Silent Hill 2 also has more characters than any Devil May Cry game. It's about tied with 4, but in SH they do much more with each one over a much longer period of time.
Exactly. As I mentioned, the one game in
DMC that actually had a multitude of characters was
4, and even with that wealth of narrative sways the writers could've taken with those, the same way a game with similar-sized cast like
Silent Hill would, they didn't really opt to do anything with them. Most of the new characters introduced in
DMC4 were very much disposable objects to the plot, and their introduction and removal didn't do a whole lot for the narrative in terms of giving it weight or investment from the player.
The main point I was making is that even if you have a small number of characters, like
SH2 does, you can still write them well enough so that it feels like you have a larger and more substantial collection of characters in the story, even if you really only have seven or eight.
It's not the quantity I'm emphasizing, but the quality.
DMC4 could have MORE characters than all the
Silent Hill games combined, but with its quality of writing, would still feel scarce and barren because of inconsequential and meaningless they are.
Even with a generous interpretation, Alan Wake has twice over as many major characters as DMC4, and again nearly all of them get more screen time than the DMC cast. I mean, just compare the amount of screen time taken up by Sarah as compared to Lady, or even Alice to Kyrie. You can call that a failing of DMC if you like, but the two games are so drastically different in focus, structure, and especially length that I don't think it's really a valid comparison.
Naturally when the stakes are magnified, something taking place on a small scale can feel just as important as something taking place on a large scale. But moreover, AW and SH are effectively normal universes with some supernatural elements that exist, narratively, to serve as a tool for exploring characters, while DMC is much more directly fantastic. Even if the characters in SH and AW were badly written, they'd feel more realistic than DMC's characters, because DMC is much more inherently outside the bounds of realism.
Then maybe that's a call for the
DMC series' cutscenes to shift the priority from having high-octane, choreographed action sequences to actual interactions or developmental moments for the characters.
DMC4 also had the disadvantage of having a botched developmental cycle, so it probably didn't retain the screentime for each of its characters that it might've intended in the first place, so I'm at least willing to forgive that game.
But the idea that because
DMC4, or really any other game in the series is too different of a genre to invite any kind of comparison isn't all that relevant when you consider that
Silent Hill 2 as a game provided more character interaction with its supporting cast than other horror games of its time. The genre and focus isn't of consequence, it's all about
execution. The original
Resident Evil games were at the height of their popularity just prior to
SH2's release, and most of the story and character interactions were quite sparse in comparison. Again, as you said, you could fault that with a difference in focus and structure...but maybe that opens the discussion of what
DMC's focus and structure of its story really should be. Other hack-n'-slash games like
Lords of Shadow, Legacy of Kain, and even
Darksiders manage to structure their stories far better than
DMC can, and they BELONG in the same genre. You rightfully claim that the stakes in
DMC are lowered significantly because of the superpowered and far-fetched nature of its universe, but a lot of that applies to other hyper-stylized action games in the same genre, that still manage to outpace
DMC in terms of characters and story, purely by better-executed writing.
Are the focus and structure different in
DMC? Absolutely. But whether or not that's a creative decision or a failing doesn't change how the characters themselves in
DMC, arguably the crux of series' overall narrative (since lore and plot intricacy are apparently something Capcom's writers aren't ever intent on truly exploring within these games), are lacking in interaction and development to make the stakes of their role in each game relevant in any fashion at all. Other games
in the same genre are managing to do it better, and when
DMC fans that are far less critical or harsh about the series than I am are vocalizing on other threads about how much they want the story and the characters to improve, you can't really call this a problem unique explicitly to me.
Perhaps that sense of lacking in the central characters is precisely why so many fans are so willing to urge Capcom to introduce new characters or new writing talent.
