you know what guys, the way i see it, devil may cry as a series deserved better especially from the company
Truest statement on this thread. Even the best games of this franchise have suffered from Capcom's abysmally-poor business and creative decisions....decisions, I've noticed, many fans continue to ignore. It's easy to blame scapegoats like Kobayashi or Antoniades for how some of these games end up turning out, but many people tend to forget the lengths Capcom as a publisher will go to sink its manipulative tendrils on a product.
Oh, what's that?
DMC2 can't be made yet, because the original team is still working on the first game? Don't worry---get a completely new team to work on it without prior experience on working on a
type of game still new to the industry. The shoe-horning of the Diesel Brand---
that'll sell the game. Oh, fans didn't like how silent and placid Dante was in
DMC2? Let's overcompensate by literally turning the character into the Japanese equivalent of Deadpool on acid, and dedicate every second he has on-screen to bludgeoning the player to death about how much nonsensical anime crap he can do, and how many one-note, personality-killing moments we can cram in.
Oh, what's that?
DMC4 might need a budget extension so more cutscenes could be made? Well, let's see...we
COULD just tell Kobayashi to tone it down with the mo-cap costs and amount of cutscenes, and put the remainder of the budget into more levels---but that would mean more commitment to creativity, and by extension, more work! The fans won't care about running through the same levels again---not as long as each level is wallpapered in overproduced cutscenes and anime nonsense! After all,
that's what sold the last game...not the GAMEPLAY, or anything. Wait, WHAT? What do you mean
DMC4 didn't make its budget back in sales? Clearly WE aren't to blame---this is obviously a result of Western gamers not liking their action games too hard, or their games too Japanese. How's about we REBOOT the franchise instead of patching up
the mistakes we've made to the franchise ourselves, and dump both the work and the pressure of living up to the standard set by previous games on a completely different studio? That way, whether or not the game succeeds or fails, we'll emerge blameless as a result!
I've literally never seen another Japanese game company operate at Capcom's bewildering level of incompetence:
SEGA can rush both in-house projects and 3rd-party games to obscenity, but at least attempt to analyze the problem and even
apologize to fans, instead of blaming everyone but themselves. Square Enix might flat-out bar the input of the "Godless Western audience" altogether, but at least THEY let their smaller dev studios like Crystal Dynamics and Eidos Montreal operate without breathing down their necks like a haggard sex predator. Even Konami, as oblivious to modern business practices that they are (a status they
upheld quite well with Hideo Kojima as Vice President of the company), they, at least, took sound decisions when preserving a lot of their more valued franchises like
Castlevania and
Silent Hill, when reviving them for modern consoles and trusting outside developers like MercurySteam and Vatra Games, without mismanaging the budgets and manipulating the final product like leering ingrates.
Capcom has done each and every possible think to exploit their own properties, mismanage game budgets, shut out the voice of the consumer, and being a abhorrent pest to the studios they hire to work on games. They will unapologetically defend their own shady business practices, even when a game they ship is literally found to be half-finished. And they will blame partner studios, the Western gaming climate, their own development teams, or sometimes even
THE FANS THEMSELVES before ever considering leveling some of the blame on themselves.