Nero’s biggest change is his Devil Breakers. Both of the returning characters wield a sword and a gun, and players are encouraged to chain attacks together between melee and ranged weapons to build up their combo score. Each character has a different playstyle, though Dante and Nero are pretty similar. This isn’t a game where you’re supposed to meditate on the meaning of family or the responsibility of power, you’re just supposed to kill stuff.Īnd killing is a good time. The plot has a few twists, but you’ll likely see them coming from a mile away and even if you don’t, they don’t really matter. There are a handful of fun boss fights, but if you’ve played any of the previous games, you know what to expect here. You start with killing the insect-like Empusa easily and then you’re introduced to flying demons, demons with shields, demons that turn themselves into invincible spiked wheels of death. The difficulty of the enemies ramps up gradually, though I never really found the game that challenging. In almost every stage of the game, you’re killing Urizen’s demon lackeys. It’s not great storytelling, and the overly similar locations for each mission make it difficult to call out specific highlights. There’s a team of ladies that accompany Dante and Nero, but mostly they are there to be rescued - the exception being Nico, an engineer who works with Nero in his new mobile workshop van. Urizen quickly bests the trio of heroes and with Dante sacrificing himself to save the others, Nero and V must figure out how to stop Urizen on their own. The gist of the story here is that the mysterious V shows up at Devil May Cry (Dante’s demon-extermination business) and contracts Dante to kill a demon named Urizen. Devil May Cry 5 splits its frantic action between three protagonists: Dante, Nero (the newcomer from the series’ fourth entry), and the latest addition V. ![]() Yet, it’s nice to see the series taking its biggest risk in quite some time (excluding the reboot from Ninja Theory). Itsuno is a Devil May Cry veteran, having helmed every entry in the series since replacing the director of Devil May Cry 2 and he’s very much in his element here. This is the formula that Capcom has reliably been going back to time and again over the last eighteen years. Loud, flashy, angry, and dumb - don’t say I didn’t warn you.ĭoes it work? Of course it works. The plot only exists as a series of excuses for you to press the analog stick forward and kill everything in your path, and that’s the way Capcom and director Hideaki Itsuno want it. The grumbly, loner, stunted male protagonists are not a bug, they’re actually a feature of the series at this point. It’s hard to review a game like Devil May Cry, narratively, because everything that’s so incredibly dumb about the game is obviously intentional. And now that I’m in my thirties, I realize that while the whole thing is indeed absurd, it’s also still a lot of fun. As I aged into my twenties, went to college and became an insufferable theatre student, Dante and Devil May Cry seemed so stupid, so childish. Then as I got older, he seemed less cool. Accompanied by a scantily clad blonde bombshell, killing demons and doing awesome stuff because it was his “job”, saving the world not because he cared but because it was less of an inconvenience than letting everything burn - Dante just seemed so cool when I was thirteen years old. With the trench coat, leather pants, matching handguns and enormous sword, Dante was everything that spoke to the teenage boy counterculture at the time. While playing the game, my teenage angst flared as the soundtrack thundered with that early-2000s electric techno/heavy-metal sound made so popular in the Matrix. ![]() The booklet explained the backstory and included a profile about Dante, the demon-killing badass protagonist who loved pizza. I rented the game from our local video store and, like excited kids did back in 2001, was reading the instruction booklet on the way home to tide myself over until I could pop the game in my PlayStation 2. ![]() I remember when I first played Devil May Cry.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |