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Boss: "F**k you!"
Dante: "F**k you!"
Boss: "F**k you!" (Vomiting on Dante).
Ah, the eloquence of a well-written text. Such a massive display of talent is truly enviable.
I hope I can get some words across the way I want without triggering the profanity filter. The game deserves some assertive adjectives, I think.
Well, I remember well the irrelevant outrage within the community when the reboot was announced, and the new character designs were revealed. The game was then released, it was good, and then that was it.
The years have given the game a fair share of critical reviews, but it seems that the core experience remains satisfying enough, and the consensus suggests that most consider the game at least a solid production.
In a very strange way, the conditions that made this game possible also put it in a unique position within the franchise, being simultaneously familiar and different enough to justify itself as a standalone and still valid experience.
It's not because the others are better that this one deserves to be discarded. For better or worse, the DMC Devil May Cry experience can only truly be found in itself.
Anyway, let's move on.
DMC was an attempt to reboot the franchise, bringing it to the West with all the gratification of the most irritating and petty teenage "charm" one could ask for.
This "Westernization," in essence, was responsible for the most degrading and superficial aspects of the experience and basically obliterated the iconic aesthetics of the originals (which ended up being, simultaneously, both the harshest blow and the most original aspect of the game).
Dante, primarily mirroring the character's version in DMC 3, went from a cocky and energetic young man, overflowing with charisma, a sense of humor, and positive confidence, to a generic punk bad boy f**kboy who seems to inhabit the darkest corners of an introverted and edgy teenager's mind who thinks he's too good for the world, without realizing he's just a idiot.
He was a true terror for his enemies. He wouldn't just beat you up; he'd mock you the entire time. It was a vibrant and competitive teenage power fantasy, like a classic good anime character.
Now, the guy can barely deliver a memorable one-liner. Instead, he prefers to make double entendres and replicate a shallow personality, a centimeter away from the unbearable sarcasm that you find in Twitter comments.
Our hero, this time, has as much presence as a stale piece of bread. But deep down, he's a good guy and has a soft spot for cute gothic girls with an even more null vibe. How lovely.
The female characters, who were as charismatic and kicked as much ass as the guys, were also reduced to lifeless and humorless characters, one being the cute goth girl and the other, an overused blow-up doll, and a grotesque abomination serving as a boss (And I'm totally stretching the definition of "female" here).
The villains aren't the best either, having no significant presence in the narrative or being mechanically interesting to fight. They have disturbingly suggestive designs and/or disgusting reproductions of what I assume is a failed attempt to execute body horror, something the Japanese have always excelled at.
Mundus, the big bad demon of the moment, went from a monolithic presence to a raspy-voiced ultra-capitalist who, despite appearing a lot and having an inevitable conflict cultivated throughout the game (albeit not very effectively), is also surprisingly weak and ridiculous in his final fight, almost as if they ran out of money and had to throw something together, robbing the game of a very satisfying conclusion.
And Vergil? Oh, poor Vergil. They massacred him.
The coolest character in video games, the best antagonist and rival you could ask for in an indulgent spectacle like this, was reduced to a boring and almost useless clean-shaven model who looks like a non-drinking version of Dante.
All these characters participate in what seems to be a relatively more coherent version of a story that retells and develops the original franchise's mythology through the lens of the new aesthetics. Mundus wants to dominate the world using his demon-juice-based energy drink, which turns people into gullible and consumerist idiots, indebted to his diabolical bank and swallowing all the sensationalist trash propagated by his dark media empire.
He is the hidden evil force controlling everyone's lives. And Vergil basically wants to overthrow him, liberating the world in a kind of anarchist revolution, and then take everything for himself.
Everything is executed with the subtlety and credibility of a barely creative teenager's brain. Devil May Cry was never smart or deep, quite the opposite, but this is on another level. The narrative and direction work horrors to deliver something intelligible and well-structured, but it's supplemented by dreadful dialogue and shallow concepts breaded in the crumbs of generic and unfocused political comments, doing EVERYTHING to say nothing concrete, effectively making this story, technically better told, with more complete motivations and explanations, sound even more childish and stupid than the previous ones.
And the worst. Of all, the greatest crime: The game takes itself too seriously.
But not everything is bad, of course. The new presentation, swapping the gothic landscapes for its super-saturated colors (surprisingly not tiresome to look at) and psychedelic surrealism, with the physicality of the scenarios distorting, breaking, and rearranging, combined with the intense and crunchy beats of a genre I discovered is called Aggrotech, gave the game a personality and very original level concepts for the franchise.
The very minimal level design of the old scenarios was replaced by almost continuous corridors, focusing the experience on light traversal challenges and combat intervals, but with well-paced progression and set-pieces and enough visual flare to not kill the game's sense of variety and spectacle.
Mechanically speaking and in terms of presentation, the combat has all the ingredients to be spectacular. Excellent animations, immensely satisfying; perfectly responsive and intuitive controls; a good amount of weapons; a good scoring system; a good variety of enemies, with well-telegraphed attacks, and relatively competent bosses.
I'm not a big fan of the enemies' visual designs, and I could live without the color mechanics that funnel your combo options, but the combat perfectly captures the intrinsic and intoxicating satisfaction of mastering a combat system that works exactly as it should.
When you finish the game, you unlock the best part of the experience: replaying it again and again, being faster, more intense, and relentless, to keep up with the increasingly demanding and tasty challenge curve.
It's not the best for that, but it's good enough.
Anyway, DMC has its merits, and I can't fault Ninja Theory for at least trying to do something different. And the story, despite what I said, is not offensively bad and can be skipped, as usual. The game is still great and polished.
It's recommended.