Long before I started playing any of the games in the series, I assumed that the general consensus surrounding the Devil May Cry franchise was positive due to its sheer popularity, so when I found out that a majority of people actually hated Devil May Cry 2, I was both surprised and intrigued. Granted, a lot of my excitement towards playing this game was more out of morbid curiosity than anything, but I was still willing to give the game a chance to see if it wasn't as horrible as people kept saying it was, and I went into it with a half-joking "How bad can it be?" attitude. As someone who wasn't even that big of a fan of the first Devil May Cry game, I was baffled by just how much its sequel got wrong and just how incompetent it is, because while it wasn't outright unplayable (although it does border on that at times), Devil May Cry 2 was still an absolute disaster of a game that prides itself in being as dull of an experience as possible.

When I beat Devil May Cry on the last day of July, my thoughts on it were very complicated, but even with all of its flaws and odd design choices, I could at least say that the game wasn't boring. In Devil May Cry 2, though, boredom takes center stage, as it strips any ounce of challenge and depth from the first game's combat in favor of turning its core gameplay into a mindless shell of what came before it. In almost every situation you're thrown in, the absolute best and most effective strategy is to stand completely still and spam your gun button until all the enemies die, and since the melee combat is sluggish and unsatisfying and the enemies barely try to attack or even move towards you, this mind-numbing strategy ends up being your one answer to everything. Instead of trying to pull off flashy combos and alternating between melee and ranged attacks like in the first game, I was instead going from area to area and essentially mashing the square button until the battle music stopped playing while occasionally dodging an enemy's ranged attack, and the monotony of having to fight the same enemies using the same foolproof strategy while getting punished for trying literally anything else over and over again made playing this game feel more like Hell than the levels that took place in the actual Underworld. Speaking of which, Devil May Cry 2 replaces the Resident Evil-style exploration and puzzles of its first game in favor of making every single area in every stage take forever to get through, as Dante's slow running speed had me dodge rolling around these needlessly empty and bland locales just to get to the next section. Devil May Cry 2 also replaces the manual targeting of the original game with automatic targeting, and it not only made the boss fights (which were already a joke to begin with) take way longer to beat than they needed to due to your attacks constantly going in the other direction, but it also made activating the required switches nearly impossible with how the game would rather make you face the infinitely spawning enemies than the switch that you're deliberately trying to hit.

While the original Devil May Cry had some design choices that held the experience back for me, Devil May Cry 2 went beyond that and instead decided to add a bunch of features that were all completely superfluous, and I honestly found that to be more insulting. For some reason, Dante can run up walls now, and not only does he only go up a pitiful distance, but the only times where I ever actually used this move were all by mistake. The whole amulet mechanic is also useless, as the unlockable moves just ended up being incredibly situational during combat while also trying to sell the illusion of customization and player choice, and the required uses of each move for traversal both occurred exactly once immediately after they were unlocked. Despite all of these nonsensical additions, Devil May Cry 2 somehow managed to fail to fix one of the main issues of the first game, as the fixed camera is still disorienting to the point where it constantly obscures its objects of focus. On top of being absolutely miserable to play, Devil May Cry 2 also fell flat from a story perspective, as the nonsensical plot was made even worse thanks to Dante's personality being changed from a cocky goofball to a coin-flipping idiot that barely speaks. Having the second disc essentially be repeated content with a swapped protagonist was just an additional slap to the face, and this choice just screams lazy rather than giving the game any replay value. My hate for this game makes it so that even acknowledging its improvements on the original feels wrong, as the additions of an actual dodge button and the ability to swap weapons on the fly pale in comparison to just how bad everything else is in this game. Devil May Cry 2 was a chore of a game that felt atrocious to play, and since I've disliked both of the games from this franchise that I've played so far, I really hope that Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening makes up for it.