As I’ve mentioned before, video games require a certain level of ‘literacy.’ Like literature - really like any sort of representational medium - video games require fluency and familiarity from their players before being rendered legible. This problem is compounded by the fact that games by their very nature require active interaction in order to progress. And beause video games – an inclusive term that refers to everything from audio-visual art books like Ceremony of Innocence to your free copy of Minesweeper - are so varied in their manifestations severely limits any single person’s ambition to master them all, limits imposed as much by one’s free time and patience as by innate talent or aptitude.For example, my sainted spouse initially found Mass Effect far too frustrating to play - its shooting mechanics, which demands she guide a small reticle across a screen in order to fire back at enemies that were firing at her, proved more frustrating than rewarding. But once she encountered Skyrim, a game so breathtaking it compelled her to spend most of our Christmas break holed up in the apartment playing it, she suddenly had reward enough to learn how to use the bow and arrow, which uses a shooting mechanic similar to that of Mass Effect. And once she’d played enough Skyrim, once enough of her neural links were firing, she picked Mass Effect back up and then blew through the latter two games of the series without any difficulty.What it comes down to, then, is the amount of enjoyment you can extract from a game compared to the amount of effort you put into it. This is where preference sets in - not unlike genre preference for literature - since the effort:enjoyment ratio is in great part dictated by the sort of effort one enjoys; not everyone can make it through, say, Tolkien’s The Silmarillion (some even find The Two Towers a spire too far), but for someone who really, really likes that kind of book, its denseness is probably part of its mythopoetic pleasure.All this is to say that, when charged to write a review of the latest iteration of Capcom’s Devil May Cry series, I found myself confronted with a kind of game in which I, supposed digital guru, am stunningly illiterate. My lineage is that of the PC gamer, with a platform of mouse-and-keyboard versatility, and I came to consoles with their specialized controllers and button-clusters only late in my life; console games, and the arcade-style games with which they share strong family resemblances, often rely on faculties that are not well developed in your humble reviewer. As such the ‘input/output’ ratio of effort/pleasure was skewed unpleasantly (at least for me), but it is as important to note that - in the case of the gamer for which Devil May Cry is designed - finger-cramping difficulty is the point. Indeed, the relative ease of the most recent game was a point of criticism from die-hard fans of the franchise, though for this reviewer it was most definitely a blessing. I almost finished it on ‘easy’; I finished all but the very last battle, one which prompted me to toss aside the controller, utter unprintable profanity, and go make myself a conciliatory cup of tea.
The first Devil May Cry was originally intended as a sequel to Capcom’s seminal survival horror title Resident Evil, but rather than reproduce the experience of a frail human body at risk, the new series departed entirely from both the narrative and central notion of its parent text, pioneering a genre of game best described as ‘cinematic action.’ Whereas Resident Evil cast the player in the role of an armed but eminently human investigator in a house of horrors, Devil May Cry’s protagonist has ever been a smart-talking, gun-slinging, sword-twirling anti-hero named Dante. Whereas Resident Evil taught its players to conserve ammunition and to flee combat encounters when they get sticky (all too often), Devil May Cry invites and even encourages its players to spray bullets with impunity, treating enemies more as opportunities for racking up ‘style points’ than threats to be feared. The addition of this ‘style meter,’ whereby a player is actively scored on how relentlessly and effectively they execute successive combos, is perhaps the most telling addition to the gameplay, which is inspired in great part by fighting games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter.The ideal Devil May Cry player, then, is one who can orchestrate elaborate action sequences, using combinations (or ‘combos’ in the parlance of the arcade fighter genre) of attacks, switching from weapon to weapon in a seamless chain of unbroken assault. The ideal player ‘juggles’ their enemies, tossing them into the air like pizza dough and liberally applying diverse varieties of whoopass like the metaphorical toppings, riddling them with bullets before neatly bisecting them with an oversized implement of medieval destruction. The ideal player is a ballerina of death, pulling stunts that make the wire-work in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon look like kid stuff as the impudent Dante artfully carves his way through demon lord after demon lord.The less than ideal Devil May Cry player, on the other hand, cuts an embarrassing and clumsy figure, constantly mistaking their Arbiter Axe for their Osiris Scythe, appearing pathologically unable to figure out just how the hell to ‘pause’ between blows to build those totally necessary ‘combos’. The less than ideal player finds himself plummeting accidentally into whatever abyss happens to be gaping his way, scowling in frustrated incomprehension because he thought that tapping that button with that bumper depressed was supposed to make him go up towards those pesky flying enemies. Oh but wait, it was that button and the other bumper, and I should have double-tapped the button and- and- and I think I’m going to go get another cup of tea.
As you might imagine, I’m tempted to focus on the narrative of the game. That’s really more my area of expertise.It’s thus worth noting that this most recent game is technically a ‘reboot’ of the series. After Devil May Cry IV had played out the adventures of its two white-haired protagonists, Dante and Nero, Capcom evidently thought a fresh perspective was needed to grab new fans, fans that - I judge - they feared had been alienated by the series’ strong anime overtones.Thus the redundantly named DmC: Devil May Cry was born, and one need only squint at that perplexing title to realize how addlebrained whoever made it must have been. Indeed, Capcom is a company infamous for its writing, writing which is so uniformly poor that it often ends up in that elusive ‘so bad it’s good’ territory.The newest Devil May Cry is no exception, leaving this reviewer literally slack-jawed at points during the opening sequence. Reluctant to try and describe what can only really be experienced, I’ll instead give you a list of choice lines, plucked from the game as a whole:The Devil’s mistress speaking to the Devil, who has just finished bullying the President of the United States via cellphone: ‘The world’s your bitch, and so am I.’The reborn Dante, upon concluding a battle on an inverted glass dome which cracks with each impact: ‘That was a cracking fight.’The disembodied head of a demonic news pundit, Bill O’Reilly in all by name, addressing Dante: ’Think you’re cool? How about I kill you and piss on your corpse for cool points?’A heated interchange between a bloated, puking succubus and the young, defiant Dante: ‘Fuck you!’ ‘Fuck you!!!’ ‘FUCK YOU!!!’Which about sets the tone. Ranging from the profane to the absurd to the smirkingly irreverent, Devil May Cry is a mind-scouring exercise in adolescent male power fantasy, one to which I’ll admit I’m averse, but one possessed of certain charm all the same. This obscene levity may be part of the ‘Americanizing’ of the game, a move away from those anime overtones I mentioned, which would rather have Dante tending an adorable little shop hilariously named ‘Devil Never Cry’ than participate in (as in the newest game) an underground resistance organization.This movement/split is actually inscribed within the text of the game itself, embodied in the characterizations of Dante and his twin brother, Vergil. The new Dante is an all-American punk, garbed in wife-beater and leather duster, prone to flipping his enemies the bird between swigs of whiskey and visits to the strip club. He’s even got dark hair, cut short, unlike the pale capillary architecture of his forebear. Vergil, on the other hand, dresses like he’s straight out of Full Metal Alchemist (Hagane no Renkenjitsu for all you purists), his faux-military garb all sleek surfaces and silver buttons. He’s cool, collected, calculating. He also has the white hair that Dante forsook, an improbable pigmentation with a long and noble history in anime. That this dichotomy represents a movement from the Japanese to the American is best indicated in the names of their primary weapons. Dante’s sword is named Rebellion while Vergil’s is dubbed Yamato, each a referent to the founding political and ethnic myths of the United States and Japan, respectively.
Their respective swords also serve as their respective phalli, in the Freudian sense. These empowered weapons are highly versatile, changing to suit the present need: sometimes it’s an axe other times it’s a scythe, still others it’s a grappling chain. They are multi-tools, in effect, and I take the meaning of the word ‘tool’ in it’s full psychoanalytic resonance. Full mastery of these weapons runs alongside Dante’s recovery of the memories of his murdered mother, unlocking also a deep and abiding love which serves as a motivation – at least until Dante finds a living replacement in the form of a character I think was named ‘Kat’ but might as well have been named ‘Romantic Interest Girl Who Gets Captured By the Big Baddy Near The Final Rising Action of the Game Just In Case We Needed A Reason Besides the Liberation of Humanity from the Demonic Yoke.' And lo and behold, the final battle in the game is fought over the place of ‘humanity’ - with Kat serving as stand in for all of the mortal masses - within a world freshly liberated from the paternal domination of the big baddy. Further, it takes place between the two brothers, Vergil and Dante, in a bout of familial aggression which basically screams 'Cain and Abel.'This is not to knock the old formula, only that it is a rather old one, tried and tested but a little tired. There are, however, things about DmC that are striking and distinct, even bordering on clever from time to time. Paternal domination wears a refreshingly post-modern mask, controlling the chattel of humanity not through brute force and prohibition, but rather through a demonically infused soft drink called ‘Virility’, and through the deployment of an insidious multi-media news network that Rupert Murdoch would be proud to call his own. In one of the game’s more memorable sections, Dante must navigate an inverted city, a dark reflection of a world quite literally ‘spun’, as he fights his way to the broadcast tower from which the aforementioned demonic pundit spouts propaganda. After diving headlong through a screen, Dante finds himself in a realm consisting entirely of the swooping graphics that adorn such news cum entertainment channels such as the infamous FOX.Trapped inside a television report, viewed from the hovering vantage of a news helicopter, Dante must battle wave after wave of enemy while the pundit regales his audience with dire tales of Dante’s grim upbringing: his history of serial institutionalization, his forays into ‘immoral’ sex and illegal drugs, his resort to violent resistance against the system that entrapped him. In this section of the game we get a glimpse of Dante not as an empowered badass, but rather as he might ‘really’ be - a young man trapped in a frightened and frightening world where the least sign of resistance is pathologized as ‘anti-social’, and the slightest show of anger attributed to the criminal individual rather than the society that produced them.Moments such as these are few and far between, revealing the core anxiety at the heart of the adolescent power fantasy, a fantasy of power held precisely by those who are coming at last into a true sense of their powerlessness. In the face of this frightful truth, Dante’s crude impudence takes on a desperate aspect, and for a game focused on stylish violence, this presents a problem. Boys don’t cry, after all, yet devils may, though we may only catch sight of it by attending to the details.____Phillip A. Lobo is a freelance writer based in Austin, Texas. His previous video game reviews for Open Letters can be found here.
