More DmC

Yesterday I finished my first playthrough of the new Devil May Cry game, DmC. Like I said when I first bought it, it definitely felt faithful to the original game. I don't know how to really describe the genre (action?) but DmC is an excellent game for the genre. It's actually a fair bit like Ehrgeiz, if Ehrgeiz was awesome instead of rather boring.

As the game progresses you unlock more and more weapons and more and more moves for each weapon. It seems weird that I have probably 8 moves on average for each of my 8 weapons and yet I can still pull them off pretty easily with just an xBox controller. A lot of the moves for each weapon are the same combination of buttons, just with a different trigger held down. Forward->forward->Y is a charge attack with a sword. With the right trigger held down it's a dodge and charge attack with my fists. With the left trigger held down it's a charge and sweep attack with my scythe. It took a little bit to get everything back in my mind after taking some time off, but once I got back into the swing of things it all felt right.

Now that I beat the game on the 3rd difficulty I can play it again on a harder difficulty that claims to have different AI for the fights so it all feels different. I don't think I'll have time to try that out until after WBC, but I expect I will do so afterwards. I've complained before about disliking needing to unlock harder difficulty levels but it feels a little different this time. Maybe it's just that I personally liked the game on the hardest option I had at the start? If it was trivial for me then it might have gotten tedious and boring. I think there's a difference between this and Symphony because DmC has a plot going on. Even if it was really easy it would still potentially be worth playing to see the story unfold and watch the cool videos.

The game is rated M, and it seems to embrace that rating. The intro movie has the main character wake up completely naked. You don't quite get to see anything thanks to convenient placement of objects around the scene but I don't know that I can recall even the idea that males could be nude in any other game I've played. It also goes really heavily into profanity. The game is fully voice acted and some of the cutscenes are really laced with language I don't typically enjoy. And yet it never really seemed gratuitous. Even when the main character and a random demon basically spend a minute just swearing at each other. It seemed like how those two characters would actually be interacting. The main character is half demon, half angel, and really doesn't care about anything. That he'd devolve into a cursing match with a demon makes sense. At another point the main character and his brother have just broken into the enemy stronghold, and the following exchange happens:


That's just not the conversation I expected to hear in a video game. And yet it still makes sense for these characters.

The ending credits showed a bit about how they made the game. They used full motion capture to get all the movements down, and I could tell while playing the game. Everything felt right in the movement of the characters. I mean, we are talking about a half demon, half angel dude with super powers and all... But if such a person did exist in the real world, I think he'd move the way Dante moves.

I've been playing a lot of different games on Steam recently. Most of them are games that were on sale for a couple dollars and have a normal price less than $10. DmC is $50. I think the difference in quality makes up for the difference in price. Most of the games I'm playing don't have big FMVs with top notch voice acting. They tend to be 2D pixel and sprite affairs, not games that used motion capture to work out how one would swing a sword. They can still be fun and have good gameplay, don't get me wrong, but I can see how DmC cost a lot more to make and therefore why it should cost more to buy. DmC seems to have done enough to justify that increased cost for me.