Happy New Year to ye all. There were three or so of ye who had wished me a happy new year some month or so ago, and at this time I return the greeting, though back then I had demurred the nicety, and preferred to wait until the appointed hour of the year that I decided to arbitrarily celebrate. Welcome in the swift Rat.
And welcome to another cavalcade of Capcom cretins who force the same game once more down weary gamers throats.
To great delight!

I'll level with all of you, I didn't immediately hate the Devil May Croy series. It took me a whole fifteen minutes of playing, and a couple hours of watching others play to lead me to the conclusion that the whole franchise was doomed to obscurity and shitiness. There were two such games out at the time. This was also after a friend of mine was showing me Onimusha and Onimusha 2, two games that I enjoyed and would play again, Samanosuke or no Samanosuke.
My frustration with the franchise didn't peak until years later, after I had played and enjoyed Castlevania: Lament of Innocence, and Castlevania: Curse of Darkness, two games on the PS2, the former had been one of the reasons I purchased the console in the first place, and the latter was its follower, spiritually, morally, structurally, and of course, actually. While playing Curse of Darkness, a young buck pipes up with why he never liked the PS2 Castlevania games, comparing them to "a slow Devil May Croy."
Imagine my disgust. Okay, for all the rest of you who don't know how attatched to the Castlevania series I am, imagine your disgust when someone insults your boyfriend, girlfriend, pet puppy, or decrepit elder. You'd be pretty livid, I'd wager, and I thereafter asked what the buck thought about the RahXephon series as compared to Evangelion (myself already knowing what a huge Eva fanboy he was), naturally he liked the latter more, demonstrating that in this case, on the scale of the goodness of things, he tended to like better the more objectively worse things. I didn't have to worry about the Devil May Croy games any more, thus, until someone else I knew or met or punched expressed a similar opinion.
And sure enough, with the next brightest thing coming out of Capcom's glowing rectum hitting the markets, someone has.
Devil May Croy Four is, as you can imagine, the fourth game in the series. Once again you follow Dante, I mean Nero, on his quest to fight the forces of darkness, I mean Dante. Nero is the main character, really. Not joking. He looks, talks, acts, dresses, fights, and fails like Dante did, but his name is Nero and he has an oni gauntlet, I mean broken arm, and he is not actually Dante. And to help allay the confusion, the writers decide to have Dante swoop in in the first cutscene and assassinate the pope, then fight with Nero in a comically-overdone brawl that would set the tone for the rest of the game. Well, the comically-overdone part, anyway. If you expect there to be more awesome fighting in your future, maybe you've never played DMC before. Seriously, Nero is the main character.
I'll leave the plot be for now because it is wretched and entirely a vehicle for displaying all the things that the Capcom designers thought would be awesome to put in a video game. Action games sometimes have wretched plots, and no one bats an eye, so I'll leave it be.

So let's address this claim of faster-paced-than-Castlevania, shall we? Whenever Dante, I mean Nero (dammit) gets close to any sand-filled demons, Rob Zombie style rock music fades in, singing about asskicking and angels and quest completion and generally drowns out whatever else was trying to set the mood at the time. Rock music is not an excuse for fast pacing. If you mute the tv, the game has the same pacing as it did when the sound was on. What the rock music gives you is the illusion of more action and better pacing. In fact you're going to spend most of the game lost unless you've been through it before or read a faq, you'll kill a helluva lot of the same enemy room-in, room-out because they didn't put a lot of variety of monster for you to tangle with. They never really put enough of them in a place for you to be able to combo off well before they all croak, meaning the rating you constantly get from the game's style meter is more of an insult than a challenge. The enemy variety is so thin in fact that each new baddy gets his own introductory cutscene. The cutscenes in general tend to slow the game down, and if they're skippable I've never seen anyone do so. They're full of the same shlocky dialogue that they ever were. Nero shooting off at the mouth about how wussy his opponents are and about how cool he is. Nero has one-up on Dante in that has two emotions other than hollow bravado: remorseful shyness about his broken arm (that is, his demonic superpower), and enraged emo- love at the pain of not having his girlfriend Kyrie holding his hand right now. You heard me. The only thing Nero wants is to be holding Kyrie's hand right now, and that's the only thing he's pissed about. Other than that, same one-liners that are supposed to be short and punchy, but instead lend to the game's theme of trying way too hard. So while you're lost, emotional, and fighting the same three dudes again and again, they throw in the occasional collection quest leading to obnoxious puzzle that is a hallmark of another game in the Capcom lineage: Resident Evil. No one ever marvelled that RE was fast-paced. In fact the game itself would stand to suffer from fast pacing. But here's the catch, it has the same exact pacing as Devil May Croy. Try it.
Capcom has basically been making the same game for ten or more years and releasing it under a different name. Back when I played Onimusha, my friends called it "Resident Evil: Samurai Edition" because of how similarly the games played. So you have all the RE games and three or four Onimusha games that are all the same and versions of those keep coming out, and then you have Devil May Croy, which is in fact Resident Evil: Castlevania Edition. The game that shoots for Superbeast and ends up Pretty Fly for a White Guy.
So why isn't Dante (and by extension, Nero) badass? Well, let's look at what kind of character actually is badass, shall we? Batman. Just about any badass character I can think of has elements of Batman in him, so I'll go right to the source. Batman is the most determined man on the planet. Batman has turned his spiritual damage into a finely honed weapon to fight the forces of evil and chaos. And crime. He scoured the Earth for all the best ways to fight, put on a disguise to strike fear into his opponent's hearts before landing the fight punch, and oh yeah, he punches people a lot. He has a backup plan for every plan he has, and always thinks two or three steps ahead. Deep down his finest skills are that of a detective. What makes Batman badass is that he does all this asskicking without the aid of superpowers. Oh sure, he's well trained, and he has some tricky gizmos to fit whatever circumstance you got, but at the end of the day he's a guy like you or me. This fundamental humanity is what carries you along with Batman on whatever badass adventure he has. It serves to connect Batman to the reader rather than estrange him.
Now let's look at Dante. He's the half-demon son of the only demon on record to ever feel the warm fuzzies for a human bean, meaning he's either the son of the most seductive succutrix in human history, or the son of only demon voted most likely to cry over having his rubber ducky run away. In fact he's the son of each. Most of the character-building cutscenes Dante gets serve to sever any ties the audience may have had with him by showing us how inhuman and invulnerable he is. We only see him eat junk food and listen to rock music and live in squalor. On the occasions when something gets to him, that thing is conveniently and immediately resolved by something else. So he's in general never even having a bad time. He's just bored. Oh, sure he's some kind of half-demon, gun-toting, peerless warrior cowboy, but all the heavy metal in the world couldn't make him truly badass. Show me Dante suffering through something that poses a genuine threat to him, or show me how he can have an emotion other than boredom, or show me some other game.

To try and make up for this gaping flaw in character design, Capcom decided to throw in the most EXTREME elements of absolutely everything else about the game. If it's not fucking extreme, then they don't want it. Religion? Howabout EXTREME religion? It was about the time Dante was surfing on a Dragunov rocket that I stopped paying attention to the details and wrote off the game direction forever. Not worth worrying about. If you want the DMC experience, play Tetris while someone screams EXTREME at the back of your head every few seconds. At least then you'll be listening to good music inbetween harsh bellows.
But this is exactly the kind of over-the-top bullshit that keeps people playing the game. What's Dante going to do that's even more extreme than last time? Who knows. Let's find out. If you want something that is over-the-top without trying too hard, something that takes you along on the ride to craziness, then you want either God Hand, No More Heroes, or Gurren Lagann. Certainly you don't want the flawed character design, ho-hum on-and-on again level design, monotonous enemies, and boring dialogue of DMC. It is EXTREME only in how awful it all is. Hell, play Onimusha instead. At least that had some substance.

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