Tag Archives: devil may cry

Typical rambling

Well, Seferia beat her first Devil May Cry game

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I’ve had a long and soiled history with the Devil May Cry series. I’ll be honest, I did not fully love it at all from the start.

In fact, when I tried the first game, this is what happened. I bought it used after years of hearing of it and wanting to try it out. I tried it for a few days before getting bored and annoyed with the game. So, I had returned the game within a short period of time. After a while of still thinking over the series, I broke down and bought it used again. However, I never quite finished it. I simply did not love it.

Still, for some insane reason, I continued to gather the games. I bought Devil May Cry 3 when it came out for 25 bucks with various discounts, but I never actually played it until I received the HD collection. I bought 4 and played through a few levels. However, I did not indulge in it.

My breakthrough was talking to Gregaman from Capcom Unity and having him interest me in the game again. Still, I did not bother to play the game until I received the HD collection. If not for the fact that I got distracted away again by Monster Hunter, I probably would have beaten DMC 3 by now.

So, it does say a bit of something that I did beat DmC last night. However, it may possibly just be a good timing for the game, for I don’t really have many priority games to distract me away from the game. I don’t know. Anyway, hope non one minds that I put a little review of my own here.

Despite the game being fun and solid in some ways, it has many problems. First and foremost, the number one glaring flaw, at least in the copy that I received, was that the score tally screen has this pause to it. It’s a slow load every single time. Each time I got to the end of the level, I became momentarily scared that the game froze up, for that screen looked broken each and every time. I do feel that this is a flaw that shouldn’t be there. There should be no moments in which the game pauses and thinks like that in a way that might make a user think “damn, did it just crash on me?”

Next, there’s an annoyance that I had with the way that the character skins worked. I love the fact that I could change how Dante looks. I’ve stated many times before that I simply do not find the new Dante attractive at all. However, I’ve played and enjoyed Gears of War, where I have similar problems with the characters not going with my sense of aesthetics. So, the new Dante’s look annoying me isn’t the flaw I want to discuss at all. No, it’s the fact that the cut scenes seemed to have no real rhyme or reason to when they decided to use the skins or when they wanted to go back to the base look. Sometimes, I’d see the skin in the scenes; however, other times, it was the base new Dante. I’d had preferred if it was always the skin for sure, but having a single pattern to how the game decided one over the other would have been nice too. To say the least, it irritated me.

Moving on, I had serious problems with the new Vergil. This has nothing to do with his design or characterization, those worked nicely for me. However, his eyes just were not right. The eyes did not express in any realistic manner, which made me feel like the animators failed when it came to him. Nearly at every instance that I saw him on screen, his eyes truthfully did bother me. They usually felt like they were opened a bit too wide and were dead in ways that do not express “this character is cold”. Instead, it just was an uneasy “this isn’t animated right” feel. I simply could not appreciate the animation work on him.

Last, DmC is full of bugs. I know that I have a reputation for being able to break any game that I pick up by this point. However, some of the bugs that I encountered in DmC were a bit too much.

First, I bugged the Succubus fight by moving to a platform to the right side before she collapsed. Instead of having her get up or something like that, the game just had her stuck, laying on the platform. I attempted to attack her, nothing happened. I attempted moving to another platform, nothing happened. I had Dante jump to his death, glitch fixed. Apparently, moving to that platform made it impossible for the cut scene of Dante punching the boss to play.

Then, later on in the dance club stage, I once again glitched the game. This one was even worse. This one required many Dante suicide jumps and fighting with the camera. I don’t even know how it glitched, however, I got to a platform where apparently three enemies were supposed to spawn. However, they simply did not spawn. So, I was stuck. Each time I attempted to jump off the platform, the camera immediately flipped around so that Dante would fall to his death. Then, I attempted backtracking. This had similar results with the camera attempting to force me to kill Dante. That camera had it out for Dante. After many camera-caused deaths and enough back-tracking followed by another death, I finally got the enemy to spawn. Still, I think the game just wanted Dante dead there.

There is one last point that I find annoying with this game. I am of the side of people who feel like some sort of lock-on might have been a good thing for this game. In most cases, the lack of lock-on worked well for me. However, there were times in which I couldn’t locate a flying enemy for several seconds or had issues getting Dante to turn in the right direction. The worse of which was a time in which Dante didn’t want to follow my commands to face forward and shoot Mondus. Instead, I shot uselessly to the side for several moments. I personally think that a button to get him to face an enemy would have been useful.

Well, those are my honest opinions of DmC. It is indeed a fun game, but flawed. I might go back later on and play the prior Devil May Crys soon enough, since this game did actually break my streak of not really getting into DMC.

For now, though, I think I shall start preparing for the streams of evilness that I am plotting with Shayla and a Dead Space 3.

Fanfiction Chronicles

When will they learn?

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First and foremost, Seferia found something strange in the last few days of browsing stories in the Buffy: The Vampire Slayer section.  At least for now, she isn’t coming across any extremely horrible stories.  In fact, she’s come across a lot of promising ones that she might dig into more later.  Of course, there were probably ones that are easy shots at having something beyond headache-inducing; however, Seferia did not feel like venturing into the twisted scene of Spike/Xander stories.

So, instead, Seferia decided to wander around and check out other usual haunts of hers.  Guess what?  Devil May Cry is still full of a bunch of fools that write stuff that shouldn’t exist.  Seriously, people should have learned by now that the “pulled into the game” stories do not work and are a sure recipe for failure.  At least, one would think that somewhere along the line, someone would tell a new author not to use that plot device, right?

I guess not.

Amazingly, from what little I could stomach of the story, the author has enough grasp onto what they are doing in order to maintain proper grammar and sentence structure.  So, I cannot use the excuse that they have a malfunctioning brain when it comes to thinking for a reason as to why they would use this plot.  Nope, the largest grammatical quirk that I can find is an apparent love for caps lock, since I suppose that people enjoy screaming above what a simple exclamation mark can indicate.

Also, I must wonder why these authors always find names like “Akina” when coming up with their original characters.  It seems to me that the author is trying to come up with an average teenager on most cases.  Yet, they have a strong tendency to have names that just scream that they are a anime fanatic.  I can’t think that Akina nor Tera are very common names at all.

Well, this story is mostly just a “meh” to me.  It garners no rage, for it’s just standard fare.  I come across these sort of tales all the time.  I just wish that someone would smack sense into authors before they write these.

Fanfiction Chronicles

How to ensure that Seferia doesn’t read your fic

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Write the silly thing in second person. Yes, that will most definitely ensure that I’ll be in a rage and not get too far into the story.

Now, a while ago, I had said that I’d bring up a story from the DMC area since that is abundant in horrible stories. Well, I delayed because the pile was so pungent that I didn’t want to really dig into it much to find one.

Well, today I return with this one, which I had known about at the time that I had spoken of Devil May Cry fanfics. I knew full well that it was a story with possible tolerable writing if not for the fact that the person decided in a moment of great lack of brilliance to write in second person. Quickly scanning through the story proves that this person has a firm grasp on grammar. So, they have that as a plus.

Still, what exactly goes through someone’s head to make them decide “I will write this story in second person”? Seriously, I don’t know how that thought process even started. I can get the huge piles of first person stories that I’ve found post-Twilight. The fact that they appeared post-twilight and tend to have a certain… well, yea, it points to Twilight having been a contributing factor in inspiration there. Even then, there are successful first person stories. So, I do occasionally forgive the uneasy feeling of reading someone’s diary when I read that sort of story. No matter about the legitimacy of writing in first person, how does someone come to think of second person?

Second person is usually stated to be utilized for persuasive speeches. It’s something a person utilizes to get a person across to the “you” which is being referenced. That “you” is usually not just this random person who clicks on a story and decides to read it. That random person is unlikely to be pulled into the story because “you”. More likely, they’ll be turned away as I am because they aren’t making decisions and don’t want to be part of that story.

The only published fictional works that I know of that ever were written in the second person perspective were “make your own adventure” stories. I did read those when I was younger, but they had a very important part to them. That part was rather simple, the reader made decisions by flipping to pages. Thus, the story did indeed interact with the reader.

This one, on the other hand, does not.

Not to mention, I’m more than certain that the author made the “you” character a Mary Sue. That really doesn’t help their story at all.

Sad final statement: there’s worse fics out there in DMC. I may go back to digging to bring another one to light on another date.