Devil May Cry 5

I’m back on the couch today having overdone it from my surgery yesterday and I needed a game. At some point last night, possibly in the throes of a dream, I was reminded that a Platinumgames developed Final Fantasy existed and woke up thinking about playing that. But I don’t own FF16… yet, so I grabbed the next best thing sitting on my unplayed shelf… Devil May Cry 5!

The last DMC I played was 3 and while I enjoyed it, I’ve still never quite got the hang of the combat. There is a weird claw grip thing you need to do as most moves require a shoulder button input and a direction and a face button. I finished 3, despite the final boss stage giving me motion sickness, and in true form of my playthrough of the series, I’m skipping another even-numbered entry and jumping right into 5. Boy what the hell happened to Devil May Cry? There’s a full cast of characters now? Like the southern hillbilly who drives a tiny RV around and builds stuff, Nico. She’s always talking about food and has terribly provocative tattoos.

Nero and V seem to be the main characters through this romp, unfortunately. I like the Nero, even though his main mechanic is revving up the motorcycle throttle on his final fantasy sword. When they first gave up the tooltip I thought it was leading up to something similar to the chargeblade in Monster Hunter, but you just rev it up and it makes it slightly stronger. His buster technique is here again, apparently back from DMC 4 and THAT is some fun action. It’s a lot like the wirebugs from Monster Hunter Rise but with different close-up abilities.

But my god what the fuck. V is miserable to play as! He’s an underbaked concept of a fighting system and he drags this game way way down. I understand the appeal of a summons character, if done well they can be absolutely bad-ass, but I don’t know if you could ever really divorce the character from character action you know what I mean? He needs to be out of harms way and can only send in his guys, a crow and a black panther. But the focus of these guys is not great. They just sort of appear and disappear willy nilly, even though you are locked onto an enemy. Playing as V is just kind of a bummer. Most of the time I’m getting injured its because I accidentally hit the ‘B’ button which teleports you on-top of an enemy - something you have to do to “finish” them off. For whatever story reason the demons you summon aren’t allowed to kill other demons, but you can? Even though you’re too week to walk most of the time? Its dumb and confusing.

V’s bad enough but I have a big problem with the way this game handles death. If you fall in battle, the camera swoops around and zooms in on your character, panting on all fours, and it presents you with an option; would you give up here? Spend precious red orbs to resurrect? Perhaps use your even more precious GOLD orbs to come back fully loaded with health and Devil Trigger?

Okay - this is kind of dumb on its own. If you aren’t paying attention or falter right at the beginning of the level, you still get this question and have to choose GIVE UP and then wait for the ominous prophecy of judgement to pop up and THEN they give you the option to restart at the last checkpoint. Those checkpoints, mind you, are few and far between, and are not even at the beginning of a boss encounter. They will be BEFORE the last upgrade point, so if you were hoping of jumping right back in the fight you usually have to slog through some corridors and re-do your upgrades first.

But the underpinning here - the reason this isn’t a mild annoyance and is in fact a terrible game design decision - if you choose red orbs but don’t have enough? You are prompted with an option to head to the Microsoft Store to buy more. That’s right, the currency you are rewarded for slaying hordes of undead insect queens are so trivial that you could just head to your online storefront of choice to pickup a pack. They are so worthless, in fact, that the conversion rate is 1 Red Orb to .00002 of a cent. That’s kind of bullshit! It’s bullshit because if the option exists to just buy your way through the game, then it sure does seem like the game exists to sell you orbs. Is that the reason that bosses get harder when they are almost dead? So you could just hop into the store and grab those orbs, you don’t want to have to try that fight again do you, you were so close! It’s basically the late-stage capitalism of console video game design and I hate it.