Fun fact, Itsuno actually wanted to make a DmC 2
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Remember when...
- Thread starter Handsome Devil Sparda
- Start date
The problem with Dante from the reboot is that he just isn't likeable. The game never try to give him some qualities to make the player like him. He's overall a dick to almost everyone, and the game just tell us that he lived his childhood fighting police or doing edgy **** like cutting himself open to see if he has a heart (christ that's stupid) without showing anything, so now he is a punk.
Also there is no comic reliever in DmC since Dante is supposed to be the comic reliever but does it so badly with edgy jokes. That means no one is stopping the edge of Dante, and no one like an edgy main character non stop. Dante taking the defence of humanity in the end scene is so stupid too, just why does he take it ? He was cleary after Mundus for revenge, why does he suddently care about others ? Oh yes, the Definitive Edition answered that by making him chasing Kat's booty.
What is likeable in reboot Dante ? He's edgy, a dick to everyone, throw punchlines worthy of a 10 years old trying to be cool. When you compare that to the original Dante, you see why he is so disliked.
Also there is no comic reliever in DmC since Dante is supposed to be the comic reliever but does it so badly with edgy jokes. That means no one is stopping the edge of Dante, and no one like an edgy main character non stop. Dante taking the defence of humanity in the end scene is so stupid too, just why does he take it ? He was cleary after Mundus for revenge, why does he suddently care about others ? Oh yes, the Definitive Edition answered that by making him chasing Kat's booty.
What is likeable in reboot Dante ? He's edgy, a dick to everyone, throw punchlines worthy of a 10 years old trying to be cool. When you compare that to the original Dante, you see why he is so disliked.
Speak for yourself. I liked reboot Dante plenty. He has honest moments with Kat and more or less softens up to her right after their first meeting when, if he were consistently A Dick To Everyone, he wouldn't have accepted her offer and a ride to the Order's HQ and instead punched another cop or whatever people think he did, or he would've shot her in the first mission. Did their whole dialogue in the car not happen in your copy of the game, or Dante reassuring Kat when the SWAT raided the Order HQ?
DmC Dante wasn't given any chances to flesh out and grow as a character and the only in-game portrayal of him is in a single title.
If the original Devil May Cry never had any sequel, I'd forever remember him as the weird dude who said "fill your dark soul with light".
Back in 2001, me and my friend casually called Dante "B-Grade Man", because that's the impression I got.
DMC2's portrayal of "stoic" Dante may have made him appear more boring.
Dante only started feeling more iconic when they reinvented him with his "wild wacky", rocket-surfing, pizza-guzzling personality in DMC3.
DmC Dante's personality isn't all that bad, it's just I already saw that "started out uncaring and ended up caring" transformation in DMC3.
I might have been more impressed if I played DmC before DMC3.
If the original Devil May Cry never had any sequel, I'd forever remember him as the weird dude who said "fill your dark soul with light".
Back in 2001, me and my friend casually called Dante "B-Grade Man", because that's the impression I got.
DMC2's portrayal of "stoic" Dante may have made him appear more boring.
Dante only started feeling more iconic when they reinvented him with his "wild wacky", rocket-surfing, pizza-guzzling personality in DMC3.
DmC Dante's personality isn't all that bad, it's just I already saw that "started out uncaring and ended up caring" transformation in DMC3.
I might have been more impressed if I played DmC before DMC3.
I mean, clearly they tried to imply that he cares about humanity cause he grew to care about Kat, which is a human. The problem with that is that he's never shown caring for anyone else BUT Kat (even when the Order HQ gets attacked, he's still mainly really worried about her, not so much about the other people in there), so for him to in the end take all of humanity under his protection feels forced and kind of out of nowhere. In fact the whole ending feels rushed, trying to mimic DMC1's and 3's, there's stuff to say about his confrontation with Vergil too but that's not the point.
They should have stuck with more personal vibes like it was in DMC3 if they really wanted to mirror the Lady thing rather that bring mankind into the equation, they most likely did it cause they felt they had to in order for Dante to go ahead and have a reason to open a demon hunting shop in the sequel like in the originals, I dunno. It just doesn't work very well though.
To add to that, I believe the decision to make it about demons and angels hurt this too. In the originals, Dante goes the extra step beyond his personal revenge for his mother (human herself) and protects humans because he eventually grew to accept the legacy of his father, which rose to justice and stood up for mankind. Taking humanity completely out of Dante's backstory in DmC makes his sudden desire to protect it in the end even more forced than it already is, for the sake of making him more like the original Dante. It works for the latter but not the former.
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The moment in the car is the only moment Kat is developped, and it's a big talk scene where we again see nothing just like with Dante. If we were meant to care for her, why not simply make her chased by one of those demons that haunted her ? Add to it some Dante flashback of him being assaulted in the same way during his past, and now there is some bonding forming over that. This would make Dante look less like a jerk and more of a traumatized boy who cutted all link with others people as a copping mecanism
Dante already had his flashbacks in the Virility factory. He could see demons. The people at the orphanage meant to take care of him were demons. He's literally shown running out of the place. He turned cynical and acted out, got violent, gained a criminal record and a reputation, and otherwise "self-medicated" with alcohol and sex to cope with the fact that no one saw the world the way he did and he was being convinced he was crazy. Then he met Kat who, y'know, went through the same thing, was told she was crazy for seeing demons and put on drugs. Her conversation with Dante in the car was a follow-up from her mention of using astral projection to "escape nightmares" when she was a child; her foster father was abusive and Limbo was a reprieve from that. She already killed him by the time Dante meets her. But Dante straight-up asks her why she would willingly come to Limbo as a child knowing what's in it, as a show of concern and not jerkily making fun of her decisions.
Do you have some kind of fixation with seeing people actively be victimized before you begin to care about them, especially when it's child abuse? You need to take that up with God.
So... we're just going to ignore that the entire history of classic DMC hinges on the fact that Sparda, 100% non-human, for whatever reason took up arms against his own kind? He certainly didn't know all of humanity to try and protect it, and we don't know if he knew all of humanity, and DMC5 retconning the Qliphoth into Mundus's backstory means that Sparda allowed hundreds of thousands of people to die before he redeemed himself, so how do people determine how many humans is enough humans to save the world over, exactly?
Every single game has had the characters fixate on a more personal stakes and extend it to them saving the world over it. It's not like the protagonists selectively choose what part of their world to save when they defeat the villain and stop the guy from wrecking the rest of the world as a consequence.
DMC3 Dante "at first, didn't give a damn" about anything but only interacting with one person (Lady) puts him into shuffling his selfishness aside and accept his place in the story to defeat Vergil and save the world. Before that he was so uncaring that he was already aware that the town he was living in was ransacked by demons throughout a year and additional casualties happened when the tower rose, and he still hung up on a caller just because he didn't name his business. What a guy.
DMC1 Dante realized through one person (Trish) that he fought not only out of revenge but to protect others from the same tragedy he felt, of losing someone they love, but until then, even he didn't understand why Sparda would fight alone against all of Hell until he saw Trish in danger and went to save her anyway, but Trish looks like his mother so his reason boils back down to "losing Eva". (See: Precious Tears sound DVD)
DMC4, Nero literally only cares about Fortuna because one person (Kyrie) loves the town, and he wants to protect what she holds dear. Dante quips about the Savior having wings when Credo is nearby, dying, and trades his proactivity in for letting Nero save the world because Nero reminds him of one person (Vergil).
DMC5, now Dante's "reason" for fighting is Urizen and thus Vergil. Still one person. Doesn't seem to care about people in general given that he rejected V's job until V mentioned Vergil being responsible, and even then was perfectly accepting of Trish and Lady going first to get their butts kicked. If a demon with the exact same power level as Urizen were in the game and it wasn't Vergil, he'd still think it was a prank and let some other sadsack take the work. And then the world ends because Dante is too lazy. The end.
Nero himself walks away while innocent humans get skewered by a demonic tree and comes back in a month (dat urgency, am I right?) but seems more fixated on the part where Dante called him a deadweight more than the part where innocent people are dying, and even nonchalantly quips more than once that Dante might be dead already and how little he cares about it ("If Dante's alive, we save him. If not, we don't" + "No body? No dried-up Dante jerky? Nothin'?"). He stands around pouting about the "deadweight" comment and trying to prove himself to a guy he doesn't care about because his inferiority complex got triggered. And then what turns him around is Vergil being his father and suddenly it turns out he has a hang-up over not being able to save Credo so now he has to stop Dante and Vergil from killing each other, in which an entire facet of his character springs up because one person (Vergil) turns out to be more related to him than he thought and it even erases the animosity he had over Vergil being the guy that ripped off his arm. Apparently, not even the fact that Sanctus revealed Nero as "the Blood of Sparda" in the fourth game hit him as hard and made him care about what's going on in DMC5, his relationship with Dante off the back of 4 regressed to the point where didn't give a damn about Dante through the first half or so of 5, and... what else?
But DmC Dante interacts with Kat, gets given a whole speech by Eva about why she and Sparda did what they did, how it affected Dante, and her attempts to make amends with, "You will have a great power. A power that will allow you to forge your own path. That, my son, is freedom." but like... it's totally out of left field that he takes in any of that and thus fights for humanity to have its own power and forge their own path, which is why he'd oppose Vergil replacing Mundus and putting them under his thumb? His being demon-angel instead of demon-human makes him totally unrelatable but Sparda being 100% demon and doing the same thing isn't?
Aight then. Carry on.
@Densetsu no Makenshi DmC Dante does get white hair at the end of the game. So he didn't wait that long anyway.
I guess they wanted an ironic joke with the wig. Marvel's Luke Cage did something similar. In his show on Netflix, it poked fun at his old comic book outfit from the 70s. It just felt more mean-spirited.
It's also supposed to signify a heroic turn at the end but i would've preferred him donning his DMC1 look at the end. But DMC3 already did that ... .
I guess they wanted an ironic joke with the wig. Marvel's Luke Cage did something similar. In his show on Netflix, it poked fun at his old comic book outfit from the 70s. It just felt more mean-spirited.
It's also supposed to signify a heroic turn at the end but i would've preferred him donning his DMC1 look at the end. But DMC3 already did that ... .
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Wha...
The obvious (or at least I thought it was obvious) and vital difference between the two is that the latter has always been barely even a character and more of an off screen plot device, the former is the protagonist of the story. The latter can afford to be "unrelatable" (which I never said he wasn't, my post was not about him), cause you're not supposed to care about him as a character so whatever. You are supposed to care, however, about Dante and his development, especially considering Ninja Theory's talks about the narrative quality of their game in interviews and shizz.
He's never shown pondering on what Eva tells him or growing an ideal about humanity from the interactions with Kat so they're kinda moot. It just kinda gets brought up in the ending, out of the blue things get from personal to idealistic without a gradual progression throughout the game that his tete-a-tete's with Kat and Eva could have provided a good basis for.
And then your tangent about Nero, using him as an argument, again as if I was "justifying" him being "unrelatable" in my comment when I never even brought him up in the specific post you quoted, like huh? I know you love to do these long ass posts but mincing words gets trite pretty quick.
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Mincing words = making them more palatable and polite.
That doesn't mean what you think it means.
The obvious (or at least I thought was obvious) point is that people disparaging the reboot have accepted the classic series is founded on a detail they themselves claim is unrelatable on a protagonist (the fact that he's not even human, which is irrelevant to the relatability of a character in general), and Dante "only caring about one person" in the reboot is especially disingenuous considering Dante (and then Nero) have consistently pinned their own character development on one person per game (specified in parentheses in case you didn't know who I was talking about).
I mean, I know I wrote a lot, but that's not an excuse for you not to read it.
That doesn't mean what you think it means.
The obvious (or at least I thought was obvious) point is that people disparaging the reboot have accepted the classic series is founded on a detail they themselves claim is unrelatable on a protagonist (the fact that he's not even human, which is irrelevant to the relatability of a character in general), and Dante "only caring about one person" in the reboot is especially disingenuous considering Dante (and then Nero) have consistently pinned their own character development on one person per game (specified in parentheses in case you didn't know who I was talking about).
I mean, I know I wrote a lot, but that's not an excuse for you not to read it.
You surely know about the show don't tell rule right ? Because what I said is the reboot never show us anything about Dante or Kat (no, 2 pictures isn't showing). We just get a big exposition scene in the car where Kat explains her backstory, and at this point no one care about her. You can tell me all you want about how tragic someone backstory is, it will never have the same effect as showing it. The same goes for Dante backstory, we never get to see what happened or even see his trauma actually have an effect on him. And even after that, Kat just get nothing more. She is just the damsel in distress to save, then she just disappear until the end scene.
The reboot has this awesome idea called Limbo where reality is deformed, so why not use it to actually show those traumatic events ? Like Mundus surely got a record of Dante's past, why isn't he using it against him ? Like trap him in a representation of his trauma in the Limbo. That would have allowed to show what Dante endured, and it could have extended to Kat. This would have been way more efficient than just a random exposition scene in a car where the player just doesn't care at all.
Nice try, but you were already calling it bull when they showed a picture of Dante cutting himself open, so I sincerely doubt you wouldn't find something else to complain about in an extended sequence where Dante or Kat get assaulted by their childhood traumas. People already assumed just from Kat's exposition about her foster father abusing her that she was being sexually violated and not simply beaten the way a drunk father would (or psychological/mental attacks that'd be just as traumatizing and abusive), and the "sexual assault" conclusion is assumed specifically to hate on the reboot for going too far and being gratuitous because it has a reputation for being "edgy". So, no, you're not getting the benefit of the doubt on that one.
You know the important part of Show, Don't Tell? It's about allowing the reader to come to their own conclusions about something instead of bludgeoning them over the head directly with blunt details, without being gratuitous. Telling is still important to maintain pacing and not overstretch the length of a work, because not everything needs to be shown, and some characters simply don't work that way (Kat is not going to go J.R.R. Tolkien to talk about her past, and Mundus was already suggested to be torturing Kat for information when she was held hostage). If showing every time worked every time, there wouldn't be articles calling it the most misunderstood, poorly elaborated piece of advice that needs a "balance" instead of regurgitated constantly by amateurs that learned a new trick.
Yes telling is important, but developping a bond between two character during a random car trip with an 2 minutes exposition scene is just a bad exposition scene. Like both characters are here and "blablaba I'm a tragic character blablabla I got raped blablabla". Nothing is happening during the scene, it's just a car trip. The audience just get bored with that. Sure the informations will be given, but the way of delivering them is bad since the audience is like "Oh yeah that's tragic... I guess I'm not really listening".
Another way to do a good exposition scene would be the reveal of Lady's motivation in DMC 3. The scene doesn't come from nowhere, Lady just witnessed that the man she chased for so long got killed by another and she basically has no other goal in her life. So having her spilling the beans to the only person with her isn't that random, especially given that she saw him before and he has been quite nice with her until now. The scene isn't just boring talk, it is actually a fight scene to keep the audience invested in it while the informations is given. Plus Lady is actually very emotional during the scene, which the audience understand why, thus keeping their attention even more. That's a good exposition scene, far better than two teenagers talking during a car trip with nothing happening. As I said, no one like an edgy character talking about how edgy he is with no background.
If we actually had a level where those trauma comes to life with the Limbo, we could then have an exposition scene right after Kat confronted visions of her past made real by Mundus. There we could have some background to the scene, to keep the attention of the audience because they just saw a twisted thing chase a terrorized Kat and want to know more about it.
I took a while to get around to this, but lol, what?
You weren't listening. She was "attacked", not raped. She is not a rape victim. People assume she was raped to make bad faith arguments about how edgy everything is, yet nonsensically ask for it to be displayed more gratuitously on screen. See also: complaining about Kat being a "damsel in distress" but wanting her torture at the hands of Mundus rendered on camera, because somehow actually seeing a woman in pain totally tracks with complaining about how bad it is that she's in distress at all, even though her being beaten on-screen wouldn't make her any more likely to save herself if the narrative already has that she doesn't (at that moment in time), it just means she gets beaten. Kat even has an "out" with her astral projection and wandering Limbo to escape her suffering and people still don't think that's enough.
You got bored with the dialogue and wanted more. You are not the whole audience. As I've said, it delivered the information it needed to, and similar "showing" scenes happened with Dante and his backstory that you complained about. You're actually a poor representative of an audience, see above, me calling bull on your claims that this is what you want, you not saying anything to the contrary.
Again, do you have some kind of fixation with seeing people actively be victimized before you begin to care about them, especially when it's child abuse? You need to take that up with God.
You thought that was good?
Here's how that exposition scene actually went down, with context.
Lady has tried to kill Dante twice now, once with an absently-fired shot from her rocket launcher, and another time by head-shotting him directly after he saved her life even though she had no plan to stop her own fall or any actual way to get down from where she stopped at (no, things happening in Offscreenville doesn't make it valid or sensible). So that's twice she tried killing him even before she found out he was a demon, much less done anything to prove himself immoral. Then she popped him in the mouth for good measure. So she was perfectly fine committing murder on her way to committing patricide, for no real reason than her characterization is boiled down to "Strong Female Character"/"psychotic tsundere with moe aesthetic". Dante wasn't necessarily nice with Lady either- -he flirted at her, complained at her, didn't make a real effort to put her on safe ground and flirted at her some more in response to an illogical request, left her stuck at the side of a tower as if that's any place for anyone to be, and made passes at her later on implying she'd ever want to date him. That's not something worth shooting a man in the head for, but that's what he got. They're both dumb.
She did not witness Arkham be killed. She saw his dead body and no one else around except one guy, and immediately accused the only other person there solely because of her prejudice, yet despite her prejudicial thought that Dante is a "demon" and he "knows nothing about family"-- and her opinion doesn't change in Mission 14, she restates it then too-- she spills her guts out about her family drama to someone that she thinks doesn't care. Someone that she already accuses of murdering her father. He didn't answer conclusively one way or the other but he gave the answer he did to rile her up, she took the bait (again, psychotic tsundere), started shooting him and threw a whole tantrum about how he stole her kill and how important Arkham was to her and her personal vengeance quest. And again, despite her prejudicial thought of Dante being a heartless, murderous demon that understands nothing about family, she lets him go and turns her back to him without any fear that he could murder her like the heartless, murderous demon that she already assumes he is.
She doesn't even know why he's in that tower. She already assumes he's against her (at least, not on the same moral alignment) and all he's said about himself is "dysfunctional family, lol". She doesn't even know who Vergil is, much less the excuse Arkham gives later about him being deceived by Vergil. Dante gave her 0 reason to trust him with her backstory but she gave it to him because....?
That's it. I don't know how you missed it, or why you ignore it. She divulges her personal issue to some random man she doesn't trust. She doesn't even know his name, hasn't given her own name to him, he hasn't earned her trust or shown he's on her side, nor has she shown she's on his side. They interact for about 15 minutes in the whole game and she spends most of it being racist and denying his ability to feel any emotions or empathy. She just tells her backstory to tell it even though she thinks he wouldn't understand, although to anyone with common sense, if he already doesn't care, her ranting to him about it won't make him care, and a few missions later she still talks at him like he didn't change at all. She did it to hear the sound of her own voice? It was a vanity project?
She also divulges her personal issue in a way that fails to connect to him since it obscures the significance of her mother and places more emphasis on the fact that that random dead man is her father.
Try watching the scene or reading the script again- -the bond established by her rant is hers with Arkham as father-and-daughter, and she's betrayed because he turned out to be a bastard, not because her mother meant anything to her. Arkham gave Mary her name, Arkham read her bedtime stories. Kalina has done nothing except get a gun named after her, post-mortem. She's not even a person. Kalina Ann has no bond established in that exposition, and she could have been as likely Lady's mother as her step-mother or any woman that Arkham could marry; what she is (as explained to Dante) is "Arkham's wife", not necessarily anything closer than that such as a mother-and-child bond that should be there. Dante could've connected to that if he'd heard it that way, as he lost his own mother to demons. Eva was not just "Sparda's wife" to him, and he has never referred to her with such an impersonal term even to a stranger, see: Trish.
Lady more clearly mentions Kalina being her mother, not when Dante is there, but in scenes with Arkham, where it serves no purpose because Arkham has known Kalina longer than Lady has by default, and it still didn't stop him from murdering her in cold blood. He already devalued her life to that of any interchangeable woman and fodder for sacrifice in service of a man's greatness. Pulling familial rank on him means nothing. Even when he appeals to her before he dies, he exploits that he's her father, not whatever meaning Kalina has to either of them, because she doesn't have one except as the name of a weapon- -which isn't explained either, but Dante magically knows that detail when he gets the weapon because the dialogue and scenarios were written with no concept of theory of mind.
What Lady says in Mission 10 doesn't even clear good dialogue, much less good exposition. But, hey, flashy fight scene!
God, yeah, Reservoir Dogs and Unleashed were so damn boring because people talked in a car for a scene or two, and talking in a car about any given topic is inherently boring and invalidates the rest of the work. Don't they know the audience has a short attention span and needs wall-to-wall action?
Action games especially don't need downtime or transition periods in cutscenes! It has to be show, show, show! A fight scene with exposition is inherently better than plain exposition, because fight scenes are good, therefore everything they're in is good, even if the exposition in the fight scene is poorly-constructed and low-quality in terms of what they're actually saying, doesn't make narrative sense, and is there to fill a cutscene quota between two characters that don't trust each other nearly enough to get that personal! Not to mention one of them is a fantastic racist who still spills her emotions to a guy she's only known for four and a half minutes before that and was homicidal to him for all of them, and then gets into a boss fight with him after less than ten minutes of interaction, with all those scenes being mere minute-long intervals spaced out across hours with the same nonsense of "you're a demon, you don't understand" being repeated over and over!
Who cares if the two teenagers talking in the car are having a conversation after one of them's saved the life of the other and helped that guy evade the cops, and they've actually spent time together in other missions, having other conversations that aren't inherently antagonistic from one of them denying the humanity of the other just because she has a problem with how he was born? Who cares if the conversation served the purpose of having Dante affirm his allegiance to the Order, shows that Kat trusts Dante, shows how much Dante wants to be trusted, and how much Vergil empowered Kat to kill her foster father (and thus, why she is Ride or Die with the Order). They did that in a car, that makes it boooorriiiiinnnnngggg.
No wonder I took so long to reply to this.
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