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.
