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.
