Devil May Cry

Here's part one of the Devil May Cry trilogy, which is only a 'trilogy' in that its first three games were on the PlayStation 2. A fourth came out for the current generation years ago, and recently the series was completely rebooted and simply called DMC with a younger, more emo version of the protagonist Dante. Yikes! Well, I can look into all that more in-depth later. For now, I have played the first Devil May Cry, a game that was originally conceived of as Resident Evil 4 before Capcom realized it was moving in a completely different direction from that series and decided to make it a new franchise. The biggest holdovers from the Resident Evil series is that for the most part Dante is exploring a giant castle, solving some light puzzles and killing nightmarish bosses. That's pretty much it though- Dante is much easier to control than any RE character, and the whole thing plays out more like a less refined God of War. The exploration of the castle plays out as 23 different levels of ~15 or 20 minutes each, where you usually have a simple task like 'unlock this door' or 'go back there and kill that boss'. Along the way Dante engages in a beat-em-up style of combat that is graded on how stylish you are- basically long uninterupted combos will give you a little icon in the corner with that combo's rank (Dull, Cool, Bravo, Awesome, or Stylish!), and these combos as well as the length of time it takes to complete a level give you a style bonus at each level's end (also in D, C, B, A, S form). This bonus can then be spent on upgrades, but I think it works best simply to show off how stylish you are- most of the replay value here comes from trying to get an S rank on every stage. The game looks pretty good, having been upgraded to HD for this re-release, and overall I did have some fun with it. Unfortunately while Devil May Cry was something to behold at the time, I don't think it holds up all that well overall- aside from the 'style points' aspect, I've played games like this that were bigger and better. Kudos to Devil May Cry for trying these things first, but hopefully the next two games in the series have a little more substance.