Late reply, but I just wanted to say that I came on too strong.
No worries…I came off as a pretty strong myself. And harsh. But, in my defense, I’ve probably been confronted with this question more than any other concerning any fandom I’m a part of. For whatever reason, it seems ludicrous to play the
Devil May Cry games and not be infatuated by Dante, and everything he is.
I didn't mean that the games would not be enjoyable if you didn't like Dante, but I find it a bit strange that you would love the games so much (and even join a forum about them) if you hated Dante.
I’ve addressed this before, but I’ll do so again for the sake of clarification. Excluding the exceptional hack-and-slash gameplay that the series provides, I like
Devil May Cry’s other qualities. I like the Gothic influences, the lore and mythos (as vague and poorly-explained as it is), the multitude of diverse demonic forces, the stellar backdrops and character designs….and of course, I’m a big fan of the soundtrack. I have plenty of reasons to love the franchise and discuss my affinity for it on a forum.
I understand Dante is a primary part of
Devil May Cry, but to me, he’s not what makes the game great. It may sound like heresy, but I’ve never found him as cool or appealing as everyone else…and in recent years, I’ve actually grown to despise him for how much of a Deviantartist’s Gary Stu fan-character he is. I find him underdeveloped, uninteresting, completely lacking in emotional variety or depth…and just overall an obnoxious character. In fact, watching people trash the New Dante is pretty funny, because my hatred for the Old Dante is much stronger and has spanned a much longer time period than DmC’s sheer existence.
All the games focus pretty strongly on Dante. He's got a lot of screen time.
He
does have a lot of screen time….in the cutscenes. And I’ve found myself skipping the cutscenes just to make his presence seem less of a hinderence. True, I’ll miss out on the superb choreography of the cutscenes, but I’d rather it didn’t come with the price of Dante laughing and whooping like a 9-year-old on a sugar-coated cocaine binge, all while shrieking one-liners that wouldn’t sound out of place in something like
Batman and Robin.
Dante is also the character you control in the gameplay, so since you don't like him, wouldn't that mean the gameplay is a bit soured by his presence? I guess I questioned your hate for Dante because characters are usually very important to gamers, especially young gamers. They can make or break games for them... and I'm assuming you were pretty young when you first played DMC. So I assumed your dislike of Dante would 'break' the game for you.
When I first picked up
Devil May Cry on that fateful summer afternoon all those years ago, I greeted the game’s simplistic and cliché-ridden story with all the interest of a college student sitting through a Macroeconomics lecture. I didn’t care about what was going on…and I forgot the story mere moments after the credits rolled. I could say the same about all the other games in the series, and I retained that mindset up until I was old enough to contemplate what was going on. Then, the stories in games like
Devil May Cry 3, which went out of its way to illustrate tension and drama, all while trying paint Dante as some kind of “badass”, really kicked into gear when I started to read into them…and how profoundly irritating he was as a character.
Did it kill the game for me? Nope…I had played and loved these games for a long time. I wasn’t going to let sudden qualms with the main protagonist stop me from murdering demons and having a good time.
I just could not see myself ever playing a game of which only the gameplay interested me. I need games to have stories and characters I like, so that I have a motivation to play. I may have projected my standpoints onto you too much. If you like the games only because of the gameplay, that's fine. I was just amazed at that, that's all.
Dude, if I couldn’t enjoy a game because its characters or story got in the way, I probably wouldn’t be able to enjoy half the games I love today. How do you think I enjoy games like
Resident Evil or
Metroid Prime? It’s not the compelling narrative or characters in these games that make me enjoy them, it’s the scenarios they allow, the
idea of the characters in them.
Resident Evil has some of the worst voice-acting, characters, and plots to ANYTHING to known to man. The appeal lies in the scenario…the idea of being a STARS agent clambering through infected corpses, covered in zombie innards, with one bullet still left in your pistol…the idea of being a survivor in horrifying conditions. There’s barely any context or story in the
Metroid series, and the one instance it
did was in the universally-blasted tripe that was
Other M. What makes it engaging is the idea of being a lone bounty hunter on a desolate planet, overcoming obstacles and laying waste to parasitic insects and alien monstrosities.
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night has a story and voice acting that belongs in a $5-budget B-movie. The appeal lies in the idea of being a dhampir diving into the bowels of your father’s castle, proving yourself as the superior monster amongst these petty demons and hulking bosses.
The same thing can be said about
Devil May Cry. If you took the wooden voice-acting and shoddily-written dialogue out of the equation, it just boils down to an invincible demon hunter slaughtering hordes of demons in a castle or confined area, with combat finesse and agility that makes you feel like a badass. It’s the
idea, the
scenario that holds the appeal…not the character himself.
If I wanted an action game with a character and story that was coherent and well-told with a character I’m 100% invested in, I wouldn’t play
Ninja Gaiden, I wouldn’t touch
God of War, I wouldn’t approach
Bayonetta, and I certainly wouldn’t go NEAR
Devil May Cry….
…I’d go to
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. 
