by James » Mon Feb 04, 13 1:33 pm
Will keep this spoiler free. I just want to talk about the game itself before I talk about Capcom's failed expectations for it.
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There's certainly a lot of people who are satisfied by this game and think it is okay to play, and that's fine. But, I simply do not understand DmC: Devil May Cry compared to something like DMC1, DMC3 or DMC4 at all.
The graphics and art-design is muddy, while the game does a great job at looking pretty and it indeed has an ambitious changing world, the environments and monsters designs are simply nothing but defined but meaningless with a lot of clutter to look cool. There's a lot of stuff lost from the concept and original teaser trailer for its overall theme. There's also a lot of amateur mo-cap ugliness going about where the animations are slightly comical. I guess Ninja Theory need to use that huge studio they own (which is the only thing there that's keeping them in business), but I'm sick of games feeling like the newer Star Wars trilogy behind a green screen compared to games that were manually animated for facial expressions i.e. Silent Hill 2. The game is also on Unreal Engine 3 (NT are experienced with it) instead of Capcom's in-house MT Framework, which is a huge flaw for performance buffs as it runs terribly for action game standards (sub 30fps) on consoles I hear but I've played the PC version so I can't comment on that.
The combat is like a mix between DMC4 and Heavenly Sword's, it is a lot more refined than the latter's but it falls very short of the former's combat system. Some attacks and animations literally traced Nero (DMC4's protagonist) and the Red Queen he uses in his left hand but this is a good thing because the game doesn't even use a proper lock-on system which angel grab/devilbringer aids in making it less annoying than it is. Still, a game like this needs its lock-on so that's a major negative. The combat is floaty and gives the illusion of freedom to the player by allowing you to stagger/stun and flip a lot of enemies into the air for a prolonged time, which I believe could only be done with canceling in the previous entries of the series. Speaking of canceling, it isn't in the game. I find this a horrible mistake as this is what actually gave freedom to the players instead of making you look good for accomplishing malignant, simple tasks in DmC which caters to the popcorn entertainment audience that plagues today's gaming community and design. The weapons are boring but I do quite find the hulk hands charming. The Arbiter/Axe is extremely flawed as it breaks the game with its lengthy stunning of enemies combined with the "see no evil" camera design exploitation.
For enemies, I only find one red masked individual to be the only interesting enemy in the game, unlike his blue masked individual. Also I hate the whole blue = blue weapon and red = devil weapon weaknesses, it tries to influence you to use different weapons to be effective which is kind of lame as DMC3&4 (Dante of course) allowed the player to complete the game with any of its arsenal on any enemy as effective as you built it to be. As for the bosses, all of them are cinematic bullshit which in my opinion has no place in videogames. There's no need to stop gameplay to show a cutscene to change boss phase when you can simply have a line of audio and animation during the actual fight... breather argument aside, I'm sure it'll annoy the player to have the fight interrupted at least 5 times during a boss.
As for the plot, easily the worst story and dialogue I have ever seen this generation. The motivation and characters are completely stupid and contradict themselves many times. This was Ninja Theory's first project written in-house, I can easily see this being their last.
There's a lot of games journalism plonks stressing that the game is receiving negative criticism from fans because of Dante's new hairstyle or hair colour, no, the game is much more flawed than his hair style. As proof, the game offers a DMC3 DLC costume pack for the protagonist, it looks much worse than the DmC default. I'd like to stress that people don't like this game because it is a flawed game and a disappointment to fans of the series.
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Anyway the point of this post is that I'm a huge fan of the DMC series and I wanted to show you my mindset before the next few sentences. Capcom's expectations for DmC was originally 5 million sales, lowered to 2 million and recently lowered again to 1.2 million. Capcom have shipped out 1 million copies and DmC has struggled to sell around 500k, however this may change when new figures are released today. Regardless, DMC4 sold 3x the amount DmC has when it was on the market and got over 2 million within a year.
I think this is what happens when you alienate an entire fanbase.
I am dead.