Long before I started playing any of the games in the series, I assumed that the general consensus surrounding the Devil May Cry franchise was positive due to its sheer popularity, so when I found out that a majority of people actually hated Devil May Cry 2, I was both surprised and intrigued. Granted, a lot of my excitement towards playing this game was more out of morbid curiosity than anything, but I was still willing to give the game a chance to see if it wasn't as horrible as people kept saying it was, and I went into it with a half-joking "How bad can it be?" attitude. As someone who wasn't even that big of a fan of the first Devil May Cry game, I was baffled by just how much its sequel got wrong and just how incompetent it is, because while it wasn't outright unplayable (although it does border on that at times), Devil May Cry 2 was still an absolute disaster of a game that prides itself in being as dull of an experience as possible.

When I beat Devil May Cry on the last day of July, my thoughts on it were very complicated, but even with all of its flaws and odd design choices, I could at least say that the game wasn't boring. In Devil May Cry 2, though, boredom takes center stage, as it strips any ounce of challenge and depth from the first game's combat in favor of turning its core gameplay into a mindless shell of what came before it. In almost every situation you're thrown in, the absolute best and most effective strategy is to stand completely still and spam your gun button until all the enemies die, and since the melee combat is sluggish and unsatisfying and the enemies barely try to attack or even move towards you, this mind-numbing strategy ends up being your one answer to everything. Instead of trying to pull off flashy combos and alternating between melee and ranged attacks like in the first game, I was instead going from area to area and essentially mashing the square button until the battle music stopped playing while occasionally dodging an enemy's ranged attack, and the monotony of having to fight the same enemies using the same foolproof strategy while getting punished for trying literally anything else over and over again made playing this game feel more like Hell than the levels that took place in the actual Underworld. Speaking of which, Devil May Cry 2 replaces the Resident Evil-style exploration and puzzles of its first game in favor of making every single area in every stage take forever to get through, as Dante's slow running speed had me dodge rolling around these needlessly empty and bland locales just to get to the next section. Devil May Cry 2 also replaces the manual targeting of the original game with automatic targeting, and it not only made the boss fights (which were already a joke to begin with) take way longer to beat than they needed to due to your attacks constantly going in the other direction, but it also made activating the required switches nearly impossible with how the game would rather make you face the infinitely spawning enemies than the switch that you're deliberately trying to hit.

While the original Devil May Cry had some design choices that held the experience back for me, Devil May Cry 2 went beyond that and instead decided to add a bunch of features that were all completely superfluous, and I honestly found that to be more insulting. For some reason, Dante can run up walls now, and not only does he only go up a pitiful distance, but the only times where I ever actually used this move were all by mistake. The whole amulet mechanic is also useless, as the unlockable moves just ended up being incredibly situational during combat while also trying to sell the illusion of customization and player choice, and the required uses of each move for traversal both occurred exactly once immediately after they were unlocked. Despite all of these nonsensical additions, Devil May Cry 2 somehow managed to fail to fix one of the main issues of the first game, as the fixed camera is still disorienting to the point where it constantly obscures its objects of focus. On top of being absolutely miserable to play, Devil May Cry 2 also fell flat from a story perspective, as the nonsensical plot was made even worse thanks to Dante's personality being changed from a cocky goofball to a coin-flipping idiot that barely speaks. Having the second disc essentially be repeated content with a swapped protagonist was just an additional slap to the face, and this choice just screams lazy rather than giving the game any replay value. My hate for this game makes it so that even acknowledging its improvements on the original feels wrong, as the additions of an actual dodge button and the ability to swap weapons on the fly pale in comparison to just how bad everything else is in this game. Devil May Cry 2 was a chore of a game that felt atrocious to play, and since I've disliked both of the games from this franchise that I've played so far, I really hope that Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening makes up for it.

Devil May Cry is one of Capcom's most popular franchises, and despite being a fan of some of the games that it went on to inspire, I never had any experience with the series itself. As an outsider, the general consensus seemed to be that a majority of people started with Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening or even the latest game in the franchise, Devil May Cry 5, but I figured that I should try and get into the series with the one that started it all. Devil May Cry was one of those games where, for a majority of my six-ish hour playthrough, I genuinely had no idea whether or not I was enjoying what I was playing, because while the game does have some good elements and interesting concepts, it is so heavily bogged down by poor and outright frustrating design choices that it boggles my mind how the game was even able to make it to store shelves, let alone spawn several sequels.

Before I go on and rant about everything that I found wrong with this game, I want to first start off with what Devil May Cry did well, and it's a good thing that there's quite a lot of positives to choose from. Stylistically, Devil May Cry is very striking and memorable, as the decrepit castles, damp caves, and especially the fleshy, pulsating depiction of the underworld made the game feel like an interesting tonal balancing act between effortless cool and an almost horror-like sense of unease with how you're venturing into the unknown. The score by Masami Ueda, Masato Kohda, and Misao Senbongi was incredibly effective in establishing the game's mood with its shifts between roaring, blood-pumping guitars and ominous ambient music, with the darkly ethereal track used for the Divinity Statues eventually becoming a favorite of mine. The core gameplay of Devil May Cry was also quite good, as the twitchy, fast-paced attacks and dodges not only made fighting enemies fun on its own, but it also made chaining combos together in order to get more red orbs feel satisfying. I didn't even mind the exploration that usually took place in between combat encounters, because while this was clearly an element of the game that was left over from when this was initially envisioned as the fourth Resident Evil game, it still gave me more chances to take in the setting's sights and sounds. Despite the unintentionally funny dialogue and voice acting and somewhat barebones storytelling, I still found the game's lore and Dante himself to be compelling enough for me to want to see it through to the end, although I felt that the relationship between him and Trish was a bit forced due to the sudden attempts at emotional impact being at odds with the little time these two characters actually spent with each other.

For every good thing I have to say about Devil May Cry, there's some aspect of it that aggravates me to no end, and while none of it was enough to make me outright hate the game, the flaws still felt glaring. For starters, the game's camera is absolutely atrocious, as having it constantly cut to different angles was annoying enough when you're exploring the area, but it made some of the boss fights barely even playable with how you get attacked by moves that you couldn't even see in the first place, whether it was because the camera was pulled too far back for anything to be visible or it was because it was at an angle where the objects of focus were straight up hidden. This makes the game's repeated boss fights even more annoying to deal with, as the game only has about four or five bosses that are repeated several times each (and in the case of Nightmare, having to repeat a boss fight just to repeat a boss fight), and it gets to the point where you fight a boss in one mission to go on and fight the exact same one in the very next mission. I also felt that the mission design was radically inconsistent, as some missions featured several bosses and took a good fifteen or twenty minutes (which was especially annoying thanks to the continues being consumable items), while others could be beaten in less than five minutes. Although the controls felt good when it came to combat, I can't say the same for the other game's aspects, as the clunky and unreliable wall jumps made platforming take way longer than it needed to and the underwater sections that turned the game into a first-person shooter were so jarring and controlled so poorly that I had no idea why they were even included in the game to begin with. There's a good game here somewhere, but there was a lot about Devil May Cry that held it back for me, but despite my mixed feelings on this game, I'm still interested in checking out the rest of the series (including the infamous Devil May Cry 2).