The IGN review for Devil May Cry 5 reads that it is exactly what the series needed; the
new pinnacle its own subset of action games.
Its battles are fair and well designed, but not easy.
It rocks, and with its perfectly paced storytelling, upgraded combat and crazy visuals, DMCV earns
a place on any action junkie’s must-buy list.
…had you there for a minute, didn’t I?
This is actually a mixture of IGN’s reviews of both Devil May Cry V and 2013’s DmC;
one being perhaps the most hyped action game of the last decade following the other, which
is widely regarded as something of a series nadir, thanks to combat that was somehow both
dumbed down and more convoluted than its predecessors, as well as a woeful story whose Banksy-level
social commentary met with a far less playful portrayal of the series’ mainstays that
totally missed the mark.
And critics (not just IGN) seemingly adored it when it came out.
All of this is to say that Devil May Cry V has now been released to the exact kind of
fanfare you’d expect from a game so hotly anticipated.
But while critical reception has been almost universally praiseworthy, I’m far more curious
to see how the long tail on this thing plays out from a community perspective.
My own thoughts on this return to form, as someone who sucks at the games but dearly
loves them regardless, are generally incredibly positive but some of the game’s finer points
keep it from becoming my new favourite in the series at this early stage—a title some
have been quick to thrust upon it.
Does it feature the best combat of the series?
Quite possibly.
Is it the best Devil May Cry game?
Well, that’s a little more complicated.
What can I say?
Metal Gear Solid V has taught me to be wary of immeasurably hyped games with a V in the
title.
Come to think of it, both Devil May Cry and The Phantom Pain feature protagonists whose
arms are torn off prior to the game’s events and whose cybernetic prostheses offer a wide
range of different abilities, including firing it off as a projectile.
Oh no.
In all seriousness though, where the similarities end and where DMCV begins to shirk off the
faux-edginess and mopey demeanour of 2013’s Dante is in its overall tone.
Where that game basked in how important it thought it was, 5 returns to the grand series
tradition of not giving a solitary s*&! about anything so self-aggrandising; if it’s a
demon and it moves, it’s fair game.
The ashen bodies of those who died in the calamity, frozen as if they were found in
Pompeii, aren’t viewed as some tragic loss—their remains are unceremoniously turned to dust
as Nero excitedly tramples through them; merely a signifier that fun lies just ahead.
Instead of mocking fans, our characters mock the confines of the game—when confronted
with our first Nidhogg puzzle grinding things to a halt as we watch Nero take the thing
out, walk it over and watch the cutscene where he puts the thing in the other thing, his
response is a curt “I should probably have just cut through that.”
In short it does what the series has always done best—taking the demonic grandeur of
the dark fantasy genre and treating it as needless self-seriousness; the bigger the
ego, the funnier it’ll be to undermine it.
The more imposing the threat, the more fun these characters will have bringing it down
to size.
We like these characters because, when the game feels so good to play, they reflect our
desire to cut the pretence and get to the action.
It’s a far cry from the camera jittering about in order to zhush up a static conversation
with Vergil about how Pepsi is trying to get in your mind, man.
Here, the camera struggles to keep up with the chaos occurring on screen.
While the plot itself isn’t up to much, the way it’s presented makes watching it
unfold a pretty joyous experience, even if it isn’t as full-on with its bombast as
3 or 4; something that could possibly be attributed to the game’s move to the RE engine, which
renders its characters in pretty staggering fidelity.
Maybe borderline photorealism just doesn’t lend itself well to this kind of mayhem.
Similarly, however, it’s the little details in the story’s delivery that sell this rejuvenated
kitsch a little short; it all looks great until those mouths start moving.
It’s not that the performances themselves are bad – the voice actors are hamming it
up in exactly the way you want them to.
It’s more to do with a somewhat awkward script translation, combined with somewhat
awkward direction, that leads to scenes coming across a little… unevenly.
For example, Nico’s southern drawl often stands at odds with the speed at which her
lines are delivered, making her zingy one-liners seem like they needed just a bit more space,
a few more frames to really nail that delivery.
It says a lot that I originally thought these cutscenes were animated for the Japanese voice
track and the English would simply have been bolted on, when upon inspection the opposite
is true and neither ends up fitting particularly well.
Dialogue can lurch along in the same way bad anime dubs do and it’s as often quaint as
it is a little disappointing; something that wasn’t nearly as much of a concern when
character faces weren’t so uncannily detailed.
Likewise, this uneven pacing can be seen across the story as a whole.
DMCV has always been touted as a declaration of love to the series’ heyday – whose
final batch of missions take this idea to an astoundingly literal degree – that rarely
reaches some of the more cartoonish heights of 4, nor does it as carefully weave its camp
with its more sinister undertones as effectively as 3.
But this is a game for the fans and with that comes a lot of fan service, no matter how
needless; leaving the game in the unenviable position of trying to introduce new things
to the canon while also including every reference they possibly can.
New edgy goth lad V is so moody that I thought he was intended as a jab towards Ninja Theory’s
take on the series’ characters, but as the game went on it became clear we were supposed
to take this…
Adam-Driver-if-he-was-popped seriously.
All while more established characters get entirely short shrift, with Lady and Trish
running into battles we never get to see or just hanging around doing nothing; a rushed
inclusion that serves no purpose other than letting fans know they still exist.
Neither the new nor the old gets the chance to shine that either really deserve.
The same, however, cannot be said of 5’s combat, where the vast majority of the dev
team’s attention clearly went; a case of knuckling down and ensuring that, on a systemic
level, this game would be the new gold standard of hack and slash design, through a careful
process of iterating on what came before.
That breadth of options available to players in any encounter, while managing to keep such
options to one button rather than forcing players to remember massive complicated inputs;
testing rhythm over memory or dexterity; giving combat an altogether more primal, visceral
feel than its contemporaries.
The ever-punishing style meter turns every swing of the sword into a desperate game of
decision making as you balance the speed needed to sustain your attacks with the restraint
required to vary them up; waiting that aching millisecond longer between strikes to activate
a different combo string.
3 and 4 offered so many possibilities to the player that, for me, a decent chunk of their
initial challenge came from overcoming legitimate option paralysis and 5, with its further expansion
of these characters’ respective repertoires, is no different in that regard.
Its complexity is indeed fairly daunting, but not overly so; with the lure of replayability
not coming solely from the need to up my scores or try new difficulty modes, but simply to
experiment with the wealth of options left underexplored on my first playthrough.
With my reliance on the game’s lock on, playthrough 1 saw me use Nero’s new Devil
Breakers far less than his grappling hook to reel enemies in.
On my second, I began to realise the potential I was missing out on, with the Breaker abilities
very much filling the gap left by Dante’s styles—allowing for loadouts that can serve
any purpose from increasing mobility or defence, to continually hitting enemies to keep your
style meter up.
The addition of Devil Breakers does an admirable job of narrowing that gap between the two
characters—even if the absence of any means to shift between the different arm types without
sequentially destroying them is baffling.
What were more of an outright disappointment were the missions attached to V, whose introduction
of weapons that aren’t actually weapons open up an entirely new way of looking at
the game; with the player being framed as more of a commander-type than a soldier.
Each of your familiars has their own upgrade tree, as well as their own health bar, all
of which you would think would require players to get into a totally different headspace
and play extra carefully; remaining acutely aware of every facet of the battlefield in
a way that one-on-one fights don’t necessitate, in order that you don’t end up defenceless.
For a hack and slash game, this is a pretty out-there concept to introduce.
In practice, however, the addition of two extra targets, combined with the wide-open
spaces of most arenas, simply meant that in my time as V, I almost never got hit.
Downed comrades respawn so quickly that a scenario in which I was left without weapons
was never a concern.
Without spoiling anything, a later section in which previous bosses make a return saw
V eviscerating in seconds what had taken Nero far more effort to do previously.
For someone so relatively weedy, V is an absolute powerhouse.
His missions are a bit like selecting easy mode, which is fine in theory; I’ve nothing
against making the explosive spectacle the series is known for accessible to more players.
It’s just that, for all the strategic potential V’s missions dangle in front of the player,
they were the few points where stepping back and mindlessly pulverising the controller
was a more effective strategy, yielded a far greater score, than being mindful of my attacks
up close and personal.
V’s distance from the action renders said action somewhat incoherent while limiting
what little precision you might end up needing.
But for all that the new character fails to make much of an impact, we still have that
old standby Dante; whose combat system remains so extensive, so finely tuned, so versatile,
so goddamn delectable that I’m gasping just thinking of the words to use in order to describe
it.
The phrase that comes to mind is musicality.
Like the other characters, you hammer on the melee button and pull off, letting a strike
sustain for just the right amount of time before going in for the next hit, but here
you’re carefully alternating gun and weapon combinations on the shoulder buttons in rhythm
with your attacks to add some flair to your performance, all while simultaneously changing
up your style on the fly with the D-pad to adapt to different situations.
It’s honestly akin to the coordination required in order to play an instrument and fittingly
for a game that treats Nero as an air-guitaring pseudo-rockstar, Dante’s combat, for me,
comes across as the real deal.
And it’s this variance between the three styles that made me yearn for a mode in which
any character could take on any level.
Because honestly, outside of the one or two that make much use of Nero’s grappling ability,
there’s not a whole lot about any environment that would necessitate one character’s moveset
over another.
It’s to the point that I think the level design generally will come to be seen as something
of a mark against the game going forward.
By the time Dante is introduced, the vibrancy of the game’s earlier cityscapes has decayed
into drab demon-encrusted ruin; our characters descend further into the same intestinal corridors
time and time again, their funnel-like nature becoming more apparent the more you play.
They do a good enough job of carrying you from one encounter to the next, but they lack
the open-endedness and sense of geography seen in prior titles—that notion that you
always have a pretty good idea of where you are, where you came from and where you’re
going next.
Even with the Qliphoth in the distance guiding our heroes
it wasn’t long before environments started to blur together.
And it was genuinely surprising to me, revisiting the older titles to gather footage, to find
that this hasn’t always been a series problem.
See, one of the things that stuck out to me most about 3 was just how frantic it all was
from the get-go, and this was largely due to tight, claustrophobic spaces filled with
incredibly persistent enemies contained within larger, explorable structures.
With the legitimate depth of these environments and how it had you navigating these spaces
over the course of multiple missions, older titles gave exploration a sense of purpose
as well as elevating the tension of combat encounters.
Hell, 3 could make activating an elevator a grand event—and it’s hard not to see
5 by comparison as a little… run of the mill.
And all of this speaks to a wider issue with difficulty that sees the game’s normal mode
playing decidedly easier, feeling far less relentless than past titles.
I’d wager this had something to do with the newly-added microtransactions that allow
you to buy red orbs which can be used for reviving a fallen character as well as purchasing
upgrades.
It leads to a cycle of fairly major design decisions made to counteract something that
came across as totally insignificant.
Congratulations, you succeeded in making the environments spacious enough, the enemies
reluctant enough to attack, that I didn’t die enough to run out of the once rare gold
orbs now thrust upon me at every turn.
The difficulty is an issue that’s more than remedied with the Son of Sparda mode unlocked
after a first playthrough, but it’s perhaps the most appropriate tribute to 3 of all that
they just can’t get that normal difficulty quite right.
Ultimately Devil May Cry 5, as a collection of combat systems, manages to build even further
on a series framework that is widely (and rightly) regarded to this day as one of the
peaks of the action genre.
There’s a reason fans wanted this style of game to return; one that drives you back
time and time again to best your scores or just for the sheer sake of engaging with it.
I just want to play some more now, it’s that good, even if the framing of its mechanics,
the level design and narrative (those things that do form an incredibly important part
of the series’ identity) can be more than a little lacking at points.
It’s almost at the stage where I could consider it my favourite of the series, almost, but
it’s not quite there yet.
That said, being only the second-best Devil May Cry entry, while still managing to be
one of the best feeling hack and slashers I’ve ever played, highlights how much of
a blinding success this game clearly still is at meeting the gargantuan task that lay
ahead of Itsuno and his team—of bringing this series back into the limelight.
Much like I experienced with the interconnectivity of Resident Evil 2’s station design earlier
this year, just thinking about the amount of effort, the logistical forethought that
would need to go into ensuring all these different parts work in tandem with one another sends
terrifying shivers down my spine.
What’s more though, it appears like they genuinely enjoyed tackling this challenge
head-on.
As evidenced by the pre-vis cutscenes filmed to animate every scene, with the development
team getting into their goofy costumes and jumping around, you can tell that at its core,
DMCV is driven by a pure, almost childlike mindset that reflects in the purity of its
moment-to-moment gameplay.
What’s that?
You want to tell us about how you’re going to wake up the sheeple to the reality that
banks don’t have our best interests at heart?
We’ll just be over here mashing action figures together and watching the sparks fly.
And if that isn’t the biggest sign of all that, even with its flaws, this is the return
to form the series desperately needed, I don’t know what is.
So I hope you enjoyed my piece on Devil May Cry V.
If you did, maybe you’d like to consider supporting the show directly on Patreon—I
cannot emphasise enough just how much your generous pledges help in allowing me to keep
up the work I’m doing.
Thank you all so much.
Special thanks go to Mark B Writing, Rob, Nico Bleackley, Sivaas, Michael Wolf, Artjom
Vitsjuk, Dallas Kean, Spencer (iruleatgames) Geller, William Fielder, Ali Almuhanna, Timothy
Jones, Spike Jones, TheNamlessGuy, Chris Wright, Ham Migas, Travis Bennett, Zach Casserly,
Samuel Pickens, Tom Nash, Shardfire, Ana Pimentel, Jessie Rine, Brandon Robinson, Justins Holderness,
Christian Konemann, Mathieu Nachury, Nicolas Ross and Charlie Yang.
And with that, this has been another episode of Writing on Games.
Thank you very much for watching and I’ll see you next time.