berto
I Saw the Devil
10+ years since the release of this game. Can you believe that? 'Cause I sure as hell can't. After thinking about that I decided to go back to play the game and see how I feel about it now. It's been 10 years. I'm sure by now I can form an unbiased opinion. Actually, the big reason I also wanted to do this was because I notice that I've logged in almost 100 hours on DmC:SE, which is double what I've logged on DMC5:SE. I had to think about that one. It definitely didn't feel right. Had to remind myself that 5 had its regular edition and I really only play DmC in its PS4 version.
Well, after playing it I have thoughts and I'm sure none of you were good children this last year so as punishment I'm going to impose said thoughts on you lot so consider this your lump of coal.
More than anything. though, I just wondered if maybe I was too hard on this game. I remember that whole ordeal and I remember everything I said and everything that was said that I cheered on. I wasn't kind to this game, nor the people who made it. I eventually took a step back and realized how overblown this whole thing had become and my part in it but I've never really took a liking to the game. Well, it's been 10 years and that should be plenty of time to let things settle and to go back in and give things a look with a fresh perspective, less bias, or none if possible to see if maybe I was wro-- wro--ro-ro... wron--ro... mistak--e--ke-mis-- (ahem) less correct than I usually am.
I should start with the fact that I stuck with the definitive edition since going back to find my PS3 and booting that up would be more trouble than it's worth. I know that I'm talking about very specifically this thing that released in 2013 and everything that that brought upon but let's just make do, ey?
So, was I right all those years ago or did I just not like the game for what it represented rather than what it was? Kinda... It's not that I was too harsh, I was, it's not that I was wrong, I wasn't. The game really isn't that bad but definitely not solid gold, either.
Let's break it down starting with the gameplay and everything associated with it. The game plays fine. It's pretty solid, actually. If you're a casual player, in fact, this game is pretty damn good. If you are, however, an action junky the game shows more and more cracks the more you play. This is something I'd forgotten till I started a second playthrough. It started with 'hey, this is actually pretty good' but then it went to 'oh, yeah, this part again' and 'oh, god, that's right, this is a thing' followed by 'this is bs!' and so on. It's not the combat or any one major element that make the experience rough, it's the little details that pile up and leave you frustrated. Example: You have the Vergil fight, which is in principle works. They cut you off with a cutscene every 30 seconds but that's not deal breaker. It's when Vergil calls his Dpplggr. That's fine in itself, even if it suddenly made the fight 4 times harder leaving you with a sense of 'balance? What's that.' The issue was the camera. Once the dpplggr popped up the camera went nuts trying to keep both in screen, and god have mercy on your poor soul if you let go of that lock on. It was already hard to keep track of who the real Vergil was but give the two similar colors that look close enough to lose track of who's who in the scramble and the camera becomes the biggest obstacle, not the enemy. Every stage has little things like this that pile on. If I made a fill list it would really come off like just bitching but they chip away at the experience. Here are some cliff notes: Color coded enemies weren't a bad idea. The problem came from the fact that hitting blue enemies with angel weapons was like trying to break down a wall with wet napkins while trying to kill the red ones would be like trying to break down a sold door with a fire axe, which is a good level of difficulty. Without the lock on these encounters were just the worst. Then you have the glitches. Even the SE can be a buggy mess. Nowhere near what we had in release but, damn.
Quick side note on the Animation side; there some stuff still don't look right, like Dante's tornado, which just looks silly, or how Vergil divekicks with no power. He looks like he weighs nothing. There are a handful of these details that make the characters feel less impactful than their counterparts.
None of these things were such bad things that I'd call the game bad the first time around. Pain in the A but manageable and some were fixed in the SE. They were so tolerable I'd forgotten them soon after they happened but when you go back it's less and less so.
Also, I don't think the 60fps is as big an issue as I did before. Yeah, it makes a difference. It's small but most definitely notable. Vastly different? No but different enough that you feel it in your hands while you play and that's where it counts.
So, then, is the game bad? Well, as bad as we all said it was? No. It really isn't. It's just not conducive to being played too much. The issues are completely tolerable when you're only going at it every so often, especially on the SE. The problem is, and has always been, that the game comes is weighted down not in the big ideas but by the little things. It's good but with a lot of asterisks which makes it hard to say that it's really good then.
So, how about the art departments? You know, the whole thing grew on me this time around. If you take DMC out of DmC and just look at it as what it is and not as a part of this franchise it's not bad. The visuals range from impressive to goofy and there is a creative way about them. The only thing that visually annoyed me was the logo for 'The Devil has Talent.' There is on the nose and then there's not bothering to hide it. This is something I'll go into detail in a moment but I want to get to the other artistic aspects really quickly.
Actually, I don't really have anything to say about the music. It's there but I can't remember any melodies on the BGM. The songs are cool. Some songs are a little edgy. Some are very edgy (It's Combichrist for Chris--... Heaven's sakes).
So, how about the writing. Well, it's not as juvenile as I've always made it out to be. It's just that when it's juvenile it's really juvenile. Like that whole chugging a luggy at Mundus? Not juvenile. Having the camera follow it till it lands on Mundus' face? That is as infantile as I remember. Punching the 'you're not on the list' door man is pretty common so not the most original thing in the world but it's passable. Writing FU on the board, on the other hand, brought the whole thing down to plain bad. You know, I would've even taken it better if he'd written anything else, like the number eight, equal sign, equal sign, equal sign, equal sign, equal sign and capital D on the board over that. Is it mature? Hell no, but at least it's more creative than just plain old FU. Which leads me to Dante. He's not as big an a'hole as I've advertise. I mean, he is. He really is, but without the hate that I've placed on him he's really not that bad. he's just kinda forgettable. There is one issue with him, though. The problem is that the story makes him the only capable character. Kat is, too, but only enough to push the plot. Certainly not as good as him. Everyone and everything is made to make him look good. It's a common writing fallacy when writers want their characters to be liked. It happens in YA all the time. It's lazy and since he's the only one whose capable everyone else is clearly beneath him. There's a youtuber called Foxcade who made videos for most DMC things and in his DmC one he mentioned that fighting Vergil at the end is a big who cares because he was completely incompetent when you compare him to Dante. Described him as non threading and he was right. 3's Vergil was a badass who was constantly shown to be dangerous; Dante's equal and thensome. DmC Vergil never did anything impressive and needed saving more than once.
The story and dialogue are meh but there is some enjoyment to be had. All the FU's are still lazy and the plot is less than passable but I didn't hate the experience. Wasn't as bad as I remember I claimed it was but, at the same time, the whole point of this project was to give DMC a better narrative and instead it ended up being the first example I can think of of a kidnapped franchise used for social commentary. See, this is a perfect example of the difference between what modern western writing has become and why it's not my favorite... at all. This is the oldest example of people equating a social message to a good story rather than trying to write something memorable. This is a trend now, to try to make all major narratives about social ills, to try to save the world, and we had to put up with it before anyone else I know of. Hell, for me, it all started with DmC. I didn't like it then, I don't like it now. On its own, without connecting all these things to the real world, I found it passable but making it a social commentary doesn't endear it to me.
So, when you get down to it, I don't think DmC was that bad a game, especially the SE. So, in retrospective, not a bad game but was DmC a good game? Saying 'yes and no' feels like a cop out so I'll say 'it is now.' It wasn't before. Before it was a good game in the making that needed a lot of patching and painting over. Now that it's there the game has become a pretty sold title... with a lot of asterisks, sure, but solid, still. Playing too much makes it you like it less but in small doses it's a fun ride. The biggest problem the game had really was its public image.
While playing I went online and looked at a few making of videos. Just got the urge. In on of the videos the director talked about what kind of game DmC was and he also talked about what kind of games DMC were and it all came rushing back. In that interview director Antonides described DMC as a series of character action games where the lead is this ostentatious anime character with two pistols and a large sword who kills demons to a Japanese rock soundtrack. I remember thinking, yeah, I guess you could describe Dante as ostentatious and I guess there are some tracks that would qualify as rock written by a Japanese composer but DMC was not anime nor anime like and every one of the songs written for DMC are in English. When he described them he had this air of condescendence towards the old games and I remembered that he never seemed to know what the originals were like, always misinterpreting them or getting the details wrong. The cast mentioned that they were asked to not play the originals so that they wouldn't mix the old with the new which is fair enough. The director, though, should definitely not be one of the people who doesn't know the original games in detail nor the person who describes them with such condescendence. All it takes is one week of playing to get the jist of it all. They're not long games and definitely don't go in patronizing them. I once again remember all the animosity and the back and forth and how all this soured the experience. It really was a PR nightmare, wasn't it? Death threats and angry screeching and snyd comments. Thing like this piled on. I remember when they made that comment about how Dante would be laughed out of any bar wearing that my immediate response was 'you know who else would be laughed out of any bar? Wolverine' yet outside of one yellow spandex joke I don't remember any of the people making modern interpretations having such low opinions of the character and it made me kinda antagonistic. Even the wig joke which was just kinda there till I remembered how everything that happened outside of the game went down and suddenly it went from mostly harmless to kind of a middle finger in the face. Oh, the drama.
The argument has been made that this game would have been better off as a DMC inspired game rather than a DMC game. See, I think there's something to that but that's not quite the right mentality. There's this really good remake of Susperia, an old Dario Argento movie about witches that's the definition of cheesy. The remake is actually damn decent and a solid horror. When the director was asked if this was a remake, a reboot or a sequel he said don't think about it like that, it's more of a cover song than anything. That, I think would've been the perfect attitude to approach this game with. I still don't think this game was all good but it definitely deserved better. Well, I say that but maybe it's all for the best. If people were kinder to the game we might've not gotten the SE and that is definitely a solid game.
So, yeah, I definitely think I was too hard on the game but I was deep in the middle of it and keeping an unbiased opinion was hard when you had an internet connection. It's never going to be my favorite DMC game because it really is not in the spirit of my favorite games in the series but I'm not as sorry that it's there as I once was. Yeah, 5's existence definitely helps with that, but in general I think I'll just take the game as is and try to forget all the baggage that came with it.
Anyway, just wanted to get that out of my chest and double it as a form of writing exercise. You may now go on about your business.
Well, after playing it I have thoughts and I'm sure none of you were good children this last year so as punishment I'm going to impose said thoughts on you lot so consider this your lump of coal.
More than anything. though, I just wondered if maybe I was too hard on this game. I remember that whole ordeal and I remember everything I said and everything that was said that I cheered on. I wasn't kind to this game, nor the people who made it. I eventually took a step back and realized how overblown this whole thing had become and my part in it but I've never really took a liking to the game. Well, it's been 10 years and that should be plenty of time to let things settle and to go back in and give things a look with a fresh perspective, less bias, or none if possible to see if maybe I was wro-- wro--ro-ro... wron--ro... mistak--e--ke-mis-- (ahem) less correct than I usually am.
I should start with the fact that I stuck with the definitive edition since going back to find my PS3 and booting that up would be more trouble than it's worth. I know that I'm talking about very specifically this thing that released in 2013 and everything that that brought upon but let's just make do, ey?
So, was I right all those years ago or did I just not like the game for what it represented rather than what it was? Kinda... It's not that I was too harsh, I was, it's not that I was wrong, I wasn't. The game really isn't that bad but definitely not solid gold, either.
Let's break it down starting with the gameplay and everything associated with it. The game plays fine. It's pretty solid, actually. If you're a casual player, in fact, this game is pretty damn good. If you are, however, an action junky the game shows more and more cracks the more you play. This is something I'd forgotten till I started a second playthrough. It started with 'hey, this is actually pretty good' but then it went to 'oh, yeah, this part again' and 'oh, god, that's right, this is a thing' followed by 'this is bs!' and so on. It's not the combat or any one major element that make the experience rough, it's the little details that pile up and leave you frustrated. Example: You have the Vergil fight, which is in principle works. They cut you off with a cutscene every 30 seconds but that's not deal breaker. It's when Vergil calls his Dpplggr. That's fine in itself, even if it suddenly made the fight 4 times harder leaving you with a sense of 'balance? What's that.' The issue was the camera. Once the dpplggr popped up the camera went nuts trying to keep both in screen, and god have mercy on your poor soul if you let go of that lock on. It was already hard to keep track of who the real Vergil was but give the two similar colors that look close enough to lose track of who's who in the scramble and the camera becomes the biggest obstacle, not the enemy. Every stage has little things like this that pile on. If I made a fill list it would really come off like just bitching but they chip away at the experience. Here are some cliff notes: Color coded enemies weren't a bad idea. The problem came from the fact that hitting blue enemies with angel weapons was like trying to break down a wall with wet napkins while trying to kill the red ones would be like trying to break down a sold door with a fire axe, which is a good level of difficulty. Without the lock on these encounters were just the worst. Then you have the glitches. Even the SE can be a buggy mess. Nowhere near what we had in release but, damn.
Quick side note on the Animation side; there some stuff still don't look right, like Dante's tornado, which just looks silly, or how Vergil divekicks with no power. He looks like he weighs nothing. There are a handful of these details that make the characters feel less impactful than their counterparts.
None of these things were such bad things that I'd call the game bad the first time around. Pain in the A but manageable and some were fixed in the SE. They were so tolerable I'd forgotten them soon after they happened but when you go back it's less and less so.
Also, I don't think the 60fps is as big an issue as I did before. Yeah, it makes a difference. It's small but most definitely notable. Vastly different? No but different enough that you feel it in your hands while you play and that's where it counts.
So, then, is the game bad? Well, as bad as we all said it was? No. It really isn't. It's just not conducive to being played too much. The issues are completely tolerable when you're only going at it every so often, especially on the SE. The problem is, and has always been, that the game comes is weighted down not in the big ideas but by the little things. It's good but with a lot of asterisks which makes it hard to say that it's really good then.
So, how about the art departments? You know, the whole thing grew on me this time around. If you take DMC out of DmC and just look at it as what it is and not as a part of this franchise it's not bad. The visuals range from impressive to goofy and there is a creative way about them. The only thing that visually annoyed me was the logo for 'The Devil has Talent.' There is on the nose and then there's not bothering to hide it. This is something I'll go into detail in a moment but I want to get to the other artistic aspects really quickly.
Actually, I don't really have anything to say about the music. It's there but I can't remember any melodies on the BGM. The songs are cool. Some songs are a little edgy. Some are very edgy (It's Combichrist for Chris--... Heaven's sakes).
So, how about the writing. Well, it's not as juvenile as I've always made it out to be. It's just that when it's juvenile it's really juvenile. Like that whole chugging a luggy at Mundus? Not juvenile. Having the camera follow it till it lands on Mundus' face? That is as infantile as I remember. Punching the 'you're not on the list' door man is pretty common so not the most original thing in the world but it's passable. Writing FU on the board, on the other hand, brought the whole thing down to plain bad. You know, I would've even taken it better if he'd written anything else, like the number eight, equal sign, equal sign, equal sign, equal sign, equal sign and capital D on the board over that. Is it mature? Hell no, but at least it's more creative than just plain old FU. Which leads me to Dante. He's not as big an a'hole as I've advertise. I mean, he is. He really is, but without the hate that I've placed on him he's really not that bad. he's just kinda forgettable. There is one issue with him, though. The problem is that the story makes him the only capable character. Kat is, too, but only enough to push the plot. Certainly not as good as him. Everyone and everything is made to make him look good. It's a common writing fallacy when writers want their characters to be liked. It happens in YA all the time. It's lazy and since he's the only one whose capable everyone else is clearly beneath him. There's a youtuber called Foxcade who made videos for most DMC things and in his DmC one he mentioned that fighting Vergil at the end is a big who cares because he was completely incompetent when you compare him to Dante. Described him as non threading and he was right. 3's Vergil was a badass who was constantly shown to be dangerous; Dante's equal and thensome. DmC Vergil never did anything impressive and needed saving more than once.
The story and dialogue are meh but there is some enjoyment to be had. All the FU's are still lazy and the plot is less than passable but I didn't hate the experience. Wasn't as bad as I remember I claimed it was but, at the same time, the whole point of this project was to give DMC a better narrative and instead it ended up being the first example I can think of of a kidnapped franchise used for social commentary. See, this is a perfect example of the difference between what modern western writing has become and why it's not my favorite... at all. This is the oldest example of people equating a social message to a good story rather than trying to write something memorable. This is a trend now, to try to make all major narratives about social ills, to try to save the world, and we had to put up with it before anyone else I know of. Hell, for me, it all started with DmC. I didn't like it then, I don't like it now. On its own, without connecting all these things to the real world, I found it passable but making it a social commentary doesn't endear it to me.
So, when you get down to it, I don't think DmC was that bad a game, especially the SE. So, in retrospective, not a bad game but was DmC a good game? Saying 'yes and no' feels like a cop out so I'll say 'it is now.' It wasn't before. Before it was a good game in the making that needed a lot of patching and painting over. Now that it's there the game has become a pretty sold title... with a lot of asterisks, sure, but solid, still. Playing too much makes it you like it less but in small doses it's a fun ride. The biggest problem the game had really was its public image.
While playing I went online and looked at a few making of videos. Just got the urge. In on of the videos the director talked about what kind of game DmC was and he also talked about what kind of games DMC were and it all came rushing back. In that interview director Antonides described DMC as a series of character action games where the lead is this ostentatious anime character with two pistols and a large sword who kills demons to a Japanese rock soundtrack. I remember thinking, yeah, I guess you could describe Dante as ostentatious and I guess there are some tracks that would qualify as rock written by a Japanese composer but DMC was not anime nor anime like and every one of the songs written for DMC are in English. When he described them he had this air of condescendence towards the old games and I remembered that he never seemed to know what the originals were like, always misinterpreting them or getting the details wrong. The cast mentioned that they were asked to not play the originals so that they wouldn't mix the old with the new which is fair enough. The director, though, should definitely not be one of the people who doesn't know the original games in detail nor the person who describes them with such condescendence. All it takes is one week of playing to get the jist of it all. They're not long games and definitely don't go in patronizing them. I once again remember all the animosity and the back and forth and how all this soured the experience. It really was a PR nightmare, wasn't it? Death threats and angry screeching and snyd comments. Thing like this piled on. I remember when they made that comment about how Dante would be laughed out of any bar wearing that my immediate response was 'you know who else would be laughed out of any bar? Wolverine' yet outside of one yellow spandex joke I don't remember any of the people making modern interpretations having such low opinions of the character and it made me kinda antagonistic. Even the wig joke which was just kinda there till I remembered how everything that happened outside of the game went down and suddenly it went from mostly harmless to kind of a middle finger in the face. Oh, the drama.
The argument has been made that this game would have been better off as a DMC inspired game rather than a DMC game. See, I think there's something to that but that's not quite the right mentality. There's this really good remake of Susperia, an old Dario Argento movie about witches that's the definition of cheesy. The remake is actually damn decent and a solid horror. When the director was asked if this was a remake, a reboot or a sequel he said don't think about it like that, it's more of a cover song than anything. That, I think would've been the perfect attitude to approach this game with. I still don't think this game was all good but it definitely deserved better. Well, I say that but maybe it's all for the best. If people were kinder to the game we might've not gotten the SE and that is definitely a solid game.
So, yeah, I definitely think I was too hard on the game but I was deep in the middle of it and keeping an unbiased opinion was hard when you had an internet connection. It's never going to be my favorite DMC game because it really is not in the spirit of my favorite games in the series but I'm not as sorry that it's there as I once was. Yeah, 5's existence definitely helps with that, but in general I think I'll just take the game as is and try to forget all the baggage that came with it.
Anyway, just wanted to get that out of my chest and double it as a form of writing exercise. You may now go on about your business.
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