Devil May Cry V's announcement at E3 2018 was the absolute highlight of the event for me. It's exactly the sort of announcement that keeps me watching and anticipating the self-indulgant advertising hellscape every year, one that gets me to completely lose my mind with raw, unfettered excitement. A new Devil May Cry!? Starring Nero!? Heavily influenced by DmC?! Kickass buttrock in the trailer!? Every second of that trailer kicked me into a new level of existance, cutting through my cynisism about hype culture and press events. Because Devil May Cry was back, baby. And despite some hickups(oh good greif), it's remained my most anticipated game of 2019 ever since the announcement.
So naturally I've been chomping at the bit to get my hands on it, and now the PS4 demo has finally dropped, I can lay down my thoughts on how it's shaping up and weather my hopes are dreams are going to come to pass.
The most interesting gameplay decision in DMC5 is the new function of Nero's arm. It's original incarnation in DMC4, which performed a different attack depending on the enemy it was used on, was designed to make Nero a good entry point for newcomers. A way to make players feel stylish with a single button press. So the decision to basically drop the old function entirely in favor of an ever-cylcing inventory of robot arms called Devil Breakers, each with a different ability, says a lot about where DMC5s priorities are set. It's less interested in onboarding new players as it is making a veritable buffet of stylish action for long-time fans. Following on from DMC4 Special Edition's Vergil, Capcom are stuffing as many moves as they can into the 3 characters of 5.
This "More is Better" approach is very much welcome, making fights into playgrounds as much as they are chalanges to overcome. Even with the demo's limited set of sword moves for Nero, just cycling through Devil Breakers offers a lot of varied forms of badassery to pull off. Capcom smartly guessed that folks would try to hang on to the same devil breaker for as long as possible, so they made it so the things are breaking constantly, by accident or deliberately, forcing you to vary your arsenal and try new tricks. I'm sure some folks will be frustrated by this aspect, but I'm personally glad that the game wants to push me out of forming rigid habits.
For me, Devil May Cry's appeal over other character action games, even Series Daddy Kamiya's spiritual followup Bayonetta, is the methodical feel to it's sylish action. Bayo rewards raw prowess, how fast you can dodge attacks and how quickly you can perform combos. It doesn't matter too much what those combos actually are because basically any combination of button presses feels roughly the same, there's a buttload of moves and they rarely feel unique. Thankfully, my worries of Devil May Cry moving in this direction have mostly been assuaded. Moves still feel deliberate and caluculated thanks to the slower speed of the animations, and the ever so slight pause after every move. It's only a split second, but it's a moment to think mid-combo that Bayonetta is loathe to give you.
5 also retains the series' standard dodge mechanic, which I remain iffy on. Rolling is still done by locking on and pressing the jump button while moving left or right, and it's still very fussy about what constitutes as left or right. And it's not that impressive either, only sending you so far and without many invincibility-frames. And it's been this way since DMC1, the reason being that the series never considered dodging to be a core mechanic in the way similar games do. Playing DMC games well tends to mean only using dodge against specific attacks from bosses. A good offence, after all, is the best defence.
The thing is, Ninja Theory's DmC expanded on dodging and it turned out pretty damn well. There's a little acknowlagement of this in 5, one of Nero's new arms is basically a dodge function, but in keeping with the main series' attitude towards dodging, you'll eventually blow it up and cycle to the next arm. So for the most part you're still stuck with the clumsy roll. And it begs the question of weather something more interesting could be done with the mechanic.
DMC5's look is an odd, but enjoyable mashup of DmC's British Punk and the more gothic feel of the original series. Dante and Nero finally look visually distinct, everyone looks like they've walked streight out of an Anime Fashion Show and for some reason the new enemies and environs are genuinely disgusting bug things. It's a bit all over the place, but in a way that tracks with the series trademark bombast. So too does the cutscene direction, a collection of mad acrobatic action scenes peppered with absolutely rubbish quips. Even the narrative itself is just perfectly designed to get fans like me absolutely leathered with anticipation. You wouldn't beleive how exited I was to see Dante falling even further into his Mid-Life-Crisis aesthetic.
The demo also ends with a Boss however, and despite being a degree better than what I was expecting, this is not a team with a strong suit for boss fights. Fighting Goliath is only ever one of 2 things; either he's constantly catching you with glancing blows and leaving you unable to do pretty much anything, or you're lazily slashing away at his unresponsive body and occationally moving aside. Boring at best, frustrating at worst. Which is a shame, because visually he's a riot, swallowing shit with his Xingtian Chest-Face and bursting through buildings. The best DMC series fights are against people roughly the same size as you that offer chances to really style on them, so I hope there's more of those than there are Goliaths in the full game.
There are other weaknesses this team has that I'm expecting to rear their head in the release version, like an economy that, depending on the difficulty, has you either picking through scraps hoping for a new skill in 3 missions time, or getting so rich you become a conservative. This team also never quite grasped the idea of gaining new skills as a way to ease the player into more complex gameplay. In 4, unlocking a new character carried over your "proud souls"(skill unlock currency), meaning your new character would have a lot of high-level skills you'd likely never use because you're still learning the basics. Proud souls are gone now, skill unlocks happening via red orbs, which can't be refunded by unequiping the skill like proud souls could. Hopefully that means you won't get flooded with too many skills on switching to a new character this time. That said, you can purchase red orbs with real money, because some rich people need to get richer, presumably. So who knows how that will shake out.
I've been waiting for the king of the genre to return for a long time now, and so far it's almost suspicious how perfectly it seems to be going for me. Even with the demo in my hands, I can scarecely beleive that this game I've been waiting for for years is actually turning out better than I'd ever hoped. There's a chance of some unseen fuckups rearing their heads soon, but for now I'm willing to let my hopes live on until the game comes out for real.
Also, everyone in this game is so hot, it's ridiculous.
So naturally I've been chomping at the bit to get my hands on it, and now the PS4 demo has finally dropped, I can lay down my thoughts on how it's shaping up and weather my hopes are dreams are going to come to pass.
The most interesting gameplay decision in DMC5 is the new function of Nero's arm. It's original incarnation in DMC4, which performed a different attack depending on the enemy it was used on, was designed to make Nero a good entry point for newcomers. A way to make players feel stylish with a single button press. So the decision to basically drop the old function entirely in favor of an ever-cylcing inventory of robot arms called Devil Breakers, each with a different ability, says a lot about where DMC5s priorities are set. It's less interested in onboarding new players as it is making a veritable buffet of stylish action for long-time fans. Following on from DMC4 Special Edition's Vergil, Capcom are stuffing as many moves as they can into the 3 characters of 5.
This "More is Better" approach is very much welcome, making fights into playgrounds as much as they are chalanges to overcome. Even with the demo's limited set of sword moves for Nero, just cycling through Devil Breakers offers a lot of varied forms of badassery to pull off. Capcom smartly guessed that folks would try to hang on to the same devil breaker for as long as possible, so they made it so the things are breaking constantly, by accident or deliberately, forcing you to vary your arsenal and try new tricks. I'm sure some folks will be frustrated by this aspect, but I'm personally glad that the game wants to push me out of forming rigid habits.
For me, Devil May Cry's appeal over other character action games, even Series Daddy Kamiya's spiritual followup Bayonetta, is the methodical feel to it's sylish action. Bayo rewards raw prowess, how fast you can dodge attacks and how quickly you can perform combos. It doesn't matter too much what those combos actually are because basically any combination of button presses feels roughly the same, there's a buttload of moves and they rarely feel unique. Thankfully, my worries of Devil May Cry moving in this direction have mostly been assuaded. Moves still feel deliberate and caluculated thanks to the slower speed of the animations, and the ever so slight pause after every move. It's only a split second, but it's a moment to think mid-combo that Bayonetta is loathe to give you.
5 also retains the series' standard dodge mechanic, which I remain iffy on. Rolling is still done by locking on and pressing the jump button while moving left or right, and it's still very fussy about what constitutes as left or right. And it's not that impressive either, only sending you so far and without many invincibility-frames. And it's been this way since DMC1, the reason being that the series never considered dodging to be a core mechanic in the way similar games do. Playing DMC games well tends to mean only using dodge against specific attacks from bosses. A good offence, after all, is the best defence.
The thing is, Ninja Theory's DmC expanded on dodging and it turned out pretty damn well. There's a little acknowlagement of this in 5, one of Nero's new arms is basically a dodge function, but in keeping with the main series' attitude towards dodging, you'll eventually blow it up and cycle to the next arm. So for the most part you're still stuck with the clumsy roll. And it begs the question of weather something more interesting could be done with the mechanic.
DMC5's look is an odd, but enjoyable mashup of DmC's British Punk and the more gothic feel of the original series. Dante and Nero finally look visually distinct, everyone looks like they've walked streight out of an Anime Fashion Show and for some reason the new enemies and environs are genuinely disgusting bug things. It's a bit all over the place, but in a way that tracks with the series trademark bombast. So too does the cutscene direction, a collection of mad acrobatic action scenes peppered with absolutely rubbish quips. Even the narrative itself is just perfectly designed to get fans like me absolutely leathered with anticipation. You wouldn't beleive how exited I was to see Dante falling even further into his Mid-Life-Crisis aesthetic.
The demo also ends with a Boss however, and despite being a degree better than what I was expecting, this is not a team with a strong suit for boss fights. Fighting Goliath is only ever one of 2 things; either he's constantly catching you with glancing blows and leaving you unable to do pretty much anything, or you're lazily slashing away at his unresponsive body and occationally moving aside. Boring at best, frustrating at worst. Which is a shame, because visually he's a riot, swallowing shit with his Xingtian Chest-Face and bursting through buildings. The best DMC series fights are against people roughly the same size as you that offer chances to really style on them, so I hope there's more of those than there are Goliaths in the full game.
There are other weaknesses this team has that I'm expecting to rear their head in the release version, like an economy that, depending on the difficulty, has you either picking through scraps hoping for a new skill in 3 missions time, or getting so rich you become a conservative. This team also never quite grasped the idea of gaining new skills as a way to ease the player into more complex gameplay. In 4, unlocking a new character carried over your "proud souls"(skill unlock currency), meaning your new character would have a lot of high-level skills you'd likely never use because you're still learning the basics. Proud souls are gone now, skill unlocks happening via red orbs, which can't be refunded by unequiping the skill like proud souls could. Hopefully that means you won't get flooded with too many skills on switching to a new character this time. That said, you can purchase red orbs with real money, because some rich people need to get richer, presumably. So who knows how that will shake out.
I've been waiting for the king of the genre to return for a long time now, and so far it's almost suspicious how perfectly it seems to be going for me. Even with the demo in my hands, I can scarecely beleive that this game I've been waiting for for years is actually turning out better than I'd ever hoped. There's a chance of some unseen fuckups rearing their heads soon, but for now I'm willing to let my hopes live on until the game comes out for real.
Also, everyone in this game is so hot, it's ridiculous.
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