I never thought Dante would be cool. The last decade of Devil May Cry created a character wrought with unfashionable swagger, not unlike a guy who read a book about how to project confidence and wound up looking overly pious and arrogant at every instance. Ninja Theory’s interpretation of Dante knocked a few years off his age and up’d his rebellious nature by somehow making him even more spiteful and disconnected. In this regard the Dante of DmC: Devil May Cry shouldn’t work. He should come off as a parody of a cliché and sink the franchise into oblivion. He couldn’t be more wrong for the game.
These are all things that I would think and/or believe had I not seen and played a good chunk of DmC at E3. Glancing at my notes, I actually wrote the word “cool” nine different times in regard to various aspects, be it art or mechanics, of the game. Again, I never expected Dante, especially this Dante, to be cool, and yet I walked away thinking no character-action game was as appealing and stylish as Capcom’s prized demon hunter.
Ironically little of this was conveyed through his demeanor. The theme of DmC is rebellion, and in our demo it was expressed by a brash Dante disrespecting authority, tossing out cheesy one liners, and referring to his trials and challenges as “bullshit.” That’s not exactly cool, however DmC quickly does an about face when Dante shuts up and starts fighting. In this regard DmC earns its stripes not through narrative or the strengths of its characters, but rather the over-the-top presentation and extremely competent combat mechanics.
Examine the scenario of our closed-door demo. Dante stumbles into a nightclub. The music’s loud, hundreds of people are dancing, and then all hell breaks loose. Well, hell doesn’t actually break loose, at least not in the traditional sense. A conceit to Limbo City, where DmC takes place, is its ability to twist and turn into a surreal caricature of itself. Regarding our demo, the raging nightclub transformed into a gauntlet run TV show, of sorts, called The Devil Has Talent. From a visual standpoint this spawned the silhouettes of hundreds of dancing people and layered in a sequence of platforming and combat segments, all of which punctuated by an overabundance of bright yellow colors and various demon fodder. Coupled with music that sounded like it was pulled straight from Deep Cuts era The Knife and you’re left with a wonderfully surreal and categorically insane sequence of events. Not much else plays like it and certainly nothing else looks like it, resulting in an appearance that, regardless of Dante’s character, came off as uncompromising and, well, cool.
DmC also played quite well. I didn’t get to play the same sequence from the demo, which was probably appropriate given that it occurred around DmC’s midpoint. Instead I engaged the same sequence that’s been popping around trade shows as of late, and what I experience fell in line with my expectations. Even at thirty frames-per-second DmC feels fast and fluid, and the detail therein doesn’t carry that pervasive sameness common amongst all Unreal Engine 3 titles. If Enslaved proved anything, it’s that Ninja Theory has an exceptional art department, and they’re really giving everything they’ve got to DmC.
Combat boiled down familiar basics. A launcher was perfect for air combos, and Dante’s trademark pistols were great for extended combos. Minor variations were thrown in with moves that both pushed enemies away and lassoed Dante forward, and these mechanics were extended to platforming segments that Dante used to ascend balconies and walls. Later, certain enemies required the use of specific moves to “break” before they could be damaged. Combat received a few more wrinkles through Devil Trigger, which rendered all enemies defenseless and stopped time while Dante’s hair turned white, the world went black, and various measures of hell were returned upon any aggressors. Mechanically speaking, all of this was fairly routine for a game in this genre, which is what one may expect with ten minutes worth of skill building in a very early portion of DmC.
But, most importantly, it all looked cool. Dante is never as cool as he so desperately wants to be, but DmC thrives anyway. If the art direction maintains its penchant for an ambitious color pallet and surreal circumstance, and if combat evolves in the stylish masterpiece the series is known for, DmC may wind up being the coolest game around – almost in spite of Dante’s endless rebellion.
