Devil May Cry Holds Up

Besides the damn camera and those underwater sections.

Occasionally, I look back on the industry as a whole and think to myself, what if I could finally, for the first time, play one of those games that people loved back in the day (mid 2000s or earlier when I could have played it but didn’t) and review it now? Well, that’s when I run outside searching for a phone booth, remember that those have been completely phased out, get disappointed and just start spinning trying to replicate the time shifting effects of a phone booth only to remember that that wasn’t how that worked and I have just made myself so dizzy that I’m all of a sudden laying in my grass while the world spins, then I get up and go back to my couch in sadness only to sit down to play a game that has a reputation in the industry as something influential or as a cult hit. Today, we are doing a Throwback Review!

The Introduction

I enjoy a good character action game. They’ve provided me with some of my favorite times playing games. One series I always wanted to play from the start was Devil May Cry. Sure, back when DMC 5 came out I got it for free with my then partners GPU, so I played that completely unaware of...everything that came before, but that kinda misses a whole lot of the experience of the series. Because of that I always thought about going back and playing the 4 that came before that. Then the DMC HD collection (incidentally HD here only means 1080p, not anything higher) went on sale recently and I snatched it up so that I could play them. I expected to find some jank of course and maybe even kinda hate them, but I wanted to form my opinion myself instead of making any assumptions based on past knowledge of the series and time it came out in.

Surprisingly, I ended up finding myself having a good time with the game. Even more, I was having fun. Sure, there were some issues, but there was one thing that shined through those, this was a good game. It was a fun game. In spite of one of the core aspects of the game being a massive annoyance, I had a great time with Devil May Cry. It’s a game that’s almost 25 years old now and that’s pretty nuts when you think about it. That a game that old could hold up and be just as fun today as many thought it was back then. So, let’s dive into the reasons it holds up, and a core aspect that is a fundamental problem that bugged the hell out of me.

The Premise

You play as Dante, a demon investigator guy who goes around pursuing demons all to try to find and kill the one that offed his mother back in the day. One day a woman that looks just like his mom comes into his rinky-dink office, beats him up until he fights back, then asks him to come to Mallet Island to stop Mundus, the Demon that Dante blames for the death of his mother and also happens to be the demon emperor, from escaping the prison that Dante’s dad put him in and entering the human world so that he can take it over and such. Dante and Trish go to Mallet Island without a second to spare and he has to explore the Island after Trish ditches him at the start, what he finds is a strangely abandoned castle on an island filled with different creatures and demons that he has to fight with his trusty sword and both of his pistols. Will he, the son of one of the strongest demons out there, survive the fight? Well, yes, there’s 4 more games in the series, of course he survives, what matters is how.

The Good

Devil May Cry originally started as a Resident Evil game but they realized it just didn’t fit that series so they made it its own thing, a very good idea. That said, the Resident Evil blood still runs thick through its veins both in a good way and a bad way. In a good way, the thing that I actually wanted DMC to inherit from Resident Evil was the atmosphere and, to me, that was on point. The small rooms filled with shuffled papers on a desk, that you can destroy that you couldn’t in RE, the large areas empty but for the uncomfortable question of why they’re empty, the objects in the game that don’t have a purpose at the start but once you keep playing or get to the ending they actually have a super important purpose. Some enemies hanging from the ceiling ready to drop down to lumber towards you and throw shit at you as you swipe at them with your weapons or shoot at them with your big guns. The strange tech magic things that just exist across the Island with seemingly no way to access them until later on in the game. The atmosphere is staggeringly wonderful in Devil May Cry despite the game only taking place on one island and without a ton of different scenery.

I mean this is just the opening area, and sure this is later in the game where the lights are out but still, atmospheric as hell.

Even more RE exists in the game because you have to wander around to find keys and items that then allow you to unlock new areas of Mallet Island which will lead you to find other new items and so on. Resident Evil did a wonderful job gating progression in this way and DMC does as well. Although DMC chose to drop most of the puzzle elements and I think that makes a lot of sense since this is a more fast paced genre. I think some of my favorite moments in the short 4 hours of my playthrough came when I found something I could interact with but didn’t have it yet and then just searched to find what I needed and then once I found it I was ecstatic! That’s a good feeling and one I cherish as someone that loves games.

The combat is a lot of fun if simplistic, combos really come into their own later in the series as far as I can tell. The weapons are all fun, hit hard, and a joy to hit shit with. The guns are especially great. One of the things about DMC is the mix of gunplay and swordplay and, while the fluidity of the future games isn’t here, I still adored swiping with my sword and killing an enemy only to start shooting with my grenade launcher at the other enemies further away. It was great fun.

Finally, the story is...pretty bare bones. I mean we don’t know a whole lot about Dante besides that he’s the son of Sparda and goes on excursions to fight demons and such, we find out much more about him later in the series and he really comes into his own later on as well. But this Dante, the more subdued Dante, is still fun. He’s cracking jokes with bosses, he’s poking fun, while the more cheesy nature is in future games and I wanted to see that, I still enjoyed the subdued cheese that Dante engaged in here. There are really only 2 characters in the entire game, Dante and Trish, even the bad guy doesn’t really have a character to him besides EVIL and that he wants to take over the world. But again, what was there was enjoyable, I just look forward to the future games in the series so I can have a more in depth and dumb ass narrative that’s fun and interesting.

The Bad

So here’s the bad part of the Resident Evil DNA, the fixed camera angles and the tank controls that go along with them. Much like I experienced in my Resident Evil HD review, multiple times I had issues where I was simply trying to move forward and the camera would change 3 times within a few steps and each time would bring with it a disorienting feeling of how to control the character. Once I adjusted it I’d be fine but then the next camera change would happen and I’d have to adjust...again. I’m so damn glad this design got dropped from both later DMC and Resident Evil games because it is just brutal looking back. Which is a real shame, I loved so much about the atmosphere on Mallet Island, but instead of being able to thoroughly enjoy it I constantly found myself fighting with the camera and the controls. It always felt like there was just one too many camera angles for each area when the game, multiple times, showed it was able to both push in and move around when the developers felt like it would be beneficial. It was exhausting.

I mean look at this, with basically fixed camera angles it took 3 of them to just do a jump. 3! Also this is a gif instead of a video because, apparently, Steam records your audio of the whole PC and I had a podcast playing while recording and…well…I figured you wouldn’t want to hear that.

The biggest problem here then comes from how the combat is MUCH faster in DMC than in Resident Evil. In RE you have a chance to adjust because the enemies are relatively slow for most of the game. You’re able to take a sec to reposition your hands. Meanwhile, in DMC the game is a character action based combat so you’re doing multiple attacks that are sweeping in their movement and oftentimes you’ll find yourself just on the edge of a camera angle mid fight and mid attack and going back and forth between the angles because of how your attack goes and because there are many enemies around you that do significant damage. If you let them. Now as you get more powerful this does help because you’re able to do more damage with your guns from a distance and not have to worry about the sometimes finicky camera. Then, add in that the game sometimes requires some platforming on very small areas and you just have yourself a recipe for annoyingness.

This is the biggest issue with the game and one that is, at its core, a product of the times. It’s understandable that there is this style of camera control given the Resident Evil blood in the games veins, and I wish the sequels would have fixed this issue because in future Throwback reviews for the series I’m going to have to just point to this section for the exact same problems.

Also, important note: Fuck underwater sections in older games. They’re all terrible and I wish I could skip all of them. Devs were still figuring out how to make the controls feel good in a 3D space and they always failed, at least for all the PS2, Xbox, and GameCube games that I’ve played. Thankfully here in DMC there weren’t a ton of them but there were still too many with horrible controls plus forcing you into first person for the sections so it was overall just damn bad and I am trying not to hold it against the game for those issues.

The Meh

Honestly I really didn’t like how short the game was. My partner, and the internet, tells me it’s because you’re meant to push for S rank for all 23 levels but I’m just not a completionist, never have been and never will be. One time through was enough. Because of that once I finished my 4 hour play through I felt a little surprised it was so damn short. In Resident Evil you could play as the other character and get some other little tidbits for the story, but here you always play as charming and cheesy Dante and, while I liked him as a character, I just had no reason to keep playing once finished. When I played DMC 5 it was a much longer experience so I can only imagine they will get longer as they go on, but I guess that’s a future Cat discovery not mine.

The Ending - Reaction

The ending was just as cheesy as one would expect from this kind of game. You have the characteristic fighting of a god as well. It was honestly a lot of fun and showed even more of the RE DNA when there was a time limit to escape the island. Predictable? Sure. But not in a bad way. In a cheesy way. Just all around good cheesy stuff.

The Conclusion

I’ve done two throwback reviews on here and when I picked DMC because of a recent sale I kinda expected it to end up being just as much of an annoyance as Resident Evil HD and Psychonauts. Instead, I found myself playing a fun action game with a massive glaring flaw in the camera structure. I had far more of an enjoyable time with this than I did with my other older reviews. In fact, I’d hazard a guess to say that I think, despite the abhorrent camera, DMC is still a great time that holds up remarkably well....if you can look past that damn camera. I definitely recommend playing it, especially since it’s actually pretty short if you’re not wanting to get an S rank on all levels. Plus it comes with DMC 2 and 3 so you get several of the early games if you want to play the whole series, like I intend to.

But what about you? Have you played DMC? Do you have a favorite one of the series if so? And were you just as annoyed by the camera as I was? Do you have another older game that you think meant a lot to the industry that you think I should play? Let me know if so! I need to play more older games and I always forget to do so.

Meow,

Cat