Yes. A Human throwing away their Humanity to seek great power is more deplorable than a Demon acting as you'd expect it to. Despite having a much less important role and not affecting the series' main character as badly, Arkham is more worthy of hate than Mundus. Mundus didn't even see what he was doing as wrong, regarding Humans as animals that barely deserved attention, while Arkham is a villain on a much more personal level, having killed his own wife and manipulated his daughter all to obtain infinite power in reverence of evil.
For Credo's part, he believed the Order was doing everything for the sake of good. Rather than seek out the power of Demons, he saw his "ascension" as evolution into an Angel, for a just cause. Only when he saw how Sanctus was willing to use and threaten his sister, who was as good as a person could be and was devoted to the ideals the Order preached, did he understand that he had actually been serving the bad guy.
Did DMCs 2 and 4 suddenly not happen? Arkham is not 'more worthy' of hate than Mundus, as his actions are not all that special/unique even among the other human villains. He killed Lady's mother. That's personal. Mundus killed Dante's mother over a 2000+ year old grudge with the intent of killing the entire family, children included. That's also personal. Sanctus allowed the slaughter of countless innocent civilians in order to frame himself as a hero, but also killed Credo, who was Kyrie's brother and Nero's... I don't know, brother-in-law, and also kidnapped Kyrie and threatened her life, once by using her as a human shield. That's also personal. Arius threatened Lucia's life on more than one occasion and tried to indirectly kill her by casting doubt on whether she was a monster or not, as well as treating her as expendable even though she was for all intents and purposes 'his daughter'. That's also personal. Arkham's actions are not unique.
How does Mundus's ignorance of morals somehow make him less evil or hateworthy, when neither Arkham nor Sanctus nor Arius also saw what they were doing was wrong? That was the entire point of Arkham's speech near the end of the game just before Lady shoots him, and Sanctus questioning the validity of 'love for a sibling'. They are
as morally ignorant as Mundus, not 'more so' just because they're human.
And... yeah? Why are you explaining any of that about Credo? I know his character and his role in DMC4. I object to the story dictating that he die just because of it as if he were exactly as irredeemable as Sanctus.
For every intelligent Demon that's good, there are countless more that are despicable.
For a full rundown, let's look at every Demon that can be described as noble in some way.
Sparda
Trish
Lucia
Griffon*
Cerberus*
Agni & Rudra*
Berial*
Modeus
Brad
* Indicates that despite having some redeeming qualities, they still served evil in some way, up until the moment they died.
Now, let's look at all the flatly bad Demons.
Mundus
Argosax
The Despair Embodied
Abigail
Phantom
Trismagia
Bolverk
Beowulf
Doppleganger
Nevan
Bael & Dagon
Echidna
White Rabbit
Mad Hatter
Sid
Belphagor
Baul
The Rolling Thunder Demon
The Wishes Come True Demons
The Once Upon a Time Demon
King
The nameless Demons from the manga, of which there were at least seven
Note that I'm not including Demons which are of overly questionable intelligence or sapience, which are countless.
Even from the small sample size we have available, there is a pretty big majority of Demons that are outright evil, or are at least completely evil from a Human's morality.
It is possible for Demons to be good, but as a whole they tend to skew bad.
You have absolutely no proof that the Gatekeepers in DMC3 were actively serving Evil when none of them save for a single one expressed their goals as anything past "Keep mortals out of the tower by any means necessary" (which, when accepting that mortals were the ones that even built that tower in the first place, places their morality as Neutral at worst). The only one that deviated from this was Beowulf with his hate-on for Sparda's bloodline, the rest of them didn't even acknowledge that Vergil and Arkham existed. You didn't even explain who put them there, because that also wasn't revealed (how convenient). Argosax/the Despair, like I said before, was only described and not shown as some "great evil" when in-game his only contribution to the plot is existing to be defeated to close Dante's story, and that extends to the other bosses in DMC2 with no speaking role. Bolverk? He was Sparda's rival. That's a crime now?
Even ignoring Nero and Vergil's relationship, there are still multiple statements that Dante is intended to be in his 30's as of DMC4.
Early 30's
is 'in his 30's', being exactly 30 is the bare minimum requirement to be in that age bracket.
The only outlying factor here is Lady's age. Remove Lady, and they have consistently suggested DMC4 to be nearly twenty years after 3.
And as I noted before, there is a reason they keep saying that Lady is relatively young. Japanese culture frowns on older, unsettled women - Especially those over thirty or nearing middle age. Lady was introduced as a teenager and schoolgirl in DMC3, and despite looking almost twenty years older in DMC4, she still retains the overall motif as the spunky, young and cute one. Lady could be in a sequel to DMC2, and it's highly unlikely that they'd say she was over thirty if you asked her age then.
Basically, it's the same reason why Street Fighter's Sakura is going to be wearing a schoolgirl outfit until the day Capcom goes under.
And if you remove Nero, as well as those eight-year-old outdated statements of Dante's age, they have consistently suggested DMC4 to be only ten years after 3 and not 'almost twenty'. They wouldn't have featured a character that appeared alongside Dante in the 'earliest occurring' installment and brought her in to a later one, implied that she's old (by her relationship to another old character) only to lie about her age. But if you just remove Nero, Dante doesn't have to be almost twenty years older than he was in the last game. I too can disregard an entire character's existence to prove my point.
Your statement about the developers' culture having such a distinct effect on Lady's character design is unfounded because you're saying that their objective statement about Lady's age is untrue yet a similar statement about Dante's age is true even though it's the same Japanese people saying it, and you're falsely attributing 'society doesn't like the idea of women getting older' as a uniquely Japanese sentiment. It's not. That doesn't change that they said Lady is in her mid20s as recently as E3 2015, whereas Dante 'approaching 40' was back in 2007 when they made similar retconned or ignored statements like 'Vergil will not be in this game' and 'Nero is entirely human/is not of Sparda progeny'.
If they refused to say she's older in a hypothetical post-DMC2 game, it's because DMC2 itself wouldn't occur much later after DMC4, not that they literally halted Lady's age because they hate old women and suddenly feel like explaining why, when 'Dante ages like a human', a game taking place past even the 'far future of the Devil May Cry series' where DMC2 is set would feature an actual human character that somehow looks the same rather than opting not to feature her at all in its main story.
The funny thing about your SF analogy is that you could just look up the Street Fighter timeline and some interviews and find that Ono confirmed that Sakura was 21 by SSF4 (Born March 15, 1973, and SSF4 took place in 1994, so she's more or less the same age as Cammy) and gave an in-universe justification for her wearing her outfit with a quirk of that being her publicly recognized 'fighting Gi' the same way Ryu and Ken have apparently never had a change of clothes, or Cammy has never had anything outside of a unitard.
Over a decade could be any amount of time over a decade, obviously, and could fit into the English translation fine. And again, that version takes precedence - It's much closer to two decades than one.
So you're saying the English subtitle of a game made by Japanese people working for a Japanese company whose Japanese culture
so obviously influences their character design and timeline takes precedence over the language they read, write, speak, and put in their supplementary media that accompany said games, which is Japanese. Okay. Sure.
Those two statements and one translation are incorrect when looking at all the other information.
Dante is in his 30's. - [Hiroyuki Kobayashi interview. Game Informer magazine, October 2007]
Dante is nearly 40. - [PSM3 Magazine January 2007]
Dante has the cool attitude of a man in his 30's. - [Hideaki Itsuno, Capcom Legend interview, June 2015]
That's three versus two.
Now, taking Nero's parentage into account, and that is most definitely the timeline. You forget, it has been confirmed that he is Vergil's son - For that not to be the case, they would need to retcon it with new information.
You're using statements made in
2007 to disprove something said in
2015. Lady is ten years older than she was in DMC3, and is currently in her mid20s. Dante is not that much older than she is, especially not 'he aged two times as much'. Time passes for them the same as everyone else. Dante being in his
early 30s doesn't magically make him not in his 30s unless you can't count. For them to retcon Lady's (and therefore Dante's) age, they would need to make a statement that also puts her in her late 30s, but you don't have that so you're making asinine comments about foreign cultures, acting as if 'age discrimination' against women is something only found in Japan or that their age discrimination doesn't also affect men over 30.
The series has reiterated that Humans and Demons are much more alike than anyone would like to admit. Demons skew evil, and Humans skew good, but the possibility for the opposite exists in both sides.
Alright, so what is your point? You can't say that they're "much more alike" to each other than they want to admit yet still say that "this race is mostly evil and this race is mostly good with very few exceptions", or else the story isn't about the 'exceptions', it's about a likely common possibility between two races that have existed since the beginning of time with presumable diversity among their populace. They cannot be 'much more alike' when the vast majority of each side has opposing extremes as their 'default state' making them largely incapable of the change you're saying they can show.
One of the original concepts for DMC4 was Dante losing control of himself and entering into an ascended Devil Trigger, so theoretically it is possible.
Dante has the capacity for both great good and great evil. That would be true whether he was fully Human, or fully Demon. Being a halfbreed merely means that he can embody the strengths and weaknesses of both sides.
No, it wouldn't be true. You've been saying all this time that Demons are mostly Evil and Humans are mostly Good, with very few exceptions that fail to disprove that particular rule, but now all of a sudden
regardless of genealogy, either race is capable of great good and great evil? Had Dante been fully human or fully demon, the story would be different. In keeping with focus on 'the exceptions' and what's more 'emotionally gripping', a fully Human Dante would be evil and unplayable, and a fully Demon Dante would be good, but that risks being a repeat of Sparda unless Sparda in the new continuity didn't save the world himself. An evil fully Demon Dante would just be 'a Demon acting as their default state' and a good fully Human Dante would be rendered invisible by the plot because they're not important, and no one would play as that Dante because the games apparently can't be built around 'No Devil Trigger'. The only thing that could agree with your statement on his character would be the reboot, where he isn't human at all and actually does have the capacity for great good or great evil due to having been born from two actually-opposing races.
What weaknesses has he demonstrated in this series? His trust in Trish paid off by the end of the first game, and he usually keeps his cool during dangerous situations so there is no emotional weakness, he hasn't been bested in a significant way by any other devil he's faced so it's not physical either, he hasn't been corrupted by his own power to compromise his morality
, and the concept was scrapped precisely because it wouldn't fit in with his character. Judging from where they placed DMC2, it still won't fit in with his character even if he were 40 or 400.
'Theoretically' anything is possible. 'Theoretically' Sparda and Eva and Vergil could be revived in the very next game. 'Theoretically', Nero could also be just as capable of great good or great evil but I'm interested in
practice. In
practice, when Dante was framed as having become evil in earlier trailers of DMC4 to set up Nero as the new hero, regardless of 'theoretical capability' most fans correctly assumed that the story was false-- that Dante was still the hero, there was a conspiracy within the Order, and that Nero would be caught on the wrong side. They were right. In practice, Nero has shown no inclination of becoming evil due to his love for Kyrie, which is why Dante entrusts the Yamato to him. In practice, he won't even become corrupt from using the Yamato because it resonates with him that well, and it's his 'own' soul that projects when he uses the Yamato DT, not Vergil's or even Yamato's itself. In practice, Capcom is interested in upholding the status quo, no matter how many new plot elements they introduce. Dante (or Nero) is the hero, he's only vulnerable in rare occasions, and the bad guy always loses by the end because they're supposed to.
In short, we have a fundamental difference in opinion. That difference being I prefer stories that actually show me rather than tell me the rules it's holding itself up on, while you accept it because they said so.
