I’m a little bit self-conscious about my writing style. I think a lot of my write-ups particularly end but also often begin the same way. Part of my worries about this because the idea behind “write at least a little bit about every single game you finish, no exceptions” is like 50% motivated by a desire to be better at this. I don’t fret about it TOO much because, hey, I’m not like, IN SCHOOL or nothin’, nobody’s gonna come after me with a pitchfork like “bitch you say you’re excited to see where a series goes next at the end of like 70% percent of your reviews get some new material.” But I fret about it ENOUGH that I do rack my brain trying to think of ways to open and close these things more substantially. So with that in mind here’s what I have for Devil May Cry 4:

Devil May Cry Four? More like, “Devil May Cry MORE PLEASE” amirite?????

Now you may think this is JUST a hilarious gut-buster and you’d be right that it’s that and you’re welcome, but it’s a statement that also describes this game in two important ways. Firstly, there is just MORE Devil May Cry here, easily the MOST Devil May Cry the series has seen to this point. A whole new guy with a whole new set of moves, not as WIDE as Dante’s and not as deep as a Professional Gamer could make Dante deep, but Nero’s single set of weapons and its accompanying combos certainly has more to it than any one combination of Dante’s powers, and requires more technical skill to fully master (something I will never achieve, I’m just not this good). Dante, too, sees his toolkit essentially unaltered from DMC3 bar a couple of weapon swaps, but now you can access all of it all at once all the time which makes him the most absurdly varied, options-heavy character in maybe any video game ever??? It’s frankly an embarrassment of riches. If DMC1 codified the genre, and DMC3 brought a second revolution for the speed, skill, and depth action games could demand without compromising things like fairness, balance, and fun, then DMC4 is a more genteel statement – there’s nothing revolutionary here, but everything is so perfectly balanced, so immaculately tuned that it’s hard to imagine going back to 3 after this, even though a lot of the stuff you can do in 4 is ostensibly exactly the same as in 3 and even though that game, undeniably, whips ass. It feels like a magic trick, it’s incredible. Every character in DMC4 is truly a pleasure to pilot, even Lady, the most underbaked character on the impressive Special Edition roster.

The second thing then, is that DMC4 is famously and OBVIOUSLY unfinished. When I was growing up I didn’t have an Xbox 360 or a PS3 until WELL after this game’s time and I still knew about this debacle, but playing it is something else entirely. It’s not JUST that the back half of the game reuses all the maps in reverse order, which honestly I don’t mind at all. You see the cracks in these really unexpected ways, like how every time the game wants to punish you for falling into a pit you fall into the same one cave room, but then also late in the game they introduce an enemy that eats you and if it gets you you get teleported to that same cave room inexplicably instead of a bespoke location or maybe just that not happening. Enemy types that are just previous enemy types but bigger. Dante’s weapons being entirely unrelated to the bosses he defeats rather than derived from them. It’s the little things like that peppered throughout that are like “oh….oOOOoooOOoHHHHHHHH.” Dante’s half of the game being crammed inelegantly into a set of levels and enemies clearly not designed for him is the most glaring thing here but it’s far from the only sign that shit was not well in this production, however it shook out.

It's a shame too because OSTENSIBLY these things would not bother me so much, right? Like I’ve mentioned, I don’t mind running through the game backwards, I think it’s kind of fun to race back to the city from the depths of the map to stop the bad guy you keep catching glimpses of on the horizon, the sky ever darkening under his wrath as you approach, seeing these places you’ve visited as another character ravaged not only by the wraths of the current occupants but also by your own travails in them. It's more that Dante’s half of the game suffers from a really high concentration of Gimmicky Bullshit that seems tailor made to stop you from just having a good time with his incredibly deep and often inventive skillset. There are staples like “level you’re constantly losing health in,” but that one is a diamond in the rough of shit like “repeated miniboss that you can’t properly hurt until you shoot it a LOT” or “terrible setpiece boss fight with unclear progression telegraphing that has very little combat and is mostly running in a horizontal line that took ina twenty minutes to do despite the fact that she took zero damage during it” or “those plants that eat you and teleport you to the cave room which is kind of funny until you get out of the cave room and realize that any time this happens you have to start literally the entire level over.”

This game is kind of littered with weird distractions from its core conceits of action combat with occasional platforming challenges, like the infamous dice game (which I think is not really bad at all once you figure the rhythm out) or a sequence where you have to fight a couple difficult flying enemies without getting knocked off of increasingly small disappearing platforms or you have to face the Punishment Cave lol, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this stuff is REALLY concentrated in the back half of the game where you can really see the seams in the development showing, nor do I think it’s a coincidence that the punishments for failing any of these challenges are almost always really minor for your character but REALLY time consuming for you the player. It’s rough, and it sucks, because I cannot emphasize enough that this is one of the best playing games I’ve ever had the pleasure to fuck around in.

I played the Special Edition which I think is the version that basically everyone plays at this point and the one you would have access to if you just went to buy it, but it didn’t really get the chance to ameliorate any of these issues. Instead they added MORE GUYS TO FUCK AROUND WITH in these same half baked levels and that’s fair that’s a choice. Capcom was never gonna spend buhmillions of dollars to make half of a game, this makes sense to me. Lady and Trish and Virgil are all very fun to play with. Lady is my favorite even as she has the fewest tools to work with because she’s weird for the series, and she really shines in the hardest difficulty setting where her extreme power and extreme fragility couples with her relative lack of maneuverability and huge vulnerability windows make for the most risk-reward play you can get basically in the game. Trish is kind of an explicit DMC1 Dante throwback ported into DMC4’s extremely slick vibe and she’s a joy to play as. Virgil is not so different from his DMC3 incarnation, same as Dante, but like Dante he feels better in the hands and he also has a unique character model so I’m happy for him. These characters I think maybe don’t make up for how skimpy on alternate modes and stuff the game is; it feels to me like a lot more could have been done to flesh out the experience of the game around the margins via side content even if the core experience is locked in forever, but three more guys in The Best Action Game You Could Play Circa 2008 is not a bad deal so I can’t complain too much.

Something I refuse to complain even slightly at all about is something I feel the series gets better at every time (ehhhh bar DMC2, as is often the case lol) are the STORY AND PRESENTATION which are excellent all around imo. I love Nero very much, he’s a great little guy. I want to ruffle his hair. I want to pack his lunch for him. Wanna make a bunk bed for him and make him sleep on the bottom bunk. What a good little dude. He’s refreshing because for as much as it seems like someone made him Look Like That because we wanted to kind of have our cake and eat it too re: phasing out Dante, Nero is so immediately such a distinct voice in this series. Although he is telegraphed with everything but out loud direct words throughout the game to be Virgil’s kid somehow lol, and he has a Special Arm, and he Looks Like That and he does all the goofy quips and flips and homoerotic, overly performative battle choreography with a guy who I’m pretty sure is his uncle, the character he actually has the most in common with from earlier in the series is Lady. Both normal kids in over their heads, the only two people reacting to the events of their respective games with anything resembling appropriate emotions. Nero is not a gothic tragedian or a romantic figure or an erotic pulp icon, all roles Dante has and does occupy at various point throughout this series – he’s just a guy, and a kind of sad, angry one at that. He’s been taken advantage of in a very real way, he’s hurt emotionally throughout the game, and when he fails it’s not in an epic way, it’s just, like, a bummer. It’s sad. Even when I started to connect with these characters to some degree on an emotional level in 3, it was in an extremely Saturday Morning Shonen Anime sense, very heightened and melodramatic. 4 isn’t NOT that, and Nero isn’t ABOVE that stuff, but I think we’ve entered a zone with DMC4 where these games might be able to tap a well of genuine pathos? There are only hints at it here but I am very curious to see if these threads of Real Drama get tugged at further in DMC5. I know Bingo Morihashi, the writer of 3 and 4, comes back for that one and he seems interested in pushing this stuff. I would like to see it.

But for as much as I like Nero, Dante is here too, and he rules, he fucks so hard, literally and figuratively. I guess not LITERALLY LITERALLY. Nobody in these games knows about sex, and Dante has always been a somewhat eroticized figure, in like, a darker, classically gothic sense (he is constantly being penetrated by swords, he has a weird borderline-incestuous relationship with a clone of his mom and also his brother, he is a stoic object of lust for other often sinister forces throughout the series), and that’s still true to some extent here but because this game truly is not about him and only kind of involves him via tangential connections to his family’s past, here we see Dante at his most carefree and flamboyant, retaining everything fun and cool and good about himself while maximalizing all of the pulpy, sexy eccentricities that make him a singular persona in the video game landscape. There is no one more akin to a $3.95 harlequin romance hero cover illustration than Dante Devilmaycry whether he’s doing an assassination or locking legs with his probably-nephew or doing a flamenco dance to fuck/destroy a hell-penis-obelisk or confronting his thematic opposite (a man who twisted himself into a demon hoping to discard his humanity altogether vs a half man half demon who embraces his natures and values his personhood) over their ideological differences through the explicit façade of theater for an audience of You The Player. He’s a delight, I love this guy.

This is as good as these games have ever looked too. They’ve always paid really close attention to the design sensibilities of their worlds and that shit is back in full force here. The way all of the angel guys at the church are clearly demonic if you get a good look at them, pulsing with black and red underneath their immaculate armor even before Dante dramatically unmasks one for Nero to see, or that the supposed savior’s most prominent features are the massive demonic horns sprouting all over his body and the deep, cruel holes in his eyeballs instead of carved pupils. The way the public church is a traditionally ornate cathedral but the actual Order’s base of operations, hidden from civilization, is a giant, brutalist slab because nobody who doesn’t actually know what’s up has reason to go there so there’s no reason to keep up a pretension. The only guy who might be suspicious is too stupid to ask that question. It’s great attention to detail, all over the game. Small stuff but it’s important to me. It’s clear how much care went into the development here, even when things didn’t go according to plan.

I’m sure that’s always the story with games like this, and DMC4 just made it out better than most. It did, really – even with all its warts, the underlying core of DMC4 is so so strong that it would be hard to discount even if things were actually as bad as this game’s doomsayers (who admittedly do seem to be fewer now than in 2008, especially in the wake of that reviled Ninja Theory reboot) would have had you believe. As it is, while the game is certainly not what I think anybody imagined or wanted, even all these years and a “hey we fixed it sort of” rerelease later, the fact that it’s just like, a good-ass game shines through all the little annoyances. I’m thinking about it right now. If DMC5 didn’t exist and I wasn’t SO curious about it and I hadn’t bought it this afternoon and it wasn’t downloading right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if I could easily put hundreds of hours into 4 between its five characters and two game modes. The engine powering this car is that good, even without considering what a blast I had with the story this time around. DMC has quickly become one of my favorite series over the last year, and if this is the worst they can do (y’know, bar 2, and uh, I guess also that reboot, like, you know what I mean) then I really just couldn’t ask for things to be in a better place.