removes the quasi-linked world that you journey through (sometimes multiple times), instead opting for fairly linear levels akin to DmC. As I said when analyzing that game, this change is very welcome. To put it bluntly now that we’re beyond it, the exploration and puzzles in the earlier entries were bad. They usually had obvious solutions, or were barely puzzles at all but instead glorified walks down hallways anyway. A lot of it amounted to walking to Room A to get a key that could then be used in Room B, with some fights in between. At the very least we have dropped the pretense of trying to mesh puzzles into a combat game and just leaned into the combat. “Puzzles” in the most generous sense of the word are relegated to secret missions, where they ought to be.
Speaking of secret missions, the game has taken a step forward and a step backwards in this regard. Rather than standard doorways that you simply had to know would be secrets (as in the first few games), or little notes stuck to walls (as in DMC4), secret missions are now located behind a puzzle involving standing in a spot and lining up a broken image. Its introduction suggested a nice way to search for secret missions that would actually encourage you to look around the environment, rather than just check every single corner.
Unfortunately, the actual implementation of these secrets falls flat. The spots where you need to stand are hidden until you are basically right next to them, and those spots are usually in off-the-path sections anyway. Seeing the actual image beforehand is uncommon – only one time did I notice the drawings and thus intuit that there must be a spot nearby. The drawings do not stand out enough to give you reason to search for the spot, making the puzzle pointless – by the time you find the spot, lining up the image is actually trivial.
A point in favor of the missions, though, is that at least we have borrowed more from DmC’s notebook, and discovering a secret mission gives you permanent access to it. So no needing to restart a whole level just to replay a secret mission that gave you trouble. Just go to the main menu, select the mission, and beat it there.
I wanted to do a section on whether or not they have finally made the change to secret missions so that taking damage in them does not carry over to the rest of the game. It was a particular frustration I had mentioned time and again in previous entries that was fixed in DmC, and it seems like it would make complete sense to finally alter it here. However, in the course of my playing I wasn’t able to test this out, just because so few of the secret missions have any significant threat in them that you need to worry about. That said, the fact that these missions are selectable from the main menu (and presumably you can get your reward from there) and the fact that few of them have any real threat is generally enough to counteract the issue from before. You now have a better incentive to seek them out, because you know that even if you run into one that is tough and might take away your valuable health, you can literally do it again at your own leisure, rather than needing to get it done here and now.
While the game lacks the kind of search mechanics that you got with Nero in DMC4, the levels do at least often direct you to secrets in various ways, making locating secret missions and hidden orbs less of a trial. Although we are unfortunately now missing the Combat Adjudicator statues introduced in DMC3 that would have been wonderful for so many reasons. As I mentioned back then, these statues were great for teaching you how to play with your characters and rewarding the players for doing well. If every upgrade orb that wasn’t tied to a secret mission were inside of these statues, I would probably be thoroughly happy with the game’s level design. A few levels have something akin to this, where you need to defeat enemies rapidly before an accessway closes. But those opportunities are much less frequent than just finding a hidden path.
Despite my criticisms, I would much rather replay a DMC5 level than any of the missions from previous games, which definitely helps the exploration stand out in this game.
3) Narrative
The storylines for this franchise have been good since the third installment, and this game delivers just as well.
To cover some of the very basics, the game begins in the middle of the action, with Dante being defeated by the newest big bad demon enemy. Nero has had his demon arm ripped off – which is now replaced by the mechanical arms I described before – and we have the addition of the mysterious V character. So those two, joined by a new character named Nico who is a genius mechanic responsible for building all sorts of fancy new weapons, must set out to help Dante and put a stop to the main villain. We get a return of Lady and Trish as well, to make sure that we maintain some consistency.
The story does a lot this time around to raise the stakes. In prior games Dante and crew never necessarily felt like they were in trouble. The world was technically being threatened, but the threat wasn’t real because the characters never gave off the air that things were bad. The closest you get is about halfway through DMC3, where Dante is defeated by Vergil – but even then Dante just gets right back up stronger than ever.
Starting with Dante’s loss to the main villain makes the story feel like things could actually go wrong. Of course, we as the audience know in the back of our minds that the good guys are going to win. But the illusion that the main characters are in trouble gives a story a sense of weight and tension that wasn’t all that present beforehand – or only existed in very short bursts.
Throughout the story are a bunch of important reveals. Our new character V and the main villain are both aspects of Dante’s brother Vergil. Vergil somehow survived all the ordeals in the underworld and being captured (referring all the way back to DMC1), and then comes back hungry for power. He rips off Nero’s arm which houses Vergil’s special sword, then uses that to separate his human and demon components and become a pure demon. V, of course, retains the humanity (but at least possesses a lot of power as well), and works to put a stop to this demonic form, with the ultimate aim of reuniting.
And they do, which results in the rebirth of Vergil. Which leads to the kinds of things you’d expect – a showdown between Vergil and our two remaining heroes. A fair amount of this is a retread of DMC3, though the actual presentation is new in a way that it still feels fresh. But there are plenty of very explicit callbacks that a long-time fan may well find appealing.
The thing I really want to bring up about the story, though, is the addition of missions that allow you to select which character you take through. Not every mission has this option – most of them are built around a single character both narratively and mechanically. But the option still exists for a couple of them.
Exactly how these missions play out depends on the specific level, but they aren’t necessarily just the exact same level with a different character. The first level that gives you the option takes you through the same basic level layout but in reverse. Which is something that makes sense because you can see the other character at the beginning of the mission going on a different pathway. The second one, though, was just the same level. So it’s a bit hit-or-miss. Generally when the levels are different, that gives the player a bit more incentive to try out the different paths. Even if the changes are cosmetic, it can still feel like a different level.
But the reason that this addition is notable is that it provides an incentive for players to replay missions. I mentioned this in discussing DmC, and brought up that it was possible to do with a couple earlier entries as well. However, the option existing isn’t necessarily enough. You need to also get players to want to replay. Because the player spending more time with the game allows them to get better acquainted with move sets and controls, which means they are more likely to gain some level of expertise in the game, which means that they have more fun. DmC having an explicit system that signaled to you that you needed to go back and replay levels to find secrets gave players a good reason to go back and thus practice.
Since we have three characters, that opportunity for practice is extra important. You get so little time with each individual character that you don’t get a whole lot of practice with each one. Especially so when you keep switching between them throughout the story. So being able to go back and replay a mission where you select a different character gives you more chances to learn.
And just as important is that it trains the player to replay missions period. While I noted that DMC3 and 4 had this same option, the game doesn’t really do anything to suggest it might be a good idea to replay missions. You do get a reward for doing so, but the game doesn’t really help you learn about that. Sure, you could, but why would you want to do that? Just play the next mission instead.
So the fact that you can replay a mission, play as a different character, and then from that process learn that it could be valuable to replay other missions is a nice change that helps get newer players acquainted with the game’s systems. In a sense, it is an incredibly subtle change that means very little. For an expert player, it’s just nice that if you like a particular character you can gravitate towards them. Indeed, an expert player could theoretically be annoyed, because it just means more levels to play to try and get top ranks on. But for a new player, this change is a massive improvement.
4) Conclusion
As I said at the beginning of this section, when I started the game I had thought that it might be a close second to DmC on my list. I went in really wanting to enjoy this game. Since the series seemed to be making constant improvements, I was not just curious but excited to see what DMC5 would bring. The game took me three sessions of streaming to complete, though I also went back to replay some missions hunting for secrets and completing the other routes for the other characters. Given that I only did this for DmC, I think that still says something.
That said, as I kept going I found myself less and less enthralled. The promise of the secret missions became less interesting once I realized how searching for them actually worked. The combat ran into many of the same old problems, and sometimes new ones. And the character select missions were too few and far between to make those off-stream sections very long. And as I kept playing, I found myself less inclined to hunt for secrets.
I am unsure how much I enjoyed the game. I think I can say I still enjoyed it the most of the mainline series, but I don’t know if I can truly say I had fun with the game overall. I had fun at points, but not necessarily with the whole thing.
That said, this game has done the best job of the mainline series of doing what so many of the other games failed at doing, which was to actually introduce new players to its systems and get them to the point of being good at the game. Because a core component of having fun with the series is performing all of those cool moves. So the game needs to get you up to speed. DMC5 undoubtedly did the best in this regard of the mainline games, and aside from the basic control issues which can still leave you feeling like you’re fighting the game as much of the enemies, it is roughly on par with DmC in that regard.
Concluding Remarks
Having gone through the series…I’m not sure I’d want to do it again. The Devil May Cry series is known for having additional difficulty levels you unlock after beating the game which really put your skills to the test. These are definitely designed for people who just want more out of the game, or like the extra challenge, or enjoy hunting for achievements. At no point did I feel inclined to replay any of these games on the tougher difficulties. One run felt like enough. If I were to play any of them and do those challenges, it would probably be DmC.
In making all of these criticisms, I want to reiterate a core point once again. Perhaps I’ve said this so many times it feels monotonous, but it is one that bears repeating. I don’t think any of these games are bad games, or unfun. It would be really cool to perform all sorts of stylish moves. I think if I were able to play like that, I would have tons of fun. The problem isn’t that I couldn’t have fun. It’s that I would need to work to be able to have fun.
So the purpose of this retrospective is to put these games under the microscope and ask how well they encourage a player to put in that work. Because if you want players to operate at that high level, then you need to find some way to help them reach that point. If you just expect players to do it of their own free will, some will, but many will abandon the task.
Coming to the series this late certainly impacted my perception. For a lot of fans of the series, they grew up with these games. Which doesn’t just mean they’re viewing the games through a nostalgic lens. These are also games they likely had to spend lots of time with. If as a kid or teen you played games, you likely only got so many a year. So you needed to squeeze games for as much time as you could get out of them. If you get something like Devil May Cry, then even if the game frustrates you the first time around, your only choice is to keep playing…and then play it again. And playing it again gives you more time to practice. You are required to put in the work, and so you get better, and then the frustration gives way to fun.
But when you have options? When you can afford to play the game once and then drop it? How well the game gets you to keep playing is going to become an extremely important question. Because if real fun relies on becoming an expert – if the game is intensely frustrating to start out – then it needs to help you reach that expertise. If the game isn’t training you directly or indirectly, then that frustration is what you’re going to be left with. And when the option comes up to keep playing? You’re going to shut it off and do something else.
And Devil May Cry is a series that has struggled to address this issue. So many of its core systems were products of its time, and just retained because that was “how it’s done.” And as the series improved bit-by-bit it got better and better at addressing the issue. But that process took nearly two decades. The genre of character action games has evolved so much over that time period. And it feels just a bit like the series that inspired so many of these later games has been left behind.
[1] I am leaving out here the fourth weapon – a katana that had originally belonged to Dante’s brother Vergil – because it is activated by way of the Combat Style system, and thus has its own issue with selection. Moreover, as part of a standard playthrough you only get a single battle to use this weapon in, and it has relatively little use, making it feel a bit useless. It likely is fun if you go back and play through the game more, but we are sticking to how the game feels to start, not how it feels when you’ve invested additional hours and learned about the systems.
Abstracting Games 