V
Oldschool DMC fan
I fired this game up recently after a long time and I was just struck by how boring the combat was, how limited Dante's moves and weapons feel, and how lifeless all the characters but Lucia seem to be (because she actually has a character arc). This was the first DMC game I ever played, so I must have enjoyed it, but I think it was the concept of the game, demons etc. that drew me in, rather than the hacking/slashing because some of it is clunky as hell. I must just not have noticed it so much when it was the only one I had. After playing DMC2 for the first time, I went and got DMC1 and it was like going from black and white vision to colour. So much more detail to everything.
It feels like much of the game is set in random locations for the sheer sake of it, and the enemies appear for no reason at all (or none that is really given away), and don't seem to fit with their surroundings much. In DMC1 the enemies at least have a little congruity and relation to where they appear, since you're on a creepy island in a castle being specifically prepared for the coming of Hell's master; he has creepy voodoo-ish marionettes which he controls, flies live in the sewers, ghosts come out of paintings, demons that in inhabit statues or skulls are awoken, the hell realm is populated by suitable 'abominations'. In DMC2... what's all that industrial zone stuff for, again? A Mcguffin hunt? Or just going from a city to a weird garden and subterranean level...? In DMC1, 3 and 4 the locations follow on quite logically from one another. In 2 it's just... oh, here's a Cathedral, and here's some town, and here's an oil rig and here's a wind tunnel and here's a weird rotating electrocution level... zooming from one place to another. The final boss from Dante's POV is highly "meh" IMO, considering we don't know who the hell he is and I don't much care. It makes more satisfying sense who you fight as Lucia at the end, but the whole thing really feels like the new team got hold of it and just decided to shove things in having only glanced minimally at the former game's material, and not taken into account the importance of backstory, and players wanting to care about their characters. Not to mention someone lost Dante's personality down the back of a desk somewhere.
It feels like much of the game is set in random locations for the sheer sake of it, and the enemies appear for no reason at all (or none that is really given away), and don't seem to fit with their surroundings much. In DMC1 the enemies at least have a little congruity and relation to where they appear, since you're on a creepy island in a castle being specifically prepared for the coming of Hell's master; he has creepy voodoo-ish marionettes which he controls, flies live in the sewers, ghosts come out of paintings, demons that in inhabit statues or skulls are awoken, the hell realm is populated by suitable 'abominations'. In DMC2... what's all that industrial zone stuff for, again? A Mcguffin hunt? Or just going from a city to a weird garden and subterranean level...? In DMC1, 3 and 4 the locations follow on quite logically from one another. In 2 it's just... oh, here's a Cathedral, and here's some town, and here's an oil rig and here's a wind tunnel and here's a weird rotating electrocution level... zooming from one place to another. The final boss from Dante's POV is highly "meh" IMO, considering we don't know who the hell he is and I don't much care. It makes more satisfying sense who you fight as Lucia at the end, but the whole thing really feels like the new team got hold of it and just decided to shove things in having only glanced minimally at the former game's material, and not taken into account the importance of backstory, and players wanting to care about their characters. Not to mention someone lost Dante's personality down the back of a desk somewhere.