Ah, this game. I really love this game. If you haven’t yet, you should go play this game. There’s an extra pretty remastered version for the PS3 and Xbox, but given both of those break if you look at them too roughly, I’d suggest the original game with the PS2, as that one breaks slightly less often and is significantly cheaper when the inevitable happens. Go now.
Devil May Cry was meant to be part of the Resident Evil franchise, but it was considered far too actiony. You can still see a lot of the influence in the setting, as well as how tightly constrained your resources and consumables are.
Is it horror? I don’t know. I certainly found it a horror game, but I admit I have no experience with these games at all and played it in a state of constant panic and confusion.
So, how did Devil May Cry do this?
Well, as I said, I do not know these games. Honestly, my first game was soothing, turn-based Pokemon, and it took years to even really accept the idea of games that don’t pause and politely wait for you to return your attention (Link died so many, many times), which is about as far from this as you can get.
Devil May Cry is designed around hacking stuff apart and making it bleed, even when it’s a puppet that really shouldn’t be full of blood. Or, you could shoot them if you want to do it the dumb way. Did I ever! See, if you shoot them, they’re too far away from you to hurt you. Except for the fact the puppet enemies have an attack that’ll turn you into a puppet if you leave them alone long enough. Also, it does basically no damage.
But the game is nice that way. It’s happy to give you the rope to hang yourself with. Or bullets, in this case. Having a way to fight back in theory ruins horror, but in practice I had no idea what I was doing, so it was hard to feel empowered. Dante was certainly capable of being effective, but I was busy running away and trying to keep enemies from getting closer by shooting them. Furthermore, you’re ranked at each level, losing points for taking time and gaining points for using cool moves, so shooting at enemies while desperately fleeing in circles results in a terrible score, which results in the smallest bonus, which results in not being able to afford upgrades, which makes the game harder and encourages more frantic running.
And this game is actually hard by the standards of people who normally play action games. The first boss is particularly impossible, and the way you allocate your resources is full of newbie traps, to the point I actually restarted the game and played through buying different powerups to be able to die repeatedly while using the optimum strategy instead. It comes with difficulty settings, but playing on the lowest difficulty messes up the storyline in that certain points are supposed introduce new enemies associated with them, like a cat demon coming out of a cat statue. That counts as story. Therefore, I had no choice but to continue on the insanely hard difficulty of normal.
And god, the enemies are great. As I said, the first enemy is set up so that when the player frantically shoots to keep it pinned down and not eviscerating you, it gives them time to use their distance attack. The cat demon that shows up later, once you’ve finally grasped that you have to close in and stab them with your giant sword and the guns are just to trick you. It starts off invulnerable to swords and, when you shoot it enough to fix that problem, shifts to stabbing you if you try to stab it. In between, there’s another enemy that’s mostly intangible. Aside from being really hard to attack, it can hide in the walls, so naturally it appears in the narrow hallway. Your only real defense is frantically swinging to try to interrupt its attack…and even when you kill it, its weapon goes flying into you if you don’t move fast enough. Or, you can try to keep your distance and shoot, which is doable if you’re really scared patient. Naturally, the upgraded form of this enemy locks you in a cage with it.
The setting of the game is this gorgeous slightly ruined and very Gothic castle. For some reason there’s not many screenshots available, so you’ll just have to play it yourself and see the rest. (There’s even flavor text!) You initially start outside, but as soon as you enter, you end up locked in. (Also, the locks are giant angry doorhands that attack you if you get too close. Why? I don’t know, but it’s certainly startling when you’re running around madly to avoid enemies and oh thank god a wall to put my back to and suddenly a giant hand is crushing you.) From there, you navigate through a lot of close areas. I quickly ended up lost and before long, I was getting anxious about my inability to get outside. I was close to outside, I could see outside through a window, but I was trapped! Trapped in a place where demon puppets kept spawning to murder me!
By this point (five seconds in), playing the game had become a two-player thing, where my brother would read the walkthrough to try to figure out where I was supposed to go and how I could not die to all the enemies. This made the enemies marginally less invincible but it meant we were spending our time discussing how we didn’t understand what was happening and couldn’t figure out how to get out again. There was this one promising point, but then it exploded. I was absurdly happy when we managed to get to the upper courtyard. I could see the sky! It was as creepy as ever, but at least I’d made it outside.
That’s where you get attacked yet again by the horrible spider boss. It’s unclear if the designers messed up on balance with the spider boss being so very impossible or if they were just deliberately fucking with people. It works very well for a recurring boss, because you try a million times to beat it the first time, and then OH GOD IT’S BACK RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN and then NO NO NO NO WHY IS IT HERE AGAIN WHYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY. It’s actually a survivable fight in its reappearances, but it’s hard to realize that because the first showdown has it hand you your charred ass so very many times.
And of course, having seen the sky for a few moments, you then have to head back into the castle’s bowels. You do eventually get to travel outside, but it’s only so the game can screw with you when you return – the castle layout I’d finally memorized had changed, despite it being stone and that not making any sense. My brother and I obligingly flipped out. That’s the sort of beautiful moment you can only really do in videogames. (As also seen in the absolutely a horror game three times over Silent Hill.)
So yeah, I really, really liked it. It was scary precisely to the point of being fun and challenging, without ever becoming truly stressful. Playing it was like bashing my head against an incredibly interesting wall, and then suddenly the wall was rubble and wow wasn’t I awesome.
Now. It is not without its flaws…
Its terrible, terrible flaws.
But whatever the fuck she’s wearing aside (it’s not a corset, but it also obviously isn’t anything else) she’s not particularly bad otherwise in the few scenes she appears. And in the third game Dante never figures out how to put a shirt on, and also when he tries to chat with that game’s female character she shoots him in the head, so the series corrected itself well there.
I have only had time/functioning game consoles enough to play the first three games so if you try to talk me about any others I will fucking murder you. Even if it’s just a warning they’re terrible and I shouldn’t bother. Let me hate purely when I get there, without spoilers.
Wow I was going to tell you to skip the second one, but you already did it? Yeesh, so horrible, that game. The third one was beautiful and might be my favorite action game ever. Vergil was an incredible boss, the theme was really strong and consistent, even though it ran along those tired “great power, great responsibility” lines, it managed to do interesting stuff with them. But that’s neither here nor there until you write something up about it, I guess.
I played it immediately after DMC1, so I breezed through it. It’s got a couple okay moments and the disappointing easiness helped mitigate the disappointing everything else by making it fly by.
(Though nothing could stop the demon tanks from being terrible.)
Vergil was an incredible boss
He was, though a bit nicer than he needed to be. I died a bunch to him but it was largely because I kept running around going “Hey look if you shoot him he deflects bullets with his sword that’s so cool!” and stuff.
Hm. Which DMC3 release did you play? Depending on whether you got the original North American version or any re-release, then yes, the game was easier because every difficulty mode was scaled down.
During DMC3’s release cycle, something happened that made Japan’s Normal be US’s Easy, and so forth. Later releases “fixed” this, so the game seems easier. DMC3 is easier than DMC1 just by virtue of the controls and camera being better, and most enemies weren’t as ruthless, IIRC.
Vergil was nice because he wasn’t always in your face, yeah. He’d chill out at a distance and teleport to you when he felt like it. The only really intense time I fought him was the first time, because I was playing using Royal Guard (not recommended for beginners) on U.S. Normal (not recommended for beginners), and he would cheerfully break my defense with every swing until I learned the timing.
I bought the boxed set, so probably the fixed one. I should go through and see how far I can get on harder difficulties.
When DMC3 first came out, Penny Arcade made this comic about it:
http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2005/03/04
I still don’t know how to hyperlink on the comments. I’ll go find out I guess.
Hmm, I’m intrigued because I remember watching my brother play a few of the games in this series when I was a kid, and I definitely didn’t think of them as horror. But my brother is one of those people who play on the hardest difficulties and still find most games too easy, so my memory of these is ” ah yes, those games where you sword to death endless hoards of demons with your flashy skills.” Maybe they would be scary if I actually got to play them.
Lol I thought the same thing. I was like “horror? You have a giant fuckoff sword and most importantly you’re Dante, what business do you have being scared?“
Yeah, but I am pretty awful at action games, so maybe my incompetence would make playing them scary. :) I don’t know, I also watched my brother play a lot of Resident Evil and Silent hill, and I was totally sure they were meant to be horrifying, though they weren’t for me personally.
I think maybe its a bit like how I don’t consider the Legacy of Kain games horror even with all the atmospheric stuff going on; if you’ve got a way of killing things that won’t run out (basically any sword that isn’t Pyramid Head’s slow useless one) there’s nothing to be afraid of. Even if you do get nommed to death you’re still not anywhere near helpless.
Because that fucking lava spider is unkillable without Air Raid! Even the people on youtube who can land Dante on the head of a pin and pull off any combo at will resort to that.
Sure, Dante sasses him every intro cutscene, but that’s because Dante doesn’t realize how many times he’d died.
Yeah, I mean the game teaches you to be tactical by introducing you to monsters who destroy complacent, repetitive tactics.
There are degrees to horror. It’s true that Dante is a wisecracking jackass and that the premise of the game is to kill everything in sight, but the first game does establish a creepy atmosphere, and it also doesn’t just throw hordes of enemies at you, they usually go for jump scares and sneak attacks first.
It’s the difference between the first “Doom” and “Doom 2”: you’re pumping demons full of leaden death in either one, but in the first one you’d be walking down a corridor when suddenly the lights turn off and demons surround you, while in the second one there would be an even bigger number of more dangerous demons, but they’d all be visible and spread out over the field. Which is scarier?
It definitely shifts away from horror once you’ve mastered the controls – for me, that was maybe halfway through.
It also depends on which game we’re talking about, because I’m pretty sure DMC2 can be won by taping down forward and leaving your cat to mash the buttons, and DMC3 was fun, but I only had trouble with a single enemy.
…I have the feeling you don’t play many action games, Farla. :-P
Wouldn’t be nearly as entertaining from a veteran of action.
That’s like the first paragraph after the cut :P
I actually did play fighting games relatively well when I was a little kid, but I was really not familiar with any of the mechanics for this one – even 3D movement is unusual in the games I play, so Dante controlled about as well as a stoned cow.
Oh, I mentioned that because the problems you seemed to be having were pretty much the same ones I went through when I transitioned from 2D beat ’em ups to 3D ones. :-P
You should be reckless and aggressive and bloodthirsty, it’s the whole point of genre. The fact that you weren’t led to much hilarity and I approve of this post right here.
“I was close to outside, I could see outside through a window, but I was trapped!”
There’s
no outside, it’s just wallpaper. And even if there was, it would be
away from all the baddies to cut up so why’d you even want to go there?
Also this is an entertaining treatise on action games by a total outsider. You should try other genres you’ve never played before.
You should be reckless and aggressive and bloodthirsty
You do significantly more damage but die significantly faster doing that! DMC1 requires tactical bloodthirstiness.
And even if there was, it would be away from all the baddies to cut up so why’d you even want to go there?
Because it’s nice to know you can retreat, or just aren’t trapped. (Especially when even after I’d cleared the rooms, I’d just be lost and wandering in circles.) Being stuck somewhere you can’t get out of is just unsettling. If the game had left the back door open in case I wanted to leave, I’d have felt way safer and more empowered despite dying just as much.
The sole consolation for Trish is she gave us the immortal line of “I’ve should have been the one to fill your DARK SOUL WITH LIIIIIIiiiGGGHHTT!”
I mean they made it ECHO for crying out loud.
The actual game itself, I decided to pick it up for a bit and WOW it didn’t age well. Voice acting range from just bad to gloriously campy. You start by having to search this drab, brown, terrible camera castle for orbs before doing any fighting for atleast 30 minutes. Trish is blegh. Dante’s wearing a shirt :p, and it just feels slow compared to three and four.
Oh and Trish really doesn’t get better in later games, sadly.
God, I don’t know what was with Trish. Dante’s all “You look just like my mom!” and I’m like, then give her your coat so you can stop looking at your mom’s tits. Also, maybe yell at the demon who decided your mom was best sent dressed in the thing that is not a corset.
Maybe this makes sense if you assume it’s something Virgil did to get back at Dante spending their whole game without the shirt while poor Virgil was trying to do Serious Demon Business.
You start by having to search this drab, brown, terrible camera castle for orbs before doing any fighting for atleast 30 minutes.
But I will totally defend this! That’s the tutorial section. They’re giving people a chance to learn the terrible controls and the doubleplus terrible camera you’ll be punished with for the rest of the game. People who already know how to play the game can hop Dante up the statue and soak up red orbs there.
I’ve been curious about this game for a while. Perhaps I’ll pick it up.
It might be worth trying DMC3 first, then DMC1. Chronological order plus properly scaled difficulty!
Hey, are you going to play the legend of Korra game?
Dunno, I still need to get back to doing the show. Anything interesting about it?
Oh the elements system is nice, you can control all the four elements and some enemies can be really tought (But this could be me being a noob at this kind of games), the history is prettily foccused on Korra and the other only character I remenber having any significant role is Ginora.
The bad part is that the game don’t have any kind of puzzle, so it’s just you punching bad guys with the four elements until you can proceed to the next part of the level and there isn’t any real variety in enemies.