What separated the first Devil May Cry in the terms of storytelling and mechanics apart from every other action game that would use it as inspiration? While it's hard to sum this up in a short sparing of words, I want to do my best to take a second and lay out how I feel about things:
Devil May Cry speaking in just terms of combat and how it relates to the rest of the game is more mechanically sound than a lot of derivatives. Every move that bolsters Dante's arsenal has some practical reason for being there. I could start listing off attacks but I don't want to do that because I feel there's too much ground to cover for it being a backup point in this article.
Those mechanics are then laced up real tight right next to the skin that holds the rest of the game together: Its tone. While it's been accused of having tonal dissonance, I'd like to try and reccuse the game of it in this article. Devil May Cry may not take itself seriously, but it does so intentionally because it wants the player to get involved.
Devil May Cry opens with a now infamous scene of Dante's quiet bar being disturbed by a blonde woman on a motorcycle crashing through the front door and setting it ablaze. Dante reacts nonchalantly, in away that was copied by everyone from Nathan Drake to Sly Cooper by shrugging his shoulders and staying kicked back in his chair.
Dante was responding with a sarcastic nod and reluctant acknowledgement years before a console generation of grizzled men with short brown hair would do the same thing
collectively.
People since have criticized Devil May Cry and its introduction scene for being completely ridiculous. As if expecting a game featuring a protagonist who wouldn't be out of place in a highschoolers first attempt at writing a work of fiction was going to be the game that was true art.
Back when Dante did it it was cool and stylish though - that's kind of how the game works.
Everything that happens in Devil May Cry from start to finish is audacious in how extreme it takes a preference of style over substance.
In that audacity everything that happens in the game is completely necessary. Dante becomes a different guy if he acts like the cock of the walk in every cutscene but the player can't juggle an enemy in the air with a pair of handguns or rocket across the floor and impale someone with a sword.
It would be hard to accept Dante could have white hair and not be laughed at if rocketing across the floor of a Gothic cathedral and plunging a six foot blade into the chest of a puppet monster wasn't a core part of the game. Dante's appearance and mannerisms are completely over the top, true. So is the rest of the game and the world that the characters inhabit.
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| castles would become pretty reoccurring |
So when Devil May Cry opens with one of the silliest and most over the top scenes that might have ever been used to introduce players to a world, it serves to paint a picture of every interaction the player has with the game after that point.
Before I go onto combat and the rest of the game, I want to segue to talk about God of War for a minute. If you're not familiar with God of War, it's David Jaffe's baby that he worked on for years on the Playstation 2.
God of War as a single game or a series whole has been called a lot of things by different publications. A cursory Googles earch for "Epic" and "God of War" in the same sentence returns results that immediately support this.
God of War is a tale of revenge in much the same way that Devil May Cry sets itself up to be. Unlike Devil May Cry though, we're aware of Kratos' intentions from the very first part of the game. God of War sets itself up as a grand tale of revenge. There's no humor to be found and Kratos switches between the only emotions he can grasp (angry and furious) as much as the writers will let him.
God of War wants you to take all of its pumped up machismo absolutely straight faced. Kratos grimaces into the camera and shouts "ARES!" with all of his might before the player even knows why he's supposed to be angry.
The rest of the game is a violent mess where things are gritty and epic for the sake of being gritty and epic. There's never anything to ground Kratos' journey in a way that when it becomes a world-spanning tale of revenge that you notice. Kratos gets skirted from videogame level to vidoegame level and there's no focus on a sense of scale.
Devil May Cry attempts to build up that Dante is on some journey of redemption or retribution for his family and brother that were murdered. The player doesn't know how much of the game is going to be about Dante seeking revenge until almost the end of the game.
The game employs what I want to call a minimal setup. As soon as we know who Dante and Trish are and a moment after we're introduced to Malet island, there's no time wasted before you're thrust into control of Dante.
At it's outset, Dante didn't really control like a lot of other protagonists. He runs at a pace that's not any faster than the characters in a Resident Evil game. He jumps straight up into the air quickly and with a minimal arc that's not really meant for platforming as it is for combat.
The game introduces the player to its aesthetic before it introduces them to how the player is involved with it. You explore the giant Gothic castle for minutes before you ever have a combat encounter.
If you compared the first game in the series to alter entries it could be seen as being cut from a different cloth. Devil May Cry is a game populated by these moments of quiet between combat where the only company the player gets is the flash of lightning through a window, or a droning organ.
This is, again, contrary to God of War. A game which form start to finish wants to constantly wow the player. Every vista has to be underneath glittering sunlight or pale moonlight, every monster is introduced with a howl and brutal display of violence or aggression.
God of War has none of the moments of quiet that help tie Devil May Cry together. You don't go around expecting a fight in every room even thought you want it that way because of how the game is structured.
Malet Island feels like an actual inhabitable physical space, despite the weird geography. There's never any moment where something is too beautiful or too creepy that you couldn't reasonably picture it. Those quiet moments help drive home the island as a physical space.
There are rooms upon rooms that only exist for Dante to wander through, but are still filled with the kind of details you would expect to find in a space the designers designated as "important"
This design choice is completely deliberate for the particular style that Devil May Cry is going for. Malet Island has to be a seemingly-real place where things have happened before Dante got there. If it were a boringly designed gGothiccastle like in Castlevania: Lament of Innocence then Devil May Cry would have been a joke.
Instead, the player gets to revel in how ridiculous of a concept Devil May Cry is but it always feels like you're laughing *with* the game, as opposed to *at* it. Even when every line Dante says in the game is ridiculous it actually lends a sort of strange credibility to the game.
What's special about Devil May Cry is right there: It clearly knows what it's doing. Really - you can only criticize the game as being 'style over substance' if you've never spent a long period of time picking it apart.
Everything in Devil May Cry is completely deliberate. Hideki Kamiya's other titles actually more or less apply a very similar philosophy from
Resident Evil Zero to
Okami.
There's little sense in the original Devil May Cry that anything was included as an afterthought or to satisfy some third party.
A quarter of the way through the game roughly and Dante receives the powerful sword Alastor.
The weapon plays out in one of my personal favorite cutscenes in a videogame, but the weapon itself is notable for satisfying the player in a way they don't expect.
When you first receive Alastor, it doesn't open up combat in any way at first glance. It comes with a second set of combos that all have their own important uses, but it only builds on what's already there rather than add new depth to the combat system is whole.
Alastor of course introduces Devil Trigger, something the player doesn't even know they're going to crave in every installment in this franchise that changes your approach to combat.
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| the form bears some likeness to its namesake |
Devil Trigger is a functionality that allows Dante to go all blue and blowing and demonic when his magic meter is full - at the players choice of when and how to use it. Devil Trigger bestows on Dante increased speed, resilience and strength. It has no downsides besides never seeming to stick around long enough, and even refills his HP.
Right around this time, the game is no longer shy about throwing much larger groups of enemies at you. The real meat of Devil May Cry happens right around the time Dante acquires Devil Trigger.
A mob of enemies in Devil May Cry provides a unique challenge. Dante does pretty poorly when he's surrounded by multiple enemies much like our bro Gene in Godhand. So it's up to the player to decide how to break a crowd of tough foes apart on the same hand as judging when to use Devil Trigger.
Popping it too early could leave the player struggling through the hardest part of a difficult encounter or not having it at a critical moment between victory and defeat. Devil Trigger becomes a push that can change the tide of almost any encounter.
Devil Trigger had a lasting influence on the design philosophy of the rest of the series, and each game has taken its own approach to slightly playing with how it functions. Because of the nature of how Dante's inventory is set up in the first game, it means that for most encounters the player is stuck with one Devil Trigger transformation.
While Devil May Cry might have an inventory system that can be seen as aging poorly - it could also be seen as a deliberate choice that uniquely works for the game. I say so because it forces the player to become intimately equipped with the differences of play style between Dante's different weapons.
If it seems like the game wants you to stick with one weapon through an entire situation, that's because it does. It's the focus of how combat
works in the original title and I feel that it's unfair to hold it against the game just as it would be unfair to say that Devil May Cry 3's insistence on the player rapidly switching weapons in combat could ever be considered a misstep.
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| also later in the series he literally fights with buttrock |
While you're acquainting yourself with Dante's application of what i'm sure is a long and varied job history of cutting apart Devils, the game switches gears and has you do it to a soundtrack of rock-and-roll guitars with the occasional operatic beat thrown in for good mix.
If it sounds silly, that's because it kind of is. Yet Devil May Cry's soundtrack jumping from mostly atmospheric to hard rock is one of the perfect examples of deliberate design choices that I mention earlier. If the game had made an attempt to have the player fight backed by opera or orchestra the joke would be too on the nose.
Instead, it makes you think you're inhabiting a slice of Dante's world. This is a guy who probably orders pizza every day and can pull off a screaming red trenchcoat with cowboy boots as acceptable wardrobe choices. If Dante had an iPod it would have Opeth and Slayer on it and probably not much else.
It's kind of dumb but the player likes it anyway. Devil May Cry's soundtrack is the vodka added to your soda. Maybe not a good choice you think while it burns your throat but later you're so drunk that anything that comes on the radio starts to sound good.
Other games tend to not deviate from the works that inspire them at all, or wear their inspirations directly on their shoulders. With Devil May Cry it almost seems like Kamiya set up a a work he expected to be copied.
Taken as is, even for all that it has aged, Devil May Cry holds up spectacularly well. It's because of how everything in the game seems like it was meant to be included, from the smallest detail to the largest.
Earlier this month I combed through some of the game's promotional material and concept artwork and it definitely shows that there was a lot the developers either decided was unnecessary completely or just didn't fit the tone of the final product.
While the third game in the series is a great deal prettier and much more refined mechanically, Devil May Cry as it stands originally is a great way to contrast the host of games that pulled from it that other developers would later release.
