Capcom are fucking idiots sometimes. They make DmC: Devil May Cry (not saying I don't love that game) because they want to switch things up and not make the same game again. But then they come in with Devil May Cry 5, and it's perfect. It's not the same thing again—they're switching it up—but they're still keeping it Devil May Cry. It feels different, but not in a bad way. In a different way.

Look at my boy. Look how he's grown. I swear, people were so furious when Nero was the protagonist of DMC4, but if DMC6 was announced tomorrow and Nero wasn't in it, they'd be pissed as fuck.

Story wise—at least for the first half—it's basically on par with the first game (that's a downgrade). It never really feels like you have a purpose, much more than the obvious world threat. The third one had Vergil and then Lady's dad, and the fourth one had Kyrie and then Nero, but this one doesn't really have that—or doesn't reveal to have that—until later in the game, so it kind of just feels like you're playing through the stages, aimlessly, for no reason. But you barely even notice because you're playing Devil May Cry 5 and so many other aspects of the game are running on seemingly infinite fumes, pummeling you with grade-A shit. The only real reason they give is that Nero is pissed at Dante for calling him "dead weight," so he has to prove him wrong, which is genius.

The art direction is a bit more chaotic, however, and I feel like things are a bit harder to see. It's like they went more Resident Evil 2 than they should have. This game just feels less real. Mostly because the terrain just isn't very inviting. Not as much as the other games, at least. It's just not interesting to look at. Especially inside the tree; everything looks the same, and it's not a good same, it's a bad same. It's an okay same. It's fine. But it's like if half of Devil May Cry 3 took place inside Leviathan.

And I don't like how Ebony and Ivory feel in this game.

Also, I despise Trish's hair. And I just don't love her character model.

V is absolutely awesome, but it was a masterpiece decision to allow us to play as him for the absolute least amount of time. He's a fantastic breather from the Nero/Dante action, but playing him for too long would get a bit tedious.

To me, this has the same glaring problem as DMC4. When you switch to Dante for the first time, the game becomes instantly less fun. As opposed to 4, however, once you get a bit into Dante's missions—and especially after you get Cavaliere—it becomes a blast again. Nero is still better, though.

But if I don't compare this to the other DMC games, this is the most insane and insanely cool video game.

This game is like, you know when you're playing Devil May Cry 3 or 4 and Dante or Nero does something really cool in a cutscene, but you can't actually do that in the game because, what, are you crazy? Well, here, you can just do that in the game.

Slightly unpopular opinion, but I think this might be my personal favorite SMT game. The story is a bit whatever and unrealized which sucks, but it was able to at least keep me intrigued before disappointing me. However, the minimalist story makes it easy to ignore, as 90% of your playtime will be in the game itself, and oh boy, its fucking peak. The accumulation of small changes to press turn over time all culminate together in my personal favorite JRPG battle system of all time, coupled with difficulty that requires you to push it to its maximum potential. No other game will have me contemplating and googling fusions for hours just to create my perfect little demon squad to tear down everything in my way after a little planning and strategy, and I never got bored of it at all during my time. The only minor complaint I can give is regular enemy strength is a little too high imo which caused me to skip a lot of them. If you like turn based RPGs, this is a must play.

I wonder if they even know what they did. You know who. That anonymous lower-level business advisory manager who worked at EA between 2017 and 2018. Watched what happened with No Man's Sky and Battlefront 2. Crunched the numbers, surveyed the right people, did the appropriate market research, and found out that most disturbing of truths our artform will likely never fully recover from. They figured out it's financially optimal to release a game before completion. Sure, some equations needed to be done to figure out the appropriate balance between the release date and pre-orders and on release performance and how long the game has been in development and how much marketing expenditure has gone into the release cycle and the estimated time before it's in a state considered 'good' by the populous, but the conclusion is there, and will never go away. Cyberpunk proved it even further. You can have two different 'release' hype cycles around your game, and still leave people with a good taste in their mouths, excited for more, even if you rush it out the door. It's just good business. I wonder if this person knew the damage they'd be dealing. Did it trouble them at all? Did they toss and turn a little before deciding to tell their higher-ups? Or did they not even think twice? We'll never know.

This is far from an egregious example of such. Shoddy and inconsistent frame rates and pop-in are the norm for many of our lazier AAA games, it's telling the completely stock-standard 21st Century Capcom in-app purchases are getting more of the press. People are numb to it, I am usually! In the truest essence of the human experience, I'm only so upset this time because it happened to me. I genuinely really want to play this game, it looks excellent, a truly distinct and singularly innovative piece of art. One of those rare things that can be described as 'next-gen' in a complimentary sense. So what do I even do? Do I simply purchase an unfinished product and support the active malpractice occurring here? I can't do that. Do I fall for the obvious 'second release' model and buy it when they finish it? I feel like I'm supporting the continuation of this practice if I do. Do I never buy the game? This is ethically the right call, but am I supposed to forever deprive myself of engaging with the work of artists I love because the system they work within is so awful? I don't know. The only easy answer is piracy, which in 2024 is both actively illegal and the only moral way to engage with a large proportion of all video games ever released. It's so depressing to genuinely adore the whizbang technical exploration of mega-budget pop art when 90% of current examples of such are visually miserable superhero movies and legitimately unfinished open world junk. This should be neither of those things, yet the circumstances of its release make me feel just as deflated. It's a cruel world out there sometimes.

Almost 10 hours playing so far. Don't listen to the fools who are giving this game a bad rating! Here are the straight facts from someone who actually knows about computers and a long time gamer:

1. This game relies on CPU more than your usual game. That is why many PC players who have beefy GPUs still have bad performance. Bad performance is mainly in cities, which are CPU intensive.

2. I have both a near top of the line CPU and GPU and the game still has some performance issues but like I said it's mainly in large cities. Peformance fixes are definitely needed but overall the game is not as bad as people say!
I easily get 90-110 fps outside cities, all max settings and 4k resolution, on a 4080 and Ryzen 9 7900X.

3. Yes, there are microtransactions BUT they aren't pay2win. Half of them are cosmetic, the other are extra crystals to rent high level pawns. It's a single player game, who cares! If someone wants to waste money on getting Power Leveled by pawns, it doesn't matter on single player games!

4. 10 hours in and I've had ZERO crashes even with a few mods enabled. Reported crashes are a small vocal minority (happens with any game on release nowadays sadly) and not the norm for most DD2 players. Update your drivers and Windows!

The game is better than the first Dragon's Dogma, and the pawns are much better; less talking, more "real", more of a bro than a mindless parrot. This game is what Skyrim really should have been.

OpenCritic has this game at an 89/100 average. If the supposed issues were as bad as people say, it wouldn't be getting high praise!

Went into a cave that seemed to go on forever, in the pitch black feeling my way around. While trying not to aggro saurians I went in a room that opened up in a suspicious way, so I stuck to the edge wall to go around just in case. My pawn, however, didn't get the memo: at some point a saurian had caught sight of someone in my party so they were in full attack mode, running straight into the middle of the room. about 5 seconds later I see a huge blue light silhouetting a goats head and a massive health bar appears. I have never run out of a room so fast.

The most wanky, self-important and contrived shite I've ever played in my long career as a gamer.
I don't actively go out of my way to play bad games the same way I do with watching bad films or tv, mainly because acquiring games isn’t as easy as film or tv. Pirating games isn’t always the best.
Copped this in a PS sale for 9 quid and was tasked to play it, otherwise I couldn’t have an opinion on the game. Sure, I said. I’ve done worse for less, I said.
But when the dust clears and the experience is over, I gotta say, this ranks very high in the worst things I’ve done as favours for other people.
I didn’t expect it to be this terribly dull and painful to play through. It’s painful and miserable on purpose, but it's doubly moreso because the game is just crap to its very core.

Killing Joel off....you wanna do that? Sure, if you can validate it. Personally, I'd rather we just leave well enough alone with how the first game ends.
The execution of Joel's execution is contrived to all hell. That's what people are most mad about.
The game goes out of its way to villainize Joel for his actions at the end of the first, completely demolishing the ambiguity of it all. What Joel did at the hospital was neither entirely good nor wholly bad, and it leaves a lot for you to mull over.
Part II scraps the ambiguity and sticks Joel in the shit for saving Ellie, and writes him off as a jerk. Even if he killed all the fireflies in self-defence so Ellie could live a life and grow up.
And he gets ambushed like a chump by Abby and her friends, despite the first game emphasising the fact that Joel is not easily fooled or trusting of strangers.
In short, Joel is shafted and disrespected in favour of a story to be told where he gets offed for being a horrible person with no room for grey areas. Cheers Neil.

And of course there's Abby.
Sorry, but I will not feel bad for this cartoonish, obnoxious twunt who was just invented to fuck up a perfect ending. The lengths they go in the second half of the game to manipulate you into liking her and her miserable friends is insulting. Don't show me this after Joel is dead, it's cheap as fuck.
I don't like Abby. I don’t understand her. I don't buy the fact that she so easily defects from the WLFs to help the runaway SCAR kids when she seems wholly devoted to her own cause.
Also, leaving Tommy and Ellie alive was a stupid decision. You were basically asking for them to come and kick your shit in.
It's why Joel killed Marlene at the end of the first game.
Pity he didn’t get you because you weren’t invented when the first game came out.
I hated playing as her, but we’ll cover that later.

The game beats you over the head that revenge is bad, you shouldn't do revenge. But Ellie only realises that after we have:
Mercilessly killed scores of people, both WLFs and SCARs, all with families, friends, hopes and dreams (the amount of times I rolled my eyes everytime an NPC yelled the name of the enemy I just killed is innumerable)
Dozens of dogs.
And killed a pregnant woman. Even if we didn’t know she was until after the fact.
But Ellie has moments of doubt and conflict whenever she confronts and kills Abby's friends. What about the hundred other people you killed without even interacting with them beforehand?
The game keeps telling you you're a horrible person for killing everyone, but there's no other viable way to progress. Especially if you play on harder difficulties where killing is mandatory to acquire resources and stand a chance in the later areas of the game. You as a player don't have a choice in choosing not to kill anyone because you can't progress if you don't.
As such, you don't feel like there's much reward or incentive out of this experience because you're strictly being told what you're doing is morally wrong and pointless in the end.
Ellie's murder quest stops dead in its tracks when her father's killer (the instigator of this quest) is at her mercy and she decides not to end her right then and there. Even after all the ballache of killing her friends, numerous faceless chumps and losing our family, we don't do it, because Joel said to her shortly before he died that she should learn to forgive.
It’s the biggest load of bullshit ever.
Not even bringing attention to the fact that if Ellie kills Abby in this moment, she would be depriving a child of a parental figure, the same way Abby did to her.
But that’s not even touched on because basic logic is thrown aside for the THEMES.
If I were to fix this ending, I’d make it a two way decision for the player to decide. They choose themselves whether Ellie should kill Abby or not. Like in both Force Unleashed games where you can choose whether to kill Vader or not at the end and get a different outcome.
But the game doesn’t want you to have a choice in killing Abby or anyone else, you HAVE to do it to progress. And killing everyone is wrong and you’re a horrible person for doing so. Prepare to be lectured to about the consequences of your actions PLAYER.
….
Can you see why this game stirs such annoyance and bile in people?

It’s like an amateur schmuck screenwriter who wants to flex how smart his content is but can’t back it up with any credible plotting, characters or story.
Oh but Neil Druckmann is an artist. He’s revolutionising storytelling in gaming, he’s a white Hideo Kojima!
No. He isn’t. He’s just a wanker. Probably one of, if not the biggest in the gaming industry, if we’re not factoring in the corporate schlubs like Todd Howard.
It pretends to be high art and smart by having flashbacks, flashbacks within flashbacks, but the structure of the final piece is completely ass backwards. As mentioned before, don’t show Abby teeing off Joel’s head then afterwards show me her petting dogs and hanging with her friends or her father dying in the first game. This should’ve come earlier.
But I guess he wanted that shock value so early on, so cheaply and shittily. That is actual amateur shit. This is stuff I’ve come across from classmates in my script writing classes at Uni and seen being slandered by the teachers. This full grown man has the backing of 200 million doubloons and is the creative director of one of the biggest game studios right now, and he was allowed to just piss it all up the wall. Faaaaantastic.
I’m sick of talking about the story.

Gameplay is pretty much the same as the first, though it gets incredibly tedious this time around because you're less invested. And not to mention, the number of drawn-out cutscenes or walking sim sections where you do nothing but move the character forward are constantly breaking up the flow of gameplay. It’s lame. I haven't played the first game in years, but I do not remember the ratio of gameplay to cutscenes being so heavily one-sided to the latter. There's big long sections where my controller was just sitting on my desk because the cutscene just kept going on and on. For the most part, the game just wants to be a movie instead.
Which btw, I can completely understand why they did a TV show now, given where this game's priorities seemingly lie.

I want to highlight one specific part of the game to make my point clear.
When you first get to Seattle, you have the option to go into a music store and play a song to Dina. A sweet moment in concept, but you don't actually play the song. You just sit and watch Ellie play the song instead.
Now since we're making a game (in theory) a good developer would tune his storytelling to the correct format. In an ideal scenario, YOU the player would be able to play this song. Make it a li'l guitar hero minigame. YOU the player are an active participant in this moment, you are serenading Dina with A-ha's banging tunes and strengthening this relationship between the two women.
For something as important as these two’s relationship, you’d want the player to be heavily engrossed or make some impact on it to get invested, because as it stands, the relationship in the actual game is dull and half-baked. They’re already together at the start of the game, so we don’t see it grow or progress.
So yea, that’s lame, and there’s dozens of bits like this where player input would strengthen their connection with the events going on. But as said before, the game is mostly here to lecture, with no actual decisions or impact coming from the player besides being forced to kill everything and everyone they come into contact with.

And it's so fucking long too. The pacing is horrendous. First hour of the game is nothing but cutscenes and walking sims. Wonderful first impression. The plotting as stated earlier is piss, but when you play as Abby, it becomes even more unbearable because it keeps going and going, diving more and more into lunacy that amounts to nothing and you forget that you were playing as Ellie once.
Sidenote, they keep talking and bigging up this prophet character from the SCARs in the Abby sections, but you never actually get to confront them at all. TF was that all for?! That’s like if Bioshock bigged up Andrew Ryan by showcasing his impact on Rapture, but you never get to confront him and instead forgets about him to go straight into the Frank Fontaine stuff.

Oh and one last note: the notes. Around 12 hours in, I was fucking done with picking up these things. They’re all pretty much the exact same, they’re all miserable and there is barely anything interesting being said in them or cool li’l stories you can follow through each one. It’s just people being torn apart, or subtle points to the THEMES of the game. And there’s just too many of them. It becomes laughable at a point at the sheer amount of them and that some of them have been left in one spot for decades without any interference.

Anyway…
Quite possibly the worst game I’ve ever played in my life. I could probably cite others that are weaker in core gameplay, but based on both enjoyment and overall story quality, it’s the most pointless and needlessly gruelling 25 hours of gaming I’ve ever experienced. I beg to god that they heavily change things for the tv show, because if they follow the sequel beat for beat, the goodwill from the first season will dissipate just like it did for the first game when Part II released.
Can we send Neil Druckmann to the void that Squidward goes to so he can relax to the sound of his own thoughts and ideas? He needs to stay away from any future Naughty Dog releases and the industry in general.
Not playing this ever again. Not even for the platinum, despite getting over half of the trophies on one playthrough.
It’s just not worth the misery.

Really fascinating game, and a really high quality sendup of SNES Shin Megami Tensei with a Touhou flavour. I was absolutely enraptured with the first 3/4 of this game, because of how high quality and authentic the experience is to both franchises. However I do have some criticisms that compounded themselves especially in the last quarter of the game.

Principally I think the game goes on for way too long, clocking in at around 22 hours completing the base game, the whole last quarter felt like padding just because there was a desire to see every part of Touhou as a franchise represented in this game, but the connective tissue for the last few hours before the final climb up to the top of the last dungeon was tenuous at best, with no story in the actual dungeons themselves either. I understand that it would feel off if we didn't get cool locations from the deep corners of the lore represented, but given the encounter rate with no way to adjust it, and the fact that the story felt pretty much done before you're hit with this final roadblock I was growing pretty resentful, especially because of some more annoying mechanics in this last set of dungeons. I was also pretty disappointed with dungeons that used Etrian Odyssey like overworld encounters since the encounters themselves provided little reward for overcoming them, and the actual encounters were easy to overcome as well, making them kinda moot as a dungeon obstacle. I'm also not enamoured with giving rewards for completing maps when dungeons often employed one way tracks and teleport mazes, making map reward completion an absolute slog for like 2500 Yen often.

The combat is really good, being very similar to SNES SMT without Zio stun cheese, and the Sleepers manage to capture the wonderful feeling of finding new demons and progressing as you go along, although I do think that the options of being able to upgrade and level your old sleepers to bring them along for later content is a bit of a scam, the EXP curve required to bring them up to par with the tier of sleepers even 2 dungeons later is pretty steep and requires you to grind sacrifice fodder, which is a shame because I did bring a Marisa out of stubbornness to the endgame and she still felt like she was pulling far less weight than my two new frontliners I was just able to fuse.

While I don't think this game is as well put together as a Shin Megami Tensei game, it's still a fantastic game on it's own merits, let alone as a Megaten or a Touhou fangame and well worth playing for any enthusiast.