Devil May Cry 2

"WOW... and not in a good way"

Sometimes something comes along and the simplest way that it could be described is with a….”Damn... that was really cool.” You know it when you see it. The Matrix was one of those somethings. Devil May Cry was another of those somethings. Devil May Cry 2, is not one of those somethings, its just pretending. It’s a game that tries to emulate all the things that were great and cool about the first one instead of evolving and building upon them. Let’s dive into why I feel this way, in no real order other than what comes to mind first. Oh, and remember, this review (though once you read along, it’ll sound more like griping) is from the first 5 or 6 (forgot which it was) Dante missions and the first 3 Lucia missions, so if the game gets amazing great near the end I missed it, I took the game back a few hours after I bought it.

The Graphics and Sounds

What were they doing here? Some of it is incredible. Dante and Lucia look great, the movements are very fluid for the most part (I’ll get back to that later) and they’re very highly detailed… and that’s about it. Well the cg sequences look very good too. But yeah, that’s about it. The bosses look boring. The backgrounds look flat for the most part (office buildings?!), the sky in the first few missions look really detailed and good though. And the regular enemies… wow, what were they thinking? The first enemies that Dante fight are skeletons that break out of their medieval torture cages. Sounds cool but then you look at them, and they look like gray and brown colored versions of the skeletons in The Legend of Zelda: A link to the Past, and not in a good way (that was a great game, btw). They get better, but not by much. In all, the games presentation lack that great Goth feel that made the first one just look so…. “Damn… that was really cool.” Too much gray and brown to feel right. And the enemies don’t really die or break here, they kind of die then fade away in a swirl of red dots. First time I saw that, I was like, what the hell was that?

Well, then there’s the sound track. The music is still pretty cool, not great but good. But damn those sound effects. If I didn’t check, I could have sworn that my speakers were broken. They sound muted. The loud pop of the gun fire in the first one, gone... it’s almost like a muffled thump, and a string of those get really annoying.

The Game play and Controls

They took the great game play of the first, and then ruined it. Badly. In the first one you can whip out the sword and just start hacking away at any enemy you want. You can’t do that here, well you can, but nowhere near as easily. Remember how in the first one you can get trapped in an area, then start hacking away at everything and anything in sight that moves by running up to the pack and holding the L1 then just go at? That’s gone. The game forces you to lock in on one enemy at a time. In the first one, you lock on, hack, it flies off and the system automatically locks on to the next closest target if you are still holding the L1. In this one, you run up, hack, it flies off and you’re still locked onto that enemy. No auto-switch of the lock, you have to hit the L3 to scroll to the one closest to you or re-hit the L1, or you will be trying to swing your sword at an enemy halfway across the screen while the one behind you is kicking your butt. This is just bad, and you can’t turn off the auto-lock at all. This totally handicaps combos.

Speaking of swinging that sword… this is another (in my opinion) huge flaw of the game. They changed the way Dante swings his sword. They went from the effortless looking swings with the martial arts exhales to what looks like sword lunges and sounds like grunts, and he swings slower (or appears to anyway), and this does effect game play. You can’t easily combo sword swings. Remember in the first one where you hack away, the enemy falls back, and you can chase him or use the stinger to quickly catch up and continue your combo (well, maybe I just did that, I dunno), well you can’t do that here… the swords is swing, swing, lunge and the bad guy goes flying, you cant catch up to it to continue your combo, its all the way across the screen. At least you know where he is… you cant miss that huge purple target they slapped on the locked enemy. And that is also a huge flaw, no matter how well intentioned of the game designed, some of the open areas of the game are huge, there are a lot of just hitting and running after enemies to hit them again.

Which brings us to the guns. They happened to ruin those too. First of all, the sound like I’ve mentioned. They just don’t sound right. Then they just don’t shoot right. They’re slower than in the first. Know how in the first you can hold down the square when you have Alastor or Ifirit and charged up your shot? Gone. Hold the square, and he just does an auto-fire, a slow auto-fire. Also remember how you can walk around, and your life bar shows up telling you get ready to fight and you can hit the auto-lock to tell where the bad guy is coming from? Gone, partially anyway. The last weapon you use has to be your guns to do that. If the last thing you whipped out was the sword, he just puts his hands on his sword handle. I almost got started again on how much I hate the auto-lock. Ok I will anyway. The only time the auto-lock seems to turn off is when you don’t want it to. They added the “cool” feature where when you flip; you can shoot things below you along the flip. Sounds great… in theory. Execution is another thing… sometimes you want him to shoot at something away from him while jumping, and all of a sudden, he’s shooting below him, totally ignoring the auto-lock for once. And finally, the guns are way too effective. You can go thru the first 5 missions and not pull out the sword once except to hit some key points, they do way too much damage, and from what I’ve played, most of the enemies don’t dodge or block them. You can just stand back and shoot.

So yeah… Dante is no longer the bad ass. Which brings us to Lucia…

She’s a lot cooler as far as what she can do. She is the bad ass. You can tell they worked harder on animating her. Swing her swords (she’s got 2) and she does so effortlessly. Keep swinging and she does this impressive combo of swings, kicks, sweeps (I think, she moved really fast, and the camera was far away for the most part) and mini-kick flips (again, I think, speed and distance obscured some of what I saw). It looks like she can pull off 7 or 8 different hits before her mini lunge, which makes a huge difference in the combo system. Basically she plays more like Dante from part 1 than does Dante. Her throwing daggers and knives and swords, they have the same problem that the guns do as far as effectiveness, you can just sit back and start hurling. Other than that, they’re pretty much the same: air-kicks, wall running, etc.

Ok, so I’ve mentioned the weapons a little. Let me go in a little more detail. Just a little though, I got frustrated and very bored and just stopped playing. Dante starts with a sword called “Rebellion” – boring… not even a cool creative name like Alastor or Force Edge for that matter. Anyway, it’s just a normal sword; in fact the description is “normal sword.” What happened to Alastor? The Sparda? (Maybe Trish has it, more on that later). Anyway, you have this sword and instead of upgrading your skills, you upgrade the sword. Seriously, like level 1, level 2, and so on. And from what I’ve seen it makes no noticeable difference. And its missing some of the cool little effects that the swords in the first one have, like how Alastor has a little lighten bolt running along it when you swing or how the Sparda morphs when you get ready to throw it or pull a stinger. Oh that also reminds me of the stinger move, this sucked too. In the first one, he lunges his sword and slides with it. In this one, I could almost swear he hops toward his target and just lunges the sword, and it doesn’t have the same cool earth shattering sound and screen effect.

Anyway, same with the guns... you upgrade them, again, whatever. Boring. The only bonus is that you can shoot in 2 different directions with the handguns.

The weapons are boring, the weapons in part 1 seem to have character, they affected game play and what can be done in the devil trigger, these don’t really (might change in later missions with different swords available, but again, the game was too boring)

Ah… the devil trigger. They totally changed this too. Those cool looking glowing runes? Gone. In their place, a standard issue energy bar. And the actual devil trigger, not as bad ass either. He doesn’t swing his sword like a bat out of hell, he just swings it a little faster. Same with the guns. And what he can actually do when he’s in devil trigger mode, more limited and specialized. In part 1, you got Alastor, devil trigger and you can fly and run like hell, here you got an amulet, and you can run like hell OR fly. The bonus is that you can fly up and down now, well up, then float down, not just hover. Oh, and Lucia’s got her own devil trigger, they don’t actually explain how in the beginning, and again, I didn’t play long enough to find out the how, if they do explain it at all. But just a question about her devil trigger... why does she look like a moth with feathered wings in her devil mode?

Then, there are the enemies… boring. They’re easy for the most part. A lot of them just stand around or hop around and barely attack. Stand back, whip out the guns (or throwing blades) and shoot, the guns do so much damage, all you have to do is dodge them once if they run up to you and they’re dead before they make another attempt. Of course that’s if they get close enough to even attempt a first attack, they move slow… very, very slow. And some of the designs are just dumb. The skeletons I mentioned earlier, you have to see them to believe that they made it in the final cuts of design. They look more funny than scary. Then there are the goat beast things, if you ever played Diablo, they look like the ones in Hell near the end of the game, except a little cartoon like. The first real boss Dante fights, looks like the Thing from the Fantastic Four. The first boss Lucia fights, like one of the fat things in Kingdom Hearts, except smaller, and has malice for arms. See a trend? They don’t belong in a game series that gave us Shadows and Reapers and those freaky Nobodies. And seriously… Infected Tanks and Choppers?

Ok, now for the non-fighting aspects. The jumping is horrendous. They still jump really high and they still float when shooting, but the cameras kill it, in the instances where you have to do the whole platform to platform thing, it gets really annoying. That brings up the camera, I turned off the Lucia game during the 3rd mission when I had to follow some damn pipe (I think, it was the only way left to go, I had no clue what I was supposed to do in the third mission, more on that later) the camera kept on changing and I kept on falling off. It didn’t help that I’d kill 10 of those damn vulture things, and 10 seconds after that they reappear, and then the auto-lock comes on and the camera angles get out of whack again, gets really annoying and boring after a while. The wall running they put in? Adds totally nothing to the fighting experience, which is why its here in the non-fighting aspects paragraph. You can run along them for a short time, but it’s like a minor dodge thing and it’s not useful at all. Running up the wall? Adds nothing - run up, flip back, that’s it. Can’t even use it to get higher, say run up, jump up and air-kick up higher. The air-kick doesn’t do that little red disk thing anymore, and I missed it. It looked cool.

This leaves the controls of the game, and Ill make it brief (its the only thing brief about this thing, isn’t it?). They switched them all up. X is now jump and Triangle is swing. Circle is a leaping rolling dodge. Square is still to shoot though. Took a little getting use to. Also the circle button allows him to do the wall running. It’s also the action button. That’s another gripe. The action button is used less, it doesn’t open doors, doors open automatically, and this gets very annoying, when you are near a door, tap a little too close, and poof, you’re on the other side, annoying in a fight. I always felt that the X and Circle buttons were the buttons that the designers felt are most important to the game, and since these are to jump, flip and dodge in this game, I think it pretty much told me that its an action game that didn’t really want to focus on the action.

The Story

I hinted at this earlier. You have no idea what you are doing on each mission. Remember how at the beginning of each mission, it’ll givea brief, sometimes cryptic description of what you are supposed to? That’s gone. It’s just some cryptic phrase that the few missions I’ve been through, explains nothing of what you are supposed to do. Of course there is a reason for this. The mission briefs helped explain and move the story along in the first one. As far as I can tell, I’m not sure they finalized a story for this one. The cg sequences explain nothing really. No cool intro like the first, just a short maybe 2 minute deal, just starts the game, doesn’t really introduce anything or push a story forward. The first one had some major loopholes in the story and it was pretty simple, but at least it had something (seriously, was Trish supposedly some clone thing of his mom or something, and since she looked exactly like his mom… that’s just disturbing. And how did they really hook up anyway? Were more cg sequences between them edited out? She popped up like twice before the last few missions, where she tried to kill him. And what’s with Vergil? How’d his brother become the Evil guys grunt? Back to Trish... who the hell named her Trish? And who would name a demon spawn Trish anyway? If there’s some demonic meaning behind the name, someone please let me know. Damn it, I started on the Trish thing again).

The Little Things

Well all that’s left is the little things, I think. Well the ones I liked from the first are gone too. The scenes where Dante trash talks to bosses… Gone. In fact he doesn’t say much at all. And neither does Lucia, though her accent is horrible, so that’s not really that bad a deal. The devil trigger state where he looks like himself with an overlay of a horned demon with wings… Gone. Replaced with an actual demon with spiky hair. Not as cool. And I already mentioned Lucia’s Devil Mode. Oh, and he doesn’t taunt, sure it wasn’t all that useful in the first game but it was an added “cool” aspect. Oh the menus are boring too. The enemy files, nowhere near as detailed and informative with the cool drawings. Equipping and using items and weapons? Pretty static for the most part, no cool animated effects.

Wrap up

Ok, I’ve rambled on about what I don’t like about the game enough. There are a few things I do like, and they were sprinkled throughout, but I’ll recount. The ability to shoot in 2 directions - very cool, and its helpful to boot. The wall running, not helpful but it does look very cool. The Flip shooting, annoying and worthless, but again, looks cool. And Lucia is a cool character. She moves fluidly (well they both do, but she attacks quicker), like I said she’s more Dante than Dante is. Basically the characters look cool.

The game is ridiculously easy on the first few levels, I don’t know about later level because I got so bored. There are the same modes as in part 1, normal, hard then Dante Must Die (I shudder to think of those huge open areas having time limits), you get alternate costumes and get Trish (told you I’d get back to her) by going through them. I don’t know if she’s playable or not though. As for the costumes… I’ll just hit the Diesel store to find out how they look like.

If you noticed any running trend here, I keep on bringing up the first game and comparing the 2 and pointing out how I think part 2 is inferior. That can’t be helped, it’s a sequel, and as such, it has to be viewed in 2 ways, how does it stand up against the original, and how does it stand on its own. And in respect to the first game, this game is far inferior. It’s lacking the “coolness” of the first one. It doesn’t have the same feel to it where the first one had this claustrophobic feel to it, this one is too open. There’s no suspense in the action, it’s just “ok, there it is, I can run up and hit it or just stand back and shoot. I think I’ll just lay low and shoot, they’ll go away faster.” Seriously, by mission 3, that’s what was on my mind every time a new group popped up. No sense of “I got to kill it before it kills me, no sense of I got to hit it harder and faster than it can hit me and before it hits me or else I’m dead meat.” Compared to the pacing of the first its outright boring. Taken by itself, the game is a halfway decent action game.

As such, I would sum up DMC 2 by saying it’s a game that wants to be cool, desperately, and in its desperation, its screaming out “I’m cool, damn it!!!! Look at me!!! Can’t you see it??!!” That doesn’t work. Its like they took the bullet time sequences in The Matrix (The Matrix references can’t be helped, it’s obvious that the action sequences and abilities were inspired by the movie, like everything else action related in the last few years) and went… “Hey we can make a whole game just based on that!” I don’t know what went on in the development of the first one, but it plays like an action game where the Matrix effects were used to highlight and enhance the action, not be the action. In this one it is the action.

Thanks for reading my review/gripe list. If you got this far, you must not have been totally bored with what I wrote. Remember, this entire long thing was written based on only a part of the game, if it improves to this kick ass game in the later parts, then I missed it, but the truth is, I wouldn’t care, the game was so boring in the beginning, its unredeemable in my eyes. In the end, I spent an hour of car time, 3 hours of playing time, and then got my 54 bucks back (50 plus tax) for getting disenfranchised about another Capcom series. I’m hoping that since this one made a boatload of money (there were over 40 preorders in the little ghetto mall I got mine at, and its really hyped up) that part 3 will get back to the fast paced action of the first one and stop being pretentious. If not, at least I got a (semi – gas aint cheap these days) free t-shirt out of it.

Don’t agree with me? That’s cool, this is just my opinion. You can let me know if you want (please keep the violent death threats to a minimum though). I’m going to pop part 1 back into my PS2 now.

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 01/31/03, Updated 02/02/03