I think I'd limit the remake to graphical and responsive inputs. Simple modern polishing. I don't want any added features. Just leave it as is but with an obviously more intuitive buttons scheme, a higher polygon count and texture quality, and less stiff controls. More than that and it's no longer the same game. Basically, I'd want the game to get the
Shadow of the Colossus treatment.
Plenty of gameplay elements from
DMC1 need a lot of reworking, especially in regards to the camera, and even moreso with things like the platforming, the underwater sections, and that Godawful plane sequence towards the end of the game. Reworking the final Mundus Boss fight would also be a welcome change....phase 1 is just rail-shooting, and phase 2 is literally capped with you charging your guns and firing them. Kind of a letdown after far harder fights prior to that one, like Nero Angelo and Griffon.
Oh, absolutely not. Once you start adding you don't stop. You add aerial combat then it's 8 more combos, 16 new weapons, and 32 playable characters. While we're at it we can remove the difficulty and fixed camera angles to appeal to modern audiences, take out anything resembling horror so as not scare away the female players, make Dante edgier and a teenager to make it more accessible to a younger audiences, and get rid of that outfit, it doesn't look very good anymore, and why is he wearing so much red?
Adding combos and weapons wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing. Take a look at
Yakuza Kiwami--it completely revamped the combat to support the Style System from
Zero, added mini-games from later in the series, and the second remake is going to incorporate the entire Idol Cage Match activity from
Zero.
I also don't see how anything I said about Kamiya implementing his experience with
Bayonetta's combat has anything to do with changing Dante's character or removing the horror elements. Just because they'll add some things doesn't mean they'll REMOVE everything else.
Ok. That is definitely crossing a line. Basically you don't want the game to look, sound or play the way it does. After that what's left?
Um, retaining the Gothic architecture and enemy designs upon porting it to another engine would still ensure it would look the same. Sound? Keep the original music and everything's fine.
The removal of Coombs' voice would probably be unavoidable due to Japanese Companies often taking the easy route and recasting characters instead of hunting down their old incarnations to pay royalties, or do what the
Yakuza remakes did and re-record all the dialogue with the original VA's (and even THAT game recast characters instead of hunting down a lot of the original cast members)...time and resources I gurantee Capcom will easily avoid by hiring everyone accessible who's accessible during modern Capcom development. The
Resident Evil series dropped Claire's original voice actor purely out of union disagreements, and that was last year. They recast Claire, and moved on.
Something tells me they're not going to exercise any larger efforts with a series even more obscure, like
DMC.
Graphic update? Fine, who wouldn't want that? And I definitely wish the game would cancel out of more animations, but removing Coombs' voice? One of the most iconic parts of that game? Nope, that is a definite deal breaker for me.
This is just down to opinions here, but I really don't care who plays Dante as long as the script remains the same. Both the good elements...and bad...of the original script will be preserved regardless of who plays the characters.
And frankly, Coombs was okay, but I'm not going to let nostalgia blind myself into thinking his performance was even close to being outstanding. It's even cringey in some scenes,
and I don't think I really have to be specific as to which ones.
I know where you're coming from but altering the game so fundamentally, changing so much of what makes it what it is, by pure logic, will transform it into something it's not. I think this is how DmC was conceived, too.
DmC was concieved to be a different game, entertaining a different tone and story, catering to a completely different audience. I don't think any of the changes I proposed are even close to that radical of an alteration.
Especially when a large part of the pushback is against the voice actor---last I checked, that really didn't alter the quality of a game. That misplaced mentality is literally the staple of the
Sonic Fanbase.
DMC1 belongs to a time in gaming that is both gone and will never come again. Games like OniMusha, Haunting Ground, Beyond Good and Evil, and the lot, which would never be made in this day and age, and probably will never be made again, just like how games like Wild Arms won't either. Because of that I'm very protective of them. DMC1 was, to me, the perfect blend between survival horror and action and it's all the little things that complete the experience, even the now annoying aspects.
I like that generation too, but there are plenty of things about the games from that era that haven't aged well...games on the PS2 in particular. There's a good reason we're getting remakes of
Shadow of the Colossus and
Yakuza 1 & 2, and that's because technical limitations have made their original console versions VERY archaic by today's standards.
And guess what? Plenty of them have changed radically to fit modern gaming conventions. The wonky camera angles, transition stuttering, and dialogue breaks from
Yakuza 1 & 2 were ALL removed from the remakes, had music redone, and as mentioned, had the combat and mini-games completely overhauled.
And somehow, I don't think you'll find many fans complaining about those changes.