In one sentence: The Big Bang as recounted by a 14-year-old whose most anticipated movie is The Matrix Reloaded, and whose primary relationship with underwear is being forced to wear it like a monastic robe.
[Hey there. Despite being an action game fan, DMC as a franchise has been a massive blind spot in my backlog. I’m fixing that now, and I figured the insight of fresh(ish) eyes into a storied set of games like this would be interesting to work out with longer reviews. The reviews will be divided into multiple sections, each notated by difficulty and completionist goals set by myself for each playthrough. It’s long, so big thanks for reading!]
I. (Playthrough 1, Normal mode, Any%)
While Character Action (or Stylish Action, or Hack-and-Slash, or what the fuck ever) has the privilege of being a fusion of two genres that saw contemporary success and innovation in their primes, it would be underselling Team Little Devils to imply that anything in Devil May Cry would’ve been possible to achieve through mimicry. After all, the entire conceit of the genre was to, in this stage at least, shift the beat-em-up arcade design into a 3D space, using the only camera technique that unabashedly worked pre-millennium. Similar goals were set for games before this, but all of them that I’ve seen are... shackled, let’s say. While I would argue that a few games, Soul Reaver and Fighting Force as examples, are worthy of a seat at the table(a booster seat, maybe), to my knowledge, DMC is a first in that its action is coherent and stable enough to be the foundation with which the rest of the game rises up in expectation. The limitations set in by its history as a rogue Resident Evil sequel surely had a hand in this, but we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.
There’s no denying that a game released in 2001 looks, talks, and behaves as expected, but the idea of a genre progenitor keeping some kind of pace with the contemporary is so outlandish in the medium of games that rewarding it on this basis alone is understandable. For reference, Yie Ar Kung-Fu had its 20th birthday the same year Tekken 5 released, and Battlezone shares its 20th with a Quake III expansion. With all this said, I’d like to keep the legacy talk at a minimum, as DMC is worth discussing on its own merits.
There’s an almost-cheap totality that this era of Capcom was capable of displaying in their pastiche-y level architecture. The castle is immediately established as an entity in and of itself, groaning out haunted songs and surrounding Dante with unreliable machinations before you even fight an enemy. It would all be exposed as arbitrary level design if it weren’t for 1. the aforementioned wholeness of it all, but much, much more importantly, 2. the pacing this game works in, which is close to perfection?
Granted, the beginning is helped by a string of cheekily short levels with quick capsules of “good job, bud” feedback, but the grip with which you are seeing new things and being given room to stretch your legs is shocking given the lack of trodden genre ground (though paradoxically familiar given the ResiEvil legacy). Not only does this game have good backtracking, it is a thesis on how to imbue familiar spaces with life to match, if not exceed The New (again, RE all day). That said, the last third of the game is lined with some fatiguing content, the height being a stack of sequential boss fights outlined by the one fool that overstays its welcome, Nightmare, totaling to a lot of repeated exposure that could’ve been truncated. Given how some of the early boss fights have outright skips and cheese strategies, it doesn’t seem absurd to imagine a world where Nightmare 1 or 2 is as skippable as Phantom 2 or Griffon 1. This could just be the me that has played this game four fuckin’ times in a month talking, by the way, so take it with a grain of salt.
Fluidity is the name of the game in both pacing and combat itself, as Team Little Devils astutely recognized that giving a massive increase to space also meant an increase to potential aimlessness. The stylish rankings are an obvious solution to this, though I’d also include the soft lock-on (as obnoxious as it can be) and barrier-based level design as helping out too. The stylish ranking is really tight in this game - even my little knowledge of future entries knows that the one-and-a-half second window is minuscule by comparison. I thought this was limiting at first, thinking there was some absurdity in knowing that a near-perfect High Time was worthy of punishment despite it still working in the machinations of the game as effectively as one that did fit. And while this is still true, there’s a risk it runs in being too loose that future systems don’t (the game simply lacks the breadth to uphold the stylish combos we eventually see in DMC3 on); besides, with enough time and experience in the game, the system ends up serving its role as an incentive to forego safe spacing and work through mobs of enemies with a purpose, especially as devil trigger becomes a core part of your moveset. Maintaining Absolute! or Stylish! through a crowd is incredibly rewarding given the circumstances, so I’d say it equals out to “worth it” even if you do occasionally reset anticlimactically.
While on the topic, if there’s anything that a passer-by will inevitably call into question, it’s the pool of moves. While it is lighter than future titles in the genre, there’s an assumption that it’s lacking which I think is simply untrue. I mean, think about it: when embarking on a new frontier of design, the main mission is always one of self-contained purpose - you have to answer the questions yourself.
So, if the question is, “why is Dante’s moveset this way?”, the answer lies in the enemy design. As much as I imagine Team Little Devils mourns the lack of intermixed encounters due to technical limitations, they do about as well with single enemies as one could ask for. Each brand has strengths and weaknesses, especially with late-game mobs asking for their share of respect. Luckily, it is rarely a binary system, but instead a gradient of encouragement that, upon discovering either through experimentation or reading lines of enemy dossiers, becomes a reward in and of itself. You coooould fight a frost with Alastor, but busting out Ifrit to lay heavy, rubatoesque chains into an enemy designed around mobility and space control makes for arguably the best feeling moments of the entire game. There’s a call-and-response of sorts with correcting your playstyle for a given encounter that would be much tougher to juggle with a larger pool, so by the end of the game, you do end up using just about everything, minus one or two purchased techniques which feel stubborn in their applications; but hell, even then you could still justify their inclusion with that nebulous “style” you’re after. All this is, besides the pacing, the crowning achievement of the game, so I’m really curious to see if/how future entries continue this alongside the added weapon / character variety and mechanical ornamentation.
II. (Playthrough 2, Normal Mode, S-rank Only, All Blue Orbs & All Secret Missions (I missed one...))
Lofty ambitions for a second playthrough, I know, but I’m no novice to the genre and I wasn’t shying away from external help at this point. Ultimately, the goal was to have a save file up to snuff for DMD Mode, which would be only a short Hard Mode playthrough away considering how the game unlocks difficulties. I had already been exposed to the bullshit-linchpins that are Grenade Rolling and Shotgun Hiking, so hitting par felt like it was more a matter of personal restraint to not hand the game its own ass. However, I immediately hit a blockade at Mission 2, getting A’s and B’s several times in a row despite clearing the requirements that the internet had told me. I did some further research, and discovered the true nature of this game’s ranking system, an act that felt like opening up the ark of the covenant.
I’ll try to keep the explanation simple: besides the obvious requirements of red orbs and time, there are several invisible markers which tally up to a final, also invisible score. Some of these extra conditions make sense even without them being explicitly referred to (damage taken), while others are less immediate in their clarity (entering rooms multiple times). Over the years, I’ve settled one definition of games as a space to take rules, things people usually dislike, and uphold them for their artistic sake. Well, here you go - here are those rules you ordered.
I mostly mean it as a joke, but ranking systems in games like this do hold the risk of backfiring, or at least becoming numbing attributes. Seasoned Character Action-ers already know that *A* playthrough is rarely enough, as the game’s early judgments are bound to be the equivalent of a teacher scolding you before you hand your homework in. And while DMC’s is far from bad, my read on it is one of a hungover teacher. I would get strange rankings both positive and negative, and even with an internalized knowledge of how it works, I’d still have to occasionally assume one to two things in order to justify the letter on the screen. If these Character Action grading systems are performance tests, then my performance had, at the final step, been rendered inert. While I have since gotten over these requirements, accepting their nature and even enjoying the trek to all S-ranks, I can’t help but think of the legacy of this game’s ranking system as being ineffably lenient, a sentiment that is briefly untrue until, well, it ends up being true again.
As for the rest of the conditions I set for myself, the secret missions vary in quality, though I did find some of them to be absurdly funny for a man like Dante to waste time doing (the sargasso staircase is an interesting way to teach enemy stepping, but also the image of 20+ skulls chattering their teeth at you when you fail is perfect video gaming). I always find some respect for something that’s earned the “Secret” title in a game, so needless to say these missions get some incredulous stares followed by a salute for the brave soldiers that rubbed up against everything Doomguy-style to find them. Lord knows I’m not in those ranks - I just read their memoirs.
III. (Playthroughs 3-4, Hard & Dante Must Die Mode, Any%)
After two playthroughs, one an attempt at genuine perfectionism, I had grown pretty resilient to the game’s standard set of challenges. Hard ended up feeling a little passé, in all honesty - once you learn the optimal strategy for every enemy type, they’ll very rarely cause problems. Another unfortunate side effect of the game’s single-enemy encounters is that the same schtick works regardless of the external pressures. Of course, not all was lost - this playthrough probably ended up being the most fun purely due to the range of options I had unlocked finally narrowing down into usable tools. It was here that the game became about mastery, and I like to think I- Oh fuck.
Hard is the setup, Dante Must Die is the punchline. Emphasis on “punch.”
Though the structure of DMD resembles Hard Mode, no-one can properly anticipate how the little changes end up feeling until the moment arrives and a single marionette becomes threatening. The DT timer is a genuine stroke of genius, as the tension missing from Hard for me had skidded into the driveway at the thought of a Blade becoming a mini-boss in its own right, super-armoring its way through every move as I struggle to conjure 3 blue runes into existence to stand a single chance. However, this was exciting, and in a strange way, felt like the final missing link between this game and the Survival Horror roots it was indebted to.
Of course, anyone familiar likely knows that the DT timer is a red herring. The true namesake of this difficulty lies in the newly bolstered boss fights, each of which is simply embarrassed with health. Nearly every fight, with the exception of Phantom 2, has transmogrified into an endurance run now, pinning the meter completely into defense. You simply cannot sustain offense perfect enough to deal any appreciable damage to them, so you’re left to resort to turtling. Give me the best pattern, as often as you can, while I thunk grenades for 3 and a half minutes. Please, God, do not do that move. I want to go to bed happy.
I’m on the other side of it now, so I can say with full-throated confidence that playing Devil May Cry 1 on DMD Mode this early on in my experience with the game was a flat-out terrible idea. It is clearly asking for absolute mastery of every move, pattern recognition that could only be gained through legitimate study, and, worst of all for me, a level of zen that rivals that of a monk. Nightmare 2, Nightmare 3, and Mundus are collectively some of the most excruciating experiences I’ve had in games, and barring the occasional bullshit pattern, it was self-inflicted. Kamiya played me, fair and square. Excuse me while I block myself.
[Hey there. Despite being an action game fan, DMC as a franchise has been a massive blind spot in my backlog. I’m fixing that now, and I figured the insight of fresh(ish) eyes into a storied set of games like this would be interesting to work out with longer reviews. The reviews will be divided into multiple sections, each notated by difficulty and completionist goals set by myself for each playthrough. It’s long, so big thanks for reading!]
I. (Playthrough 1, Normal mode, Any%)
While Character Action (or Stylish Action, or Hack-and-Slash, or what the fuck ever) has the privilege of being a fusion of two genres that saw contemporary success and innovation in their primes, it would be underselling Team Little Devils to imply that anything in Devil May Cry would’ve been possible to achieve through mimicry. After all, the entire conceit of the genre was to, in this stage at least, shift the beat-em-up arcade design into a 3D space, using the only camera technique that unabashedly worked pre-millennium. Similar goals were set for games before this, but all of them that I’ve seen are... shackled, let’s say. While I would argue that a few games, Soul Reaver and Fighting Force as examples, are worthy of a seat at the table
There’s no denying that a game released in 2001 looks, talks, and behaves as expected, but the idea of a genre progenitor keeping some kind of pace with the contemporary is so outlandish in the medium of games that rewarding it on this basis alone is understandable. For reference, Yie Ar Kung-Fu had its 20th birthday the same year Tekken 5 released, and Battlezone shares its 20th with a Quake III expansion. With all this said, I’d like to keep the legacy talk at a minimum, as DMC is worth discussing on its own merits.
There’s an almost-cheap totality that this era of Capcom was capable of displaying in their pastiche-y level architecture. The castle is immediately established as an entity in and of itself, groaning out haunted songs and surrounding Dante with unreliable machinations before you even fight an enemy. It would all be exposed as arbitrary level design if it weren’t for 1. the aforementioned wholeness of it all, but much, much more importantly, 2. the pacing this game works in, which is close to perfection?
Granted, the beginning is helped by a string of cheekily short levels with quick capsules of “good job, bud” feedback, but the grip with which you are seeing new things and being given room to stretch your legs is shocking given the lack of trodden genre ground (though paradoxically familiar given the ResiEvil legacy). Not only does this game have good backtracking, it is a thesis on how to imbue familiar spaces with life to match, if not exceed The New (again, RE all day). That said, the last third of the game is lined with some fatiguing content, the height being a stack of sequential boss fights outlined by the one fool that overstays its welcome, Nightmare, totaling to a lot of repeated exposure that could’ve been truncated. Given how some of the early boss fights have outright skips and cheese strategies, it doesn’t seem absurd to imagine a world where Nightmare 1 or 2 is as skippable as Phantom 2 or Griffon 1. This could just be the me that has played this game four fuckin’ times in a month talking, by the way, so take it with a grain of salt.
Fluidity is the name of the game in both pacing and combat itself, as Team Little Devils astutely recognized that giving a massive increase to space also meant an increase to potential aimlessness. The stylish rankings are an obvious solution to this, though I’d also include the soft lock-on (as obnoxious as it can be) and barrier-based level design as helping out too. The stylish ranking is really tight in this game - even my little knowledge of future entries knows that the one-and-a-half second window is minuscule by comparison. I thought this was limiting at first, thinking there was some absurdity in knowing that a near-perfect High Time was worthy of punishment despite it still working in the machinations of the game as effectively as one that did fit. And while this is still true, there’s a risk it runs in being too loose that future systems don’t (the game simply lacks the breadth to uphold the stylish combos we eventually see in DMC3 on); besides, with enough time and experience in the game, the system ends up serving its role as an incentive to forego safe spacing and work through mobs of enemies with a purpose, especially as devil trigger becomes a core part of your moveset. Maintaining Absolute! or Stylish! through a crowd is incredibly rewarding given the circumstances, so I’d say it equals out to “worth it” even if you do occasionally reset anticlimactically.
While on the topic, if there’s anything that a passer-by will inevitably call into question, it’s the pool of moves. While it is lighter than future titles in the genre, there’s an assumption that it’s lacking which I think is simply untrue. I mean, think about it: when embarking on a new frontier of design, the main mission is always one of self-contained purpose - you have to answer the questions yourself.
So, if the question is, “why is Dante’s moveset this way?”, the answer lies in the enemy design. As much as I imagine Team Little Devils mourns the lack of intermixed encounters due to technical limitations, they do about as well with single enemies as one could ask for. Each brand has strengths and weaknesses, especially with late-game mobs asking for their share of respect. Luckily, it is rarely a binary system, but instead a gradient of encouragement that, upon discovering either through experimentation or reading lines of enemy dossiers, becomes a reward in and of itself. You coooould fight a frost with Alastor, but busting out Ifrit to lay heavy, rubatoesque chains into an enemy designed around mobility and space control makes for arguably the best feeling moments of the entire game. There’s a call-and-response of sorts with correcting your playstyle for a given encounter that would be much tougher to juggle with a larger pool, so by the end of the game, you do end up using just about everything, minus one or two purchased techniques which feel stubborn in their applications; but hell, even then you could still justify their inclusion with that nebulous “style” you’re after. All this is, besides the pacing, the crowning achievement of the game, so I’m really curious to see if/how future entries continue this alongside the added weapon / character variety and mechanical ornamentation.
II. (Playthrough 2, Normal Mode, S-rank Only, All Blue Orbs & All Secret Missions (I missed one...))
Lofty ambitions for a second playthrough, I know, but I’m no novice to the genre and I wasn’t shying away from external help at this point. Ultimately, the goal was to have a save file up to snuff for DMD Mode, which would be only a short Hard Mode playthrough away considering how the game unlocks difficulties. I had already been exposed to the bullshit-linchpins that are Grenade Rolling and Shotgun Hiking, so hitting par felt like it was more a matter of personal restraint to not hand the game its own ass. However, I immediately hit a blockade at Mission 2, getting A’s and B’s several times in a row despite clearing the requirements that the internet had told me. I did some further research, and discovered the true nature of this game’s ranking system, an act that felt like opening up the ark of the covenant.
I’ll try to keep the explanation simple: besides the obvious requirements of red orbs and time, there are several invisible markers which tally up to a final, also invisible score. Some of these extra conditions make sense even without them being explicitly referred to (damage taken), while others are less immediate in their clarity (entering rooms multiple times). Over the years, I’ve settled one definition of games as a space to take rules, things people usually dislike, and uphold them for their artistic sake. Well, here you go - here are those rules you ordered.
I mostly mean it as a joke, but ranking systems in games like this do hold the risk of backfiring, or at least becoming numbing attributes. Seasoned Character Action-ers already know that *A* playthrough is rarely enough, as the game’s early judgments are bound to be the equivalent of a teacher scolding you before you hand your homework in. And while DMC’s is far from bad, my read on it is one of a hungover teacher. I would get strange rankings both positive and negative, and even with an internalized knowledge of how it works, I’d still have to occasionally assume one to two things in order to justify the letter on the screen. If these Character Action grading systems are performance tests, then my performance had, at the final step, been rendered inert. While I have since gotten over these requirements, accepting their nature and even enjoying the trek to all S-ranks, I can’t help but think of the legacy of this game’s ranking system as being ineffably lenient, a sentiment that is briefly untrue until, well, it ends up being true again.
As for the rest of the conditions I set for myself, the secret missions vary in quality, though I did find some of them to be absurdly funny for a man like Dante to waste time doing (the sargasso staircase is an interesting way to teach enemy stepping, but also the image of 20+ skulls chattering their teeth at you when you fail is perfect video gaming). I always find some respect for something that’s earned the “Secret” title in a game, so needless to say these missions get some incredulous stares followed by a salute for the brave soldiers that rubbed up against everything Doomguy-style to find them. Lord knows I’m not in those ranks - I just read their memoirs.
III. (Playthroughs 3-4, Hard & Dante Must Die Mode, Any%)
After two playthroughs, one an attempt at genuine perfectionism, I had grown pretty resilient to the game’s standard set of challenges. Hard ended up feeling a little passé, in all honesty - once you learn the optimal strategy for every enemy type, they’ll very rarely cause problems. Another unfortunate side effect of the game’s single-enemy encounters is that the same schtick works regardless of the external pressures. Of course, not all was lost - this playthrough probably ended up being the most fun purely due to the range of options I had unlocked finally narrowing down into usable tools. It was here that the game became about mastery, and I like to think I- Oh fuck.
Hard is the setup, Dante Must Die is the punchline. Emphasis on “punch.”
Though the structure of DMD resembles Hard Mode, no-one can properly anticipate how the little changes end up feeling until the moment arrives and a single marionette becomes threatening. The DT timer is a genuine stroke of genius, as the tension missing from Hard for me had skidded into the driveway at the thought of a Blade becoming a mini-boss in its own right, super-armoring its way through every move as I struggle to conjure 3 blue runes into existence to stand a single chance. However, this was exciting, and in a strange way, felt like the final missing link between this game and the Survival Horror roots it was indebted to.
Of course, anyone familiar likely knows that the DT timer is a red herring. The true namesake of this difficulty lies in the newly bolstered boss fights, each of which is simply embarrassed with health. Nearly every fight, with the exception of Phantom 2, has transmogrified into an endurance run now, pinning the meter completely into defense. You simply cannot sustain offense perfect enough to deal any appreciable damage to them, so you’re left to resort to turtling. Give me the best pattern, as often as you can, while I thunk grenades for 3 and a half minutes. Please, God, do not do that move. I want to go to bed happy.
I’m on the other side of it now, so I can say with full-throated confidence that playing Devil May Cry 1 on DMD Mode this early on in my experience with the game was a flat-out terrible idea. It is clearly asking for absolute mastery of every move, pattern recognition that could only be gained through legitimate study, and, worst of all for me, a level of zen that rivals that of a monk. Nightmare 2, Nightmare 3, and Mundus are collectively some of the most excruciating experiences I’ve had in games, and barring the occasional bullshit pattern, it was self-inflicted. Kamiya played me, fair and square. Excuse me while I block myself.
3 Comments
Ey, thanks! It was a big project but I feel good about it.
Fantastic review of an underappreciated masterpiece. I remember Nero Angelo 3 and Mudis phase 2 absolutely demolishing me on my DMD playthrough but it felt SO good to win. Kamiya the GOAT!
Ardwyw_mp3
2 years ago