Not really. I think that's an issue with 5 alone. In 3 the progress was more natural. In 3 Dante loses and gains a power, sure, but in the second fight the situation is far more even. In the final fight he wins. There is a progression. A loss, a tie and a victory. Dante gets better, he struggles for that victory. It's not just handed over to him.
Natural? Dante goes through the same sequence with his Vergil fights in 3 as he did with the Nelo fights in 1 but with one tweak in the second fight. In both games, he loses the first time but wins soundly the third time. The difference lies in the second fight, where Nelo gets laid flat on his back because Dante got stronger through his journey around Mallet, compared to his bout with Vergil in 3 ending in "an even fight" that's interrupted by a third party because Vergil isn't a strong enough character to carry the entire game with himself as the sole villain (Capcom has proved this two times now), and everyone including him had to be dumbed down to justify it.
This is like claiming a story is complete solely because it has a beginning, middle, and end and a sequence of events in between it. I'm telling you the story is incomplete and poor quality because the dialogue is tripe and the motivations are bogus. Dante wins in the end against Vergil despite him only having had his DT for about a weekend at most, while Vergil had 10 years to figure out his powers and be more experienced with its use (and he could have had a much bigger arsenal of weapons to show for it and suggest he actually traveled the world and bested other devils as part of his quest for power—what the hell else was he doing for 10-11 years?). Dante wins because he not only fought a bunch (and what, Vergil never did?), he believed in himself
really, really hard and got into his righteous feelings 4/5ths of the way through the game. Suggesting that Vergil didn't want what he wanted hard enough and lacked conviction, or at best his existing conviction paled compared to Dante's own.
But like I said, he threw a tantrum when he was asked a legitimate question of his goals at the end of 3, so the former is truer than the latter and he lacked conviction. If they didn't want him to be perceived as a tantruming baby, they shouldn't have written one.
Of course this doesn't matter by DMC5, and it doesn't make sense in its own game, because if we're already shelving narrative consistency and character strength in favor of conventions such as "the hero always gets the upper hand on the villain eventually" and "the hero gains power via convictions", Dante should've lost twice to Vergil and not just once, and Lady had all of the conviction needed to be relevant in the final fight the way Beryl was in the 2nd novel. Instead, Lady was shelved because she's a side character and the game isn't about her despite her narrating it. Her boss fight in Mission 16 is because the game is constructed for almost every mission to end in a boss battle, so she was there to fill a quota. Her bequeathing the Kalina Ann to Dante is her equivalent of "defeated devil gives Dante their soul, he has new Devil Arm", same as Cerberus, Agni and Rudra, Nevan, etc. Her scene with Arkham in Mission 20 is an afterthought; for all intents and purposes, her arc and relevance in the game ends when she entrusts Dante to "please, free my father".
In 4 Nero also has to get better to beat his opponent.
Same DMC4 where Nero doesn't kill any Hellgate devil he encounters except for Bael (replaced by Dagon because he's that worthless), so that Dante can pass by and defeat them all himself and acquire fresh Devil Arms. Nero also gets overpowered by some lesser demons in Agnus's lab, loses Kyrie twice, gets bested by Dante who had
"been playing me from the beginning", then his outclassed ass is still allowed to continue his journey because Dante had the infinite wisdom to treat an end of the world scenario with as little seriousness as possible, only for Nero to get caught by Sanctus because, um, Sanctus holding Kyrie hostage was going to end well for everyone, somehow. That DMC4?
That all happens
because Nero has to share spotlight with Dante and his part of the game wasn't built for him to gain or use Devil Arms, and they needed justification for Dante's reverse traversal of the same locales without having diverse bosses (see also: the dice game within the Savior). Therefore, Nero is barely competent and couldn't destroy the Gates, and Dante is so wise and powerful that instead of handling everything himself despite how powerful the narrative wanks him as, he lets the inexperienced hotheaded teenage protagonist get in over his head and wind up caught in the Savior, which ends up helping the villain, making the situation worse, and getting more innocent people killed than before. Nero was one big loss away from just being genderbent Viola, but I think him being a dude bailed him out.
If you entertain the idea that Dante in 3 was learning of his priorities and coming into his heroism, starting to care about Lady and her safety as the story went on, thus he only fought her to protect her as the rest of the journey into Hell would be too perilous, it means he has even
less reason to let Nero go ahead with his journey to rescue Kyrie given the increased stakes (innocent life in Fortuna) and Dante's added years and experience/perspective on the matter (he didn't motivate Lady to keep going and finish her fight for the sake of her closure and offer to cover for her, he just took her weapon and left her to sit there!), but he does anyway because in a Doylist sense, we wouldn't have a plot beyond that point if Dante were a
competent hero, and in a Watsonian sense,
he's stupid.
In DmC he was just better than everyone from the start so, yeah, not the same since it's not that he gets a power that lets him win, it's just that he was always awesome.
That's ignoring that DmC goes through the same gameplay loop of "defeat boss, get weapon" that Dante could build himself up with, but you're also skipping the part where Dante had to recover memories of his past, build a relationship with Kat, and also received a post-mortem heart to heart with his mother talking straight to the camera and presenting the moral that power isn't just having the physical strength to kill things, but the agency to dictate the trajectory of one's own life, otherwise one has no real freedom. It's not subtle in the least bit.
The same as DmC Vergil making it clear that he's a self-aggrandizing control freak and a "black hat hacker" who only exploits vulnerabilities to sell himself as the solution to his own problem and place himself in a position of power rather than actually help victims of an oppressive system, thus his "turn" in the end doesn't come out of nowhere, it's
who he's always been throughout the game. And he shows you who he is!
Well, yeah, but they sure as hell couldn't do it with the other villains. Arius, Sanctus and Mundus in DmC are comically villinious. DMC1 Mundus is just as stock but more digestible and Arkham is a bit more nuanced, though still not what you'd call the greatest villains in the land of fiction. When you read the prossess of thought behind the creation of Vergil as an antagonist he really is the peak villians in the franchise. The other villains really are all just too cartoonishly evil for that kind of depth. Hell, Sanctus doesn't understand why people act out of love! 'Love?' he says, confused. Doesn't get more silly evil than that.
It's hard to take "Vergil has more depth" seriously when he acts the exact same as all those other villains and
shows you who he is, but you ignore it because...?
In 3 alone he fatally attacked three entities he perceived as beneath him and were in no position to actually fight him. A post-defeat Hell Vanguard in the middle of groveling to him, Arkham in the middle of a sentence, and an already blinded Beowulf who was defeated by Dante just a few missions prior.
Killing your own like they were nothing? Mundus did that. Dante explicitly calls that out as heinous. But his morals weren't installed yet in 3, I suppose.
Sanctus doesn't understand why people act out of love? Whoa, good thing we didn't have Vergil monologue about Arkham still harboring fatherly emotions for Lady and sparing her life, right?
"Why didn't you kill her? Perhaps because she is your daughter? Did some pesky fatherly love get in your way? [...] To further your study of the black arts, you sacrificed your loving wife, to become a devil as well. Knowing this, I thought you'd be more useful to me, but I was wrong. No wonder your attainment of power is incomplete."
Oh sh*t! Well well well, if it isn't Vergil telling Arkham AND the audience that he believes
your willingness to sacrifice your loved ones shows your commitment to power and that
love for your own blood makes you weak.
Wow, exactly like Sanctus said one game later—Vergil expressed the idea first! Who'd have thought? The guy that doesn't care that a man murdered his own wife and
wholly expects him to murder his daughter isn't a great guy!
Vergil discounted the value of humanity and consistently underestimated its power like Mundus did, killed his subordinates like Mundus and Sanctus did, and betrayed his flesh and blood like Sanctus wanted Credo to do. Both villains said straight to the impaled character's face they didn't see the value in acting out of love for family. The parallel couldn't be any more obvious if it were side by side on a YouTube video.
Vergil wasn't lying there to put on an act and hide his own intentions. He didn't know Arkham was deceiving him/didn't truly love his daughter. Nero wasn't invented yet, so he wasn't saying all that to protect his kid either. The game is not a documentary of alternate universe events that are immutable. He wasn't posturing. He said all that because someone wrote it and thought it reflected his character, and the kind of man he is, and that the writers wanted to write, was one that
would kill his remaining family if it'd give him a power-up yet a bunch of contrivances and his own stupidity and inefficiency stop him. Again, it's not subtle.
Arkham's counter to the assertion that he still loves Lady enough to spare her isn't to bring up that Vergil spared Dante in Mission 7 and thus has brotherly love, making them the same—because
Arkham was the one that ordered
Vergil to leave him be in order to further his own plans and Vergil was none the wiser. The sole counterargument that Arkham brings as an "F You" to Vergil is bringing up Vergil's
blood purity; he has no love for Dante remaining, or not enough that is worth Arkham bringing up.
Vergil didn't kill Dante in Mission 7 or Arkham in Mission 10 because in a Doylist sense, we wouldn't have a plot beyond either point if he were a
competent villain, and in a Watsonian sense,
he's stupid. He's exactly as cartoonishly evil and idiotic as previous and future villains in the series (including himself in the form of Urizen), but his sole benefit or redeeming factor is that he's hot and mysterious and he looks cool and his gameplay is sick, so people give him more allowances and perceive depth where there is none, as he clearly only acts to further the plot of the game at the expense of his consistency as a character and basic intelligence. Then they idolize him with memes.
This is why he can kill the Hell Vanguard so cleanly in the start of Mission 3, but doesn't kill-confirm on either Dante or Arkham or even Lady (where his "cuts through anything" katana gets blocked by a human weapon): Hell Vanguard is no longer useful to the narrative so it's expendable, but Dante and Arkham (and also Lady) still need to exist so the game lasts longer, meaning Vergil
has to be completely ineffectual at harming them but also totally badass, you guys, please make gigachad memes. But he'll also pull sick kicks on a corpse after quadrisecting its head, so it's not like he
respects bodily integrity post-mortem. Once you introduce that a character has no compunction for beheading an opponent and beating their corpse, you have to wonder why he's not constantly doing it even when it makes sense for him to do it.
The same plot armor affects everyone in Mission 13, as Arkham injures Lady and later threatens to kill her instead of killing her while she's down the first time around since she doesn't need to remain alive (and he clearly is familiar with murdering women to become a legend, etc), and he monologues like a James Bond villain to give the trio time to recover. But, you know, the story can't happen if the bad guys are competent, but also the heroes aren't that competent either.
In an interview one of the makers of DMC4 mentioned that if Kyrie wasn't around or died Nero would just go down to hell and live there. He has zero attachment to the human realm and humans in general outside of Kyrie. There are a lot of things said about his development, from sophisticated to hunter type but this description sticks with me the most. This makes him a sociopath and the only reason he does anything good is for Kyrie or for rage. He and her take care of orphans but he only does it for her. They give him these noble actions that are negated by this prospect and it doesn't make him look like a good person. Ok. This is deep diving, right? This is the stuff that only fans go looking for. The average player couldn't care less, they already moved on to another game. Yeah? Even then, even if you only play the game once and never cared to look into how the makers designed the characters, Nero is still an obsessives a'hole who only does things for his girlfriend and if she wasn't there he could care less if people died in front of him. He only attacked Dante because he walked up her. They just don't seem to know how to interpret heroism.
Well, yeah. You're bringing this up like it's something new. I'm telling you that the apple doesn't fall too far from the tree here. Nero is a sociopath because
Vergil is a sociopath. They modeled Nero
after Vergil specifically except for one detail. Vergil's character, intentions, and actions came before Nero was even a thought in their heads. They can't interpret heroism, and they also can't interpret villainy either. Why? Because after all of this, after Vergil lost his moral compass in the absence/death of his mother, after he tarnished his father's and mother's legacy by endangering innocent life, after he expressed his views that love for family makes one weak, after he went down to Hell and showed no attachment to the human world just because "[Hell] was our father's home" totally ignoring that Sparda abandoned that home for 2000 years thus his progeny would never be welcome there in 2000 years more, and then he came back in 5 and did the second point one more time and likely subjected thousands if not millions to the same trauma he went through, and he also never brings up the mother of his child, the writers think all of that still ultimately made him redeemable in 5 because
he felt a little bad and Mommy didn't love him, look at how sad he is.
Again... Well, yeah. You'd want Dante to talk his issues out with the devil? The root of all evil? Even if that wasn't so, do you think it's unreasonable to not try to talk out your grievances with the thing that killed your mother and brother?
That would've been funny, but the first game wasn't about it and for all intents and purposes it didn't need to be. Dante did exactly what he set out to do, as he was a fully-realized character who serves as the pivot to Trish's development into a better person. I'm asking you why you're expecting Nero not to be a sociopath given his sociopathic gene donor and equally psycho uncle are the blueprints credited for his characterization and not a single one of them care about innocent life caught in the crossfire. Nero barely reacted to people being impaled by Qliphoth roots at the start of the game, remember? And yet he's trying to whine his grievances to a total stranger who happens to be his dad, despite the fact that the dad is a murderer who also took his arm and abandoned him as a baby, but he wants super hard for that same man to respect his existence and power because of his own manufactured inferiority complex.
That applies to Mary, too. What kind of conversation can solve what her father's done? Murdered her mother, manipulated her into being a sacrifice, tried to kill her to use her blood and he wasn't even sorry when they put a gun to his head, just mad no one would let him get away with it. Yeah, I get that you'd want more nuance to your narrative but there are things you can't resolve with reasoning with one another, specially when the villains are so mustache twirlingly evil that one of them scoffs at people who actually get the whole love thing.
Don't ask me, I'm not the one that wrote Lady in 5 to be part of the Vergil Defense Squad as a motivator to Nero becoming "the adult in the room" to stop Dante from putting Vergil down like the entitled rabid dog he's been. No one can pretend Vergil didn't express the same exact sentiment about "the whole love thing"; I posted his exact line about it. He just never gets to truly act on his lack of love for his family because he's an idiot and a weakling within the verse he's written in. Given that he
didn't recognize Nero as his son at the beginning of the game
, he had no reason to let him live, but very conveniently he happens to be weakened to the point of crumbling so he
can't do fatal damage to Nero from frame one. He can't be seen doing anything "too bad" to the heroes so that his eventual redemption is easier to swallow, but everyone else he kills on the way there is expendable. I didn't invent this. I'm pointing out the trend.
Like I said, the series was
not built on "real conflict resolution", but despite how bad 5 is, you were still tricked by the slop of a story into thinking that "real conflict resolution" is a genuine point the game is trying to make, when again, the series isn't about that, and this "violence isn't the answer" thing only came up
in 5 and 5 only just to save Vergil and nothing else. This is blatant. The hypocrisy of Nero saying this is there for a reason, because it's only there to save Vergil. No character genuinely believes in it, because the plot then refuses to interrogate what it means for Lady to say what she said to Nero given that she had to kill Arkham and saw no other way out of it, and reasoning with him would've been ridiculous. She mourned after she shot him because she
knew him once as a good and loving man. Her dialogue describing Arkham in 3 affords him more personhood and stronger familial bond than she ever gives Kalina Ann who she's supposed to care about enough to avenge and name her trusted weapon after. And she certainly didn't
act like she was still psychologically traumatized over killing Arkham in all her other appearances post-3. This literally only comes up in 5, in Morrison's files of the characters and Lady slipping up about "cutting ties that bind".
And also, it's f*cking Lady. The same Lady who spent the third game being perfectly willing to commit murder twice on a man she
had no idea had demonic blood in his veins until the second murder attempt via bullet to the head, and the first attempt was when she fired a missile at him without even looking in his direction. She did both things to a perceived normal human man
then figured out he could survive it. She did both things for no reason that makes sense for her as a character and was entirely so Dante could flex his reflexes and his regenerative capabilities for cheap "drama" later. The game did not bother exploring how wildly belligerent she was because it didn't matter and they knew it didn't, but now suddenly she has a heart, enough to talk about "trauma" and "regret" like that means anything. It's a joke.
The writers give no real theory of mind to the characters, therefore the characters behave erratically and in ways only justifiable by "this'll make perfect sense later" and "we already know this won't affect the characters very deeply, thus the characters know not to be affected and will behave with no caution". That's literally all this is. It's bad writing, where all the characters are pawns to the plot to pad the game out to be 20+ missions full of stylish combat.
5 hinges on V and Dante refusing to say Vergil's name out loud to
anyone until he actually appears,
solely to surprise the fans. Dante should have no reason to hide the name Vergil from
Trish and Lady . Them knowing beforehand that Urizen is potentially Vergil would've allowed them to take that mission more seriously instead of going on ahead to get their butts kicked, and Nero has never even heard the name because Dante never told him about his dad for six whole years, thus he'd have no reaction or recognition of that name
as his father.
Everyone in the cast then turning around and blathering about how Nero shouldn't kill or hate Vergil simply because that's his father and it being presented as an attempt to protect Nero's mental health from the trauma of patricide is a joke in the same vein, given he's designed to be a sociopath, his dad is one too, and neither of them knew the other existed for over two decades. Nero had no opportunity to know or love his dad at all until that very game, and even if he did, half of the series post-3 is supposed to be based on the notion that two people can cope with the same traumatic event differently. No two people are the same. That's part of what makes them distinct characters. It's why Vergil becomes a mass murderer even though he gained the power to defeat demons at age 8, and Dante is presented as relatively well-adjusted despite either seeing his mother die right before his eyes or being within listening distance of her final moments and having to run in fear for his life since then.
The additional joke in this is that they're all entertaining the idea that
Nero can even kill Vergil at all instead of the other way around given that Vergil is supposed to be extremely powerful by this point and enough to rival Dante. That's because his power and lethality are irrelevant now as they always have been, and the game is telling you right to your face that that's the case. Nero will overcome it because of course he will, or they expect Dante to do it as he's done before because the plot can't go any other way. Like, they could've at least appealed to Nero by bringing up "If you die, Kyrie will be left alone," but no one cares about Kyrie either, so the angle is that Nero's mental health is in danger from killing a stranger, so we have to reveal that he's family, even though this doesn't explain why that family started the game ripping off his arm and leaving him bleeding out in a garage.
Nero starts the game more or less being "kinda upset" about losing his arm and bouncing back with a magitech prosthetic but then blowing his lid about being called a mean name and later makes jokes about "Dante jerky" when the world is in peril, I'm sure he can handle a bit of patricide. But the game also pivots from the notion that "Vergil and Dante coped differently with the same circumstance of losing their mother" and presents that "having to kill one's father traumatizes everyone in the same way, consistently, all the time, no matter who they are and how different their circumstances leading up to it". Everyone being the same level of fragile is completely stupid and makes them all seem interchangeable, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's just because the writing values fatherhood over motherhood that much.
If DMC6 gets constructed with the same "care" as 5, we'll be hearing Trish go on about how Mundus wasn't that bad and that unsealing him is the right thing to do, because putting down your evil family is wrong and traumatizing even though it's morally correct and they have no other options. And whenever Lucia gets to appear, she'll be a sobbing mess about Arius too. Give me a damn break.
I know I can be very critical of this whole thing but you really do top everyone off. I know you recent them for it but they are a business and like any other business they are in the business of making money.
Well yeah, they're not running a charity. But the entire point of that text was that
the fans reward Capcom with money for making silly decisions that crap on the characters and putting little effort to delivering a complete game, so none of us should be surprised that they're crapping on the characters and following fandom memes. The fandom has "voted with their wallet" and Capcom is following the money, where having a cohesive grasp of the characters is irrelevant as long as it gets them the green precisely because fandom loves that type of thing. Vergil is such a gigachad child support dodger tax evader, he's so cool even though his ideology was supposed to be proven wrong by combat multiple times. Media literacy is dead.
