Man am I glad to be done with this one. This game has been a barrier to getting into the Devil May Cry series for me because it's hard to get myself to play games that I don't really like. I could have skipped over DMC 1 but the fans kept saying that this one is worth playing - with some fans even saying that it's the purest form of Devil May Cry and future entries water things down. The idea of anyone being elitist over this game is ridiculous to me. I suppose if the motto of JRPG fans is "It gets good after 80 hours" then the motto of character action game fans is "It gets good after you go for a perfect ranking on the hardest difficulty". Yeah, I'm not doing that. I'd rather invest my time in an action game that isn't randomly flipping the camera all over the place with no regard for the player.
The camera ruins the game for me. In a game that's supposed to be hard but fair, the camera does everything in its power to make sure the player experiences plenty of cheap deaths. It should be obvious, but a resident evil style camera doesn't work for a game that's very fast paced, relies on a quick succession of inputs, and allows the protagonist to perform different moves depending on the direction he's facing. A random camera shift could happen at any moment that changes what your inputs do, resulting in a loss of player control. Once again I have to ask why there are any hardcore fans that prefer this game when the constantly shifting camera limits the degree that you can be in control of your own moveset. I know people prefer Kamiya directed games because of their focus on the ranking system but this easily one of Kamiya's worst games. It has a solid combat system for the time and you can really see the aspects that make it a Kamiya game... But it's just needlessly frustrating due to the camera.
Devil May Cry can feel like a boss rush at times and while there are a number of challenging encounters, most of them you have to fight 2-3 times with little variation in their movesets. I can see that Devil May Cry wants to be the game that's constantly throwing challenging fights at the player, but this isn't as impactful when it's the just the same fight in the same way repeatedly. The final boss encounter was also underwhelming. There's a shmup section for the first phase, which is fine. It is a Kamiya game after all. But the second phase which is fought on land is also just a battle of projectiles, which seems like a ill-fitting way to round out the experience. It's not an outlandish idea to suggest the final boss should have used the melee mechanics which you've been using the entire game.
For the origin of the acclaimed Devil May Cry series I was pretty surprised to see how weak the story is. I enjoyed the character Dante more from cultural osmosis, memes, and SMT Nocturne than I did in his own game. His personality is far less confident and quippy than the internet would have you believe. I've heard from purists that the games after DMC 1 ruin Dante's personality... bro, what personality? When people compared original RE4 Leon to Dante I was expecting him to be similarly badass... But it turns out Leon makes a better Dante than Dante himself. I never once bought into Trish and Dante's character relationship. The game expects you believe that these two care for each other but they've only spoken to each other a handful of times... And one of those times was Trish betraying Dante.
I respect and appreciate what this game accomplished by inventing the character-action game genre. But as a game I didn't enjoy it very much. This is the only DMC game I've played so I can't speak for the series, but I'm already seriously doubting the purists who say that this one's the best.
The camera ruins the game for me. In a game that's supposed to be hard but fair, the camera does everything in its power to make sure the player experiences plenty of cheap deaths. It should be obvious, but a resident evil style camera doesn't work for a game that's very fast paced, relies on a quick succession of inputs, and allows the protagonist to perform different moves depending on the direction he's facing. A random camera shift could happen at any moment that changes what your inputs do, resulting in a loss of player control. Once again I have to ask why there are any hardcore fans that prefer this game when the constantly shifting camera limits the degree that you can be in control of your own moveset. I know people prefer Kamiya directed games because of their focus on the ranking system but this easily one of Kamiya's worst games. It has a solid combat system for the time and you can really see the aspects that make it a Kamiya game... But it's just needlessly frustrating due to the camera.
Devil May Cry can feel like a boss rush at times and while there are a number of challenging encounters, most of them you have to fight 2-3 times with little variation in their movesets. I can see that Devil May Cry wants to be the game that's constantly throwing challenging fights at the player, but this isn't as impactful when it's the just the same fight in the same way repeatedly. The final boss encounter was also underwhelming. There's a shmup section for the first phase, which is fine. It is a Kamiya game after all. But the second phase which is fought on land is also just a battle of projectiles, which seems like a ill-fitting way to round out the experience. It's not an outlandish idea to suggest the final boss should have used the melee mechanics which you've been using the entire game.
For the origin of the acclaimed Devil May Cry series I was pretty surprised to see how weak the story is. I enjoyed the character Dante more from cultural osmosis, memes, and SMT Nocturne than I did in his own game. His personality is far less confident and quippy than the internet would have you believe. I've heard from purists that the games after DMC 1 ruin Dante's personality... bro, what personality? When people compared original RE4 Leon to Dante I was expecting him to be similarly badass... But it turns out Leon makes a better Dante than Dante himself. I never once bought into Trish and Dante's character relationship. The game expects you believe that these two care for each other but they've only spoken to each other a handful of times... And one of those times was Trish betraying Dante.
I respect and appreciate what this game accomplished by inventing the character-action game genre. But as a game I didn't enjoy it very much. This is the only DMC game I've played so I can't speak for the series, but I'm already seriously doubting the purists who say that this one's the best.
6 Comments
@Jiqian I would imagine that playing this game at a high level would make the camera annoy me even more.
@SevenForce Play DMC 2, you will enjoy that one more.
@Caleruega Maybe I'll try out DMC 2 with the definitive edition mod
@SevenForce Maybe. I don't remember being annoyed by the camera except on very rare occasion. It became more of a positioning thing at times though, I'll admit, though I liked how that matched the combat. Oddly enough I do remember being a bit annoyed by the camera in 3 a few but notable number of times last time I played it... Anyway, if the camera is just too bad for you, no way around it, I suppose, but the higher difficulties do make you appreciate the design of enemy encounters more, and you are able to appreciate the changes between boss encounters better; with these games it makes your entire first playthrough feel like a tutorial for the real challenge ahead. It's a very different experience from the later games, really, to the extent I could not claim I'm a "DMC purist" for liking it more than 3, for example; 3 and 4 are very comparable, this and any of those two? Eh, not so much.
@Jiqian The combat definitely feels different than the newer ones. On the one hand I enjoyed the combat when the camera was still but on the other hand when the camera randomly shifted I wanted to stop playing. I do think there's unique value in DMC 1, I just didn't enjoy my casual playthrough very much so I'd rather be playing other games that I like more
Jiqian
4 days ago