Oh ya I agree there , the hd collection ruined the difficulty
Not ruined, reverted back to its original. Just like how DMC3SE reverted the difficulties back to their original settings.
For those who don't want to go down the list:
The Devil’s In The Disappointment
To begin, I must go all the way back to Devil May Cry 1. When the Devil May Cry HD Collection was released, Capcom were praised for ‘fixing’ the control scheme of the first game as people found jumping with Triangle to be awkward. However, Capcom didn’t ‘fix’ it per se, they just used a version that ‘wasn’t broken’.
Believe it or not, the original Japanese version of Devil May Cry actually used X to jump and Triangle for melee. For proof, here is a screenshot of the control scheme.
Triangle reads “剣攻撃” – Sword Attack.
Capcom decided to use the Japanese version of DMC1 for the HD release and injected the English text into the game. This decision led people to believe that they had
become action game gods:
I played DMC1 HD at a friend’s house last night, and I swear it felt easier than the original version…Does anyone else feel like they toned down the difficulty? Or did I just magically get better at this game…?
– Yoshi006, 2012
The answer in this case is the former.
Here we cut back to our friend BassOmegaX. After comparing both the Japanese and American versions of Devil May Cry via RAM watching,
he came to this conclusion:
In DMC1 USA, Dante’s attacks do 80% of the damage compared to the JPN version on Normal and Hard mode…In addition, Dante takes 20% more damage from regular enemies compared to the JPN version on all modes, including DMD.
– BassOmegaX, 2015
So there we have it, Devil May Cry 1 was made artificially harder in Western regions compared to its Japanese counterpart.
When it was time to make Devil May Cry 2, Capcom
rolled out a global survey on Devil May Cry 1 to see what changes they could implement into the sequel. All regions complained about the game’s difficulty, which later resulted in Devil May Cry 2’s
pathetic difficulty:
It seems somewhere along the line that Capcom took the criticism of DMC being too hard for the casual audience and went completely the other way, making it harder to die than not…right now we’re praying that the challenge ramps up soon, or else this is in serious danger of being labelled one of the easiest games of all time…
– Eurogamer, 2003
Unfortunately, the difficulty never did ramp up, and Western reviewers and players alike were
especially cut-throat about it:
Our first impressions six weeks ago seemed to confirm these reports that the game was almost embarrassingly easy for anyone in possession of two functioning thumbs.
– Eurogamer, 2003
Wanting to avoid the mistake of making another game that was too easy, it seems that Capcom made the decision to make a sequel harder than Devil May Cry 2, while following in Devil May Cry 1’s footsteps of making it easier for the Japanese market. This would explain the Eastern vs Western difficulty difference, but
not the NTSC-PAL difference within the West.
This is simultaneously the most interesting part of the story and the part that nobody other than myself has figured out. If you’ll stay with me, I can explain to you why Europe received Devil May Cry 3’s Japanese difficulty settings rather than America’s.
