Let’s just start out by saying, I am a huge DMC fan. I’ve replayed the game a multitude of times, and I haven’t gotten sick of a bit of it. I love the game. It’s easily in my top ten, perhaps even my top 5. When I heard DMC2 was coming out, I was excited. Ha, no, I was extremely excited. The night before its arrival, I was barely sleeping. Then I found out that…I lost sleep for nothing.

The new team handling Devil May Cry 2 did some things right, while seemingly avoiding the original formula. To point this out to you again, I wasn’t biased against the game, and was biased toward it. I heard Gamestop, I heard IGN, I heard Famitsu; they gave it decent, but not stellar, scores. But I didn’t believe them. Why? They were obviously looking at the game for the wrong reasons, and not taking it the right way. Perhaps they missed something. I mean, it’s Devil May Cry 2, they HAD to miss something to give it anything less than an outstanding score. What could be bad? New moves, a new character, a new plot; what could go wrong? …Too much, I assure you. Read on to explore the good, the bad, and the ugly of Devil May Cry 2.

Graphics: The graphics are pretty good. The character models have some nice detail, and Lucia’s pants are skin-tight, which is a plus all in itself. A lot of the textures don’t seem to have had a lot of work put into them, and some of the levels can get to looking downright bland. There’s not much to say here, but I’ll give info on whatever I can think of anyway.

As far as the differences between Dante and Lucia’s levels go, it’s basically a level twisted around or done backward, but there are some differences.

The bosses are mostly “scary” looking enough, but they don’t have the effect that they did in the first game. The bosses range from possessed buildings to infested helicopters (ala Shinobi?), and all-in-all, aren’t very interesting.

Enemies are pretty bland. There aren’t too many new concepts here. They go from ghostly white wolves to metal-plated zombie-type guys, to wizards. Again, nothing to be excited about. The first game had much more originality. Where are the Shadows? The Death Scythes? The Plasmas?

Sound: In my opinion, Devil May Cry’s voice acting wasn’t half-bad. Sure, there were some parts where the game screwed up a little, but overall, I thought they did a good job. Devil May Cry 2’s voice acting is uh…well, it sucks. Lucia has something of a French accent, but at times, it’s hard to tell what exactly it is. Dante’s old voice actor has been replaced by some Jack Nicholson wanna-be, and his voice has no emotion at almost any time. In Devil May Cry, Dante showed emotion. There was even a part where he cried. In this game, no such emotion from Dante is to be found. No wait, there’s this one part where Dante comforts Lucia for reasons I won’t spoil (as if it’d a spoiler anyway; DMC2’s story is moronic). But the funny thing is, they’ve barely interacted at all, so why would Lucia be worried about Dante? Because the game was planned poorly, that’s why.Enemies screech and yell and sound good, so that’s never a bad thing, and some of the effects were used from the last game. Don’t fix it if it isn’t broke. The music is boring, though, but sets the mood, so I guess it works.

Story: Uh… Something about…um… Well, let’s say the story wasn’t very well developed… Even now, I really can’t think of what it was… Something about stopping this guy from getting these artifacts and taking over the world…?

Game Play: It’s got its ups and downs. Definitely more downs, though…

First, the controls suck. DMC’s controls were great, but now that we’ve gotten used to them, Capcom’s new team of developers decided we shouldn’t be as easy with them as we have been, so they changed them.

DMC’s Controls:X = Fire Projectile Weapon Square = Fire Projectile Weapon Triangle = Jump O = Attack with sword/Ifrit R1 = Target Lock R2 = Taunt L1 = Devil Trigger L2 = Map

DMC2’s Controls:X = Jump Square = Fire Projectile Weapon Triangle = Swing sword (there is no Ifrit, don’t get your hopes up) O = Dodge R1 = Target Lock R2 = Disable Auto-Target Lock L1 = Devil Trigger L2 = Switch Projectile Weapons L3 = Switch Targets

Let’s take a look at the good and bad of this list. First and foremost, what happened to the taunting? I remember fighting Nelo Angelo and taunting him after I knocked his sorry butt down. It was a rewarding feeling. Now you press R2 and nothing happens. Great trade off, Capcom; well done. You can now switch your projectile weapons on the fly with the L2 button, which is very handy, but at the same time, next to pointless. Your pistols now accomplish everything the other guns can do and more. Remember the “shotgun twitch” technique in DMC? (For those of you that don’t know, it was where you fired the shotgun and switched Dante’s direction of movement, and the shotgun would skip the reload animation and be ready to fire again.) Well, that’s gone. You now have to wait. I guess it makes sense, but still, why fix was wasn’t detracting from the game? Remember the “grenade roll” technique? Where you shot the Grenade Gun and jumped/rolled, as to skip the reload animation and fire off shots faster? That’s also been taken out. Now, when you fire the Missile Launcher (the Grenade Gun’s successor), you’re completely immobile until the gun fully reloads, making this almost completely useless. Also, considering the slow speed at which the missile chugs along, which considerably rips off its accuracy, and the fact that your pistols almost never miss and fire faster, what’s the more obvious choice? You’ve also got a new gun in the fray: the sub-machine guns. Cooler/better than the others? Yes and no. For one, they fire extremely fast. But they do next to no damage. Even without being powered up, a few relatively slow shots from your pistols murder the power of the sub-machine guns. Useless? You bet. Sadly so? Indeed. Now let’s head to the pistols: The Good: They’re stronger; you can fire two ways at once The Bad: They’re stronger; they fire slower; shooting in two directions only works for one shot, which will blast the enemy away instead of allowing you to pummel them for a while; charged shots cease to exist; pistols are much slower than in DMC The Ugly: They reign over swords

Focusing on the good first, the pistols are stronger. But this is also listed in the bad section. Why? Because they’re so powerful, swords are useless. Why get close to the enemy and risk losing health when you can pin them with your pistols? Here’s an interesting fact: High Time is also next to useless now. There’s no need to launch your enemies into the air and shoot them; any enemy light enough to fly into the air by High Time is also light enough to be sent flying with a few pistol shots, even when they’re grounded. Sure, it defies the laws of physics and is ridiculous, but Capcom’s new team, again, doesn’t care. Even for Devil May Cry, it’s pretty far-fetched. Firing two ways at once is cool. It works for 45°, 90°, and 180° angles, if memory serves. The bad part? Dante’s pistols again defy the logic of science by firing out a more-power-than-usual bullet, which sends the enemy flying backward as if they’ve been hit by a car. Why doesn’t your other pistol do this to the other guy? Why can’t you continually pummel both enemies with your pistols? I guess you could credit this as a good thing, since firing at half the rate of the usual would slow down the action, but it’s still idiotic. As for the bad, pistols aren’t good because they’re stronger. The sword is useless, as I said before. It’s only for dealing with large groups of enemies. Oh, and remember charged shots in Devil May Cry? They’re gone, too. Capcom’s new team of pranksters decided it’d be better if the pistols, instead, fired out automatic shots instead of being allowed to charge. Have you been ripped off? Yes you have. Not to mention, the automatic fire is rather slow in itself, and even the manual fire is slow. Capcom’s team put their heads together and decided that’d it’d be nice if the pistols didn’t fire fast. At all. The pistols you have can’t be fired as fast as you’re capable. Unlike DMC, they now fire as fast as they darn well please, not as fast as your trigger finger goes. I guess if they let the pistols fire as fast as you could fire them, the power that they possess would kind of be overwhelming because of the power boost, wouldn’t it?And the swords, useless, I tell you.

Let’s focus on what you all want to know: how could it possibly be so bad? Dante’s got new attacks! He’s cooler than before! Yeah, sure. For one, the new moves ARE useless, there’s no way around that. At first, I thought it was a matter of opinion. I said, “Any move is useless if you don’t know how to use it correctly.” No really, they’re useless. The Rain Storm attack, which is initiated by double-jumping and firing your pistols, let’s Dante gain some extra air-time and pummel the enemy DIRECTLY BELOW HIM (make no mistake; auto-aiming eludes you here) and they fire just as fast as usual. Useless? Yes. Even for style, it’s useless, and that’s no bias. I’m serious here. It breaks your combo chain to double jump and fire, then have to land. You could do the same thing, fire the same speed, and inflict the same damage by just standing on the ground and firing there. The wall-run, another seemingly would-be-good add-in, is done by pressing toward a wall and pressing Circle, which allows Dante/Lucia to run up the wall and do a back flip off of it, Matrix style. But what’s the point when a simple back flip does the same thing and saves on time? Useless. Cool, but useless.

Onto the swords. Remember the old combo? You tap the button 3 times and it does a basic combo, then by waiting certain time from the second slash, you could either perform a 5-hit combo or a multi-stab. Yeah, that one. It’s gone. It’s been replaced by a basic 4-slash. You can branch off the path, but they way they did this doesn’t mean for a smooth transition at all.

For one, this game doesn’t use timing to hit the combos or certain moves anymore. Now they use the lock-on system. How does this work? Well, there’s a difference between target lock and auto-target lock. There was an auto-target lock in the first, but chances are you didn’t rely on it. It just attacks the nearest enemy. This makes the lock-on more-or-less useless. For one, any good combo can’t be done while locked on. Let me explain:

By locking on, you can shoot your guns and use your sword in the basic 4-slash combo, and also use High-Time. When you’re not locked on, you can branch the combos. By pressing the slash button once, then pressing any analog direction you can branch to a 3-hitter. By waiting until the second slash to branch, you’ll go to a 6-hitter. The 3rd is a 5-hitter, and the fourth is the final slash anyway, so that one doesn’t branch. You can only branch without locking onto the target. I’m not sure why they did this. To complicate things, perhaps? It’s not difficult to get the hang of, but still, there’s no point to it. Also, you don’t need to be locked on in this game to shoot. You can just shoot normally without holding R1. Why? I’m not sure. There’s no point in shooting without locking on, so why make it that way? To do the two-directional shooting, you need to be locked one and pressing toward the other guy. You shoot a guy from a distance, you need to be locked on. Another complaint I have with the lock-on system, actually, is the fact that DMC2 no longer locks onto the closest enemy, as DMC did. Now it looks onto one enemy perpetually, and there’s a target switch using the very inconvenient L3 button. Why not just use R2? It’s useless enough being an “auto-target lock disable toggle”.

Fighting isn’t smooth anymore. In DMC, you just sliced and your sword went through the enemy like a knife through butter. In this game, there’s a white “slash-line” that follows your sword strikes, and your sword hesitates after every attack. The hesitation is small, I assure you; only a split-second, but it IS tangible…tangible enough to demote the game’s smoothness a notch, unlike the unbreakable fluidity of DMC. Add to that that guns do everything that swords do only from a range, and you’ve got no reason to use swords anyway. And yes, I repeating myself on purpose. Dead seriously.

Oh, here’s another treat. If you’ve played DMC, you’ll know that each weapon had an attachment to Dante. Like, there was a reason it was there. The Force Edge (or “Woozy”), which was your starting sword, was given to you by Dante’s father. There’s its significance right there. The Alastor, a sword possessed by a thunder spirit, attempts to kill Dante by impaling him. After Dante survives the test of strength, he inherits the sword and its abilities. Ifrit was the same. The pair of flaming gauntlets attached to Dante’s hands and exploded in an attempt to murder him, but he survived that test as well, and inherited the strength of the gloves. Sparda was the final sword in DMC. It was powerful, and really cool looking, but I’ll reveal nothing more than that, for those who haven’t played DMC. What’s that got to do with anything? “Nothing,” said the new guys at Capcom They disposed of all weapons with any significance and replaced them with useless garbage. Now, in the place of the Force Edge as your starting weapon, you’ve got The Rebellion, “Dante’s cherished long sword”, so the game quotes. How is it cherished? You’re telling me it’s cherished over Alastor? Ifrit? SPARDA? I don’t think so. The very thought of replacing one of those swords with some hunk of crap and calling it “cherished” is idiotic and almost insulting to my intelligence. The next sword you get goes by the name of The Vendetta, which is shorter range and more damage than The Rebellion. The final sword, which should be all-powerful and excellent, like Sparda in DMC, is Merciless. Believe me, it’s been filled with mercy. Instead of being powerful like Sparda, it’s exactly the opposite. The Sparda, as the final sword in DMC, had long range and extensive power. The Merciless DOES have extensive range, yes, but the power sucks crap. That’s not comparing it to Sparda; that’s comparing it to the Rebellion. You heard me right. The Merciless, as the final sword, holds long range with power less than that of the first sword you get. In other words, there is no reason to switch swords other than personal preference.

The power-up system is also something I love to hate. DMC’s power-up system involved using the Red Orbs you get from enemies and various places to buy different moves and abilities from a Goddess Statue, be those moves for Devil Trigger or for regular use. Now you buy upgrades for your weapons. Let me rephrase that: you make you weapons stronger than before. This is both good and bad. For one, enemies die faster. On the downside, there is no reason to switch swords. Once you get the Vendetta or Merciless, you’ve probably already powered-up the Rebellion once or twice, so switching to a sword that doesn’t match in power would be a waste of several thousand Red Orbs. This makes guns and swords all personal in taste, which can also be good and bad. There is no sword that is stronger than the other, since the range always balances out the power. But not having an ultimate sword or gun is always a sad thing.

Devil Trigger isn’t the same either. There’s something about the Devil Trigger that spaces is far apart from the Dante in human form, or the Devil Trigger in DMC, as well. For one, your projectile weapons, be them your Pistols or your Shotgun, become completely automatic and fire faster than crap, and inflict decent damage while doing so. This is a good thing, but that means no charged electric or fire shots. Also, sword combos branch differently, performing different actions based on when you paused. The every-popular multi-stab in the original returns to Devil Trigger mode, but only if you branch from the second hit in the combo. Then you’ve got “Devil Hearts”. These are acquired throughout your quest and power up your Devil Trigger, by helping you regain health faster, stay in DT longer, power up your DT, and even fly. Not as great as it sounds, but still helpful, and fun.

Lucia is basically the same as Dante, except she has different combos and uses throwing knives instead of pistols. Her Devil Form is some kind of angel or something.

Replay Value: Not much to speak of. Like the first DMC, there are hard modes, and the Lucia/Dante Must Die modes, as well. But unlike the first game, going back through the game for whatever reason is very unappetizing. The option is still there, and I guess that’s always a plus, but when there’s no appeal for going back, what’s the point? Actually, maybe I would’ve played again. But wait, you can’t play Dante’s hard mode until you play Lucia’s hard mode as well, and vice versa. This is not smart. What is this? It’s just to force people to play the other character. I didn’t ask for another character, I didn’t want to play her, and as I play her, I still don’t like her, so why should I have to play as her if I don’t want to? I just want to play Dante’s hard mode, is that so much to ask? Of course it is. They spent the money, they designed the character, and they WANT you to know why, even if you couldn’t care less. Another thing is, there’s nothing much to go back for. In DMC, you could go back to earn more Red Orbs and max out Dante, giving him every ability, Blue Orb and Purple Orb, making him a killing machine. In DMC2, you start out with full abilities, except for Blue and Purple Orbs. It’s not like there’s moves to go back for, and the Red Orbs come in so fast and in such massive quantities, it’s easy as heck to buy just about anything. I guess there is SOME replay, but not enough to keep me going.

Rent or Buy: Rent. PLEASE rent. Not because I’m absolutely 100% positive you’re going to dislike it, but because I DO NOT want you making the same mistake I do. Some people claim that if you liked DMC, you’ll love DMC2. THIS IS NOT ALWAYS THE CASE. I loved DMC. It’s one of my favorite games of all-time. But DMC2 is a huge disappointment in my point of view. Some people love the game, others don’t, and this comes from both sides; people who loved DMC, and people who didn’t. There is no 100% guarantee you will like this game, so I urge you to rent it first. Plus, a rent is enough time to go through the game anyway. …Twice. It’s extremely short, which is another point. If you like it, buy AFTER the rent, but I urge you to not to buy right off the bat. There’s a large chance you’ll like it, and an equally large chance that you won’t, so why not go in with a little knowledge before hand?

Devil May Cry 2 is a disappointment. As said by myself and many others, it is indeed an above-average action game, but doesn’t come even close to stacking up to the glory that was and still is Devil May Cry.