ATTENTION: UNBRIDLED AND SENSELESS RANT INCOMING
I've had this rant brewing for an extremely long time, but given the discussion, I feel it's relevant to finally commit to text. It's not about the franchise's progression, not about Capcom, not even about the individual games themselves...as I've serviced myself a sizable piece about the thing, or specifically the one game, responsible for the series' most serious maladies...No. This rant's mainly about what I think this article and many game journals online poorly articulate about the status of the Devil May Cry series, and the true nature of the conflict that arose in the reboot's presence....more importantly, the gestation and evolution of the series' most daunting and gluttonous predators: the Fanbase itself.
Now, I want to be perfectly transparent about something: the experiences I make mention of in this lengthy yarn is based on
NOTHING I have encountered on these forums in particular. As unnecessarily-heated and excessive as some of the discussions here on the good ol'
DMC.org can be, they are NOTHING compared to the toxic swath of rancid forum shrieking that can't even be remotely construed as "arguments" that took place on countless other more infested, and less civil forums on this protracted insanity test that is the Internet.
So I what exactly bothers me about the reboot, and its dissent among the fandom? What did the reboot "not deserve"? What exactly did the worst or the fandom do to degrade itself to the point where the entire gaming community took notice?
It's incredibly amusing that this point was made, because out of all the games in the series that have been released,
DmC actually reminds me more of the original game than any other has even tried to be. Its premise, its variety in environments, its horror roots, its approach to enemy design and functionality, even its portrayal of Dante, who revived the original's standout trait of being fleshed out and varied enough to pass off as an actual character, instead of the tripe one-note mannequin that he'd end up being for two straight games.
I love the original
DMC to death. It was the sole reason I bought my first PS2, and the only reason I clung to this series after the atrocities that were
DMC2, DMC3, and the
Animated Series. And I can safely say, without resignation, that no game in the franchise---not even
4---has come remotely as close as retreading the feeling of the original.
And the second you make that argument, people will instantly shriek:
"BUT DMC3 & 4 ARE MORE ESSENTIAL AND TRUE TO THE TONE OF DEVIL MAY CRY THAN THE ORIGINALS TWO GAMES!" Thus diminishing their relevance as entries in the series, and dismissed entirely when discussing the series as a whole, presumably because they don't resemble their more anime-esque successors.
See, DMC fanboys (fanBOYS being the crucially-key term here) all have continued to shelter themselves under the umbrella of delusion that DMC, as a series, remained triumphantly consistent under one style and tone, one that the reboot promptly cartwheeled in and dislodged entirely...
And that's why I'm here to plead yet again on how that is absolutely and egregiously not the case.
Now, please excuse the long-winded and overthought analysis I'm going to make, but I feel I have to make it here, given how I've never understood the line of thinking rooted in this mentality. I think people really forget how drastically
DMC shifted in tone and style when moving on from
DMC1 & 2 to
DMC3. The original style was more horror-esque, Gothic, with a lot of Western influences in the way the characters behaved and the arsenal they wielded---more akin to something like
Hellsing. That kind of comparison may seem like a stretch, but think about it: they're both made with the sole purpose of emulating what their respective creators consider cool, with a large emphasis on visceral, pulp satisfaction, woven into over-the-top characters that emulate a style in pulp novels and action films from the late 80's and 90's. Both even have a larger emphasis on excessive firearms than use of the supernatural. Dante's arsenal has a larger lean towards customized guns and bulking firepower than Devil Arms in
DMC1 & 2. In terms of style and tone, both of these are cut from the same cloth...and unlike later installments,
had predominantly Western influences. This tone was present and vibrant in both of the Kamiya-approved
DMC novels as well. Dante himself still acts more detective-like in these novels, and there's a larger emphasis on making him more like a Western action hero than a bishonen protagonist---and this was present in the stylization of other character in the novels as well.
But when
DMC3 sauntered in, reeking of outdated anime cliches and nonsensical action set-dressing, the tone of the entire series changed radically. There was a larger emphasis on fight scenes and visceral appeal than atmosphere or ambiance. Enemies and weapons became less grounded in mythological and occult styles, and more goofy and Japanese-ridden. The very notion of Dante sporting a K-Pop haircut, strumming on a demonic guitar whilst jamming talking in diabetes-inducing "cool lingo" like some autistic skater kid from the 90's clashed wildly with the kind of laid-back, professional air that Dante had retained in both the first two games and the original novels. The way Dante fought, the way the cutscenes played out...even the visual inspiration for the weapons, bosses, and locales seemed painfully uninspired compared to the older games. Whereas
DMC1 focused on explicitly Gothic environments and enemy types (Armored lizard warriors, Venetian puppets, grotesque insects, and spectral reapers), and
DMC2 had a balanced divide between urban and ancient enemy types and locales (infected choppers and tanks, vs. Baphomet-looking goat men and scaly gargoyles) ,
DMC3 introduced this random, garbled mess of an art style for its weapon and enemy assets, with a larger emphasis on making estranging and exaggerated designs. The other games felt committed to satisfying one kind of essence to how the game looked and felt, whereas later games just felt like the creators just jumbled together whatever they thought "looked and felt cool", versus making sense for the environment (flying enemies with giant buzzsaws for shields, eyeballs that shoot lasers, enemies lugging around giant explosives or coffins)...not entirely unlike, ironically enough, the kind of senseless, bubbly, nonsenical, anime-ish enemy types infesting the Godawful latter-day
Final Fantasy games...which is fairly-appropriate to associate with latter-day Dante himself, whose strumming of a lightning guitar and wielding of a "nunchuck-motorcycle" aren't entirely dissimilar to Snow Viliers' Shiva Cycle or Sazh's Brynhildr Dune Buggy. This really isn't about how the games play, or how the hack-n'-slash mechanics of the series developed over time...
(if anything, the later games didn't move
away enough from the older games...especially given how
DMC3 was still using the first game's clunky controls and cameras as late as 2005, well past the time its
competitors knew better) it's more to do with the tonal shift of the series as a whole. And to be perfectly honest---
despite what facetious and staunchly-clinging fans may claim in their biased fits of baseless elitism---that shift happened
WELL before
DmC ever entered the picture.
What I'm basically getting at here is that this series has
NEVER been consistant in tone or style, even within the boundaries of its original series. It crossed a bridge into another style of "cool" when the games transitioned from
2 to
3. You know this, I know this....every observant fan with a head on their shoulders and who's played the games for a long time know this.
"But Wolf!" I hear you cry;
"No one's talking about DmC's stylistic or tonal contradictions to the original series...the debate, the heart of the discussion, has always been about the GAMEPLAY!"
Really? Because I remember standing in the wake of the fire and brimstone of fan-broiled rage following
DmC's initial debut back in 2010 and not a
single person in the
Devil May Cry fanbase was making mention about the gameplay.
Was the rage over his hair? Nope. It was the hair, the look of Dante's clothes, his physique, the style of art and aesthetic choices, and everything else.
I saw all manner of petty complaints...and by petty, I mean
really petty. Things like his hair color and initial cigarette use were just the beginning: I can sit hear and quote for hours about how many comparisons people were making, calling the New Dante everything from a "Edward Cullen wannabe" to a "Emo cutter on crack" to a "Westified version of a perfectly-Japanese character". And they got even
pettier, with complaints like
"Rebellion isn't big enough, and looks underdesigned", "or Ebony and Ivory look exaggerated and overdesigned", or "Dante's not muscular enough", or "Dante looks too beat up and bruised---when everyone KNOWS he's too uber-OP to take damage", or "he's not supposed to smoke, he's only suppose to eat strawberry sundaes and pizza"
(even though the original Dante drinks, smokes and swears excessively in both of the Kamiya-based novels).The chest-slapping, shortbus-riding, ramen-swilling Naruto Headband-bedect seminal
idiots occupying the cancerous bowels of whatever dwindiling ruins making up the
Devil's Lair forums were too busy decrying the reboot on the basis of such mundane reasons, that they were unwittingly displaying the kind of shallow, petty whining that would make the Sonic Fanbase look like civil human beings...all because of aesthetic and stylistic changes to a franchise that was never stylistically consistent with its tone or characters to begin with. Not gameplay. Not mechanics. Not even legitimate grievances like the writing, the console port, or the casualized mechanics.
Now, keep in mind: this was two good years after
DMC4...by this time, I had dislodged myself from the fanbase years prior. My interest in the series had long been drained, and I was not even remotely interested in playing a tried-true sequel
OR a reboot. And if I hadn't indulged myself in revisiting the series through both the reboot and the HD Collection in recent years, you can bet that I would've
never come back. Because in the heat of this
stupid controversy, I never felt the cringe-inducing, wallowing urge to distance myself from the
DMC fandom than I did then. People were literally raging over this game, before a second of gameplay had even been shown....not because it was bad (and no one had anyway of truly knowing for a fact that it was, unless they had telepathic means to access the game three years before its release)....no, because it was
different.
This isn't the first time they've done this, either: These are the same people ostracized Nero mere seconds after he was revealed, disregarding any and all gameplay additions he could've brought as a new character, on the sole grounds that "he wasn't Dante", and therefore was deemed unacceptable before the game was even pressed to the disc. They anally ravaged Reuben Langdon when he was cast as the DMC3 Dante's voice, on the grounds that he wasn't Drew Coombs. Hell---the DMC Fanbase are the same livid, leering ingrates that actually committed themselves to a widespread petition to keep DMC4 PlayStation 3 exclusive to preserve its Sony exclusivity, because Capcom had the gall to attempt to subvert the series into the dangerous convenience of multi-platform inclusivity.
This is the DMC Fanbase, people. The simpering, puckered elitists so rigid and entitled, that they will assume frontline war positions at the vaguest mirage of change. This seething fanatical mentality has been apart of the series LONG before Keiji Inafune even breathed the proposition of a Western reboot into the greedy ears of Capcom's shareholders...before Ninja Theory was single-handedly credited as advocating "unnacceptablr and inconsistent changes" to a series as consistent and impervious to change as a ****ing chameleon on bath salts.
When people like me or a whole host of others refer to
"DmC deserving better than it got", it's almost exclusively the reaction it got on reveal, not the reception the game got in the wake of its release. Fan and non-fans alike can praise or trash the game to their hearts' content, because at that point,
the game was already out.
That kind of fanbase,
THAT kind of soulless, braindead, superficial, addle-brained, cult-like fanbase is not only what
DmC doesn't deserve, but the actual
Devil May Cry series doesn't deserve either. These whiny, bleating, vapid, entitled
children were and still are an outright embarassment on the gaming communty, as well as to as storied and embedded in gaming culture as
Devil May Cry. These gibbering anime-obsessed Japanophiles have left this franchise more violated and defiled than the Vatican's favorite chamber boy.
The franchise's biggest enemy, its
worst asset isn't the incompetence of its producers or publisher...it's having quite possibly the
WORST fanbase on the internet, and in gaming at large.
I s'pose probably not since Kamiya didn't want him to, and probably would have had references to smoking taken out.
