Alright, I'm going to dig up facts about this topic before I even smother it with my opinion in the slightest, just for the sake of integrity.
First off, everyone making guesses about Capcom "streamlining" DMC to gain greater sales numbers overseas is absolutely correct. In fact, back in 2010, a Capcom employee made the following statement:
“Devil May Cry 5 is a game that, when started development, this will change a lot in relation to the above. The reason is that, despite the franchise has some very loyal followers, their sales are not particularly high, especially overseas.”
This can be attributed to a great many number of causes, but my guess is that despite the original
DMC crew eagerly anticipating the chance to work on another game, Capcom's board of Shareholders were either uninterested in a sequel, or refusing to greenlight it...solely because of the series' sales. Despite
DMC4's status as the fastest-selling game in the series, the logic behind that is actually quite reasonable: despite its success, it
did not meet sales expectations...probably because the game itself was an expensive project to produce, what with Hiroyuki Kobayashi cranking up the budget limit to make his fantastical cutscenes happen. For better or for worse, the cinematic overload in
DMC4 ended up coming with a cost.
But the strategy to reinvent the series with a Western twist
did not come from Capcom's Upper Suits, but rather,
one employee in particular. Which employee, you ask? Why, the same one who made that financial statement about the series' not selling well overseas:
Keiji Inafune., right before he left Capcom in the eye of the
Legends 3 development maelstrom.
Now, as for who decided to reboot the series entirely instead of just releasing a streamlined sequel is completely up in the air. According to Ninja Theory,
Capcom was very much opposed to making a direct sequel, and pushed them at every corner to make the game as radically different as possible. Designer Alex Jones even stated that him and his team initally wanted to make Dante as close to the original as possible---middle-aged, white hair, red coat and all, with what were probably
"4 or 5% alterations"---just so that they wouldn't **** fans off. But every time they would come within an inch of making the game or characters even remotely similar to the originals, Capcom's Japanese Development studio overseeing the designs---again, led by Keiji Inafune---would shut their attempts down...and urged them to make it as different as possible.
So this decision came about because of many factors, not just one...multiple people were involved, and the end result was the product of a downward-bulking snowball of decisions.
Now, with that out of the way, what do
I think should've been done with the series?
Well, as I've stated once before, I still think that the reboot was completely and utterly unnecessary. Why?
Because DMC4 ended up raising more questions than it answered. I could understand if
DMC4 served as some kind of big, concrete conclusion...but all it did was introduce more characters, usher in more plot devices, and explain less and less about either one. And really, the decision to wipe the slate clean and reboot the series was Capcom acting like lazy adolescent high-schoolers using Wikipedia to write their essay for them...which is even more approproate seeing as Capcom not only commissioned an overseas developer to handle
DmC, but didn't even bother to give them English access to the MT Framework Engine...because, you know...THAT would've taken some actual work.
As for all the condemning of the "blasphemous westernization
DmC", well...I find that accusation downright hilarious seeing as
the core of the series was shaped by a plethora of Western influences in the first place. From Dante's attire in the
DMC1 concept art, to the initial Gothic atmosphere, to the fact that Dante was originally stated to
work and live in America in the manual of the very first game, I'd say that Hideki Kamiya and Team Little Devils had way more Western aspects in mind than Japanese ones. Hell, the only remotely-Japanese things about Dante's conception were his inspiration from the manga
Cobra, and his coat color being designed for the sake of Japanese heroic symbolism associated with the color red.
The only
real Japanese-type nonsense was when Hideaki Itsuno came back to right the wrongs he committed in
DMC2, by overcompensating for Dante's serious tone in that game and making him a bishonen power fantasy in the sequel. And with that change came the complete alteration of the game's lore, feel, tone and emphasis. Gone were the Western influences, gone were the Gothic locales, and gone were any rational or grounded attempts at story-telling: everything had to be over-the-top, hyperstylzed, and flooding with a Toonami series' sense of logic.
All of this spread to
DMC4, and was one of the reasons the series got both an anime and a manga series. By that time, the series was more anime than game anyway.
Now does the series
need to be as Western as possible? Not necessarily. But having it go back to swan-diving headfirst into bishonen nonsense isn't automatically the solution either. Keep in mind that Japanesey-type stuff can even be grating for Japanese people themselves. Take a gander at the anime-centric Musou ecstasy known as the
Sengoku Basara series. Capcom has made half the series and all of its spin-offs Japanese-exclusive, and even THAT series' sales are plummeting.
Anime influences and Japanese-centric approaches to story-telling will not save this series, people. It didn't save
DMC4, it didn't prevent Capcom from going ahead with the Western mentality when they chose to reboot the series, and it's certainly not saving other niche hack-n'-slash titles in the same vein like
Onichibara and
Bayonetta.
