i don't usually put a ton of stock into things like polish or what many gamers consider objective markers of quality in games, so i often find myself on the other side of popular negative opinions and i try to keep an open mind when i'm going into things that i know are big punching bags
UNFORTUNATELY dmc2 is PRETTY ROUGH, GUYS
extremely visually ugly to the point of occasional nausea, replacing the goofball corn of DMC1 with...nothing, enemy AI that basically doesn't exist on the normal difficulty, hugely overpowered guns, no variety in the way weapons feel or the ways they level up so you just kind of have five identical swords by the end of the game, multiple bosses that have literally one attack or extremely limited windows to hurt them and massive health bars for forced, boring wars of attrition...everything bad everybody says about this game is true, it's truly unpleasant to play.
the part that stings the most is that you can see the kernel of good shit here, right? The new combat system is cool, but the game never explains how it works and never gives you a reason to engage with it, or enough tools to play around with it, or enough depth to explore it with; but it could have been cool! Equipment is an interesting idea to play with that could add another layer of depth; my understanding is that dmc5 fucks with this a little more. A lot of the story of 2 feels like a rehash of 1, but Lucia and Atrius' deal and the themes of those characters feel like something of a dry run of what we'd see with Lady in 3. And a lot of the innovations in the styles in 3, particularly in the Trickster and Gunslinger styles, are actually pulled almost directly from here, repurposed into that combat system.
It's not like there's nothing here, and now that it's common knowledge that this whole game basically came together in six months it's kind of a miracle that what's here is here at all. But damn it's not fun to watch and it's not fun to play.
UNFORTUNATELY dmc2 is PRETTY ROUGH, GUYS
extremely visually ugly to the point of occasional nausea, replacing the goofball corn of DMC1 with...nothing, enemy AI that basically doesn't exist on the normal difficulty, hugely overpowered guns, no variety in the way weapons feel or the ways they level up so you just kind of have five identical swords by the end of the game, multiple bosses that have literally one attack or extremely limited windows to hurt them and massive health bars for forced, boring wars of attrition...everything bad everybody says about this game is true, it's truly unpleasant to play.
the part that stings the most is that you can see the kernel of good shit here, right? The new combat system is cool, but the game never explains how it works and never gives you a reason to engage with it, or enough tools to play around with it, or enough depth to explore it with; but it could have been cool! Equipment is an interesting idea to play with that could add another layer of depth; my understanding is that dmc5 fucks with this a little more. A lot of the story of 2 feels like a rehash of 1, but Lucia and Atrius' deal and the themes of those characters feel like something of a dry run of what we'd see with Lady in 3. And a lot of the innovations in the styles in 3, particularly in the Trickster and Gunslinger styles, are actually pulled almost directly from here, repurposed into that combat system.
It's not like there's nothing here, and now that it's common knowledge that this whole game basically came together in six months it's kind of a miracle that what's here is here at all. But damn it's not fun to watch and it's not fun to play.