Devil May Cry Concept Art

Devil May Cry had a curious journey as it went from a prototype for Resident Evil 4 for what it would eventually would become. Because of the nature of how popular Resident Evil 4 ended up being in the social consciousness, the journey that Devil May Cry made has had less investigation than the many different iterations of Leon's solo outing.

Double unfortunate is that the only concept art of Devil May Cry that really exists on the internet appears to be the handful of pieces available on the HD collect release disk. Most of these for the original title are just promotional renders of Dante and the different enemies in the game.

Let's make some observations based on what I've found available online:

At one point in time it looks like Dante had some sort of supporting cast. Since this picture in particular involves what looks like two police officers/detectives, I think it's actually concept art from when the game was still being pitched as the fourth Resident Evil.

This is a neat tidbit because in the actual series itself, Dante is never around anyone that could be considered a 'normal human' except for a brief bit in the introduction of the fourth game in the series. As the concept would have gone, in the Resident Evil series Tony Redgrave might have represented a fantastical element out of the norm, whereas in Devil May Cry Dante is representative of the closest anchor we have to reality.

Also worth pointing out: Dante's outfit might have been the first thing really established about the character.
A piece of art I haven't been able to find online is a concept artist trying out several different color combinations of Dante's coat before looking like they finally settled on the red outfit.

Above and below is more concept art of Dante. I'd like to key into how the character is represented in these pictures as when we might be able to determine if this was "Tony Redgrave" or "Dante" we were looking at. The top most picture is most certainly from the era after Kamiya was given the green light to create a wholly original product. Dante's outfit might be similar to the bottom picture, but is rendered with a more stylish flourish. He looks like a character that wouldn't have been out of place in Vampire Hunter D.

This picture is more hard to say, but judging by how para-military Dante's outfit is I think this is from the "Tony Redgrave" design of the character. Notice that while in an undefined style, certain details are already set in stone: regal detailing on his vest, and a combination of motorcycle and street wear.

Despite Dante's flamboyant attire, this outfit wouldn't seem too out of place among the likes of Oswell Spencer or even Wesker post him seeing The Matrix. Dante's outfit merely stands out more because it is a great deal more complex than the simple button up coat Wesker eventually dons.

Before moving on to area and equipment concept art I've found: This is probably the most interesting piece of art for the original Devil May Cry. Mostly because of the character standing between Dante here, wearing an outfit near what he wears in the final game, and Trish. Was this character a last minute cut? Or simply did Mundus originally appear in the game in a more human form.

Devil May Cry has an incredibly small cast. The top-most picture in this article already details that there was originally more of a supporting cast for Dante when the game was still connected to Resident Evil. Maybe this third figure was a last attempt on delivering on that idea before it was finally abandoned?

In the original concept for Resident Evil 4 that Kamiya worked on, it has been noted that Tony Redgrave was either the son of Wesker, or the son of someone directly related to the Spencer family. Supposedly this is an image of Sparda (judging by the twins in the crib) but here he looks unlike any of the ways he's depicted elsewhere in the series. 

Sparda's role the in the series is an interesting one: His demonic visage frames the opening of the original Devil May Cry and is references throughout the rest of the series. Yet there's never been a true depiction of him in the games outside the above mentioned alternate costume in Devil May Cry 3.

The only possible thing that could shed doubt on that character being Sparda is the existence of artwork of the above man - who bears a striking resemblance to Dante's alternate costume in the third game but is still markedly different. I think there's evidence that more of the series' storyline was already present than we're aware of before the game took on the moniker Devil May Cry and this art points to it. At some point, this became the art that future references to Sparda would be based on. 

Above is concept for an area the player encounters super early in the game, below it is the final product as the area appears in Devil May Cry HD collection. It's immediate that you'll notice the concept art depicts a much gloomier and spookier area. The final area, with the exception of a single boss fight, retains a brightly lit aesthetic for the duration of the game. Also worth pointing out is that in the concept art there's a much more of a bizarre wildlife concept present, whereas all that remains in the final version is the vines below the fountain and a few trees.

This is one of the first areas in the game you'll lay eyes on if you play Devil May Cry. Much like the original Resident Evil has the iconic opening hallway that introduces the player to the mansion this area serves to tell us as much as it can about Devil May Cry and its gothic aesthetic. While there's more color apparent in the conceptual design of this room, the finalized area comes off as pretty close to how it was envisioned.

I especially like how much care was to taken to bring in the spacial arrangement as close as to the concept as possible. The horseback rider dominates most camera angles here, and when it doesn't the camera lingers in tight corridors or on the giant statue of what players will later discover is Mundus towards the climax.

Finallly - an area from the end of the game that borrows elements form many different areas of the game in the final product. Out of frame in the lower screenshot is the fact that the final product keeps the warped, organic pillars that throb like veins. Yet

Unfortunately, even though there's yet more concept art for Devil May Cry none of it really answers the question of how much of the game remains unchanged from its original format. Just looking at some of these area designs there's still some Resident Evil influence. In many ways the castle that Devil May Cry is set in has the sort of bizarre somehow lived-in atmosphere that the Mansion and Police Station in Resident Evil and Resident Evil 2 had.

As the franchise went on it's a feeling that was eventually lessened over time. While there's strange occultism present everywhere in the castle Dante journeys through in Devil May Cry it still feels like a real inhabitable place. This is contrary to the environments in later games of the series that while well designed still feel like wholly digital environments. They become Hell Castle or Ancient Temple.

DEVIL MAY CRY OCTOBERFEST AT SKELETON PARTY

While it may no longer be fresh in our minds, the original Devil May Cry marked the death knell of the 3D action game as it was. Gone would be the stilted combat systems only added as an afterthought so the player might explore an area in 3D. Instead, it delivered action games to a whole new level of mechanical brilliance and essentially lay the groundwork for the modern action game.

Even games like God Hand came from lessons that team members learned from Devil May Cry and it's approach to making combat a cornerstone of design and not just an afterthought. Some of the only legitimately important titles in the same genre that could be considered cut from the same cloth like Shinobi are only so because they decided to embark in a separate direction entirely.

Devil May Cry was an odd experiment for its time that just happened to crawl kicking and screaming from the womb of creation and grow into a full on franchise. It's a series that's left it's mark with a host of imitators in the realm of videogames as well as dozens of homages and shout-outs in comic books, anime and film.

Appropriate for a game that was so inspired by all of the above that it in turn was able to leave a deep cut in all of the things that inspired it. Devil May Cry wasn't just a breakout hit on the Playstation 2 - it was the result of a creative decision that likely wouldn't fly in a major studio these days.

If you're not familiar, Devil May Cry was a pretty big creative gamble for Capcom. The director, Hideki Kamiya had previous experience but still was given the ultimate go-ahead to create a new title completely separate from one of the studios' most popular franchises instead of trying to tie it in to that pre-existing series.

So goes the back story of Devil May Cry: Around the turn of the new millennium Shinji Mikami tasked Hideki Kamiya with creating a new entry in the Resident Evil series. Kamiya decided to go in a different direction then the survival-horror trappings of previous Resident Evil games, and instead wanted to make a stylish action game.

Eventually the scenario that was planned by Shinji Mikami and Nobooru Sugimura (a scenario planner for Capcom a the time) was deemed to have gone in too different a direction then would be fitting of the Resident Evil moniker, so ties to that series were severed and our hero Tony Redgrave became the eponymous Dante.

Even though Devil May Cry became it's own creature apart from the monster that is the Resident Evil Series, it always had a little familiar glimmer of Resident Evil in its makeup.
Whether it was in the design of the devils bearing the same eyeball-obsessed sinewy look that many Resident Evil monsters would share or the many dark corridors Dante would walk down, Devil May Cry and Resident Evil always had the faintest of connections.

In honor of that, I'll be dedicating the end of September and, more importantly, October to an examination of the Devil May Cry series of videogames (including DmC) in an attempt to not just find out what makes the individual games tick, but more importantly because I'm on the hunt to find out what keeps the series from being true horror and instead be left in the realm of 'spookiness' along with Jack-O-Lantern's and spider-webs.

Of course, my ultimate goal is to do a critique of the newest release/reboot of the series, DmC: Devil May Cry. I feel like the game has been critiqued before, but not in how it relates and draws from previous games in the series in a kind of schizophrenic way. What I mean (if you haven't played DmC) is that the game had an unclear idea of just how much it wanted to draw from previous elements of the series. Anytime it does wholeheartedly, it seems a little bit apologetic in the way it re-hashes elements players were familiar with before.

Before we can make that criticism of DmC seem sound, I'll be covering every other game in the series from what I hope is as close to the ground-up as I can possibly get.


NEXT -> FROM A WORLD OF THE UNDEAD TO A WORLD OF DEVILS: Concept art and it' relation to the final look of Devil May Cry