Part of what makes RE4 a great Shooter is that its simultaneously a great Brawler. Sure, you can just go through the game just shooting almost everything as the game gives you ample ammo, but if you want to save up plenty to blow your load at a later, more difficult section, then you're welcome to try implementing your knife into your toolkit beyond Okizeme, and you will soon realize just how well crafted the melee combat in this game is:

RE4 places major emphasis on spacing, not just in having to pay attention to your surroundings to avoid nasty backshots or accidentally cornering yourself, but in maneuvering through enemy attacks. Most enemy attacks can be shut down by just walking backwards, leaving you an opening to take the offensive. If you decide to use the knife, you have a solid chance of staggering your enemy, but there's also a chance that they'll armor right through your swings. This ends up creating a fun risk-reward playstyle with the knife depending on your preference. Keep swinging to get the stagger, and you may get hurt in the process, or back away and play it slowly and safely, giving the rest of the horde more time to gang up on you. What incentivizes you to go in more than anything, however, is your ridiculously massive and invincible roundhouse kick. Pulling this off is your entire win condition. You are inherently making yourself safe using this move, and you get rewarded with getting every enemy knocked down, allowing you to clap all of their asses at once. And when that's all done, you're probably thrown directly onto the danger zone again as more zombies approached you while your dumbass was indulging in that short term victory.

What makes Resident Evil 4 refreshing to play is that its a game where being risky isn't defined as just being up in your enemy's face. Any action you take, whether it be pulling out your knife, firing a gun, or reloading, can carry an inherent risk, both for your livelihood and your resources. Its a game that will bleed you dry into desperation and also make you feel like an absolute god, all in the same encounter. Its only a matter of time before I turn to the church of God Hand thanks to this game.

Its common that whenever a long lasting game series changes its direction drastically for a new title, you are bound to hear "Its a good game, but its a bad [insert franchise] game". You know the drill: games like Breath of The Wild, Resident Evil 4, Final Fantasy 16, you name it. You'd think that the Devil May Cry equivalent of this would be the reboot, and while there is a degree of truth to that, I'd say you could ironically say this about the game that started it all in the first place. If you expect Devil May Cry 1 to play like 3, 4, and 5 (the most popular ones and what people think of when Devil May Cry comes up), you will be severely underwhelmed. Not only is the camera here notably worse than future titles with how it doesn't even allow you to manipulate it to your advantage, not only is Dante and the rest of the story much less interesting or wacky here, but even the series' trademark Stylish Combat™ is barely present here, with a style gauge that doesn't seem to mind you spamming enemies with the same moves, and yet is oddly very strict about how long you can go without attacking.

But the magic in Devil May Cry to me lies in its classic and brutal videogame-y feel. Its unapologetically dumb and cheesy in its cutscenes yet simultaneously is twisted in its visual design, like its origins as a Resident Evil game naturally molded it into. The environments here are so memorable compared to the later entries, which can look pretty at times, but overall just blend into a grey mush. Its background music in particular it what sells the setting to me, making you feel as if you're descending into insanity the closer you get to hell, only to be contrasted by a mix of techno and metal once battle begins. Its a game that I see as extremely artistic: not due to some bullshit about the game being "prestigious" or that it should be in a museum because of how beautiful it is; it rather comes from how experimental and unique it is. Even as someone who grew up way past the PS2 or Devil May Cry, there is a weird nostalgic feeling in its presentation that I can't explain.

In classic arcade fashion, the game also manages to still push you despite how seemingly simple the game is. Enemies demand your respect, as one mistake can lead to a big chunk of your health bar being gone. You are not only expected to actually study enemies rather than to just wait for a signal telling you to roll or parry to appear, but more than ever, it is crucial for you to lock in and make sure you get hit as little as possible. I love that Devil May Cry has probably the most well balanced guns in the series to complement this. I get why they were nerfed after the direct-to-video Disney sequel to this game, but guns later on just become a combo tool and aren't really that viable for actual combat encounters. Here, they are a cool alternative if you want to play safe that work perfectly fine. You aren't getting insane damage and you might sacrifice some red orbs, but the game is also heavily based around a meta of building DT. The slow methodical playstyle that this game allows is surprisingly fun and intense.

I think where the game really shines is in its DMD difficulty. Here the game asks you to sit the hell down and actually learn what the hell you're even looking at. Once you get past Normal and Hard mode, you have a solid understanding of how enemies work to the point where its relatively easy, by the time you reach hard, but here? Get used to hearing sirens when you enter a room as shadows will frequently show up to test your patience, and its also time to put away that air raid spam, because the bosses do not fuck around. A single tiny fart will wipe a third of your health bar. You have to discover a way to efficiently damage them and to counter their nifty tricks. I'll admit that I'm a hack, and a lot of the tactics I used on normal enemies came from watching speedruns or Matthewmatosis' commentary. But against bosses, I didn't have that much of a grasp on what to do. It came from discovering certain gimmicks on my own, like shooting Nelo Angelo out of the air with meteor to stop the blades, or jumping with Ifrit to easily parry Nightmare's stabs. Bosses that I didn't enjoy at first, like Nightmare or that fucking bird that I hate, ended up being pretty fun outside of the occasionally shitty camera. The peak of this was with Nelo Angelo 3, where I died over 50 times to this fucker. He was one of THOSE bosses, the one where you die so much that you virtually stop verbally whining like a little bitch. Its only a shame that the same can not be said about the game's final boss. If a poorly implemented Space Harrier homage wasn't crappy enough, then be prepared for an awful 2nd phase, where you're at the mercy of RNG to get good patterns and also auto lock to shoot the tiny orbs you actually want to shoot. Fuck Mundus.

While Devil May Cry has plenty of aspects you can criticize about it, I think that the game deserves more credit than to be thought of as the equivalent of Street Fighter 1. It still dogs on most attempts to make a "cool" action game nowadays, expecting the player to be able to overcome challenged, to experiment and learn with their own resources rather than to feed them answers and victories. This all just sounds standard nowadays, and its undeniable that we're far past from this PS2 classic being the absolute peak of depth or adrenaline in combat. But tell me, how common is an entire foundation done in so much style and grace?

EDIT: Right after writing this, I went and beat Mundus. I used literally every item I had, but I'll gladly take the D and move on from him