• Welcome to Talking Time's third iteration! If you would like to register for an account, or have already registered but have not yet been confirmed, please read the following:

    1. The CAPTCHA key's answer is "Percy"
    2. Once you've completed the registration process please email us from the email you used for registration at percyreghelper@gmail.com and include the username you used for registration

    Once you have completed these steps, Moderation Staff will be able to get your account approved.

Devil May Cry: A Wide Assortment Of Sad Denizens Of Hell

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
Cerberus was a big roadblock for people in its day, so congrats on getting past that hurdle. Together with something like SMT Nocturne, DMC3 teetered on the edge of a niche in what kind of play it wanted out of people who approached it relative to its peers, and had that big publisher and series visibility to attract players who otherwise might have ignored it. It lead to some rude awakenings and consequently "this game is unreasonably difficult" kind of estimations in response. For some people, 3 is the fundamental start of the subgenre in the form they most recognize and desire, but looking back it's easier to see that the qualities that make it stand out now are the transitional and liminal design conceits that live in it as it's reorienting the series concept from what was to what it would become. It's also still a system-defining showpiece to me in choreography and direction in its cinematics, totally elevating what is in its dramatic arcs also the best the series has to offer in storytelling. Complete commitment to tone in ways that don't feel accidental or lost in translation as parts of the first game might.
 
The most recent rerelease of DMC3 tried to approach at least the breadth of 4's combat by allowing you to set your playthrough for style switching (which also makes it quite a bit harder to sustain high style rank, it's honestly a little overly punishing about it). But yeah, things didn't really get much more fluid than the original until 4.

My favorite part about how even I myself thought the game felt too difficult when I originally played it, was finding out many years later that they actually for real set the difficulty higher for the US release. I don't remember if being forced to restart the entire mission on a game over was part of that (imo it was easily the most brutal aspect of that version of the game), but the experience made a lot more sense when I found out the US's Normal mode was everyone else's Hard mode.
 
Last edited:
I don't think any of the DMC games ever feel as "fluid" as Bayonetta, and the closest they probably get is when you're playing with a maxed-out Trickster style.

To clarify a bit, I'm glad that it still more or less feels like the first game! Having done the first Virgil encounter now especially, it's clear that they've thought a lot about what kind of encounters work well as an opponent for Dante, and they've figured out how to start pushing you to the limits while still remaining fair and fun. This feels like they've finally achieved the sensation of a duel that the Nero Angelo encounters in DMC1 were supposed to be, because they found a sense of difficulty that plays to Dante's strengths instead of making you feel like you have to find a spammy or cheesy way to get past it.

Cerberus was a big roadblock for people in its day, so congrats on getting past that hurdle.

I'm sure a big factor here is the the HD collection's difficulty set back to the original JPN version's tuning and easier checkpointing that Oathbreaker mentioned, but I didn't really notice Cerebrus. Compared to the bosses in DMC1, it felt a lot easier. (I did die once, but I died like a dozen times the first time I ran into the big spider in DMC1.) Outside of the adjustments in the HD collection, I think the biggest factor is that I feel less like I'm fighting the camera in pretty much all boss encounters, which is a bit like all those Dragon Ball scenes where the characters throw off their weighted training gear or whatever.

(The boss I died to over and over the most so far in this one was Agni and Rudra, but it never did feel frustrating, except that it was at the end of a long level that also had another boss, so I felt like I had to figure it out in one sitting when I wanted a break. I wish they would have just made A&R a mission on its own.)

Complete commitment to tone

One thing I really like and that I'm glad the series hasn't lost yet as of DMC3 is the lack of a gap between the damage Dante can take in and out of cutscenes. In gameplay, Dante is constantly getting ripped up with weapons and sliced through with huge laser beams or whatever, and it just makes him lose a small fraction of his health bar. It's not a big deal. And that's normal for an action game like this. What isn't normal, and what's really fun about the storytelling, is that in cutscenes Dante is also getting impaled with swords and shot through the forehead multiple times with a gun and similarly shrugs it off. I enjoy the cartoonish over the topness of playing this dumb half-demon guy who is just getting constantly owned but also it doesn't hurt him that much.
 
Last edited:

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
Dante's a big doofus and basically all his defeats and victories and moments of weakness and triumph across the series circle back to his emotional vulnerability and honesty as a vector for his demonic ability. As fundamentally macho and downright misogynistic as the stories can get, there's also a consistently sincere portrayal of trauma, repression and recovery in them... for the male cast, anyway.
 
DMC3 is still really good, but I want them to stop teasing the gauntlets and just give me the gauntlets. (I know it has to happen soon, I've been teased twice and these games aren't that long.)
 
Finished it, continued to be great all the way through. I'm also 1/4 of the way through a Vergil playthrough, which I'm enjoying because he starts with the gauntlets, can switch between three weapons, and has a fun unique style mode where he does Dragon Ball style instant transmission teleports from the start of the game.

Despite the mixed reception I'm thinking of trying both DMC4 and DmC, the former because I was so put off by the demo that I wonder how I'd feel about the game now and the latter because it was so divisive that I'm curious to see what it's like. Both are also frequently on sale and pretty cheap, although unfortunately with them the series has definitely entered the era where games by major publishers come with a long list of DLC that's a mix of content that probably should have been included with the base game and exploitative pay to win stuff that would have just been a cheat code in the past, so I have to figure out what is what for both.
 

R.R. Bigman

Coolest Guy
DMC4 and DmC are the only games in the series I’ve played. I thought 4 was okay. The egregious levels of backtracking and area/boss recycling left a bad taste in my mouth. I liked DmC a good bit more, despite the often embarrassing writing and small number of bosses. I’m in the minority on that, it seems.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently of getting DMCV. It certainly came up a bunch during Woolie’s playthrough of Bayonetta 3 on his channel!
 
Continuing to enjoy playing as Vergil in DMC3. He's extremely overpowered, so it makes for a fun victory lap.

The first moment I wasn't able to just steamroll everything was, funnily enough, the first encounter with Vergil as a boss. As an enemy, Vergil's attacks have big hit boxes that linger, and as a player character Vergil's primary dodge gives him some invincibility that makes him OP in most situations BUT brings him closer to enemy Vergil's big, lingering hitboxes (in comparison to Trickster mode Dante being able to effortlessly escape them), so I had to die a few times to unlearn my instinct to dodge right into his attacks and rely instead on the jump-button based backflips and rolls. After that, though... Vergil (1) is not prepared for the player character to have the gauntlets and he just melts once you're not teleporting into his sword swings over and over.
 
DMC4 Special Edition is the way to go. It makes no real changes to the original experience that I know of unless you pick Dark Knight difficulty, but it adds Vergil and especially on PC runs far far better than the original release. Its DLC are essentially costumes, Super-versions of the characters to break the game with, and ignorable currency.

DmC on the other hand you'll want to pick up Vergil's Downfall unless you're going to play on console, in which case just get the Definitive Edition. DE not only comes with Vergil's DLC, but makes tons of gameplay improvements that go a long way in making the game feel a lot better. Unfortunately since DmC Definitive Edition isn't on PC, you'll have to track down the mods the dev team lifted all their DE improvements out of if you don't want to deal with the raw original experience.

Both happen to be on sale on Steam for a couple more days
 
Thank you for the breakdown about the various editions and DLC. I didn't realize the PC version of DmC wasn't the definitive edition, so I guess I'll look into mods when I get around to it.

I keep seeing reference to "Turbo Mode" when looking into DmC mods to create the Definitive Edition experience on PC. Is that like a difficulty modifier for Super Players, or is it more like an adjustment because many found the game to be sluggish?
 
Looking around it seems like a blanket speed adjustment to compensate for the disparity between a PC running the game at a smooth 60fps while the game's visuals are still stuck capped at 30, it apparently makes a lot of people feel like the game is slower than it should be. While the setting is active it fast-forwards the game by 10%/15% (the apparent recommendation)/etc, including cutscenes.

It looks like a lot of the important DmC mods like the improved angel dodging are actually harder than I thought to track down these days so if possible I would suggest playing Definitive Edition on console.
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
i liked DMC4 a lot, and the things people point to as bad (which i wouldn't disagree that much with; 3 obviously has a lot of running through the same/similar areas repeatedly, but there's some metroid fusion stuff as the game goes on) are things that are mitigated for people who get really into the game and get used to mastering the combat and stuff, because once you play it that much you aren't really thinking about the stages so much anymore. as a one-time game (or even a couple) it definitely falls far short of 3, but there's a lot of really fun stuff, especially in SE.

dmc DE was a bit in the other direction for me, though i still think it's pretty good. certainly i think a lot of the people who just go through the game for a bit like it, the combat feels pretty fine and the boss fights, though more...videogamey...are cool. but when i started going through again i was reminded of all the walk-and-talks and decided i didn't want to do them that much, so i only improved a few of my stage scores. just really hard for me to want to do all that waiting again...
 

Adrenaline

Post Reader
(He/Him)
DmC has a rough reputation with some series purists since it was a Western developer but I think it's one of the best games in the series.
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
Which is a large issue in discussing the game today, because the caustic and reactionary rhetoric defined the game's image in popular discourse. DmC is a game I absolutely loathe and consider about as ethically bankrupt as a passive piece of media can be, and it's difficult to get that position across when the assumption is you're disillusioned because the protagonist's hair is a different colour. Ninja Theory being a British company adapting a Japanese work didn't matter; that they were a studio founded on a consistently orientalist creative voice did, and that they treated women no better in their works. You can take that context into DmC and have it inform how you interpret it, but it's honestly not even necessary; the game is completely capable of defining all its odious ideas on its own. It will just "enrichen" your understanding of the text when you take a look at development material and comments that make it clear where aspects like Dante's visual design and portrayal came from--in this case, explicit homophobia and the intent to frame him as masculinely aspirational and "cool" as how the developers deemed it. That there were game mechanics, level design, structural, aesthetic and other areas of criticism with the game, and which the mods/Definitive Edition sought to address, was rendered completely irrelevant because none of it would affect or could salvage what made the game fundamentally unsupportable. They sure edited out a character's fedora from it, though.
 
I probably should have mentioned I also loathe DmC in its entirety. I've just osmosed a bunch of details about the state of it from being in the vicinity while people talk about it. Ninja Theory would have to pay me real currency to play it to the point that I refused to pick it up while it was free on PS+ and even then, they'd have to pay me A LOT (I'm too poor to say they couldn't pay me to play it). Honestly I'm not sure why I didn't just say to avoid it. I guess because I got shit on pretty hard for loudly being one of those fans they actively worked to drive away before I knew how bad the actual content of the game was.

The gameplay by all accounts and everything I've seen is novel enough for a retrospective type of playthrough of the series but holy shit, even if everything else was fine (and it's really not), there's some really messed up shit in the back half of the game that is absolutely unconscionable. I'm just gonna spoiler it, not because the game deserves anyone keeping its narrative under wraps for an exciting first experience, but because honestly it does call for a content warning to anyone that has not played it and feels like they might.

Vergil flat out shoots a pregnant woman in the stomach to murder the baby. It is shown on-screen in completely unnecessary horrifying detail. I've seen people try to justify this with "but she's a demon, she's evil" who fucking cares. She looks human, the writing humanizes her, they're in a human situation, and someone who has likewise been humanized to the player does that to her. And that's not even yet mentioning the ENTIRE BOSS FIGHT where Dante brutalizes her AND the baby.
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
I am also a disliker of DmC's narrative choices, but there's been so much time since it came out that I cannot speak to the specific reasons why.
 
My early impressions of DMC4 SE are very positive.

I think that when I played the PS3 demo (an amalgam of missions 2 and 3) back at the time of its original release I was put off by Belial without the context of the previous games (or at least 1 & 3, more specifically—2 doesn't really touch you much), but now it's fine. I think most other games in the series waited a bit longer to put a boss this tough early on. Even with the buildings Belial destroys during big attacks basically being pinatas full of health recovery items, I think he's much more of a roadblock than Cerebrus in DMC3, because Belial's attacks for the last three-ish health bars get much more difficult to avoid and do a ton of damage. Also, at least DMC3 gives you a warm-up boss in the previous level before the real thing. It felt impossible for me back then without having had a bit more time to internalize the basic systems.

In any case, with that not being a problem anymore, I'm really enjoying it for what it is. The enemy throwing and long range grabbing introduced by Nero's arm are a great addition to the rhythms of combat and provide a diversity of moves to grow the style meter from the start of the game that Dante lacked until you'd put in some orbs toward upgrades. It's not the best grappling hook mechanic in the world, but I've enjoyed the little platforming puzzles more than the platforming challenges in DMC1 and 3, which often seemed to be about working around the jumping mechanics instead of with them.

It's absolutely not a fair comparison because one is the fourth iteration in a series and the other is the first, but being inspired to try DMC by coming off a disappointing replay of Bayonetta is making that game come off even worse in comparison to DMC4, which came out the previous year. With a point of comparison that has hardware parity for their initial release systems, I feel like I'm already getting the combat fluidity I like out of Bayonetta in Devil May Cry 4, but the vestigial exploration elements in DMC4 make more sense both in terms of gameplay and the character fantasy. Also it's kind of funny that they have a not-Bayonetta character in DMC4 (Gloria) that does the exact same kind of erotic moaning in the middle of battle with constant boob/butt/crotch shots in cutscenes that is also voiced in Japanese by Tanaka Atsuko doing more or less the same thing, so it just feels like a Bayonetta cameo or something. It has to be intentional because this didn't get a Japanese dub until the SE, so you kind of have to figure they just asked her to do Bayonetta for that scene.

Speaking of the Japanese dub, it's been kind of fun because this is one of those cases where the Japanese subtitles (presumably made for the original release and prioritizing the rhythms of the English dub) don't match with the Japanese voice acting (made to prioritize sounding better when spoken out loud), so you get two different variations on the same dialogue simultaneously. (This might be distracting for something more serious or complicated, but this is Devil May Cry.)
 
Last edited:

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
Throwing new players at any DMC's first major boss is asking a lot, yeah. The reason why I highlighted Cerberus earlier is because of the context in which many people experienced these games in, simply because of the release chronology. DMC3 for most intents and purposes is the series and genre codifier; its rhythms and nuances are very separate from 1 despite that game inarguably being the progenitor of many shared concepts. As a reboot on the series, as its narrative prequel, as a redemption story after a lackluster sophomore effort, it was simply the first contact many had with the kind of game mechanics that would settle into a standard from then on, and so Cerberus has an outsized reputation for breaking in that ethos despite not standing out much the more one is familiarized with the larger scope of the genre. I alluded to a similar phenomenon with SMT Nocturne's Matador, who is just a regular (mandatory expansion content) boss in the context of its game, but has been rendered iconic and memetic for being the first basic test of play fundamentals many in the audience were not accustomed to interacting with, in its regionally specific context way back when.

There is a kind of escalation and recognition of the audience growing seasoned (or increasingly insular) as far as what's demanded of them on a base level as DMC progresses, which is great for iterative returnees, but potentially forbidding for newcomers in everything there is to internalize and get to grips with. Since this genre has largely evaporated in the grand scale and now only occasionally subsists on legacy continuations, a similar trajectory has occurred within the genre and game design lineage that is the closest to its modern equivalent and which cultivates a partially shared audience, in the FromSoft action RPG megafranchise. Many player advantages are on offer there if need be, but on a fundamental level each subsequent game turns up the game speed, increases the number of major boss confrontations within, and elaborates greatly on the complexity and ferocity of the patterns the player is meant to parse and respond to.
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
I would be frankly amazed if a newcomer to the genre was able to play DMC5 with any reasonable amount of success.
 
To DMC5's credit, Nero's moveset as you start the game, while a little more involved than in DMC4 is still to the point where a new player can get at least some familiarity with it within a few missions, with devil arm management being probably the hardest aspect to fully grasp. By the time the game gives you Dante and the moveset options blow wide open, anyone who's stuck it out that long will probably be able to reach competence with at least one of Dante's styles and that's all you really need.
 
The reason why I highlighted Cerberus earlier is because of the context in which many people experienced these games in, simply because of the release chronology.

To clarify a bit, I totally got that and didn't mean to disagree with or contradict you. I only intended to share my personal experience, not to suggest that you were incorrect about this. And my personal experience is definitely shaped by playing them all in a row without long breaks, so I'm able to apply things I've learned from previous entries and only have to make minor adjustments to take in new systems. And since the new systems mostly seem to make things easier once you get a handle on them (styles in DMC3 providing four and eventually more ways to personalize Dante's repertoire, Nero's stretchy grabby arm in DMC 4 dramatically increasing your options to control the space), it definitely gives me a different experience than someone trying DMC3 as their first contact with this type of game, or even after a long brake between it and the first game.
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
As for DMC4, I do think Nero's segments are the strongest material the game has. What 3 did for the series was beyond significant but it also left a feeling as if the Dante play mechanics paradigm was not only innovated there but might have plateaued right out of the gate. There will be new weapons to play with, sure, but the framework of the character's abilities, his movement and the power curve of charting his repertoire per game was so firmly set that it made it difficult for any continuation to conceptually break off from the model. Nero as the co-star was welcome to offer a parallel play philosophy--more condensed and initially straightforward-seeming, but with tremendous execution depth in his arsenal--so the Dante baseline has license to remain as is, since there's another set of verbs that so far has shown meaningful expansion of their vocabulary.
 
I'm really appreciating how well DMC4 uses Nero's arm as a contextual attack.

Against most small, standard enemies, this just means a simple throw, but because it's contextual this gives the game room to create situations where a throw does something very specific to a standard enemy with a gimmick, or allows for a really big, cinematic punish when a boss is weak, or to create a boss that takes the form of "throw the boss' stuff back at them," a Certified Video Games Classic setup. This also (so far at least) means the game never followed its peers into the the world of QTEs—if you the games needs a contextual cinematic action, you do it with Nero's demon arm, by pressing the demon arm button, not an one-time arbitrary sequence or by asking you to jam a button over and over.

(What will happen when Dante takes over, though? I've reached Mission 8, so it's probably not too long before I find out...)
 
I've played the first Dante mission by now in DMC4. I was dreading loosing the stretchy/grabby arm, but I'm extremely impressed with how powerful they make Dante feel with his immediate access to 4 styles that you can shift between on the fly. I think it would be overwhelming if this was your first DMC game, but coming off of DMC3 (where you could only use one style at a time) it's a ton of fun to have access to such a wide array of moves and modes that I'm at least partially familiar with already. (I never got around to trying Royal Guard in DMC3, because it felt very situational... But now it's possible to just switch to it when that situation comes up!) Also, I'm not sure if this just visual and sound design plus maybe a little more damage per hit or something real, but it feels like Dante's attacks have a lot more weight.

He's definitely a lot more fiddly, because because the game replaces a one-use multitool that always works (the devil arm) with a few dozen new moves that are all mapped to one button plus the d-pad to switch between modes, but my first impression is that it works.
 

YangusKhan

does the Underpants Dance
(He/Him/His)
The Switch port of DMC3 actually puts in style switching like DMC4's. I still haven't played that version, but I do wonder about people who play that specific version as their first DMC.
 
I've finished DMC4, and I think I like it more than the overall consensus (here and elsewhere).

I honestly thought the Dante missions that I see frequently criticized were a lot of fun. It's true that the way the levels are remixed in the back half of the game is not as inventive or atmospheric as in DMC1 and 3, but I don't think they were bad, either. They're mostly just a series of fights with a few minor gimmicks to switch up the stages a bit, but they're also pretty brisk. It feels a bit like a victory lap, and they keep it interesting by constantly expanding Dante's repertoire over those missions at a good pace. I understand that the game was rushed and don't disagree that the DMC1/3 approach to reusing assets in the back half of the game is better, but I enjoyed it for what it was. Maybe the wrinkles start to really show on Son of Sparda or Dante Must Die difficulties, but for one standard playthrough I found that it worked. The only Dante stage that I thought really didn't work was Mission 18, where you fight the big statue, and apparently this was worse in the original edition, so maybe the improvements to the SE are swaying my opinion here.

The initial Nero stages are definitely the strongest part of the game, and probably the best version of DMC4 would either keep building on that or give Dante stages more tailored for him, but I enjoyed the whole experience, and I definitely like it more than Bayonetta 1. I'd rather have a little too much repetition of too few assets that I find consistently fun, rather than a game being stuffed with a bunch of things I wish weren't there at all.

Funnily enough, after my experience being put off of this entire franchise by the Belial fight in the PS3 demo, in Nero's boss rush Belial was still the closest I came to dying, even with a Devil Trigger and being only a one segment short of being maxed out HP gauge (did all the Secret Missions but missed some hidden fragments). Something about that boss just doesn't click with me at all, for whatever reason. He seems like a weird fit for the game's first boss encounter, difficulty wise, although that's probably just a personal issue.
 

spines

cyber true color
(she/her, or something)
honestly, i like dmc4 a lot, way ahead of a lot of similar games, and not that much less than 3, and to the extent i tend to downplay that like, it's because i do ultimately get why people feel negatively and would hate to overpromise on the game, haha. but i'd consider it my second favorite in the series and probably the genre as a whole, so it really made me happy to see you "get it" too, especially as someone who i assume is not going to go and play the game for another 40 hours. (really, i specifically held off saying so because i didn't want to do so only for it to fall flat by the ending...) i really do think a lot of it has aged relatively well, and as you've mentioned, i think a lot of it comes from the ways that it didn't align with a lot of the accepted design of the time and kind of "settled" for being an (even more combat-focused) sequel to 3

nero's mechanics are funny to me, i think it's clear they wanted him to feel more straightforward but as a result they made the entry to his best stuff feel very steep, which i think a lot of people find off-putting. i think he feels fine at a basic level and really satisfying to feel the best parts come together if you stick with it, but i recognize the disappointment of being stuck halfway. dante in this game is an incredible kind of nonsense and i think if anything they toned down a the individual styles to make up for having everything all the time, which on balance feels like a buff for the usefulness of royal guard and gunslinger even if the former's outrageous damage in 3 has been toned down in return. there's a lot of cool videos out there.

SE vergil is pretty similar to his version in 3, though he similarly feels a bit less overpowering to everything, and i think lady and trish's game is the coolest addition to the rerelease. lady is a bit like nero, and plays on his stages, with a lot of power and a couple of unique tools covering a relative lack of overall options. and trish's game gets a little rude in spots since her damage is really low and she's more designed around control that doesn't work well on a couple of especially annoying enemies and bosses. but i definitely think you might have a good time with that.

honestly, i've played both games to the point that the difference between 3's "remixed" areas and 4's obvious retreading stopped being something i cared about, but the parts where i really, really think 3 wins out are the story (and its corresponding late 90s/early 2000s action movie vibes compared to 4 being more of...a jrpg) and music. and even then they came up with one really good dmc song for the credits. hahahahahahahaha
 
Last edited:
I'm definitely planning on playing as Trish/Lady and Vergil. I bet those will be quick because I already did all the exploring with the base characters, and those rewards carry over as completed on new playthroughs. Last night after posting I actually rounded up the last few orb fragments and then played through Mission 2 with Lady. She's a very well realized character for a Special Edition bonus, considering how different she is from either Dante or Nero! It's too bad that apparently she doesn't return as playable in DMC5. It feels like she could support her own game or levels designed fully around her.

i really, really think 3 wins out are the story (and its corresponding late 90s/early 2000s action movie vibes compared to 4 being more of...a jrpg)

Yeah I think this is definitely a downgrade, but in its favor I like that it establishes the Fun Uncle Dante personality, which is a good place for the character to be in comparison to DMC2.
especially as someone who i assume is not going to go and play the game for another 40 hours

I'm curious what this means. Reading more responses to the game after finishing it, I noticed that DMC4 (like Bayonetta 1!) has a pretty vocal contingent of people who argue that it has the most technically interesting combat in the series and therefore is the best. Is that what this is referencing? Because I did notice that there are definitely people who argue that it's the most rewarding to put time into at least in terms of what you get back for systems mastery, no matter what they think about the level design.
 
Last edited:

fanboymaster

(He/Him)
DMC4 isn't a bad game by any means, but it definitely felt like, at the time, a game where I'd waited a few years to see what new wrinkles they'd add and where DMC3 was like "OH!" this was more an "... oh." I don't think Nero's bad to play but his devil bringer to me feels too simplified and his moveset is missing something I can't fully describe for my tastes.
 

Peklo

Oh! Create!
(they/them, she/her)
DMC4 has traditionally been viewed as the fan favourite by the most hardcore players for most of the series's existence thanks to its very, very high skill ceiling, whether it's the frame-perfect MAX-Acts with Nero or the galaxy brain combat approach with Dante's all-or-nothing play. The estimation comes from the kind of players who value the series most for its combat mechanics in a vacuum, almost literally; the comparison that arises within the medium is the thinking that Pokémon games "begin" after the single-player scenario is concluded and competitive play opens--the equivalent in DMC is that the "real game" is only to be found at Dante Must Die levels, and ideally in its contextless battle arena dimension Bloody Palace where nothing else about the games can intrude upon the experience of reveling in the core mechanics. There's a huge amount of overlap with fighting games, since the influence between the genres is intrinsic and mutual especially in the wake of DMC3's codifying take on the formula, so the player mentality and mindset that delights in "labbing" combos, inputs and execution in these games as their primary goal and purpose will gravitate to the games that offer the most avenues for it. For most of the series's existence, DMC4 has been that game, though now it probably has to share the throne with DMC5.
 
Top