Angel
Is not rat, is hamster
So before anyone gets all ratty over it, I am not talking about any elements of actual gameplay here because this sort of game makes me want to gouge out my own eyes with a teaspoon - it's just not my cup of tea and never will be. That said, I am always interested in how the story and characters are presented and played out, so I took 90 minutes out of my day to grab a cup of coffee, some gosh-awful lunch and watch all the cutscenes from the opening credits to the final fight.
First off, I want to point out that I don't have a degree in...well...anything and I'm not a student of anything even remotely creative - this is a viewpoint taken from a someone who is not only NOT part of the fanbase but also someone who is not trying to portray themselves as some sort of supa l33t h4x0r gamer or anything silly like that.
Things that I liked:
The graphics were, for the most part, very pretty indeed. I liked the fluidity of the whole real life/Limbo merging and I especially liked the attention to detail concerning facial expressions and gestures. There were some nice subtleties put in there that made the physical appearances of the characters seem more realistic and genuine.
The bit where Dante mentions his coat on the ferris wheel genuinely raised a little smile out of me - never before has a DMC game of any kind even begun to amuse me, so I was pretty surprised by that.
Voice acting was, on the whole, far more what I would like to see in games. There wasn't too much of that stilted "oh, is it my turn now?" sort of dialogue going on - there were some negatives to this, but I'll come to those in a bit. Phineas was one of my favourite voice actors, to be honest.
I really liked the characters of Kat, Phineas and Vergil - I liked how they were presented, how they interacted and the little things they did physically to pad out the scenes. I also liked Mundus up until towards the end of the game when he just...disappointed me (again, that comes later) - he was a villain I could enjoy watching.
I liked that Sparda's face is ripped off in the picture of him in the house - I dunno why I liked that, but I did.
The scene where Kat is taken by S.W.A.T was really good, I thought. I enjoyed how it was played out and it didn't have that whole "KYRIE!!!!11111ONE!" angst about it, which was nice. The apparent lack of concern by Vergil compared with Dante's hotheadedness over the situation was a nice contrast for me.
I anticipated there would be some jumpiness for some of the scenes because I wasn't watching the fight sequences, but it wasn't too bad in all fairness and it was kind of like watching a slightly-disjointed film.
I also liked the twitter-esque bit at the end where people are going nuts over the internet asking what's going on. Cheeky little @superninjatam in there too, which I liked.
Insofar as lack of character development goes, I actually think that there is plenty of room for manoeuvre, should NT make a sequel, and this is a good thing because there's not enough set in stone to tie their hands over any particular details. Loose ends can be a positive in this case...what would suck is a Mass Effect 3 style approach to finishing a game. So I hope they do make a sequel and start expanding a little more with certain characters and plot themes.
Things I didn't like:
Lilith was a total waste of time. From the stupid cliched monologue in the club to the stale delivery of almost every line she had (which, let's face it, weren't many), she was a character that could have never featured and I don't think anyone would really have cared. It felt like she was bunged in there just as a way of finding a reason to make Mundus all rageface later on.
A few blips where graphics were concerned, but these are really minor. Things like Kat's spray can just covering the entire stencil without her hardly moving it; the guy drinking a glass of Virility inside the factory and not actually filling the glass with anything first; Poison's vomit didn't seem to be anywhere near her own mouth at times...it was small, insignificant things that don't wreck a game by any means but I'm a bit of a stickler for details like that so...yeah.
The swearing - now I know this has been a huge debatable topic for some time but honestly? Sometimes it just didn't work properly. It didn't carry the weight it ought to have done and some of the language didn't...fit, I suppose. Like when Dante says, "sh*tting hell" - who ever says that? I mean. really? Nobody - you'd pick a different expletive at the very least. Some characters like Mundus and to a degree Vergil lost some of their appeal to me by reverting to swearing in their dialogue - on the one hand I can see why (times of stress, anger etc) but on the other it's not like they've never encountered difficulties before so it seemed almost out of character at times.
Eva - wow. Did someone just drag some random woman in off the street, hand her a script and say, "read. read now. don't think, don't prepare, just read"? Absolutely ruddy awful bit of "acting" there - utterly unbelievable and not at all the compelling piece it perhaps ought to have been. Here is Dante, encountering his mother for the first time since her murder, and she's just talking at him in this rather stale and boring tone of voice before stating she loves him without a hint of emotion at all.
The catch-up scene in the house where Dante and Vergil lived as children was poorly done in my view. I'm not sure how they could have done it, but it shouldn't have been like that. It was like the worst, most B-movie cliched way of bringing everyone up to speed on Dante's past...I honestly thought it would have been better than that.
Aside from one or two perfectly-placed wry comments from Dante, his delivery was not great. Came off as quite same-y - whether that was the plan or not I don't know, but it got boring after a while.
The one-liners were embarrassing to listen to, for the most part. Whether that was a nice little throwback to previous DMC titles, I don't know - but to me they were cringe-worthy in places and crap at best.
The fight with Poison (or rather the cutscenes concerning it) was a classic example of poor dialogue, to me. It was just...yeah. No.
*******************************************
Overall, I think NT made a HUGE improvement in terms of voice actors, dialogue (for the most part) and of course the graphics and animation sequences were impressive to say the least. Still got zero interest in playing the game proper, but I'll just watch Steve do it instead.
One last thing - when Mundus changes into that uber-gigantic form...I immediately thought "Well hai thar, Megatron!" I'm such a geek...
First off, I want to point out that I don't have a degree in...well...anything and I'm not a student of anything even remotely creative - this is a viewpoint taken from a someone who is not only NOT part of the fanbase but also someone who is not trying to portray themselves as some sort of supa l33t h4x0r gamer or anything silly like that.
Things that I liked:
The graphics were, for the most part, very pretty indeed. I liked the fluidity of the whole real life/Limbo merging and I especially liked the attention to detail concerning facial expressions and gestures. There were some nice subtleties put in there that made the physical appearances of the characters seem more realistic and genuine.
The bit where Dante mentions his coat on the ferris wheel genuinely raised a little smile out of me - never before has a DMC game of any kind even begun to amuse me, so I was pretty surprised by that.
Voice acting was, on the whole, far more what I would like to see in games. There wasn't too much of that stilted "oh, is it my turn now?" sort of dialogue going on - there were some negatives to this, but I'll come to those in a bit. Phineas was one of my favourite voice actors, to be honest.
I really liked the characters of Kat, Phineas and Vergil - I liked how they were presented, how they interacted and the little things they did physically to pad out the scenes. I also liked Mundus up until towards the end of the game when he just...disappointed me (again, that comes later) - he was a villain I could enjoy watching.
I liked that Sparda's face is ripped off in the picture of him in the house - I dunno why I liked that, but I did.
The scene where Kat is taken by S.W.A.T was really good, I thought. I enjoyed how it was played out and it didn't have that whole "KYRIE!!!!11111ONE!" angst about it, which was nice. The apparent lack of concern by Vergil compared with Dante's hotheadedness over the situation was a nice contrast for me.
I anticipated there would be some jumpiness for some of the scenes because I wasn't watching the fight sequences, but it wasn't too bad in all fairness and it was kind of like watching a slightly-disjointed film.
I also liked the twitter-esque bit at the end where people are going nuts over the internet asking what's going on. Cheeky little @superninjatam in there too, which I liked.
Insofar as lack of character development goes, I actually think that there is plenty of room for manoeuvre, should NT make a sequel, and this is a good thing because there's not enough set in stone to tie their hands over any particular details. Loose ends can be a positive in this case...what would suck is a Mass Effect 3 style approach to finishing a game. So I hope they do make a sequel and start expanding a little more with certain characters and plot themes.
Things I didn't like:
Lilith was a total waste of time. From the stupid cliched monologue in the club to the stale delivery of almost every line she had (which, let's face it, weren't many), she was a character that could have never featured and I don't think anyone would really have cared. It felt like she was bunged in there just as a way of finding a reason to make Mundus all rageface later on.
A few blips where graphics were concerned, but these are really minor. Things like Kat's spray can just covering the entire stencil without her hardly moving it; the guy drinking a glass of Virility inside the factory and not actually filling the glass with anything first; Poison's vomit didn't seem to be anywhere near her own mouth at times...it was small, insignificant things that don't wreck a game by any means but I'm a bit of a stickler for details like that so...yeah.
The swearing - now I know this has been a huge debatable topic for some time but honestly? Sometimes it just didn't work properly. It didn't carry the weight it ought to have done and some of the language didn't...fit, I suppose. Like when Dante says, "sh*tting hell" - who ever says that? I mean. really? Nobody - you'd pick a different expletive at the very least. Some characters like Mundus and to a degree Vergil lost some of their appeal to me by reverting to swearing in their dialogue - on the one hand I can see why (times of stress, anger etc) but on the other it's not like they've never encountered difficulties before so it seemed almost out of character at times.
Eva - wow. Did someone just drag some random woman in off the street, hand her a script and say, "read. read now. don't think, don't prepare, just read"? Absolutely ruddy awful bit of "acting" there - utterly unbelievable and not at all the compelling piece it perhaps ought to have been. Here is Dante, encountering his mother for the first time since her murder, and she's just talking at him in this rather stale and boring tone of voice before stating she loves him without a hint of emotion at all.
The catch-up scene in the house where Dante and Vergil lived as children was poorly done in my view. I'm not sure how they could have done it, but it shouldn't have been like that. It was like the worst, most B-movie cliched way of bringing everyone up to speed on Dante's past...I honestly thought it would have been better than that.
Aside from one or two perfectly-placed wry comments from Dante, his delivery was not great. Came off as quite same-y - whether that was the plan or not I don't know, but it got boring after a while.
The one-liners were embarrassing to listen to, for the most part. Whether that was a nice little throwback to previous DMC titles, I don't know - but to me they were cringe-worthy in places and crap at best.
The fight with Poison (or rather the cutscenes concerning it) was a classic example of poor dialogue, to me. It was just...yeah. No.
*******************************************
Overall, I think NT made a HUGE improvement in terms of voice actors, dialogue (for the most part) and of course the graphics and animation sequences were impressive to say the least. Still got zero interest in playing the game proper, but I'll just watch Steve do it instead.
One last thing - when Mundus changes into that uber-gigantic form...I immediately thought "Well hai thar, Megatron!" I'm such a geek...
