Information on Devil May Cry 2’s development is suspiciously limited. What we do know is that it was moved into production without the knowledge of the original team, and given to an unnamed director. With roughly four months until release, Capcom took this secret director off the project and replaced them with Hideaki Itsuno, the guy who would go on to make Devil May Cry 3 and save the franchise. Having four months to fix the issues with this game would be like having five minutes to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic, but he’s still the only name credited as director. His exact changes are unknown, and the only hints we have from interviews at what was originally intended is that it was supposed to be bigger than the original, have fewer puzzles, and use a better camera. So what was this game even supposed to be? What lessons can we pull from this legendary disappointment?

The best method to understand what happened here is probably to lay out all the changes from the first game and draw a line of best fit. So firstly, we have the aforementioned bigger worlds, fewer puzzles, and improved camera. Then, there’s the nearly silent Dante, who speaks fewer words in the first six hours of play than he does in the first game’s intro cutscene, and he only has access to a single melee moveset this time around. Instead, you have a second protagonist, who has an entirely different playstyle than Dante. The difficulty has been significantly lowered, and your orbs will be spent mostly on direct power-ups instead of new moves. The combat focuses more on guns, and even melee attacks now lock onto the nearest enemy automatically. The atmosphere and general tone are a lot darker, taking place in a realistic city and having none of the previous game’s cheesiness.

So, with all those points on the chart, what can we assume happened? To me, it looks like they wanted to accomplish two things: adjust the game to fit recent trends, and remove all the things people complained about in the first game. Devil May Cry 2 was being developed in a post-GTA3 world, so a bigger, more serious setting might have been considered more marketable. Having more guns and fighting modern enemies like helicopters and tanks is a natural development with this perspective in mind, especially after so many people laughed at how Dante’s guns in the original did almost no damage. Some people also didn’t like Dante being so cocky, so that was taken out. The difficulty was a turn off for a lot of people, so it was toned down and simplified. If all this conjecture about the mystery director’s motivation is correct, then I think we can fairly confidently state what went wrong with this game. The fundamental question they were asking was “how can we get more people to buy Devil May Cry”, and not “how can we make a better Devil May Cry”. None of the mechanics from the first game were enhanced and all the personality was sandblasted off, it broke its back trying to change instead of trying to move forward. What’s surprising isn’t that this happened, it’s that it doesn’t happen more often. Trying to improve something by changing its controversial elements instead of enhancing its strengths is a trap anyone could fall into. Listening to critics who might not know what they’re talking about ∗cough∗ isn’t a shortcut to getting things right, you have to recognize that nothing in art will appeal to everyone, and to respect the uniqueness of your creation by forging ahead.

Devil May Cry at its worst is still better than most of the shit I played for fun as a kid.

Real videogamers don’t skip Devil May Cry 2, I’ve heard, so I figured it was high time I actually took a look at it for myself. I’d heard for years — decades! — that this was one of the most historically impressive pieces of shit ever put to market, and so I avoided it like it was a nuclear waste disposal site. This was not a place of honor, the signs warned me, and I wasn’t about to go digging for treasure against their advice. But now, with all of the pretentious gamethinker wind at my back, I wanted to see for myself how it really was. I actually started thinking that it would be immensely funny if it turned out to be the greatest game I’d ever played, so I could come on here and parade the fact that I liked it in front of all of you stuffy sheeple, all of you blindly following the opinions of whoever told you it was bad.

That was wrong of me, and I’d like to apologize. Devil May Cry 2 is bad.

But it’s not that bad, and that’s kind of where the problem is. You compare this to Devil May Cry, and it’s really bad. You compare it to Devil May Cry 3, and it’s unforgivable. But we live in a world where, somehow, this didn’t completely kill Devil May Cry as a series. I legitimately have no idea how it survived. Better games have killed better franchises for less. Even so, when something this bad exists but it doesn’t murder the series, it becomes kind of hard to really hate it. Capcom released three more mainline Devil May Cry games after this one, and they’re all ridiculously good (Devil May Cry 4 haters need not respond). You’ve always got the option to not play this one, pretend it doesn’t exist, and just experience the rest of the series without noticing anything different. If Devil May Cry 2 got It’s a Wonderful Life’d out of existence tomorrow, nobody would even think to ask if there was anything different. You know that joke about releasing three pigs with the numbers 1, 3, and 4 painted onto them, and then watching everyone freak out when they can’t find the fourth pig? I know the person who came up with that joke wasn’t a big Devil May Cry fan, because nobody who cares about Devil May Cry ever gives a shit where Pig #2 went. Hell, we even got a fifth pig a little while ago, and everyone was more than content to continue pretending this one didn’t exist.

But I stuck it out, because real videogamers don’t skip Devil May Cry 2. I saw the Stinger animation and ignored the saliva that filled my mouth, warning me that I was about to puke. I beat the Infested Chopper by spamming the square button so hard my thumb went numb. I swung at the switches to open the sliding door and auto-focused on the flying enemies instead and I promised the universe that I would keep going no matter how much I was starting to hate myself. You know, if you force yourself to play Devil May Cry 2 for long enough, it actually kind of starts feeling like a Devil May Cry game. I know this is just me eating the grey slop from The Matrix and pretending it’s a juicy steak so I can keep it down, but some of the small-scale, tightly-packed room fights feel remarkably complete. It’s no secret that this game only had about six months in the oven, if that, so it’s mostly a mess. Even so, you can still get a pulse every now and then to remind yourself that both you and the game are still alive.

Anyway, after slogging through the boring encounters and the frustrating level layouts and the way that Dante lifelessly stares into the camera during cutscenes with those indescribably weird eyes, I managed to get to the final boss. Unsurprisingly for a game rushed out the door this quickly, the final boss is actually a boss rush, followed by a piss-easy final form that gets completely blown apart the second you press the Devil Trigger button. Unfortunately for me, I took my very first death on this boss fight, and decided that I would just start the level from scratch to avoid incurring a continue penalty. The game asked me if I wanted to continue. I said no. The game asked me if I wanted to go to the main menu, or if I wanted to save. I didn’t want to save. I wanted to restart. I went back to the main menu. I was then prompted to load a save. My last save was about forty minutes before the final boss. I decided that it wasn’t such a bad thing to lose to Devil May Cry 2.

It would probably reflect worse on me if I’d actually taken the time to beat it.

We have no record of who the original director of this game was before Itsuno took over.

Yoko Taro is truly a visionary if you take into account his talent to make his games extremely repetitive and tedious most of the time, with shallow and uninteresting gameplay, and still manages to deliver a memorable and deeply touching experience in the end, one that you will cherish. Now seriously, I don't think it's as good and impactful, and most importantly, engaging as Nier: Automata, but it's still a game that has its value, and it was a very special journey for me, establishing Yoko Taro as one of the best game directors and writers today in my opinion.

I mean, Taro managed to make a book one of the most interesting and charismatic characters I've ever seen in my life. That's really something to applaud.

I love you, Weiss.

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