Devil May Cry 1 - Death By A Thousand Camera Angles

With the release of the new Devil May Cry anime, Xbox did a special sale on the Devil May Cry HD Collection and Devil May Cry 4 special edition. I have only ever played the reboot DMC and that was a long time ago so I hardly remember that game, I do know that the DMC franchise is greatly loved though and was interested for seeing why. So while I a patiently wait for the release of Expedition 33 (Should be out when this post is released!) I decided to purchase the deal and boot up the first game.

Devil May Cry 1 was released in 2001 for the PS2 and was met with a ton of love to the point where it holds a 94 on metacritic. The game follows Dante, the son of Sparda who was a demon overlord that ruled over the planet before disappearing. He is hired by a woman called Trish to go to Mallet Island and defeat a demon emperor called Mundus who is trying to come to earth to rule it. Mundus is also the demon that killed Dante's mum and brother so it's especially personal for him. That is basically sums up the plot of the game and not much else happens other than you storming through the island and one or two surprises. I know this is an old game but it was quite refreshing how uncomplicated the plot was compared to the other games I play (I mean Catherine was completely wild). The game does have voice acting and it being an old game it is quite horrible, making you laugh more than taking it serious but to be honest this whole game is not meant to be taken serious. It is meant to be an awesome, fun time and the game does a great job with that.

I will also say that it being an older game the game looks absolutely gorgeous. The areas are dark and gloomy, the enemies are twisted and interesting, and the bosses and characters have some crazy fun designs. It being an old game the characters and areas did have some sharp edges and looked a bit old school in style but to be honest I think it really complimented the game and couldn't picture what it would look like with modern graphics. Yeah it is a really great looking game.

On the gameplay side the game has an awesome combat system. I am surprised that it is the first in the series, it seems like Batman Arkham Asylum where they knocked the combat out of the park on the first attempt. It feels great, making you do almost fighting games controller inputs to perform crazy attack combos to keep your score meter high. The higher the score meter, the more orbs you collect from enemies which allows you to buy items or upgrade your weapons to unlock new combos. Its freaking epic, you purposely try to show off when attacking to increase your score meaning you do some wild combos just to keep that score increasing. For me I always am aggressive when gaming, I will always aim to attack and parry instead of keeping distance in games so devil may cry encouraging that style of gameplay is a massive plus for me. 

You are also provided with multiple melee weapons to use and each have a pretty cool cutscene when you retrieve them. One is a lightning sword named Alastor which allows for quick attacks and health regen when you trigger the devil gauge, another is is Ifrit gauntlets which allows for devastating heavy fire attacks on enemies, and the last that I found was Sparda which is a demonic great sword that allows you to basically transform to Sparda. You also have your very famous handguns called ebony and ivory but they are just to keep your combo going more than actual damage. I do know I missed a few legendary weapons but in all honesty I just stuck with the Alastor sword for 95% of this game and was totally fine so don't think I was missing out too much. 

Now comes the interesting part which is the game difficulty. This is all over the place for me. In general the game is not difficult but challenging, it took me a few attempts at the start to get use to game but as soon as I realised that in most boss fights I can just use Alastor devil gauge to heal. do big damage, and be lightning quick it meant most boss encounter where beaten first time. I say most though because their was one that was utter hell ...... Nightmare. This boss is like an armoured slug that you can only damage in certain weak spots that only appear for a small time, if that wasn't bad enough it also does an insane amount of aoe attacks and you get damaged from its slime if you get too close to it. Also it has a fucking tank of a health bar. Each boss you encounter three times, the first time I encounter Nightmare it was tough, the second even worse, the third time..... I almost stopped playing the game. This thing is just the worse to fight in a tight space, especially with the camera constantly messing you up (we will talk about that in a second). I think it took me 20+ attempts before I realised the only way I can kill him is with a ton of these items called holy water that does aoe damage to enemies. Even then though once I figured that out I still died 5 more times just due to how hard it is to stay alive. Finally I did beat it though and that felt great. The only downside was that it was by far the hardest boss in the game, even Mundus himself only took me three attempts and that was only because the fight starts of as a bullet hell and then leads to a second weird combat phase (I really didn't like the final true boss fight). The balancing of difficulty just felt a bit off there.

Another thing that I just need to question is the swimming first person segments in this game. Why. Why do this. They just felt unnecessary and boring but luckily it is only in a small segment of the game.

Then we have the camera. To be honest this isn't going to be as negative as it seems because I totally understand it is an older game and needed to have set cameras. I even very much enjoyed it when exploring areas as it gives you that unpredictable feeling as you are running towards the camera down a corridor just for it to suddenly flip and you see a group of enemies. It's what I love about the original resident evil 2 and its totally the same with this, because the camera is set it means the developer team can have a lot of fun with it, with amazing backdrop moments and surprises. However their is one massive problem with this....combat. I died so many times especially in that Nightmare boss fight thanks to terrible camera angles which would flip and invert my controls. This drove me crazy, it felt like a separate enemy I was fighting half the time. In some sense I can't blame the game because having a free flowing camera is a luxury we expect nowaday but it did make it bloody hard to play an action game with set camera angles. Just please no more tight arenas with massive bosses and set camera angles.

Overall though their are so many more positives in this game than negatives. It was a great game to play over a weekend (took me roughly 7 hours to beat) and generally made me massively more interested in playing the other games. I think it will be something I do alongside my Tomb Raider games. The location was epic, the combat was awesome, and while the enemies and bosses where mostly easy they were still great fun to fight. Just please no more Nightmare. 

So if you haven't played Devil May Cry 1 then I would totally recommend you try it, unleash 

your inner demon!