The Devil May Cry series has always been defined by one word: Style. Melodramatic anime cutscenes sandwiched between combat that plays like action movie choreography, where you're constantly measured on your ability to look good while kicking ass. And quite frankly, DmC has more style than all it's predecessors. Granted it's not quite the same style as the rest of the series, but still, it's absolutely got more of it. And similarly, it's flaws weigh heavier on the whole than they do on the original games.
I had God of War on the mind as I revisited this old favourite of mine. God of War loves to think it's the most Cinematic thing on consoles because it nicks a camera trick and the po-faced tone of a few Oscar winners, but DmC actually understands what it means to be "cinematic". It's in the pacing, the stylistic and tonal divides between acts, the little things that God of War wasn't really interested in. And DmC doesn't give off the vibe of something that cares for those little things, what with it's punk teen exchanging Fuck Yous with the Slurm Queen from Futurama, but they're all still present, working their magic quietly and making it's story flow as smoothly as butter on an ice rink.
DmC's plot is hardly an original one, but it's simple framework is packed with fantastic performances and striking visuals. Limbo as a space lets environments quite literally explode with character, each one built on a some specific visual, and playing around with it to it's fullest. It was an early innovator in the field of fluid movement systems too, lifting and pulling Dante through setpeices feels effortlessly smooth in a way that modern games still try and fail to capture. I'm not exagerating when I call this game a masterpeice, it stands as one of the strongest examples of the Character Action genre. I get cravings to play it. Playing games that tread into it's territory leave me constantly thinking of how I could be playing it instead.
And I can't really be proud of that.
Because despite my innumerable praises for this game, it's attitude towards women is pervasive from start to finish. Every woman in this game exists to suffer or die, often both, and always at the hands of men. Mundus's wife Lilith is this at it's worst, her sole purpose in the plot is to get killed by Vergil to piss off Mundus. And it's not even her death that pisses him off, it's the death of his child that she was carrying. She's entirely defined by subordination to and fear of Mundus. After she gets kidnapped, we get the prisoner exchange scene, an uncomfortably disturbing sequence mostly by design, the skip cuts as Kat gets up brutally convey how long and painful this whole process is. But it's a scene of the 2 currently alive women of the cast reduced to objects, chess peices, while the camera languishes on their suffering. And I say reduced, but Lilith never really gets to be more than that at all. So the camera tricks don't matter.
Kat's treatment by the story frustrates me even more, because it undermines the game's strongest thematic moment. In the final mission, Vergil finally makes his heel turn. It's an obvious twist, not least because of the context of the original series, but it's pulled off excelently. Set in a spot of beauty amidst the aftermath of the battle with Mundus, Vergil reveals his distain for humankind, and Dante sticks up for them, using Kat as his anchor. "We would have failed 20 times over if it weren't for her!" he states, as she stands in the background, meekly looking on. It's a great payoff to a great throughline, only if you take a look at what preceded it, it isn't really a throughline at all.
Thing is, Kat HAS been a badass for this whole thing! But the game has not shown that. We've seen Kat's actions, but she's continually framed as weak and subordinate. If Vergil and her are in the same place, Vergil is centered as she sits in the background. There's the sparks of something interesting in that she gets more precidence when she's with Dante, but those missions are all front-loaded. She disapears for the prison section, then when she returns we're treated to her getting shot and beaten by police. The game's shedload of style doesn't get shared so much with her, the camera just doesn't care. So when the game tries to come forward to say "look how important she was!", it doesn't feel genuine at all.
But then the fight with Vergil starts, and I get lost in the flashes of lightning, the quickfire cutscenes peppering the fight, and the finely tuned details of the fight structure. And I replay the mission again for that SSS rank. And then I do that for other missions, and play all the difficulty levels, and then I've got the Platinum Trophy.
DmC's plot is hardly an original one, but it's simple framework is packed with fantastic performances and striking visuals. Limbo as a space lets environments quite literally explode with character, each one built on a some specific visual, and playing around with it to it's fullest. It was an early innovator in the field of fluid movement systems too, lifting and pulling Dante through setpeices feels effortlessly smooth in a way that modern games still try and fail to capture. I'm not exagerating when I call this game a masterpeice, it stands as one of the strongest examples of the Character Action genre. I get cravings to play it. Playing games that tread into it's territory leave me constantly thinking of how I could be playing it instead.
And I can't really be proud of that.
Because despite my innumerable praises for this game, it's attitude towards women is pervasive from start to finish. Every woman in this game exists to suffer or die, often both, and always at the hands of men. Mundus's wife Lilith is this at it's worst, her sole purpose in the plot is to get killed by Vergil to piss off Mundus. And it's not even her death that pisses him off, it's the death of his child that she was carrying. She's entirely defined by subordination to and fear of Mundus. After she gets kidnapped, we get the prisoner exchange scene, an uncomfortably disturbing sequence mostly by design, the skip cuts as Kat gets up brutally convey how long and painful this whole process is. But it's a scene of the 2 currently alive women of the cast reduced to objects, chess peices, while the camera languishes on their suffering. And I say reduced, but Lilith never really gets to be more than that at all. So the camera tricks don't matter.
Kat's treatment by the story frustrates me even more, because it undermines the game's strongest thematic moment. In the final mission, Vergil finally makes his heel turn. It's an obvious twist, not least because of the context of the original series, but it's pulled off excelently. Set in a spot of beauty amidst the aftermath of the battle with Mundus, Vergil reveals his distain for humankind, and Dante sticks up for them, using Kat as his anchor. "We would have failed 20 times over if it weren't for her!" he states, as she stands in the background, meekly looking on. It's a great payoff to a great throughline, only if you take a look at what preceded it, it isn't really a throughline at all.
Thing is, Kat HAS been a badass for this whole thing! But the game has not shown that. We've seen Kat's actions, but she's continually framed as weak and subordinate. If Vergil and her are in the same place, Vergil is centered as she sits in the background. There's the sparks of something interesting in that she gets more precidence when she's with Dante, but those missions are all front-loaded. She disapears for the prison section, then when she returns we're treated to her getting shot and beaten by police. The game's shedload of style doesn't get shared so much with her, the camera just doesn't care. So when the game tries to come forward to say "look how important she was!", it doesn't feel genuine at all.
But then the fight with Vergil starts, and I get lost in the flashes of lightning, the quickfire cutscenes peppering the fight, and the finely tuned details of the fight structure. And I replay the mission again for that SSS rank. And then I do that for other missions, and play all the difficulty levels, and then I've got the Platinum Trophy.
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