Devil May Cry

Drew has pledged to slowly but slowly churn his way through his sizeable stack of Nintendo Switch games for his ‘Beat the Backlog’ feature. Check out his main article to see what games he’s completed already!

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Statistics show that I am one of only six gamers in the entire world who has never owned a PS2. Being part of this exclusive (but incredibly sad) club means that I’ve missed out on a boatload of excellent titles that had an absolute stranglehold on the world in the early noughties. One such game is Devil May Cry – Capcom’s action-adventure that debuted the dashing half-demon swashbuckler, Dante, which went on to sell over two million copies. With a Netflix anime series coming in a few months, I thought it was high time that I donned the crimson trenchcoat for myself.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen the intro to a game more successfully sum up what’s to come next than the original Devil May Cry. After an incredibly corny title screen, we’re offered a short crawl of text that explains the backstory of the legendary dark knight, Sparda, before careening into a hodgepodge action scene where we’re introduced to Dante. After tussling with a leather clad demon named Trish, Dante is just seconds from putting a bullet between her eyes when she takes off her sunglasses… apparently her vague likeness to Dante’s dead mother is enough to overcome the fact that she javelined a whole ass sword through his chest 30-seconds earlier, and makes Dante open to helping her out.

The storyline that unfolds over the next 6-8 hours is wafer thin and makes little-to-no sense from minute to minute. From this hare-brained opening to revelations about Dante’s family and his Oedipal relationship with Trish, it’s all messy, teenage stuff. Obviously, no-one is expecting a finely nuanced tale from a hack-and-slash action-adventure, but what you get is closer to what you’d get from an arcade shooter like Time Crisis, where the plot is merely a device to facilitate blasting baddies. Does the story make the game any less fun? No, of course not, but it did make me cringe and as a fan of a lot of corny media, I think it’s worth noting.

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Devil May Cry At a Glance

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Thankfully, the gameplay holds up much better than the story does. Devil May Cry always marketed itself on being ‘cool’ and ‘stylish’, and dashing around as Dante, engaging in sword- and gunplay against the forces of evil is certainly that. The controls are simple, yet somehow still a little clunky, but I’m willing to look past that for all the fun I had blasting demon marionettes and juggling giant lizards with Dante’s oversized sword. Entering the Devil Trigger Mode is fun too – at the push of a button you can transform the halfbreed Dante into one of his demonic forms, raining down elemental attacks on your enemies until your energy bar runs out and you return to normal. There’s nothing groundbreaking about the format (even in 2001) but it’s undoubtedly fun.

What does hold the fun back somewhat are the partially fixed camera angles. A Capcom staple in the early 2000s, the developer figured that entirely static cameras might restrict their options somewhat, and so chose to split the difference by providing players with views that panned to follow Dante around the screen, before snapping to offer different views of the environments as you passed certain points. Choosing to eschew an entirely dynamic over the shoulder camera may have helped in creating impressive views of their environments, but it makes controlling Dante an absolute nightmare. 

Battling in the tight hallways of the castle often leads to you fighting an enemy who’s off camera; with Dante on one side of the threshold and the baddie on the other, you’re unable to properly time your attacks or evasions. Even in the many open courtyards, you’ll often find yourself flicking back and forth between two vastly different views as you fight, flipping the direction of your controls from moment to moment and leaving you both bamboozled and at the mercy of your foes. I’m a lifelong fan of the Resident Evil series and absolutely love the tension that the fixed camera angles helped provide, but Capcom’s tried and tested formula just doesn’t work in this entirely different genre, even tweaked as it was.

Another element carried over from Resident Evil is the menu scheme, which pauses the action while you switch weapons, upgrade your skills and administer health items. All the stopping and starting feels jarring for a game that prides itself on fluid and continuous action, and I think the flow of the game would have been better served using button combinations to access common items, like healables, without interrupting the battle. What also stands out about the menus are how dated the visuals look almost 25 years later. The ‘cool’ pre-rendered videos of your weapons in use and items spinning into shot when you select them have not aged well, and the entire UI now looks absolutely ancient (which it is).

But while the menus are pretty ghastly, I won’t say the same for the environment or enemy designs, both of which are characterful and enjoyable, even a quarter of a century later. The gothic castle environment leans heavily on Capcom’s experience with the elaborate but dingy locales seen in Resident Evil 1 and 2, and while many of the places make very little logical sense, they certainly pass the Rule of Cool. The demonic enemies are also excellent – from the creepy, shuddering marionette puppets, to the shadowy reapers wielding massive shears, to the Hunter-inspired lizard warriors, the bad guys look great. My favourite enemy is the massive magma filled arachnid boss, Phantom, who snarls and shouts at Dante between explosive breath attacks and lightning fast tail strikes. I love his condescending manner and his booming voice as much as his visual style, and he’s easily the most memorable enemy in the entire game.

Even though I enjoyed the core gameplay (awkward cameras aside), some of the later missions get bogged down. After battling waves of increasingly spongy enemies to artificially slow you down, it takes an unexpected turn, introducing a gimmicky first-person underwater section that is wholly out of place and entirely uninspiring. And the final boss, which should be an opportunity for an impressive showdown requiring all the skills you’ve mastered up to this point, is instead relegated to a bland on rails shoot-em-up section instead. I’m rarely a fan of games shoehorning in random changes to the formula for the sake of gameplay diversity, and that’s especially true when the new sections are objectively less impressive than what you’ve gotten used to. Again, this is one that Capcom would chalk up to experience, I’m sure.

Devil May Cry harkens back to simpler times, offering fun hack and slash action that you don’t need to take too seriously. Capcom treats us to some very cool environments as we wander across the spooky Mallet Island, smashing through some excellently designed enemies along the way, and what gets in the way can mostly be put down to inexperience on the developers’ part. The fixed camera angles that served them so well in the past are a real pain this time around, and the slow and deliberate menu system detracts from the fluid pace they were going for. This debut entry offers a fun peek back at the origins of a popular franchise; it might be fun for fans of the modern entries or videogame historians, but the average man in the street probably isn’t missing out by not revisiting it in 2025.

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