Second Look - Devil May Cry

 

Note: This review contains spoilers for Devil May Cry

While the Devil May Cry series may be more popular than ever, the original game actually started off as more of a gamble, with its roots in the development of Resident Evil 4 (RE4). Fans of both franchises aren’t unfamiliar with the story, but it’s an interesting one nonetheless. The short version is that during development of RE4, the original version, directed by Hideki Kamiya, would have gone in a different direction from traditional Resident Evil (RE) titles by going for something more “stylish” and “cool”. The scenario for this version followed Tony Redgrave, an invincible man with superhuman abilities explained by biotechnology who would fight enemies within a gothic setting through more dynamic combat, while ditching the fixed camera angles and tank controls found within the previous RE games. Series producer Shinji Mikami found this iteration too far removed from RE to keep it within the same series, but instead suggested that Kamiya spin it off into its own IP. After some rewrites that affected the setting and scenario, including some influence from Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy, this game turned into Devil May Cry (DMC) and the rest is history.

I’m no stranger to the Devil May Cry series myself, as I’ve previously reviewed every game in the series. While I’m not really proud of how I’ve covered most of them, this rereview actually came up during my journey through the Resident Evil series, as I thought it would be more interesting to play it after RE4 with the context of its unique development. In the nearly eleven years since I last played it, I’d say that just like the original RE4, it’s showing its age and although it's rough in places, it still remains a great game in its own right.

Before I continue, I want to firmly establish that this review is based on the PS3 version of Devil May Cry as presented in Devil May Cry HD Collection. As such, I will only mention any significant differences from the original PS2 release based on my own memory of playing it.

Dante, son of the legendary dark knight Sparda, is the proprietor of Devil May Cry, a devil hunting business that doesn’t see much clientele. One night, Dante is attacked in his office by a mysterious woman named Trish. During their combat, he explains that for years, he’s been hunting demons in hopes of finding the ones who killed his mother and brother. In return, Trish explains that her attack was a test and that the demon emperor Mundus is planning to cross over into the human world. They travel to Mallet Island, where Mundus has steadily grown in power, but Dante is quickly left to his own devices and enters the castle in front of him to face the nightmares within.

Compared to DMC’s parent series, the story is told minimally through the occasional cutscene and only has one other subplot based around a major reveal of Trish’s character. Despite this, however, there’s more to the story than it appears at first glance, as it has a surprising amount of depth. Dante’s motivation for killing Mundus looks like a simple case of revenge, though it’s understandable and a revelation in the second half of the game not only makes the player root for Dante even more, but also shows off more of his emotional depth. The context of Dante’s past also fuels his motivation for ultimately caring about Trish and lets the audience know that despite all the killing he’s done over the years in the name of finding his family’s killer, he’s never lost sight of his humanity. His attachment to humanity is contrasted with Mundus’ apathy for and sense of superiority over it, as he views not only a human like Dante’s mother Eva as disposable, but also his own men. Witnessing Mundus kill one of his own subordinates with no remorse highlights Dante’s compassion even further, as he shows concern for the same enemy he had just fought and lets the audience see that there’s a more complex man beneath his confident and snarky exterior. The difference between humans and devils is explored until the very end of the game, when Dante suggests that only a human can cry.

During this last playthrough, it’s more obvious how DMC builds the foundation for later games. The sequels build on what this game established, but go out of their way to not contradict anything, especially the depiction of Vergil, down to his specific abilities. At the same time, while the series is known for its campy and wacky tone, this game is comparatively more atmospheric, with a more consistently serious tone broken up only by Dante’s occasional one-liner like “Flock off, feather face!” Perhaps this is due to the lingering influence from RE, though I couldn’t help laughing when I realized that its ties with RE4 even extend to the similar ending where the protagonist and his female companion escape from an island as it explodes behind them (there’s even a timed section leading into an escape sequence where the player controls a vehicle after defeating the main antagonist!).

 

Dante says the aforementioned line before this fight.

Devil May Cry is broken up into 23 Missions, each with their own objective designed to keep Dante moving through the castle and around Mallet Island. For example, one mission may ask you to obtain an item, with the next mission asking you to take it someplace else. Each Mission usually runs pretty short at about five minutes or less, though players can potentially take longer if they they’re fighting a tough boss or they like to explore around. Unlike later games, however, you can’t go back and replay any specific Mission and must play them in order from the beginning. Personally, I’m not fond of this limitation, as it means repeatedly replaying the game or carefully managing your ten Save slots (I’ve just done the former).

If the player searches the area well enough, they can also stumble across one of 12 Secret Missions that grant valuable rewards on completion. I actually completed two of them for the first time during this run and felt pretty good about it, since I finally got to experience more of an already good game.

Players can carry collected items and Orbs between playthroughs, but there’s a catch in how the difficulty works. You can’t select the difficulty level at the beginning and are given the default Normal difficulty. If you die three times before Mission 3, you’re given the option to drop down to Easy Automatic, but you can’t carry anything from this difficulty to any other and are stuck on Easy Automatic forever unless you start fresh, plus a number of enemies simply won’t show up. Otherwise, if you beat the game on Normal, you unlock Hard and are forced to play on that difficulty if you continue from the same save. If you beat the game on Hard, however, you unlock the highest difficulty, Dante Must Die, and finally have the ability to choose your difficulty level once you start again. From memory, I know that I wasn’t that great on the PS2 version and kept playing on Easy Automatic, but I could actually handle Normal on the PS3 version, which from my understanding is because this version is based on the Japanese original, which includes a friendlier control layout (changing jump from Triangle to Cross) and slightly different damage modifiers.

As part of the influence from RE, the game has a slow burn at first, letting the player soak in the atmosphere of Mallet Island before the first enemies show up in Mission 1. Dante can also look at certain objects and give brief commentary on them, filling just a little more detail or letting the player know they need to do something else first. The player may also need keys to access certain doors, though the key (if required) is automatically used from the inventory rather than requiring the player to select it manually in the right spot. Although the game does away with tank controls, which would have otherwise obliterated the flow of combat, the fixed camera system of “classic” RE titles is still in place and movement on the analog stick persists between camera changes.

This is where the gameplay similarities end, however, as DMC otherwise diverges heavily in its mechanics. To begin with, progressing between rooms doesn’t always require a key and can instead require fulfilling another objective, usually clearing a room of enemies or, in a handful of cases, paying a certain number of Red Orbs (a mechanic not seen in subsequent games). There are also a couple points where Dante swims underwater in first-person with a unique control scheme and can use a weapon, the Needlegun, that only works underwater.

Since I’ve mentioned Orbs a couple times now, Dante can collect Orbs of various colors for a variety of useful effects: Red acts as currency; Blue increases his Vitality (either by collecting a whole orb or four Blue Orb Fragments); Green restores Vitality (or grants 10 extra Red Orbs if the Vitality is full); Yellow revives Dante near where he died with full health; and Purple, which can only be bought, increases Dante’s Devil Trigger (DT) gauge. Enemies and other smashed objects can drop Red and Green Orbs, though they will disappear if left alone for too long. Dante can also collect items with helpful effects: Vital and Devil Stars recover Dante’s Vitality and DT gauges respectively, Holy Water does area-of-effect damage and Untouchables grant brief invincibility and put Dante into his Devil Trigger state. You don’t want to use too many items, however, as they will affect your Mission ranking (graded from D to S).

There are limitations, however. The biggest is that while Yellow Orbs do bring Dante back, the player will lose every item you used beforehand. Plus, you can’t control whether or not you use a Yellow Orb, as they are automatically consumed when you die. Considering how scarce these Orbs are, as well as the penalty of losing every item consumed in the interim, I ended up just restarting the Mission from scratch every time I died and simply took a different approach to avoid that happening again. Another related limitation is that while you can Save your game whenever you want, it will only preserve your item and Orb counts. If you reload your save, you will have to start the Mission over from the beginning. I ended up making this mistake once when I accidentally overlooked the end point in a Mission, but I did find two spots in the game where I could use this to my advantage for grinding Red Orbs.

What really sets DMC apart, however, is its “Stylish” combat system, which greatly influenced the hack and slash genre as a whole. In this system, Dante can attack enemies with a combination of melee weapons (aka “Devil Arms”) and guns. Repeatedly attacking slowly raises Dante’s Stylish ranking from D (“Dull”) to S (“Stylish”), but taking damage or relying on the same move too many times in a row lowers the ranking, which encourages more variety in dealing with enemies, helped by the different utility of each weapon. With the right moves, Dante can also launch regular enemies into the air and juggle them with his guns, which can help with at least temporarily immobilizing them and regain control of the fight. If you have good timing, you can also deal a critical hit by attacking an enemy at just the right moment, such as when a Sin Scythe winds up its attack. The depth of Dante’s moves isn’t as wide as later games would allow, but the game is at least built around its limitations and almost never overwhelms a more prepared player.

Go to town on your enemies.

The fact that Dante has infinite ammo helps the flow of stylish combat remain unbroken. What does break the flow at times, however, is how weapon switching is handled compared to later entries. For all of Dante’s guns, the player must switch between them through the Weapons menu; while this didn’t come up too often during this playthrough, it did get mildly annoying when switching between the Grenadegun and Ebony & Ivory while fighting Griffon. You can freely switch between two of Dante’s Devil Arms, Alastor and Ifrit, on the fly with R3, but it’s not instantaneous and the lengthy animation leaves Dante vulnerable to attack.

From my own observation, I noticed that while guns are particularly powerful in this game (compared to later entries), Ebony & Ivory seemed to lower the Stylish ranking faster than other weapons. On the other hand, repeatedly using more powerful guns raised the Stylish rank higher, though I’m not sure if other elements of those circumstances contributed as well. Ifrit also becomes more of a go-to for combat later on, but Alastor is still incredible for mobility, especially with the essential Stinger and Air Hike abilities. While using the Stinger, I thought I saw some proto version of the Million Stab ability from later games, though I couldn’t get it to consistently go off.

Dante doesn’t just have his weapons to help him with enemies, however. After obtaining Alastor (an unmissable event), Dante gains the DT gauge. When enough runes fill up in his DT gauge, either through taking or dealing damage, he can access his Devil Trigger state, granting him access to more powerful abilities, as well as altering the properties of certain attacks and even his very appearance until the gauge depletes. While tapping into the powers of a demon, Dante’s Vitality will also slowly refill, which can often help turn the tide of a fight.

With enough Red Orbs in his possession, Dante can visit a well-placed Divinity Statue, aka the “Watcher of Time”, to buy upgrades or power up Dante through the unique abilities of his Devil Arms. You can buy as many of an item as you can afford, or as much as your inventory will allow, though the prices on certain items notably go up each time you buy it (ex. a Purple Orb will cost 440, then 830, then 1560 and so on). Prices are also affected by your difficulty level (ex. a Holy Water costs 700 on Easy or Normal, but costs 3800 on Hard and 4100 on Dante Must Die). Notably, this is also the only game in the series where you can’t upgrade the power of Dante’s guns or unlock extra abilities for them.

Something else unique to this entry is that there are two “intermission” points where the player can do whatever they wish with no time or item penalty: one between Mission 7 and 8 and one between Mission 13 and 14. The latter doesn’t offer much opportunity to do much, but the former is a perfect spot for grinding Red Orbs to power up Dante as much as possible or accessing previously missed opportunities, which I took full advantage of once I realized I could. I also observed that much like how the final version of RE4 placed multiple Save opportunities close together, DMC placed multiple power up opportunities close together, with a Watcher of Time sometimes showing up right after I powered up in the pre-Mission menu.

Through both the lighting and Mallet Island’s architecture, DMC has a distinct gothic style. While it’s now clearer to me that RE influenced the various designs seen throughout the game, including the enemies and the UI, DMC does enough differently that it forges its own identity that later games would stay mostly consistent with. While the graphics are showing their age now, it’s at the point where there’s a charm to the comparatively more polygonal models and the art style has aged well enough that it doesn’t really matter as much. I can also appreciate that although it mostly retains “classic” RE’s fixed camera style, foreground objects are made transparent during combat, which makes it easier to track both Dante and his enemies. It’s also interesting how DMC’s Game Over screen, which I didn’t see this time, used the “You Are Dead” phrase a little before RE adopted it.

Although I played the HD version on a CRT, it still looked really good.

That said, there are some imperfections. Possibly for simplicity, items are mostly palette swaps of each other, which means relying entirely on color if you’re looking at a glance (though thankfully the colors are distinct). Before enemies showed up in a particular hallway during Mission 2, I noticed a slight pause, though I would attribute this to the performance of the PS3 version. The one real issue, however, is the inconsistency of the subtitles. Specifically, even if you have subtitles on, only the bosses Dante interacts with have subtitles, while he himself does not. This is a baffling decision, but one you’d have to live with if you rely on subtitles or just like to have them on (like I do).

Although DMC is generally more atmospheric than the later games, the English voice acting is below average and kind of cheesy, unfortunately including Drew Coombs as Dante, especially during a particular scene near the end. Considering the games that came out around the same time that had good English dubs, I would attribute this more to bad direction than a lack of talent. On the flip side, the music and sound effects are pretty memorable and have stuck with me even with about eleven years between playthroughs.

While Devil May Cry may feel more skeletal than later games in the series, it’s still a fun game that provides not only a good challenge, but also a fascinating window into what Resident Evil 4 could have been. For both its historical value and its merits as a hack and slash, I would still recommend playing this game at least once.