Devil May Cry's appearance on Switch should be regarded as an essential installment of modern gaming history. Its genesis in Resident Evil, unconscious evolution of the beat 'em up genre, and conception of stylish-action showcase the fierce innovation demonstrated by the PlayStation 2 in 2001. In 2019, the primordial Devil May Cry may be more frustrating than fun, but what it lacks in comfort it corrects with prestige.
In Devil May Cry the player can use a giant sword to uppercut a demon ten feet high and then brandish two pistols and juggle the demon in the air with bullets. Devil May Cry will literally tell you this is cool. It is, in fact, cool. In 2001, during the PlayStation 2’s ascent to global gaming domination, Devil May Cry’s innate transformation of the beat ’em up genre put it in the same class as Grand Theft Auto III, Ico, Final Fantasy X, and Metal Gear Solid 2. Devil May Cry pioneered stylish action.
It is impossible to separate Devil May Cry from its origins as the fourth numbered Resident Evil game. The first of a trio of failed attempts at conceiving Resident Evil 4, Devil May Cry was spun off in its own direction as its development strayed too far away from Resident Evil’s interpretation of contemporary survival horror. Even with that separation, Resident Evil’s fingerprints are easily seen in the obtuse fixed camera angles, haunted mansion setting, the you are dead failure greeting, and identical sound libraries. Devil May Cry feels like it was pulled from a parallel dimension where Resident Evil never happened.
If Resident Evil is one parent, the other is an amalgamation of the contemporary beat ’em up genre. By 2001 games like Sword of the Berserk: Guts’ Rage and The Bouncer were trying to transition 3D beat ’em ups out of the stilted hell that manifested in Fighting Force. Dynasty Warriors 2, with its unprecedented sense of scale, also lit a path toward a possible future. Devil May Cry accepted the core beat ’em up tenets—hordes of opponents, boss battles, light and often misguided navigation and platforming challenges—and installed 3D fighting game combat sensibilities, the aforementioned bullet-juggling, and full commitment to looking as stylish as possible at every second. Games where you navigated a bizarre plot and murdered hundreds of dopes had never looked or played like Devil May Cry.
Devil May Cry’s action and progression unfold in a manner common of action games of its era. Dante, demon hunter extraordinaire, follows Trish to an ominous castle in order to prevent the return of Mundus. The castle is full of an escalating series of marionette demons, giant spiders, gothic humanoids, and nefarious shadows. Dante hacks and slashes and stylishly obliterates everything in his path, room by room, and locates generic keys to open curiously locked doors along the way. Devil May Cry is broken down into twenty-three missions and twelve secret/optional missions and, by design and by time, hard as hell.
Phantom, a giant spider and first legitimate boss fight, is statement of Devil May Cry’s intent. It will melt a health-bar very quickly and tokens that allow the player to continue, as opposed to restart the entire mission, are not in great supply. Phantom is quickly followed-up with Shadow, a cat-like creature (with morphing abilities that feel like an embryonic Bayonetta) that will do the same. Figuring out when to dodge, when to attack, and which combination of melee and ranged weapons are best is only understood through trial and error. Devil May Cry does allow for some cheese, as its Devil Trigger (read: brief super-powered mode) and shotgun frame-skipping technique can be abused at will.
Devil May Cry’s difficulty stands in sharp contrast to Devil May Cry 5. Missions can’t be repeated, meaning red orbs (the currency earned by defeating enemies and used to buy weapons, consumables, and upgrades) can’t be grinded out with ease. And while there is an “easy auto” mode for combo delivery, there is no adjusting Devil May Cry’s difficulty level. Getting smoked deep into a mission and being forced to repeat the entire mission—totally normal for 2001!—incites fury and anger under a modern lens. I can’t fault Devil May Cry for staying faithful to Devil May Cry but, given the treatment of other remasters, this choice can grate patience.
Devil May Cry’s camera is its most nascent asset. Because it has fixed positions, it can shift your point of you and your direction of attack without warning. This is particularly troubling in life-and-death boss encounters. Camera angles are eventually learned and adjustments can be made to deal with their rigid demands, but it stands as one of the features it shouldn’t have borrowed from the pre-rendered origin of Resident Evil. Like so much of Devil May Cry, the camera was overhauled for every subsequent release.
It’s possible to play Devil May Cry as if you were touring a museum to find all of the features that, eventually, never made it in another Devil May Cry. First-person swimming underwater sections, the lack of a true lock-on mechanic, Dante being unironically cool, a half-assed rail-shooter sequence, repeating boss fights, orbs tucked in ridiculous pieces of the environment — Capcom was really throwing everything at Devil May Cry’s approval-seeking wall and not sure how much would create exceptionally pleasing spatter.
As combos were Street Fighter II’s history-changing happy accident, air juggles were Devil May Cry’s signature providence. Derived from a bug in Onimusha: Warlords, the idea of hitting an opponent in the air and continuing to hit them before they fall was revolutionary. Being carried out by a man in a crimson trench coat with snow white hair at the height of turn-of-the-century angst caught the performance at its maximum potential. There are few people, fictional or otherwise, perfect for their time and place and in 2001 Dante enjoyed every moment of his spotlight.
The Switch’s Devil May Cry arrives without any noticeable performance hitches. Devil May Cry held sixty frames docked and in handheld mode the entire time I played it. It carries the widescreen conversion originally created for the 2012 PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 remaster. Devil May Cry remains Devil May Cry, only now you can hurl the entire console into the wall above the couch instead of just the controller.
Devil May Cry’s place in Switch is complicated. The “Put Everything On Switch” meme is a thought I happen to agree with because it would be extremely good if every game from before 2013 was on Nintendo’s versatile platform. On the other hand, gosh it’s dispiriting to see the PlayStation 4 and Xbox One showcase not only Devil May Cry 5, but a bundled trilogy of all three of the PlayStation 2’s Devil May Cry entries for the same asking price as this release. The Switch gets the original Devil May Cry for $20, which is consistent with the 2019 re-release Onimusha and ten dollars less than the recent trio of Resident Evil games. $20 still feels like too much!
Devil May Cry’s appearance on Switch should be regarded as an essential installment of modern gaming history. Its genesis in Resident Evil, unconscious evolution of the beat ’em up genre, and conception of stylish-action showcase the fierce innovation demonstrated by the PlayStation 2 in 2001. In 2019, the primordial Devil May Cry may be more frustrating than fun, but what it lacks in comfort it corrects with prestige.
