Devil May Cry ★★★☆☆

I thought it would be interesting, after replaying Resident Evil 4, to also return to a game that started as a prototype for it and examine the divergent evolution, and structurally it does feel somewhat like a Resident Evil game with an arcade game stabled on top of it. The main setting of the game, an old, ornate European castle (much like a large portion of Resident Evil 4 itself) is a series of interconnected rooms whose that are unlocked through a series of puzzles involving putting the right key item in the keyhole, but instead of the slow exploration and unpicking of the space that one might expect, Devil May Cry is instead divided into a series of missions each of which give you an explicit objective on how to proceed next, where you are given a rank at the end of each level based on how quickly and efficiently you completed it, with a limited pool of lives and saving only available between levels. It reminds of Half-Life 2: Survivor. I feel like I’m playing an arcade mode in a game that is missing its main story mode, where the details about the castle and its castellation that you can read when examining the environment are actually part of the story and not just set dressing, where your file menu has documents you find scattered around rather than just your current objective and strategy tips for enemies, where you can save at the statues of the watcher of time rather than just buying skills. And unfortunately I think I would prefer to play that hypothetical story mode.

Devil May Cry is at its heart an arcade game of the style I don’t gel with very well. It wants to be played over and over again to master it, improve your ranking and level up to the higher difficulty new game+ modes. In true arcade fashion it even starts straight into a second loop on hard mode when you finish it on normal, not even kicking you back to the title screen. I generally want a game that is paced to be played through once, that introduces itself, lets you get familiar with its concepts, and then slowly master them. I do not like the limited lives system and especially how it uses them up automatically when you die instead of offering you to restart from save point instead. If you die early on in a mission and wanted to save extra lives for a boss your only recourse is to reset to the main menu yourself. It is also just quite an unforgiving game in general. Even on normal difficulty Dante doesn’t take many hits before he dies and the pace of fights is very fast, with little warmup before its throwing bosses and very nasty enemies like shadows at you. I know I’m not so old yet that my reactions are that bad, I do fine at Deltarune bosses and besides I remember sucking just as much at this game as a child, though other things came as a surprise to me. I did not remember the swimming sections at all.

I did manage to improve and get my head above the water as the game went on, and really started enjoying dealing with a degree of crowd management when being swarmed by mobs of marionettes and really liked the one-on-one fights with Nelo Angelo especially, though unfortunately none of the other bosses really measure up and must all be fought three times. I did start to use items more as the game wore on, especially against Nightmare and dumping all my unspent points on powerups before the final boss, which in the style of Sonic the Hedgehog starts with a really bad gameplay shift where you are fling in space for a shmup section. I also resorted to setting up a turbo mode for ◻ when I got to Griffon because the button mashing for the guns was killing me.