Devil May Cry 2 Review

 Whatever

Well that didn't take very long, now did it? My hunt for the game I played in my youth continues on with- oh wait, no I'm pretty sure it was this one. Yep, Angelic transformation, vaguely European building you can jump up, a mission with constantly draining health, the warped level geometry which I originally thought was just my spotty memory playing tricks on me- turns out it was the Lucia disc of Devil May Cry 2 that I played all those years ago back at my Cousin's house. Guess that's that then. I don't really need to review the rest of the series. In fact, I don't even really need to finished this review. So that's all she wrote, I guess. Nothing more to say... But there's so much to say, isn't there? Especially about this game! I just keep going until I get bored. (Although considering this is Devil May Cry 2, I don't expect that will be long.)

But talking about the actual game that is Devil May Cry 2 is only half of the fun, the rest comes from talking about the legend behind the game. You see, I was under the impression that people's issue with this game was the lack of personality from Dante and yeah, he's like a blank piece of wood in this game, but it wasn't until now I realised that the infamy sinks far deeper than a bad performance in a franchise so far resplendent with bad performances. Devil May Cry 2 was a game first birthed totally without the knowledge of the series creator Kamiya. In fact, he was busy localising the original game into English when he heard about it's production, attempting to capitalise off the runaway success with a slapdash sequel. As the legend goes, Capcom were already making their own Tomb Raider rip-off when this franchise blew up in their laps, which is why the game features a rush secondary protagonist with no personality and the exact same backstory as Trish from the original Devil May Cry. They already had a half-finished protagonist, why not just recycle some old story into her?

Now one part of this story that isn't conjecture is thus; the original director of the game is not known outside of the Capcom offices! Yes, there was an original director who left the project as something of a spinning, burning disaster before Hideaki Itsuno was dragged abroad to finish it. Itsuno tried the best he could to bring the thing together, and the fact the game is a functioning hack-n-slasher at all is thanks to his efforts. Still, the game was a mess and not at all a proper successor to what Devil May Cry established. So distraught in his apparent failure was Itsuno, that he redoubled his efforts into making Devil May Cry 3 and that led to- well, I guess we'll see what became of Devil May Cry as a franchise when we get there, no won't we...

For today we can talk about DMC 2 and my strangely optimistic approach I afforded this game. Perhaps part of that was due to my search into the past that I wanted to satiate, but the other half was my excitement after letting the demo for the game play and finding said footage to be exciting! I saw new more fluid animations for shooting, some acrobatic upside down shooting moments, cool cartwheel dodges- heck, the game looked like a riot! And to it's credit all those flashy and eye-popping moments make it to the gameplay too! You can run up walls vertically or horizontally, fire your twin pistols Ebony and Ivory at two targets in the same barrage. (although the stick trick to pulling it off is excessively temperamental) Dante's animations are smoother, his attacks more vicious looking, his red suit sharper than ever, there's just one problem- why is my man so slow?

I mean sure, he's not really slow by the standards of a normal fighting game protagonist, but if you had just played Devil May Cry 1 you'll immediately spot the difference. It's as though Dante was suddenly hit by the weight of his heavy sword and physics now hangs on his every swing... until he jumps in the air and propels himself by the weight of his own gunshots... Yes, as it turns out Dante was designed to feel heavier so that all that nascent agility could be unceremoniously transplanted to new-series character Lucia, a mysterious new girl in Sheik-cosplay with what should honestly be in the running for the world's worst faux-French accent ever to grace earth's soundwaves. She fights about as speedily as Dante used to.

From the get-go Dante feels quite fun to control, wielding all the basic toolset he had in the first game from his lunge to his launch, but something doesn't feel quite right. Firstly, there's actually no way to unlock any more moves, in this game all the upgrade path does is reinforce your weapon damage. Secondly, Dante's launch barely keeps the enemy up for more than a second, most times it's not even enough hang-time to start a gun juggle chain. Thirdly, and this is more of a personal gripe, the dodge button was moved from being the same as the jump button, which did mean I went through Dante's entire campaign without dodging before I realised my mistake. Weep for me. And lastly- none of the enemies really challenge you enough to require making use of the smooth animations or slightly improved basic moveset.

It was a problem I noticed in the first level, how literally no enemies managed to hit me and I wasn't even trying to go hitless. But as I progressed onwards the issue only really got worse. New enemies just seemed to idle for that moment too long, or only one would jump forward to attack in a group of five. The real moment when I couldn't take it anymore was the level which I imagine is the common breaking point for most players- the one with the infested vehicles. You have the three tanks with the giant turret that simply can't hit you when you're stabbing the tank. You can run up to it and watch the turret desperately turning about trying to achieve the impossible before the close-range machine gun turret kicks in after five full seconds of flailing. And that's just the prelude to the Infected Chopper.

The Infected Chopper is a special kind of boss that we all keep in our hearts. An apparent 'chase scene' across rooftops where the enemy is so laconic you can just stand there and shoot his health bar to pieces instead of flee because it seems to be incapable of shooting you. (Doing so does nothing, the helicopter pops up again in the next scene.) Only once it's chased you to the top of a building are you finally allowed to fight back, for some reason, and the fight is legendary. Firstly, for some reason the DMC 2 team decided to make this the kind of fight that really has to be fought exclusively with guns, which is already a pretty static endeavour that only requires the pressing down of a single button. Secondly, the helicopter only has two moves. A machine gun which seems to always shoot above your head and homing missiles that are designed to loop around you before homing in, which means if you stand still on the ground they literally smash into the floor and explode. Yes, this means the fight essentially is just standing still and pressing the shoot button. And as guns have the smallest damage output, you're there for about five minutes. It's about then that you realise that this isn't really a Devil May Cry game.

Even as you progress through the game and some of the trash mobs become a little more interesting and taxing, (nothing to the level of the late game mobs from DMC 1 which started feeling like minibosses all of their own) somehow the bosses remain just embarrassingly bad. There's a two headed man with wrecking balls for hands and a really limited range. A range far smaller than that of your guns. Another 'stand still and shoot' option. You have humanoid bosses that can be bowled over by Dante's lunge, making them pushovers. It gets to the point where the team just floods some bosses with adds so that the bad lock-on system can become the challenge players have to overcome. The new lock-on that is automatic and sticks to whatever creature is closest even when you need it to lock anywhere else. They even bring back Phantom for some reason, but forget to put him in an arena cramped enough for him to be effective, and so he's a push-over.

What's that? You want to know why Phantom is back despite being destroyed in the first game? How about asking why Phantom would even be present in any form at all given that he was a servant of the demon Mundus and this new demon is called... gimmie a sec- Argosax? (Sure.) If the story of the first game was simple and shoddily written, this narrative is straight nonsensical. The narrative is split between Danta and Lucia in such a terrible fashion that you actually cannot understand the basic events of the story by just playing one. Play as Dante and the concept of 'Arcana's being this game's mcguffin are thrown in half-way through the game as if you've always known about them. (Seriously, how does Dante know something we don't?) And if you play as Lucia, be prepared for key boss fights to just be skipped past because they get covered in Dante's playthrough. Which is just about the worst of all worlds, it's safe to say.

And as for Dante's personality drain- I can see what the fans were saying. I didn't particularly think Dante was exactly cool in the first game, but it seemed like he was trying to be. Throughout the entirety of DMC 2 it feels like Dante is on a job he really doesn't want to do and thus refuses to donate his attention to caring about anything. They'll be entire cutscenes where he doesn't say a word, and when he does open his mouth it's typically to end dialogue as soon as possible. "Whatever" and "Don't speak, just die". Up until the final two missions it really feels like Dante wants to be anywhere else then in this game, he even brings a coin to flip in order to decide whether he can bothered enough to help anyone. Of course, spoilers, it is revealed eventually that the coin had double heads, so he was never leaving such moments up to chance- but then what was the point of him using it at all? To make Matier think that he was going to leave her entire land to become a demon infested swamp based on the result of a bored coin toss? That he was happy to see her adopted daughter get gutted if the coin didn't ring in her favour? He wanted to look like a dick? To what end?

Lucia, on the otherhand, doesn't sound so much bored as she does...confused. About her entire being. I'm not just talking about her backstory, by the way, I'm talking about her performance. Her VO sounds like she either couldn't speak English or had never actually met a French person before to study how they speak- and the result is the kind of line reads where you'll be constantly second guessing yourself trying to figure out what she even just said. And of course the sound mixing is shoddy so sometimes you just can't hear the woman anyway. Honestly, she did not make herself main protagonist material in either her content or delivery, and since Dante didn't feel like giving his one hundred percent for most of the story, our narrative feels largely checked out for the majority of the story.

You'll largely just drift around this quite large map, almost totally devoid of the zone repetition from the first game which I was actually somewhat fond of, preforming objectives purely because the game has decided this is what needs to happen next. It seems the confused mythological inspiration splurge of the series canon has leaked onto the main script. Although we haven't lost the confused inspirations either, mind you! We still get to see Freki and Geri, Odin's wolves, now serving under some random weirdo called Bolverk, who in the lore was Sparda's rival who now hunts his son, but in the game he... well he says nothing. Nobody seems to be willing to establish any world building whatsoever. The main mastermind monster is only name dropped once, and I might be wrong but I think it only happens in Lucia's playthrough despite the fact that Dante is the only character who actually gets to fight him. 

Most of the game is painfully easy to drift through and a few of the bosses are so boring I was actually editing one of my other blogs whilst I fought them, I wrote the first two paragraphs of this review whilst fighting the first phase of the final boss for the second time. (I forgot to save after beating the game the first time, stupid story.) On rare occasions, however, the difficulty spikes up so abruptly you'll get whiplash. Bolverk's stupid fight with his wolves in a tiny room where they can all stun lock you, Lucia's one-on-one with an invisible fish she can't lock-on to, or the three floating heads. They're all painfully annoying and difficult in all the wrongs ways. Bolverk is enemy spam, the fish exploits the fixed camera angles in order to launch attacks you can't see coming and the head... well that's another 'pistol only' fight, which should be considered a war crime. Only the final form of the final boss for Dante's disc, The Despair Embodied, is an actual fully formed fight with challenge and precision in the style of the first game. Still, it's a shortlived bout.

Fighting The Despair Embodied did, however, introduce me to a concept I had never even known exsisted. Desperate Devil Trigger! When your health is in the critical, if you activate Devil Trigger you'll transform into a much more powerful, and larger, variant of Devil Form that boasts it's own unique moveset and a huge DPS boost. It's actually a genuinely cool and cinematic way to turn the tables of a fight going bad, although I struggle to think of anywhere it could possibly used outside of the final boss because everything else is either painfully easy or utter grating trash. What a cool, but ultimately wasted, idea. 

Lucia's own campaign is like a mirror of Dante's, occurring at the same time but taking mercifully fewer levels to complete. Lucia pushes through levels that are largely the same as Dante's but done in a different direction, typically backwards- but she does have some unique levels such as her water level bouts, which aren't terrible. Lucia also has some of her own bosses, which are all terrible. Especially her final boss which is just ludicrously pathetic to the point where I think you'd have to actively be trying to die in order to lose to him. I don't think I saw him do more than two moves in the entire final encounter. Next to the genuine challenge of 'The Despair Embodied' he was a total joke. Then again, with Lucia's moveset I wouldn't want to fight The Despair Embodied!

Although she is mechanically the same as Dante, Lucia plays just a little bit different thanks to a few key factors. As I mentioned before she attacks at the speed that Dante is supposed to- but she also has a pathetic reach making her 'lunges' an embarrassment to witness. Honestly her battlefield coverage is pretty poor, which would make for an interesting change up to the way you play the game if she actually had any different way to play, but apart from those points she plays pretty much exactly the same as Dante. The animations are different but the fundamentals are identical- she's just Dante with less potential for moving whilst striking, making combos more difficult to chain and annoying me. Her side arms are also all terrible, especially the grenade which takes so long to roll the enemy has already gone off and started a mortgage by the time the fireworks start.

Now I know that Lucia has her fans who consider the character underappreciated, and I can only assume that's down to the bird-like design of her Devil Trigger which is actually pretty cool. I think her human design, however, feeds into the 'generic rogue' archetype too heavily. Plus I find it funny that fans bemoan the fact she's never made it into another game, dooming her to the stereotype of 'the one in the bad game' when it's only those same fans that are holding her there. Literally, open your eyes and look around- you'll see that she absolutely did return in one of the greatest Hack-n-Slash games of our generation. She's literally Mistral from Metal Gear Rising Revengence- only Mistral somehow has more character, emotion and a real French Accent with a fraction of the screen time. Now can we stop stanning such a mediocre character just because some fans still think she's hot? (Besides: Mistral is way more hot.)

Summary

Devil May Cry 2 feels like it was a mistake that everyone rode to the finish line in the desperate hope that belief alone would keep the ship together. It's not nakedly bad enough that it's problems would shine to a total stranger who approached the franchise, but even my cursory experience granted enough context to recognise this mess before I actually started looking into and learning the story. It's AI is bad, the bosses are badly designed, the story is a mess, (increadibly for such a simple plot) the acting is terrible, the script couldn't have been more than a couple of pages long, the world feels disjointed to navigate, neither of the two protagonists feel right to play as and the unlocked outfits for beating the game on normal difficulty are ugly Diesel promotional items. After Devil May Cry 1 this game feels like one of those full face tumbles that a franchise can be sunsetted off. The bizarre thing is that in a round about way, this game might actually be more influential than the first. It was the utter disgrace of failing to live up to the first game with this sad fart of a title that inspired Itsuno to pull out all the stops for DMC 3, a game that the world assures me defined the genre. But I guess I'll have to see that for myself, now won't I? Hmm? Oh right, score... umm... D Grade. Yeah it's a D. Below passing, criminally boring. No game this short should drag like it does. This one is a skip, without doubt.

Starfield should be a PS5 Exclusive?

 Whatabout-isms begin

It seemed like we'd never find ourselves a moment in time when Microsoft's attempts to carve out some small thing of their own in the gaming landscape would come to any result whatsoever. Sony have ruled the roost with their endless console exclusivities, locking award winning games away from literally anyone in the world who didn't have a Playstation- Microsoft somehow managed to find themselves in the role of the plucky underdog, trying to establish their own niche in the shared knowledge that their games would be enjoyed by console players and PC players- because Xbox aren't callous enough to believe they can force console sales out of gaming PC owners. (Plus, I guess Microsoft owns Windows so it's a win-win for them.) Microsoft have gone out their way to gobble up studio after studio but the output has been... meagre and unimpressive to say the least.

Redfall was about the straw that broke the camel's back, when it all seemed beyond hope Microsoft would ever have a backbone to stand with. But now we have Starfield coming to the Xbox fortunes have been aroused for the first time since this whole entertainment arms race began. It's a wild hail mary of a shot, banking on the ability of Bethesda to deliver in a manner they never have before, but it's hope beyond hope that Microsoft and Xbox players would finally have something to call their own. And, of course, Playstation and it's players immediately want it for themselves because that is just the nature of things. There can't be good natured competition, humble respect is a myth, everyone in this world is a  parasite who persists sucking the joy out of others.

Sony have been fighting tooth and nail to prevent Microsoft's acquisition of companies under belief that, if given the chance, Microsoft would do something horrible like make console exclusive games. (Imagine that!) The Activision deal has been a particular hotspot, with Sony treating the potential of Activision falling under new management as the coming of the anti-Christ. Sony have acted petulant, kicked over tables and chairs, straight up refused to share PS6 information with Activision if the deal goes through and now they're pointing fingers at Starfield's exclusivity as proof of just how 'unfair' Microsoft is, not letting them have that game. Which I guess means Xbox will be getting Final Fantasy back any day now, right? No? How about God of War? Not that either? Uncharted? Horizon? Literally any game made alongside Playstation studios? I mean Sony wouldn't want to be scum-sucking hypocrites, would they?

But at least Sony have the excuse of being corporate sharks to excuse their behaviour, their fans are just being weird. Point-in-case, the Change.org petition that was started to beg for Starfield to not only be a Playstation game, but to be transferred into a Playstation exclusive. My gut reaction to seeing this was that it must be satire, but if that is the case then it's a poor satire, because the punchline just appears to be the arrogance of a single internet weirdo. That's actually been a reaction that has blossomed across the entire Playstation fandom. Either people saying the game looks terrible, ignoring how the rest of the world is utterly enraptured by what is presented, or claiming that Bethesda are a terrible company that are only capable of putting out bad games because... Fallout 76 was bad and... that's Bethesda's entire catalogue now I guess. (Ignore those consecutive Games of the Years, I guess.)

Meh, enough beating around the bush- let's ask the real question! What has the Xbox community done to not deserve Starfield? Well, the biggest crime seems to be that they're not the Playstation community. As the Petition states, they've had the gall to be excited about the game which the poster has taken to view as wanton arrogance. Honestly, the most discourse I've seen on the game beyond just excitement about it's features are people dogging on it for either being an exclusive or just existing after titles like Destiny 2. Yes, I saw one person rant about how this game is redundant since we already have Destiny 2. Not sure how those games in anyway cross over apart from both being in space, but there you are. So 'arrogance' might be taking it a bit far but there we are.

Xbox as a platform doesn't deserve the game either because it's not the most popular platform and therefore the potential buyer base isn't as large... the same was true with Playstation once but the PS3 still got The Last of Us, now didn't it? And games run better on Sony. Now that one is a bit more interesting, there was one Xbox first party game that did, indeed, run better on the PS5, but by and large the differences between the console have been negligible. And if we're to delve back into history than by a wide margin Bethesda games have tended to run abominably on Playstation. Skyrim was such a mess that there's an entire generation of gamers who seem to think the game was a hardly functioning dumpster fire at launch and seem genuinely surprised when every other platform owner shrugs their shoulders and says "Yeah, it was kinda buggy but nothing game breaking." PS3 Skyrim had to have the DLC delayed for months whilst Bethesda tried to figure out how to make the game stay in one piece, it was bad!

And last of all; Sony fans are just the only one's who would appreciate a game like that, the poster claims. Quality gaming is the home of Sony and exclusively Sony, and all the lower ambition trite should wash up on Xbox. By the sheer merit of turning out to be rather ambitious, maybe the most ambitious game that Bethesda has made, the title was instantly disqualified for the Xbox library and should be transferred post haste. And Xbox players should be deprived of the game because... they smell funny, I guess. You can tell why I thought this was a satire, I bet. But somehow it makes the whole thing even funnier to think it actually isn't and someone out there is really this twisted up about one single exciting looking game that they can't get their hands on. Oh, the humanity.

Now as I've said before, I'm not a believer in exclusivity as a concept. I think it's painfully redundant to the pursuit of the art of gaming and places far too much importance on hardware when it's the products themselves that deserve scrutiny. But I understand that exclusivity deals have helped fund some truly incredible products and I'm not heartless to the extreme financial commitment any odd video game simply demands. So when between a rock and a hardplace, I'm always going to default to supporting the platform that serves the most people, and as long as Sony remains bitterly allergic to the PC audience that's always going to be Microsoft. Here's an idea; why not everybody just start releasing their 'permenent exclusivity' contracts in favour of timed ones and we can all get back to enjoying gaming again?

Devil May Cry Review

 I should have been the one to fill your dark soul with LIGHT!

Well this came out of nowhere, didn't it? In a week that has rather suddenly become a week of reviews, I get to cover a title I've been trying to complete for a long while now and just decided to sit down and 'get her done', so to speak. To be clear, it isn't by design that I completed the reviews for three games in a row, that's just how thing's have shaped up. And what a spread of games they are! An action adventure openworld faux-RPG game that never ends, a disgraced and redeemed openworld first person sci-fi RPG I didn't want to end, and now a hack-n-slash legend-in-the-making: How do I fall on the first Devil May Cry game? You'll have to find out once I'm done telling you the bizarre story about how I came to this franchise in the first place. Sharing time!

So as any kid in the age when I grew up, most of my experience playing games were done around the houses of those I knew who had game's consoles. I never controlled what I played, I just enjoyed whatever was there and spent more time dedicated to the hardware than the people around me because I guess I've always been a recluse like that, huh. And in doing so there were a few games that stuck out in my head. Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the original Star Wars Battlefront and, of course, that one weird hack-and-slash game that I remember playing at my cousin's house. God knows what it's name was, or even what the story was about, I just remember being fascinated and that I couldn't beat it. I remember two distinct aspects of the game, even now. I remember combat areas being enclosed with doors who's locks were a giant ghostly face that would shatter when you beat everything in the area (I think it was a face, although that might be my memories of Fable diluting the memory pool. ) and this one later area mission. This mission wherein you were constantly having your life drained and I had no idea how to stop it. Despite this being a late area in the game, you could visit areas from other levels and I remember running all the way back to the start of the game to figure it out- powered by the fact I remember some type of 'ultimate' state you could 'trigger' that allows health regeneration when in effect. Also, for some reason whenever I think of the game I remember a DVD copy of 'The Devil Wears Prada'.

Now unfortunately I also remember the map consisting of high reaching European streets, which is the reason why I've been searching all this time without any luck. But upon starting Devil May Cry for the first time some years back, I've been struck with the feeling I'm onto something special. In fact, I'm willing to bet that the game I'm looking for is none other than Devil May Cry 2, often referred to as people's least favourite in the franchise. But as a stickler for consistency and lore I have to start where it all begins, with Devil May Cry 1, you know- so that I can properly come to respect the world of this game before I wrap up my investigations. Although... although I have already purchased the entire franchise... so I guess I might as well give the other games a shake as well... damn, has this turned into a series retrospective? Bugger.

Welp, might as well get to it. Devil May Cry: the blueprint that launched a thousand of Hack-n-slash games! Actually, it might have been the franchise that killed the hack-n-slash genre because we don't get a great many competing franchises these days and those we do typically spawn from this franchise. Bayonetta is directed by the man who started the DMC franchise, and Final Fantasy XVI boasts the talents of a Devil May Cry design alumni who calls the new game his 'personal masterpiece' based on all his years working on the DMC games. It's almost as though Devil May Cry defined the genre so much that no one else is confidant enough to try and make their own franchise in the space anymore. And it all started with this first outing, so what could it have to show me?

Well when we hear about what people love about these games, one of the loudest refrains I always hear pertains to fans love for the style and personality of it's main lead- Dante. Dante and his too-cool-for-school, white haired bad-ass antics that sent countless hearts a flutter across his prolonged career of impromptu demon hunting. Which means that, alongside the combat, is certainly something to look out for. Because you know, there are some games that really do hold up all these years later in those special regards. Discounting graphical achievement, some games have that style or performance that remains timeless and fantastic all these years later. To this day the cinematic achievement of Metal Gear Solid  stands firm, the clever gross-out irreverence of Conker's Bad Fur Day still draws a chuckle, does the charismatic wit of Dante still twinkle with that same charm?

No, good lord no. When we first see Dante, running his demon extermination service 'Devil May Cry', he boasts the 'pretence' of the aloof 'I'm so cool you couldn't hurt me even if you wanted to' hero- and to be fair the things he actually does are extremely cool. The man juggles a motorbike in the air through the power of firing his twin pistols, he gets impaled through the chest with a massive sword and simply gets up and walks it off. Twice! But the backbone which would cement the style of these actions, the performance of the voice actor and the lines he has to read... not great. (It's not going to be until Devil May Cry 3 that we get the voice of Dante people know and love.) Right away, I can see how the team try. Behind the janky action sequences and silly cutscene action, I see them attempting to have Dante seem cool as he whips out his dual pistols and remarks "Let's get to work", but I just don't feel it. And that might be due to the way that his breaks of seriousness are filled with either utter nonsense or abject cringe. We'll get to the latter in due time, but for now I'll give you a small taste of the early game nonsense. "You were the first one to know about my Avengence." Your what? Avengence? Who in the- that's even more ridiculous than Revengence! I know it's kind of Japanese en vouge to revive long depreciated words but... that ain't it. I'm sorry.

Thankfully the cutscenes and performances in Devil May Cry is not what keeps people coming through the door. That would be the actual gameplay and layout of the world you traverse on Dante's journey to 'Avengence' his Brother and Mother who were apparently slain by some vague bad-guy called Mundus or something. The game itself takes place in a sprawling castle/mansion through which you'll explore mission-by-mission as you uncover it's secrets. In one of the cooler early uses of this design style, you'll find yourself walking over the same bits of castle in each mission as you become familiar with the layout, uncovering new pathways and crannies in places where you've been before. It's a little like Castlevania in that regard, except that exploration is explicitly linear. Still, the game has you become familiar with your playspace in a way that engenders those some types of 'familiarity cues' when playing through Resident Evil or Symphony of the Night; most games get too 'ambitious' to shoot for that, I still appreciate it. 

Of course, any DMC game is defined by it's combat, and here I have to admit that even in it's early form, DMC has impressed me. The combat tool kit is quiet basic with your melee weapon attached to one button and your dodge with another. Locking onto a target allows the use of move specific movement options, special attacks and your sidearm attack for 'peppering damage'. A lot of the heart of DMC combat depends on giving the player the tool kit to look stylish as they blast through their enemies, and this game handles that beautifully. The range of attack options, gradually unlocked through the spending of blood orbs, is neat enough for the average player to get to know all of them. You have the lunge homing attack, the launch attack, some variant types of attack for Devil Trigger and the ability to juggle enemies in the air with your twin pistol attack should you need to. The 'Style' meter which constantly assess the quality of your combo is a very neat addition as it's strict rules really teach you how to play. You learn how to read enemies and dodge so as not to break your combo, how to absolute not touch the analog stick in the middle of a bout, that you have so many attack moves that double as movement options, and as you learn to start pulling S-Rank combos, the smooth rhythm of combat settles in and the breadth of combat possibility becomes second nature. It's a very simple system by the standards of today but it just works so well.

Devil Trigger is the special state you can build up by landing attacks and activating with a touch of a button once you're got enough 'devil juice'. It's essentially your typical buff mode; attacks hit harder, certainly faster, and certain special attacks morph into pretty powerful 'devil attacks'. Your jump in the air and shoot move (a fine way to stay off the ground when action down there is getting dicey) can morph into becoming a flying winged demon shooting lightning from his hands. It all depends on the primary weapon you have equipped and the abilities you've purchased for that weapon between missions. However, I found that it was difficult, given the brief nature of the game, to really develop both of the weapons you unlock in the story, so despite the fact they have quite unique move sets, I ended up sticking to the sword rather than the fire fists. I figure this system is built more for follow-up playthroughs on higher difficulties. Oh, and Devil Trigger provides a stream of constant health regeneration, so that should be a plus in anyone's book, right?

The challenge of Devil May Cry comes in the variety of it's enemy pool, and for the length of the game DMC has a healthy amount of enemies to throw your way. Puppets to Grim Reapers to animalistic mask monsters- and they've all got quirks to their attack style and movement which makes them interesting to tackle. And frustrating for some of the tankier ones later on. They aren't just sword fodder I'm glad to say, and some even gave me a serious run for my money and straight killed me off when I wasn't paying attention. Of course, the actual programmed enemies are only one fourth of the challenge that this game has to offer; another fourth being the reoccurring bosses you'll become very familiar with throughout DMC.

All of the boss cast here are like old friends- annoying friends you really wish wouldn't keep turning up to parties they weren't invited to. In some ways it fits the nature of the world layout to fight every boss at least three times before they sod off for good, but on the otherhand I really do wish these reoccurring bosses changed up their approach a little more for each fight. It's like they learn one new trick for each fight and the new trick is never really all that different from what they were doing last time so whatever trick you learnt for fighting them then (running around Nightmare, rolling around Neo Angelo's slashes, Just straight blasting Griffon to pieces with your guns) still works wonders no matter when you fight them. Still, they're decent enough stop gaps, and at least the Neo Angelo fights felt fast enough to be a genuine challenge.

And the remaining half of the difficulty? That damn accursed camera! Devil May Cry makes use of the fixed camera angles that were all the rage back in this day, but unlike similar titles like Resident Evil and it's ilk, DMC doesn't appear to have designed the fixed camera angles with the enemies that would spawn in those rooms in mind. You'll have fights where travelling to one edge of the room gives you a bizarre corner angle that blinds you to everything else present in the area because some designer was too busy thinking about how to direct you to parkour rather than how you'll keep alive from the actual fight. And the final Neo Angelo brawl takes place in a room that is inexplicably split down the middle in camera coverage, there's a very real possibility he can teleport to a corner of the room you literally can't see and spam projectiles at you- the dick. And don't even get me started on platforming with badly fixed camera angles- hell incarnate.

Yes, let's put our woes to rest and instead pull back to the narrative itself- wow, is it confused. I get the sense when playing this game that the scenario writer was a big fan of a bunch of different western myths and cultures but had never taken the time to formally study a single one- a position I'm very familiar with in the reverse. You'll be bombarded with various ill-fitting names and objects from jumbled together mythologies without any connecting rhyme or reason to their placement. Dante and Vergil, from the Divine Comedy, bare no resemblance to their name sakes in even the most analytical sense. The Philosopher's Stone is a key to the underworld? The caduceus of Hermes Trismegistus unlocks a... mirror dimension? A lot of things are just 'keys' that sound cool because they've got the name of some Greek god haphazardly slapped ontop for no discernible reason, such is the result of slap-dash world design.

That lack of narrative purpose bleeds into the script and story, which are nigh on non-existent. I get the sense that a certain love for film was central in visualising this project, but not from the place of studied mastery like with Hideo Kojima three years prior to this game, but from more of a hobbyist- 'I bet I could make something like this' angle. (Again, painfully familiar.) Information is teased and withheld for underwhelming late game reveals with bad lines. "You remind me of my mother", being an especially silly moment. It's not until the final encounter with Mundus, however, that I was hit with the unavoidable rays of weaponised cringe that this game was hiding beneath it's cool-guy faux-exterior. Dante is coolest with his mouth shut in the middle of gameplay, when he was faced with back-to-back 'emotional' scenes... well let's just say it doesn't go... great.

Man, what am I talking about! Is there any scene as legendary as the moment when Dante screams "I should have been the one to fill your dark soul with LIGHT!" topped off with the classic voice crack and echo effect? I feel like 'lost-in-translation' is to blame for the flat composition of most of these lines, but come on, what am I going to do: listen to some Japanese dub of Devil May Cry? Dante is American, I think, so that's the language I'll here the man speak in! Even if he hits me with such lines like "Trish, Devil's never cry... These tears, they're a gift only humans have!" I swear it's like the lyric sheet for an Evanescence song got jumbled up with the DMC script in the late game. And you know, Devil's may never cry but I was absolutely red-eyed by the end of this game. It took hours for me to stop crying from how bad everything is. "The sky is fair, it'll always be above everybody's head, no different." WHAT DOES THAT EVEN MEAN? WHO TOLD DANTE TO WAX PHILOSPHICAL? Some of the greatest and worst dialogue lines ever devised by man- I don't know if DMC 3 can top this masterpiece of narrative cohesion!

Summary

Devil May Cry is a classic franchise in the industry, responsible for marking out the face of hack-and-slash games as we know them today. And when the gameplay is in front of me I absolutely know why. The simply intuitive nature of combat, empowered by stylish flair and just the right amount of freedom plays smoother than any other game around it could have dreamed of at the time. When the gameplay gives way to cutscenes, however, I'm left wondering how this story ever got a follow-up at all. Iconic, classic, baffling, cringe-worthy: Devil May Cry is a lot of things all at once. Honestly, I don't really know if I'd recommend this game to anyone who is a lover of this genre of gaming. Newcomers would certainly find something approachable yet challenging here, but hack-and-slash veterans might find the breadth of gameplay choice somewhat frustrating. It's a great place for the genre to begin at, but I'm just not sure if DMC has that same 'ageless appeal' as some other series might. It's not as well aged as Baldur's Gate, although not as badly aged as the original 'Hitman'. At the very least, you must watch the cutscenes on Youtube because they are ridiculously stupid. All in all I enjoyed my brief romp, and DMC gets itself a C+ Grade for it's troubles. Historically significant and still has a little kick to it, there are far worse ways to expand your repertoire of gaming knowledge than delving into the DMC rabbit hole.

Cyberpunk 2077 review

Nowhere to run, it's all undone! Everything Burns! Everything Burns!

Finally I've come around to the moment I've put off for years now, actual years. After seeing the state of the base game, the optimisation issues and realising that this was a game designed for a richer tier of video gamer than myself (and considerable more tolerant for bugs) I put this one on the back burner. But deep in my heart I always knew I'd come around on it. I knew that someday I would buy Cyberpunk 2077 and engage with the dream which was snatched from me and so many others on that faithful day so long ago. And now, as we stand on the cusp of the game's first and only proper expansion, I need to clear my air with this game. Also, as the game was finally optimised enough to run on my hardware, I need to finish this blog before that update comes out which bursts the game out of the range of my hardware once again- because apparently CDPR are simply disgusted at the prospect of having people of my tax bracket among their fans.

First off I'm going to start by saying this won't be the sort of review where I go into the history of the game before release as I usually do, and that's because if you've hung around this blog for any amount of time you'll know that I've done that incessantly over the years. Here's the cliffnotes. CDPR hit it big with The Witcher- promises were that the next game was going to be even bigger. Their mouths ended up writing a lot of cheques that their accounts couldn't cash and when it launched the 'next generation of open world game' dissolved into a better Ubisoft-style game. This was never quite going to be the Grand Theft Auto killer that the team were selling it as, and I bet only Rockstar themselves knew that from the get-go. But let's put all that history behind us and ask- what about the game that did arrive? Is that any good?

Cyberpunk 2077 takes us to the far flung year of 2077 in the 'independent' lands of Night City; techno-powered vice-soaked rotten apple on the West Coast of the New United States. (Although, clearly, Night City itself it not a member of the NUSA) As an adaptation of the old Cyberpunk 2020 Table top role playing game, this world is one seeped in decades of lore and stories pertaining to a society bought and sold by megacorperate mandate. Where capitalism is like an internationally recognised religion that counts just about every single remaining member of the human race as it's congregation. A world of commercialised technological augmentations turning high quality functional prosthetics or skin grafts into ostentatious fashion statements, indulged in to escape the pit swallowing reality of extreme economic inequality, overwhelming disenfranchisement and that ever inescapable sense that you're roaming around the dystopian wastes of an apocalyptic world that doesn't know it's ended yet. The definition of a porcelain mask- delicate and beautiful, but fragile and false: that is the face of Night City in Cyberpunk 2077.

We are brought kicking and screaming into this world through the eyes of V, a two-bit mercenary thug with any of three reasons for being in a city he or she can't escape from. 'The city of dreams'. Through the course of the plot V will be dragged into events beyond their paygrade, thrown to the centre of a massive web of plots, violent aspirations and conspiracy- be broken down to the core and built back up again as something else- something unstoppable... and we'll see V pushed beyond the limits of their understanding to corners of the world they can't reconcile, or are incapable of. All whilst racing a ticking clock in the back of their head threatening to rip away the one thing they seek most of all- more life. Think of Blade Runner if the protagonist was Roy Batty and you'll get both the rough premise and to some degree the thematic emotions the narrative attempts to alight. That of how it is we experience and compartmentalise the trials and irreconcilable limitations of our own lives. Only V is a lot more violent.

As a studio known for the fantasy RPGs following the rigors of an established character, Geralt of Rivia from 'The Witcher' novels, it's quite the change of pace to shift to a player built sci-fi shooter premise. CDPR, ever ones to challenge themselves, took the task to heart by redesigning everything about how their games worked on a fundamental level. Gone is the third person perspective and the elaborately choreographed cinematography for cutscenes- sacrificed in favour of a staunchly rigid locked 1st person perspective designed to tie you fully into the role of your V. And, of course, that means this game is a First Person Shooter- but it does actually go deeper than that. You are in V's eyes for cutscenes, when entering into cars, when being debriefed on missions, when undergoing surgery. You are inhabiting the world through the eyes of V fully until the adventure is complete, as staunchly attached to their psyche as The Construct of Johnny Silverhand is.

So how did that transition from third person swordplay to first person shooter turn out? Increadibly well. If Bethesda are ones to take notes, Cyberpunk is the game to learn from. The way the first person mechanics of Cyberpunk function, from sliding to lean-shooting and snap aiming all the way to the sensation of the weapon in your hands, the feedback of the recoil, the damage response from targets, the brutal carnage of a successful kill- the variation of weapon types, with alternate damage effects or even firing quirks. Smart bullet, wall punching rounds, ricochet shots- it feels so intuitive to play with. Some staunch FPS fans who play games that endeavour to the exact same standard of shooting might scoff their nose about this because doesn't play exactly like Call of Duty or Destiny, and blame the RPG core for holding the game back- but I disagree completely. The game plays it's FPS mechanics flawlessly to it's own strengths. It plays differently to dedicated first person shooters, sure; but it doesn't play worse than them. It feels great, snaps just right, provides every bit of feedback you could want and ties in solid RPG mechanics alongside for good measure. I started off impressed with the combat, but familiarity made me completely satisfied with- I think the combat of Cyberpunk is top tier.

The UI, on the otherhand- not so intuitive. There's a trend I've noticed a lot in modern games, to design these overly hostile looking and cluttered screens of information that pack everything you need to know for a veteran, but to someone just getting started it comes off as particularly unwelcoming. Cyberpunk compounds this with one of the messiest and badly laid-out inventory screens I've ever seen. People who mock Bethesda's inventory systems better lay down their apologies stat because Cyberpunk literally floods all of it's items into a jumbled grid of chaos and asks you to understand it. Thankfully food item buffs are largely useless so you'll probably never have to check out this screen beyond the times you go weapon scrapping. But every now and then you'll get a quest objective that forces you to interact with something in your key items, or read a specific info shard, and those are the most galling objectives in the entire game because of the absolute colossal task of navigating that dumpster heap of a poorly laid-out inventory menu

This is yet another one of those games that surrenders to the pressures of levelling systems, but the way that gun scaling and level matching works isn't quite as bad as some of this generation's less clueless siblings. You get higher level gear and weaponry out in the world quite often, and even legendary weapons don't always offer buffs strong enough to warrant using them over a slightly better machine gun you just picked up; which does feed into the bizarre 'constantly chasing the green arrow' playstyle we've all but assimilated into general gaming culture at this point. There are systems for improving weapon damage but, curiously, later guns do tend to be more interesting anyway. The buzz of finding a smartgun with ammo that literally jumps around corners far beats out the strong punching rifle you'll have jealously hoarded at the beginning of the game. (Firing around a cover without having to poke out your own body is one of those special feeling combat moments you only really get in Cyberpunk.) Also, although it wasn't available at launch, the Transmog system neatly helps relieve the problem players used to have of chasing the strongest clothing gear and ending up dressed like an insane 90's fashion disaster brought back to digital life.

As you progress through the game and start piling on skills, the freedom of your gameplay choices really starts to blossom out. This isn't quite an immersive sim unfortunately, and stealth approaches, whilst fully possibly, don't feel as bespoke or fleshed out as one might expect from a game like Deus Ex. Patrol routes aren't particularly layered or complex, quickhack makes non-human complications all resolvable in the exact same way (pointing with your scanner and disabling) and there's only two animations for stealth takedowns. But providing you're willing to play with the tools that the game does offer you, Cyberpunk encounters can feel drastically different depending on your playstyle. You can engage in a straight room-to-room shoot-up, dashing around impressively cluttered and realistic environments picking shots through a dry-wall of ripped up apartment blocks. You can charge in with drugs and a sledgehammer, soaking up roads and splitting open skulls. Or you can take a hybrid approach, donning the versatile Mantis Blades and a camo-skin implant- jumping about as an invisible assassin, picking off the stragglers in the flurry whilst the survivors search frantically about for their unsee-able opponent. You can even go the 'hacker' route of installing infectious malware into your targets that poisons the victim and then jumps to his nearby buddies, or drives one of them into a cyberpsychosis killing his own friends, or hack someone's system and force them to kill themselves. And, of course, you can switch between all these playstyles depending on how you feel that day. Cyberpunk offers that level of gameplay freedom and moment-to-moment action choices. It is quite special. 

Of course, the gameplay is only a third of the factor when it comes to games like these, there's also the story and the world that story plays out in. Focusing on Night City for a moment, I have to express how impressed and simultaneously disappointed I am in what CDPR delivered for us. Visually, Night City is a total wonder. A techno-futuristic flurry of skyscrapers and billboards, caught between a mix of LA and Tokyo and pulled directly from Ridley Scott as he laid out the sets for Blade Runner. Moving neon billboards, holographic Koi fish, harsh industrial sectors- every district of Night City, and it's surrounding badlands, breathes with a life of their own- distinct and personality rich. You know the districts of the various gangs, the rich, the poor, the rockerboys and the netrunners. In the faceless and homogenous uniformity of a corporate dystopia, CDPR remembered vividly how to retain the colourful variety of the people that live there.

And it goes deeper than looks. We hear the variety in the various fantastic battle themes that engage whenever any of the factions becomes hostile, each unique to the culture or personality of that gang whilst retaining the overall synth-metal theming of the genre and world. We hear authentic voices speaking their authentic dialects and languages, Creole, Japanese, Spanish, Brazillian Portuguese and so on. It truly feels like a hub of world wide cultures, or perhaps more fittingly- a run-down flophouse where all these walks of life have collided in the piss-stained mess of a hovel they call home. Everybody, no matter where they come from, are united by their desire to get out of the rat-race the city traps them under, and you feel that desperation, indignancy and air for rebellion any direction you choose to go in.

Which brings us to the radio and soundtrack- wow! CDPR commissioned a plethora of artists not just to bring the Rocker Boy Johnny Silverhand to life, but to fill the world with in-universe bands playing music in their various styles. In a universe were the power of music is so very important, in it's rebellious spirit mostly, this is a irrefutably important part of the mythos that CDPR needed to devote the amount of serious attention to that they did. I'm not typically one for heavy rock, but I absolutely loved every iota of this game's soundtrack. The artistic heart of every contributing artists is engaged to create music in the mindset of a citizen of the Cyberpunk future, downtrodden and disengaged from the world, screaming their frustrations into powerful and catchy beats. I literally went to work for months banging my head to some of my favourites, 'Resist and Disorder', 'Never fade away', 'Holes in the sun'; every band delivered the assignment to the absolute letter and most went above and beyond the call. What results is, in my opinion, the best in-universe fictional soundtrack in gaming, perhaps in the art of fiction as it stands. How often is this scope of art even attempted, and when has this much heart and passion ever gone into it?

Oh, and the dialect! How could I not mention the dialect! The Cyberpunk franchise employs this curiously distinct timbre to the way people speak, with turns of phrase, manners of structing sentences and unique idioms. This is by no means unique in fiction, but I've never seen another piece of entertainment sell the constructed vernacular quite as strongly as Cyberpunk 2077 does. The natural ease of spoken dialogue, the cohesion between pronunciations and emphasis- I can feel the amount of work the linguistics team put in to make the voices of everyone sound real and natural, creating a world that sounds unlike any other in otherwise normal conversation. You detect the real world influences, the draws from Latin speech patterns, Afro-American speech even hints of that classic transatlantic verbiage- but the result feels distinct and evolved, like a manner of speaking which could easily exist in a melting pot that just never came together in our version of the world. Kudos is required for the effort that went in here.

Perhaps one more controversial angle of the world of Cyberpunk, although one I found so interesting with how different it was to ever other interpretation, is it's fascination with the extremes of commercial oversexualisation. You'll find hyper-sexual billboard advertisements looming down on the streets or being broadcast in every mega-building elevator, read excerpts of gaudy smut novels left lying around in guard-posts covering all walks of life, see the ugliness of a world built off  ofsuperficial sex appeal clear on the face of the narrative and the seedy places it drags you. This isn't the exaggerated beauty of hyper-sexualisation, the idealised glimpse of a glittering world were everyone confirms to the uniform standards of conventual beauty, but a hedonistic and lascivious corruption of it, drunk on the heady fumes of vice and debauchery.

Prostitution, drugs, cosmetic surgery- all glorified and beloved pillars of Cyberpunk society highlighting a society where you can change yourself to look however you want, intoxicate yourself to see the world however you wish to and engage in whatever most base desire takes you at any point- and in the depth of all the hedonism and excess you're still empty and soulless on the otherside. At the end of the day it's all just pomp, glitz, smoke and mirrors. Cake for the masses so they don't feel the corperate boot of faceless 'innovation' and 'expansion' slowly squeezing down on their necks. Which is why it's so important for the rebellious screaming music of the Rockerboy movements calling for people to wake up to the world. And so ironic that by the time of the game, 2077; that entire movement is old-hat and washed up, a vestige of a long-gone age enjoyed only by those who can't let the past go- despite the fact their message is just as relevant today as it was in their hey-day.

Damn, I could talk about the spirit of the world all day- but for this blog it's important I highlight the let downs as well. Namely, the interactivity. For all this effort that went into making the world feel so real, it's utterly criminal that CDPR couldn't go the distance to let us live in that world to a convincing degree! We can't buy food from vendors, go for a drink at the bar, visit an overcrowded nightclub in the wrong part of town, shoot-up unspecified narcotics and wake up hazed out in an alley four blocks away with nothing but our long-johns on. We can't even sit down on benches. For all their effect, Night City is functionally nothing more than a backdrop for another Ubisoft style open world. You have police scanner missions, which are just pockets of enemies that attack anyone who get close. They do, increadibly, all have lore and data shards explaining each criminal going-on; but the encounters themselves are never more than a minute long, so why would I care enough to read about what these murderous arseholes were doing wondering around in the viaduct?

Most all of the world boils down to chasing map markers for side quests, scanner missions or the more involved love-child between those two- Gigs. And as you can imagine, that really does pull away from the wonder of exploring the world for yourself. Driving isn't particularly great, the controls feel sluggish or floaty depending on what ride you pick: whatever class of vehicle, the control always just feels wrong. (And no vehicle combat whatsover) You can buy new apartments for V, although there's no benefit to visiting them beyond a small EXP buff for sleeping in your bed. It feels like everything CDPR attempt to put into the guy to create more of a simulation for the world just ended up feeling half-baked and hollow. For all the thousands of Eddies (Eurodollars) you'll make throughout the narrative and side-objectives, there will never be anything worth spending it all on. Which could be construed as a commentary on the emptiness of commercial pursuits but come-on: We know it's just weak design.

Plus there's the police system, a curiously anaemic anomaly considering one of the core-most taglines of the Cyberpunk 2077 marketing was literally "In Night City: What makes you a criminal?" Nothing, apparently! From hours of shooting my way all up and down Night City, reckless driving, blowing up highways and maybe, accidentally, not always causing hostile casualties- I never once saw a Night City Police officer. Oh, I got a wanted level every once in a blue moon- but the actual units themselves took their sweet time getting there so often that I was typically in the next city district over before they showed up. And apparently Night City PD can't splurge on pursuit vehicles for their unit considering the only time I ever saw them chase me in a car was during on side mission for Kerry, and they gave up before I reached the end of the road. There just isn't a police system at all, even after the 'overhaul' it received-  That probably shouldn't even have ever been an aspect of the marketing.

The Journey

From the start Cyberpunk places the power of controlled destiny in the hands of the player, by allowing us the chance to choose between three origin stories for our V. Each of these introductions, Street kid, Nomad and Corpo, come with their tailor-made prologues and a unique trait for call-back options in dialogue throughout the game. (And an increadibly tiny side quest which isn't really worth mentioning.) Unfortunately, it's hardly more than a hour before your introduction is over and you're thrust onto the unified story path of every character. This belies how the 'choose who you want to be' presentation is merely a smokescreen that conjures the illusion of choice and consequence without following through on that promise, which is a theme the game continues on until, bizarrely, it's very end- at which point choices suddenly mean something for the first time.

The first act of our play is very prototypical for any crime-fantasy story, but CDPR's talent lies in their ability to elevate the material they work with. Whereas on it's face playing the 'merc looking for his big break' sounds very by-the-numbers, there's a level of authenticity with how the world is portrayed, the nature of opportunity is presented and the stellar performances of the actors engender the worth of the circumstance and situation. Right from the word go you'll come to be embroiled in the relationship between V and their best friend Jackie, the allure of the Night City underworld where everyone is trying to use you with a smile on their face, and the monumental scale of the target- enough even to make the most cocksure and arrogant of your circle sombre up their act a little. It's a delicate balance of high quality writing and higher quality performance that brings the world to life in stunning vivacity.

Of course, this intro also demonstrates the span of reactive choice and consequence available to the player as during the set-up for the heist they are capable of approaching their tasks with any number of alternatives, redundancies and short-cuts to get everything into place. Of course, I endeavour to remind you that this is absolutely not indicative of the rest of the game- but rather a startling standalone reminder of what Cyberpunk 2077 could have been if CDPR had unlimited resources and time. Which they didn't. Still, enjoy the freedom whilst it lasts, because it really does feel great when you have that malleable narrative in the palm of your hands!

Another aspect present in the first act that I like, and is actually present throughout the whole narrative, is the willingness of the story to take a break for quiet moments of emotional vulnerability. Whether to get closer to Jackie before the Heist, learn more about the sort of motivations that drive Johnny Silverhand or, my favourite, delve into the person that V is through brilliantly written and acted introspective confrontations such as the unforgettable one-on-one with the Doll inside of The Clouds. Whereas some games simply can't stomach taking their foot off the gas for a single moment, or don't know what to do with themselves unless the hero is shooting something- Cyberpunk recognises the value in moments of peace. Letting the emotional stakes be set up in the story, the connections between characters be established or the tensions of the campaign be released in a time of still. Some of my absolute high-light moments of the game were great conversations between solid characters who shared little nuggets of themselves in arguments or trauma sharing. In a world of action, it's the peaceful times that ring the loudest.

It isn't until Act 2 where the actual narrative rears it's head and the bigger themes that the narrative wants to carry for the long haul are revealed. Spoilers from here on out in case you haven't even seen the basic premise of Cyberpunk- but in a series of events with consequences larger than you could ever have known in the moment, V is afflicted with a data chip in their head affixed with the engrammatic personality data of the long dead 2020's rockerboy and one-time Arasaka terror bomber, Johnny Silverhand- frontman for the band Samurai and icon for anti-corporate sentiment across the land. Or at least he was. Johnny has kind of faded away in the fifty years he spent dead, all until he woke up in the mind of an unsuspecting mercenary. But of course the penny has to drop- Johnny's psyche is slowly overwriting the host bodies in a process that is slowly starting to make V's own body see his or her mind as a foreign entity, activating the antibodies. Essentially, V's body is slowly killing itself and Johnny Silverhand's engram is slowly taking over the corpse that process is going to leave behind. That is the set-up for the narrative; a ticking clock where the protagonist and the ghost of Johnny Silverhand have to race to win V more time to live. A race against mortality itself.

Now narrative wise Act 2 is a lot messier than the first one. The game loosens it's tight grip on the player and almost immediately events start to drift. Right away I discovered a pretty obvious cohesion error where I could, and did, activate the Delamain side quest when going to retrieve my car, which activates a little friendly back and forth with the ghost of Johnny- a bit jarring since before that point you've never shared a conversation with the man and are fully under the belief that he's trying to kill you. It's a small sequence break in the narrative, but there's actually a few of those dotted about in bizarre places that disrupt an otherwise flawlessly presented and told narrative about facing the inevitable however you can stomach it.

This is also the act when it really starts to dawn that the Choices from part 1 aren't really coming to substantive consequences. Choosing to side with the Corpo scrooge from Act 1 in a tense stand-off scene and proceeding operation, even as it puts you in danger, doesn't net you a valuable contact you can call in a dire moment but a brief bedroom fling. Really? That's the best that could be devised? A few side quest decisions don't appear to present any consequence that we get to see at all, such as the Peralez missions which seem to end at the exact moment the questline got supremely interesting, probably victim to the messy late-development troubles we now know that the game was subject to. But if there's one thing that really started standing out to me in Act 2, it's the voice actor for V.

Now I played the male lead, I would have liked to play both but with the recent announcement that CDPR are soon going to make me incapable of playing the game by cranking up the specs, it looks like I won't have the time to. But from my experience with the male V, I have to say I found the performance to be honestly powerful in it's most emotional moments. That scene where V first learns that the chip is killing him is heartbreaking, as you can hear this ostensibly tough-as-nails street-smart merc beginning to crumble in the face of his impending mortality. It's his ability to sell the razor-sharp thug and the scared lost soul without losing the thread of V that made me had me totally mesmerised during his prominent scenes. Gavin Drea elevated this role with his work. 

Side quests are a large part of the CDPR identity ever since The Witcher 3 blew practically every other RPG out of the water with the quality of every one of it's side missions; and I'm happy to say that Cyberpunk 2077 continues that legacy and then some. There isn't a single throw-away side quest, each has character and payoff at the least or reoccurring chains of quests at the best. Seriously, some of these quests were so good that I found myself thinking back on characters a week later and wondering whatever happened to them. I loved the criminal with the Jesus Complex, and wanted to know more about how the whole thing effected Rachel Casich, or how my choice at the end of the Peralez questline changed their fates, or even what Claire got up to once our races were over. In some ways it's really frustrating that we never seem to leave these characters with everything said and done that needed to be done, but in other ways I can tell that's kind of the point of the story. Night City is this boiling cauldron of activity writhe with all these people trying to either whether the flames or hop out and run- it's totally natural in a world like that to brush by people on their own journeys, catching just a glimpse before their swallowed up by the hustle of the City that Never Sleeps. (Wait, isn't that New York? You get what I mean!)

As the story progresses the narrative presents one of those false junctions that Grand Theft Auto popularised back in it's 3D era. Three distinct paths of questline to follow that all, ultimately, have to be explored before the story can progress. A false choice, if you will. But at least these three questlines play out like small contained stories on their own with self contained narratives, branching side characters who can blossom into strong relationships and even romances if you wish, and some pretty exciting set-piece moments to round them out. Of course, the 'Barge' questline is the most impressive, with hands down the best boss fight in the game near it's conclusion. That fight had everything, build-up, speed, versatile challenge and a venue to die for- highlight of the game right there!

It's in the final act that agency and choice returns to the player. All roads lead to the same funnel from which the choices you made and relationships you've formed will come to play in the form of quite distinct and explosive finales in the race to save your life. Honestly, I was a little shocked by how quickly this final part of the story came upon me. It seemed the story had just started to open up before I was being told to meet my fate and The Embers and getting told to wrap up all of my loose-ends- not that I think the story is horrifically short so to speak, just that the second act really could have used more meat on it's bones to make the whole story feel more full-bodied. As it is I feel the game has a supremely strong intro and a powerful conclusion, with a bit of an aimless middle with glittering moments that shone here and there. There's just no unified purpose in the second act beyond 'following leads', most of which don't really push the needle of the plot further than a small inch, the last of which drags you all the way there. It's not the most satisfying way to lay out a narrative and I suspect it's probably not what CDPR originally planned for. (The Witcher 3 shows they typically know better when it comes to plot composition.)

Luckily what the main plot lacks in, the increadibly fleshed out various character questlines make up in droves. If the side quests lines are sparkling gems, than the character questlines are flawless uncut jewels. Huge and completely contained narratives that each brim with character progression, pathos and set-piece scenes you'll remember. A few of which can prove important enough to change the prospects of whatever ending your hurtling towards. These character quests are tied to strong relationships you find throughout your journey, friends or lovers from various walks of life providing a full perspective of just about every angle of Night City life- and though not all of them have the potential to tie back into the narrative, they all have satisfying conclusions that wrap up their arcs and give you a better understanding of yours and Johnny's journey by perspective.

Now it's only fair, after talking so much about companions, that I focus on the man himself: Johnny Silverhand. Brought to life by Keanu Reeves; Johnny is the perfect encapsulation of meeting an arsehole celebrity who turns out to be more than the persona implied. I cannot understate how perfectly I think this team did writing and performing the personality of Johnny Silverhand to make him a character worth spending the entire breadth of the story around. A shadow of yourself but also a distinct entity, Johnny is like the devil on your shoulder commenting on your choices, critiquing your allegiances and sometimes even taking over the wheel when he feels he's needed. Having him in your head you would expect to have a one way easy street into his inner-most soul, but CDPR knew to make him so much interesting than that.

Johnny is his own personality even within your head. All the ego and narcissism and pomp still radiates out of the perception he wears, a mask so finely crafted it's become who he is- unravelling the actual human beneath that takes time and shared introspection- companionship wrought through conflict and contest. Moments simply talking with Johnny about his thoughts on old believers in SAMURAI, and those prying into his history serving in the corporate war- those are cracks in the armour Johnny's soul is made out of. But then at the same time, Johnny isn't just some book to be read. He's his own person with personality, desires and decades old vendettas. Sometimes it's impossible to distinguish between moments when Johnny is being truly vulnerable with you, and when he's trying to radicalise you into being the same self-destructive anti-corporate soldier he was in life. Maybe he doesn't even know himself. The special moment when you realise you no longer know where V ends and Johnny begins marks the point where you have to take off your hat for Keanu Reeves for doing an incredible job losing himself in the complex and rich role of Johnny Silverhand. I was foolish enough to consider the man just another 'Celebrity casting' when I saw his name: he proved me wrong soundly with his work. Reeves whipped up and summoned the spirit of Silverhand right off the page and brought gaming one of it's most lovably narcissistic anti-heroes ever. 

In it's endings Cyberpunk 2077 has quite a fair share of choice, and even though the actual ending acts themselves all funnel towards roughly the same decision lane, the actual disparate final missions themselves are all high octane and thrilling finales. Each decision and ending stays close to the same theme, feeding to an artistically pure message that survived through all the heavy monetary production and fingers from a thousand creatives. Experiencing a few of those endings reminded me of the human souls conjuring these narratives in the same way that some of my favourite games ever do. Now I don't want to over-bake the dessert here; I'm not calling these finales as emotionally rich and cathartic as a Persona finale or anything, but they were fitting. They fit the story being told and gave the send-off we needed them too. They give V, and the player, one last chance to seize their destiny; and that's as far as this game needed to go.

Now I've put it off for a bit but now I should ask the big question: is the game still buggy? Yes, yes and triple yes. Cars still fall through floors, police never seem to show up, faces sometimes stop animating in cars, sometimes my arms become glued to my feet. There's no first person option to look through my rear view mirror (Maybe that would be fixed with Ray Tracing- I don't know, my computer wouldn't even dream of running that), there's no route on your map when racing, there's no goodbye option in conversations- oh, and the increadibly frustrating 'Can't save at this time' bug is still alive and well. But the game runs. That last one is important because the more available this game has become over the years, the more it has been able to nurture that battered reputation and it should be nurtured; because the game they was a great one. It wasn't the one they sold it as, and it wasn't even the game they set out to make, but as the game they ended up with, it's still something to be proud of.

Summary

This has been an important blog for me, a chance to release a grudge I've been holding around for years by getting my hands on the game that aggrieved and, despite it's flaws, forgiving it. Playing the game for myself to completion, seeing all the things they got right against what they got wrong, it's clear that CDPR are still masters of their craft and that were just dealt a bad hand they made the most of. The composition of the world, the authenticity of the emotional themes, the complex life within the script and the blood, sweat and tears put into the performances; Cyberpunk 2077 is an achievement of collaboration which ran afoul when the time came to put it all together. But do the positives outweigh the still present shortcomings? That depends on what you want to see. If you're still holding out hope for the Cyberpunk 2077 we were promised, then nothing this game does will get through to you. If you instead take the game for what it is and judge it by it's merits, then I'd go so far as to call this game a flawed but earnest masterpiece. I will go ahead and recommend Cyberpunk 2077, amazingly, and use the powers invested in me by my arbitrary review system to award the game a respectable -A Grade. I come away from this game with the relief of a man who held in a breath for two years, finally tasting the air and liking the sensation as it tickles on his nose. I like the heart of Cyberpunk, and one day I'd love to see it beating in the body it was built for.