Devil May Cry a Casual Retrospective Part 2

I was not looking forward to this. Anytime you decide to go through an entire series there’s always that one entry that you know is going to be rough to get through. Like Moonraker for 007, like Mega Man X6/7 for Mega Man X, there’s always that one entry in a series that everybody can agree sucks to high heaven.

For Devil May Cry that is the second entry. Which at least means we’re getting the bad stuff out of the way early. This way I don’t have a lingering sense of dread as we build up to it, I can just rip the band aid off right away.

But yeah, Devil May Cry 2 is infamous. It’s widely regarded as one of the most disappointing sequels ever made. Fans of the series hate it with a passion. In fact, if you talk to any Devil May Cry fan, they’ll tell you to skip it entirely and just ignore it exists.

A game so bad the fans don’t want to acknowledge it even exists. This one must be really awful. Like Highlander sequels levels of awful. How in the world did it end up like this? Well let me give you some history and that might explain things.

Devil May Cry 2 was greenlit as the first game was finishing production. This is Capcom we’re talking about after all. These guys love sequels more than Rick James loved cocaine. So of course, they greenlit a sequel before the first game was a proven success.

Thankfully, it did end up being a success. So, the sequel was put into full production. Just one problem, none of the people who worked on the first game were available to work on the sequel. Hideki Kamiya, was busy working of his ode to Tokusatsu with Viewtiful Joe, and Shinji Mikami was still struggling to get Resident Evil 4 off the ground.

Instead, the development duties were handed off to Capcom Production Studio 1. This was the division responsible for a lot of Capcom’s arcade game output. But with arcades dying, and home consoles being far more profitable, it was decided to restructure the company to focus entirely on home console releases.

This makes sense from a business perspective, but there were some very obvious growing pains. The team were used to making short simple arcade experiences you could beat in an hour, not the longer more involved experiences expected of a console game. You don’t need to be psychic to see how this was going to end.

The production was an utter mess with the team’s lack of experience working on 3D action games being a major struggle. Another problem was that the team never understood Devil May Cry. One producer hated Dante’s wise-ass attitude and wanted it changed to be something more serious and mature, despite fans, you know, liking Dante as a wise ass.

This inevitably led to a stalled production. Nothing was coming together, and the game was well behind schedule. By all accounts the early builds were borderline unplayable. Things got so bad that Capcom had to change directors’ mid development.

The original director being taken off the project and replaced by Hideaki Itsuno of Rival Schools and Power Stone fame. By the way, we still don’t know who that original director was. Even after 20 years they still haven’t said who it was, probably as some form of protection for the guy.

Itsuno wasn’t happy with the assignment, not the least of which being he had only 6 months to salvage the project. But he was a professional and was able to get it into a playable state for release. But it was too little too late to save it.

It released to mixed reviews from critics and harsher reviews from fans. As I said earlier, most fans tend to ignore it entirely. Based on its reputation, I went into this with very low expectations, and it did not disappoint me.

This game is not good, for reasons that we will go over shortly. It absolutely earns its title as one of the worst sequels ever made. So, let’s just get this over with. Let’s look at Devil May Cry 2 and see how bad it truly is.

Set 10 years after the events of the first game, Devil May Cry 2 see’s Dante travel to the island of Vie de Marli to stop an evil corporation called Uroboros from summoning a powerful demon and taking over the world. This is literally the entire plot.

I’m not kidding. That really is the be all end all of the story. There’s a big evil guy with a big evil corporation trying to summon a demon, go kill. There is nothing more to it than that. The story is so paper thin it’s practically invisible.

The first game wasn’t exactly heavy on story either, but Devil May Cry 2 makes it look like Shakespeare by comparison. At least the first game had interesting world building and a mystery with Trish to uncover. Not to mention Dante’s backstory.

It wasn’t a lot, but it was also the first game in the series, and they hadn’t fleshed everything out. Yet it still created an interesting world and characters that could be expanded upon in later games. In Devil May Cry 2 there’s no interesting lore to dive into, no interesting character arcs, no world building, no nothing.

The thing is, Vie de Mari does have some interesting lore behind it. it’s an island made up of a variety of nationalities that came together to aid Sparda in his war with Mundus. That’s interesting, but none of it is in the game.

The only way you’d know about any of this is if you read it in a guidebook or something. Maybe it’s in the manual, I wouldn’t know since I’m playing it digitally, but still, it should be in the game proper. I should not need extraneous sources to get the most out of the plot.

The only remotely interesting thing the story has going for it is that it’s told through two perspectives. Devil May Cry 2 introduced the ability to play as other playable characters. So, we get to see the story through the perspective of Dante and new character Lucia.

It’s an interesting idea, and normally I like it when games do this, but they really screwed it up. For starters the individual stories both have pieces missing which makes them feel incomplete. It’s especially obvious for Dante as most of the major character revelations happen in Lucia’s story.

Which also means if you play as Dante first, and why wouldn’t you he’s the face of the franchise, those revelations will be spoiled for you in the most anti-climactic way. And when you do get to Lucia’s campaign, those moments won’t hit the way they should because you know about them ahead of time.

In fact, Dante doesn’t contribute much to the plot at all. This is more Lucia’s story. She’s the one with the connection to the island, the main villain, and is the only one of the two with any kind of character arc. It’s not well developed, but she at least has one while Dante has nothing.

Why Dante is even on the island is never explained. He’s just there to hunt demons, I guess. The first game set up a reason why Dante was going on the adventure. He was invited by Trish who was made specifically to appeal to him, he was trying to avenge his mother and brother’s death. There were personal reasons why he would want to be there which created a personal connection for the player to care about what was going on.

We aren’t given that in the sequel. It’s never explained why Dante is here other than demons and Lucia vaguely asking him to come. Which, why would he even care? She’s not paying him, he doesn’t know her, who the fuck is she to him?

As a result, it’s hard to care about what’s going on because there’s no personal stakes involved. Sure with Lucia you get a bit more of that since it is her home, but Lucia herself isn’t given much of a backstory. So even then it’s hard to care for anything that’s going on.

And the biggest reason for that is because the characters don’t look like they care for what is going on. What in the world happened to Dante? He’s gone from a lovable cocky goofball to a stoic, brooding plank of wood with no personality whatsoever.

I don’t mind the idea of a serious, darker Dante. He had elements of his backstory that could work with that idea. But the thing with having a brooding protagonist is you need to give a reason why they’re brooding to begin with. Guts from Berserk is a brooding badass, but it’s his complex backstory and reasoning why he is the way he is that makes his brooding nature so compelling.

So why is Dante so mopey? No idea. There is no explanation as to why he’s like this. The prevailing fan theory is that Trish died between games, which would explain her strange absence, but this has been de-confirmed with subsequent games. Dante is just brooding for the sake of it and that’s not compelling, it’s annoying.

But here’s the kicker, I don’t think he’s being broody or stoic, I don’t think he’s being anything at all. Dante is so devoid of personality or charisma that he comes across as an empty husk rather than an actual character.

Silent RPG protagonists have more character than Dante in this game. I know the producer wasn’t a fan of Dante’s personality in the first game, but if you’re going to remove Dante’s wise-cracking bravado, you need to actually replace it with something to fill the void.

And that’s what Dante is, a void. A void of charisma, a void of character, a void of personality. He’s an empty circle of nothingness that sucks everything in and reduces it to nothingness. Heavy emphasis on the suck.

Lucia gets it a little better, but even she is so wooden and boring she comes across as unlikable. Not a great first showing. Maybe there’s a reason why she hasn’t come back in future games.

The worst part is that there are moments where Dante’s old personality does come back. But these moments are so brief they almost feel like they’re mocking you. They tempt you with something you love for a brief moment before taking it away again. Like taunting a donkey with a carrot on a stick, only to yank it away before he gets it.

Ok so the story is a mess, but really who cares about that. Nobody plays an action game for the narrative, they play it for high octane, balls to the wall excitement. So surely the gameplay is what will hold things together right? Right?

Alright, before we rip into the gameplay, let’s change gears and talk about some of the things it gets right. Because there are things introduced here that would go on to be standard features in later games.

For one, Devil May Cry 2 introduced the ability to switch weapons with one of the shoulder buttons instead of having to open the menu. This makes it easier to swap weapons mid combo to change up your playstyle. Granted you can only do that with the guns, because there aren’t any different melee weapons other than swords with different stats, but it still is a change that helps make combat a little smoother.

The games ranking system was also improved. Killing enemies with a higher style meter now gives you more red orbs. I think this was also in the first game, but I’m not too sure. At the very least it felt more noticeable here.

The end level rankings now show grades based on different criteria. Like how fast you beat each level, how much damage you took, your average style meter rank, you get the idea. It’s a more nuanced system than the first game, which only seemed to care about how fast you made it through each level.

Having 2 different characters also gives a little more replay value. They don’t play too differently, but they do have unique stages and bosses which makes it worth playing through both to see everything. There are also unlockable difficulty levels and even a third playable character to unlock after beating the game on hard.

There’s also a new mode called Bloody Palace, which is a survival mode where you fight through floor after floor of enemies. The game isn’t shy on content, even if the actual campaigns are only 3 hours long.

Well, that’s all the positives, now for everything else. Jesus Christ where to start? I guess the best place to start would be the level design.

The first game had very constricted level design. This was in large part due to it starting out life as a Resident Evil title. Since Devil May Cry 2 started as an entirely original title, this means the designers have more freedom to craft levels however they want.

In theory this is a good thing. It gives them the opportunity to craft levels with a more unique identity. In practice, it only makes the team’s lack of experience in 3D game design all the more apparent.

In their efforts to make the game seem grand and epic. Devil May Cry 2’s developers have made the same critical mistake a lot of 3D developers make. They mistake density for size. Instead of tightly designed levels with tons of stuff to find and interact with, we get bloated empty husks of levels with so much empty white noise they work as an effective sleeping agent.

The level design in the first game was tight, but it was also complimentary to the games design. It packed you into rooms with tons of enemies which kept the challenge high, but also made the action exciting. It made it easier to close the distance and keep the flow of combat going.

Here interruptions to combat are frequent simply because you can send the bastards too far away. It’s difficult to close the gap which often results in you dropping combos frequently. If it wasn’t for the fact that guns keep the combo going, it would be impossible to get any kind of decent combo at all.

There’s no flow to combat because of this. You can’t get into a groove because your constantly chasing enemies down. The Stinger helps with this, but that also sends enemies away, so it doesn’t even help that much.

And exploration doesn’t benefit either. Bigger levels are fine, but only if you fill those levels with things to find in them. Devil May Cry 2 does have secret items and weapons to find, but they’re so spread out across the indomitably wide stages that it makes finding them a pain in the ass.

There are long stretches in these levels where absolutely nothing happens. Words cannot describe how incredibly fucking boring these levels are. At least throw in some more Red Orbs for God’s sakes. These levels are emptier than Street Fighter V’s online lobbies.

The funny thing is, despite the gaping size of most of the levels, most aren’t that long. Most will take ten minutes or less to complete, which only further proves how empty and dull the level design actually is.

Speaking of dull, this game visually is a drab nightmare. The gothic horror aesthetic from the first game is largely absent here. Replaced instead with muted brown pan-European villages and boring ass cityscapes.

There’s one level set in a demon world corrupted tower where the game does start to look a little like the first game, but everything else is visually unappealing. Technically the game isn’t bad looking for a PlayStation 2 title, but artistically? It’s completely lacking in any of the style the first game thrived in.

Which ironically enough fits the game like a glove. Let’s talk about the combat. Since the very beginning, Devil May Cry was built on one simple idea. To make an action game where you kill enemies as stylishly as possible. It isn’t just about killing enemies; it’s about doing it in the coolest ways possible.

Devil May Cry 2 utterly fails to live up to this idea. And no, it’s not because you can increase the style ranking by spamming the same move repeatedly. That was the case in the first game, they hadn’t quite figured that out yet. I’m talking about the utterly neutered move set.

I won’t lie and say the say the first Devil May Cry had the most involved, intricate move set because it really didn’t. it was honestly pretty basic by today’s standards. But even then, you still had stuff like the delayed attacks and charge moves to spice up the combat. It wasn’t much but given how it was the first of its kind it was serviceable.

Devil May Cry 2 is utterly anaemic by comparison. The move set has been watered down to the barest minimum. You have a standard combo, a launcher, the stinger, an air combo, and that’s it. No delayed attacks, no charged attacks, there aren’t any different weapons other than swords so no changing things on that front, all you have are basic combos and your guns. That’s all.

It’s nearly impossible to create stylish combos because of how limited your options are. There’s no reason to experiment because there’s nothing to experiment with. It’s so basic that it strips the combat of a lot of its original depth.

Now you do unlock new things for the Devil Trigger. You can find pieces of an amulet that can give the Devil Trigger different properties you can swap out. Like doing more damage or giving more life, and even different elemental properties.

It’s not a bad idea and gives some customisation element to the game it lacks otherwise. Since you don’t unlock new moves in this game, all you can do is make weapons stronger.

The problem is that it doesn’t change much. I didn’t notice a huge difference in attack power or healing, and the elemental properties basically just changed what colour your attacks were. It didn’t seem to do much else.

This means the combat never really evolves throughout the game. You’ll be doing the same thing at the end of the game that you were doing at the beginning. And without a sense of evolution or growth for the player, the game gets incredibly stagnant by the mid-point, if not earlier.

You may think the different enemy types might offer different strategies, but they really don’t. Basic enemies can be defeated easily by just spamming stinger and the launcher. For larger enemies, do the exact same thing but dodge out of the way every now and then.

The enemies aren’t nearly as aggressive as before, so they don’t put up much of a fight. I never once felt like I struggled with any of them, even the ones that on the surface should pose a decent. The combat is brainless. There’s no need to strategize, nothing to push the player to try new things or get better.

This is one of the most boring action games I’ve ever played. Look, all action games have one goal, to make the player feel like an unstoppable badass. But the key to doing that well is to have things that can stifle the player. You need to have moments where they struggle because it’s the process of overcoming that struggle that makes them feel like a badass.

It’s why a lot of the best action games are very challenging. Look at Ninja Gaiden or Contra for crying out loud. Those games are merciless sons of bitches, but they’re also lauded as some of the greatest games of all time.

The reason the action in those games is so satisfying is because of the steep challenge they present the player. It isn’t rampaging through everything effortlessly that makes action games fun, it’s getting to the point where you have the skill to do that.

Devil May Cry 2 has no challenge. it’s an incredibly easy game, which removes any kind of fun you could have had with it. Normally I don’t mind easy games, I’m a Kirby fan for God’s sake, but easy games only work if being easy fits the design.

And in most cases, easy games make up for their lack of challenge in other ways like having a good story or a fun world to explore. Hell in Kirby’s case it does have side games that do offer a fun challenge.

Devil May Cry 2 doesn’t have any of that. It has an unlockable hard mode, but from what I can gather it doesn’t change much. Without that challenge, that push to get better at the game and engage with it on a deeper level, it just becomes a monotonous bore.

And being brain dead easy is one problem, but there’s way more issues the game suffers from. The camera is still a pain in places. I’d say it’s a little better than the first game, but not by much. There are still moments where the camera angles shifting can throw you off.

The platforming still sucks. The jumping is still very stiff, and the awkward camera angles make certain platforming sections harder than they should be. There’s also a wall running mechanic that has no clear purpose. Seriously, what do I use it for? There’s no parkour needed. Why is it here?

The underwater sections return and are absolutely godawful. They control like total ass and combat becomes even more limited than it was before. Thankfully there aren’t many of these. In fact, Dante doesn’t have any water levels. They’re all in Lucia’s campaign, which kind of just screws her over by giving her the worst levels.

Then there’s the games targeting system, which is one of the most backwards targeting systems I’ve ever seen. See the game uses an auto target system. You can’t manually lock on to enemies, the game will automatically do it for you. Meaning it takes control of who you can target away from the player.

And I mean that literally. Once your locked on, you can only attack the enemy you’re targeting. You can even pull the analogue stick in the exact opposite direction of the enemy and your character will still turn around to attack who you’re targeting.

Nothing about this system feels right. There were moments where I would pull away to attack one enemy, but the game targeted another, and I was forced to attack them. It never felt like I had full control, and that’s an important thing to get right in an action game like this.

It doesn’t even make sense who you target sometimes. You’d think you would target the nearest enemy, but no, sometimes it targets enemies slightly farther away, or enemies behind walls you can’t hit anyway.

It’s especially annoying in segments where switches are involved. You’ll go to hit them only to target an enemy off screen because the game told you so. Meaning you need to take care of the enemies before doing what you need to do to progress. Oh, and did I mention enemies constantly respawn in certain parts. Meaning you have to keep killing them to hit more switches. Yeah, that doesn’t get old at all.

But the targeting system really highlights the main underlying issue with Devil May Cry 2. From the beginning the team wanted Devil May Cry 2 to be more accessible to newcomers. The first game was criticised for being too difficult, which I disagree with but that’s more in hindsight. At the time it was a new kind of game nobody had played before. It probably felt way harder at the time.

I can understand why they want to make the game more accessible. The problem is they went about this in the worst way possible. I mentioned in my Paper Mario review that the best way to make an accessible game is to bring the player up to the games level.

Simplify things yes, but never to a point where you talk down to the player. You offer the complexity expected from the genre, but in a way that’s easier to comprehend for new players.

Paper Mario is a good example of how to do this right, Devil May Cry 2 is a good example of how to do it wrong. It simplifies things too much to the point where the depth and complexities of its genre are basically non-existent. It doesn’t bring you up to its level, it brings itself down to your level. Which just ends up making it feel insulting to play.

This is why Itsuno couldn’t salvage the project. It was fundamentally flawed right out of the gate. They had watered down the gameplay to such a degree that it became tasteless. Just a bland, inoffensively boring mess that lack any of the hype or excitement of the first game.

And the combat isn’t just boring, it’s also completely broken. You can win almost any encounter just by holding down the shoot button. I am not exaggerating. 90-95% of the games combat encounters can be absolutely trivialised simply by getting the guns out.

Sure, you won’t get a good ranking by doing so, but who cares. It’s not like it’s much fun getting a high ranking anyway. So, fuck it, go nuts with the blasting. Even with bosses it’s more effective to just pick at them from a distance. And in Devil Trigger the projectile attack utterly shreds their health bars.

In some instances, using the guns is the only effective strategy. Like the flying enemies. Air combat is limited outside Devil Trigger and they’re often too high to jump to, so what other options do you have.

The worst example of this is the Corrupted Helicopter boss fight, where the only way to get consistent damage is to use the guns. Incidentally, fuck the Corrupted Helicopter. It’s one of the worst boss fights I’ve ever seen. It’s so ungodly tedious I could feel my soul slowly die while fighting it.

Devil May Cry 2 is not a good game. The story is barely even a thing, it’s artistically dull, the combat is mindlessly boring, the level design is meandering and empty, and while there are some minor improvements, these are dwarfed by the utter mediocrity of the full package.

As a stand-alone action game, it’s dreadful, but as a sequel to a, at the time, hot new IP, it’s godawful. I can absolutely see why everyone tells you to skip it.

And yet, and I know this is going to sound crazy, I actually DON’T recommend you skip it. Hear me out. The game is bad, really bad, it’s one of the dullest games I’ve ever played, but that’s also why I think you should play it.

Look, if you want to appreciate a good game you need to experience the bad as well. If you want to know what makes Devil May Cry one of the greatest action game series of all time, you also need to see how badly it can be screwed up.

I’m a big Mega Man fan, and one of my favourite games in that series is Mega Man X. It’s one of the tightest designed action platformers ever made, and I know this because I’ve played X6. I have seen how they can mess up the formula through bloated design and awful mechanics. Which only makes me appreciate what the original X did so well.

So in a very strange way I do recommend Devil May Cry 2. If only to see how not to do a hack and slash action game. At the very least it isn’t a frustrating playthrough. It’s honestly a pretty breezy game to get through, which is a major fault with the game but still. And it isn’t too long so it isn’t a huge time sink either.

That said, don’t buy it separately. Buy it in a pack with the other games like with the HD Collection. If you can’t get it like that, don’t bother unless it’s on a deep sale. Don’t waste too much money on it, you’ll probably only play it once.

The story of Devil May Cry 2, the making of it not the story in the game, is a messy one. It’s a story about a team forced to work outside their comfort zone to work on a major title with no idea of what they’re doing. Resulting is a complete mess of game that everyone hated.

However, the story does have a happy ending. While the game was critically panned, it sold well. In fact, it sold better than the first game. This meant that Capcom still wanted a sequel, and Itsuno and his team asked if they could develop it.

They knew they screwed up and wanted a chance to redeem themselves. Itsuno himself specifically wanted to make the game his own as he had been brought in late into development. So, for the next game, they would attempt to right the wrongs of Devil May Cry 2 and make a sequel the fans truly deserved. But that’s a story for next time.