There's Only One Character in These Fighters - The Games I've Played

Typically when you play fighters you get dozens of characters to pick from. You get all of your favorites from Sub Zero to the Hulk to whatever else is in the franchise that you're playing. Then comes this game, it is practically a fighter game where you have to learn specific, complex, fickle button combinations to kill whatever is around you, but unfortunately there's only one character that you have to play as, and the entire game is a pain to get through.

I'm going to cover all three of these games in one go, because honestly, they're practically the same game, just with slightly different game elements within them. There are people out there (like the friend that recommended this game to me) that love this series. I'm sorry to say this to those people, but I can't stand this game.

Let me start off with the first one. I'm not 100% sure on this one, because I did start to zone out with the game because of just how amazing it was and I couldn't handle all of the amazing that was coming off of it, but the story goes a little something like this - you're Dante. Dante likes killing things. Oh look, you're at a castle. There's things to kill at the castle. Dante likes killing. Maybe you should kill things. End of the world is happening? Demons are coming? Whatever, they're squishy and they bleed blood, you can kill them. Keep on killing! Oh wait! There's a weird guy in a suit of armor. . . maybe you should kill him too. Okay, keep killing! Ultimatley you end up in an alternate dimension killing someone who you're not really quite sure who they are, how they work into the guy with the suit, or just about anything you had done up to that point, but he's squishy and is trying to stop you from killing things, so KILL HIM!

Now, weird story line that never explains much of anything that is going on, and you just sort of have to make it up as you go to the side, let's talk about the gameplay. Remember this guy from the N64?

Lakitu's the guy's name, and he's using a fishing pole in a cloud to be your camera guy but he still manages to not screw things up too bad for the most part because he's awesome.

Well. . . let's take Lakitu and give him a night out on the town where he can no longer pass a sobriety test, and then smack him on the head with an anvil or two just to make sure that he's nice and brain damaged and then ask him to try to keep up with Dante. Nothing too tricky, just simple things like not focusing on the wall while Dante is trying to walk anywhere else but into the wall, or even trying to  not skip between four different camera angles during a boss battle because each camera angle switches the direction you're walking so down no longer becomes 'down' but right then up then left then down. To put it nicely, the camera angles are part of the challenge to this game.

Let's move on because we need to cover more than just #1 in this rant.

I finish 1 and my hopes go somewhere along the lines of this - first games in series are always a little short sighted and limited in their scope because they're the first game. The company doesn't know if it'll be a big hit or anything, so they play it safe, and cut corners so that they can see if people would like a second. The game was and is popular enough to get a second game, so it hopefully will fill in some of the blanks (all of the blanks) of the first game because there were some big ones that it left behind.

Yeah. . . no.

It's a bit after #1, but it pretty much runs this story line - girl flirts with Dante, asks him to kill some guy who's trying to take over the world with demons but promises him that there's going to be lots of squishy bodies between him and the final boss guy thing, Dante can't resist and goes on a killing spree again.

Rinse and repeat from #1

You don't know what's going on.

You have a slight idea that you're at least trying to stop someone in this game a bit better than the first one, but it still runs the world of here's a room, oh no there are things in the room so all of the doors are now locked. If you want to keep going, you better get your killing on!

Seriously? Can we take a moment to talk about this thing that happens in Devil May Cry but also makes appearances in a lot of 'action' games? The barriers of death that won't move unless you commit murder? I have a guy that can throw his sword around and teleport to it at will, shoots bullets out of the air, and can hide weapons in his magical back pocket without having any issues ever with reloading or carrying capacity and a weird little door thingy is going to stop him unless he doesn't kill four things that he's already killed HUNDREDS of? Seriously? It got annoying after a while. It wasn't like the game was challenging me, it got insulting. It was like it wasn't paying attention to the previous room where I did the exact same thing with an S rank 70 hit combo where the bodies were expertly juggled between sword strikes and bullets as I flew around the room.

Back to the story of 2.

At the end, instead of a cliffhanger, they flat out kill Dante. I mean there's no coming back from it.

He gets sucked into a demon dimension with no way out and the story is over. Goodbye, goodnight, the hero is dead, all of that time you spent jumping around and leveling up is meaningless, you saved the world but he's dead.

BUT WAIT! There's a Devil May Cry 3? He must get out!

Nope.

Turns out #3 is BEFORE #1.

Remember all of those awesome things that you hardly understood but you learned how to really kick butt doing in #1 and 2? That hasn't happened yet! Remember some of the most awesome things like . . . I don't know. . . your sword? Yeah, totally not in your possession.

By this point I had given up all hope of any sense being made. Whatever story they fed me, I saw it for what it was, here's some monsters, how about you slice and dice your way through them?

Good?

Good.

Just like the other DMC games, there's rating systems that tell you how skilled you are in a certain fight. Keep things up in the air and do a ridiculously long combo without repeating moves? Get a better ranking! Does it do anything to get a better ranking?

Absolutely not.

So throughout 3, as well as 2 and 1, I just found out what combo was the easiest to do that would kill things the fastest and spammed it any time there were bad guys anywhere near me. Who cared if I got a C on my fight? Everything died so I could finally go to the next room to get another C.

Get all of the upgrades, get the weapon that is actually a guitar (no joke)

and don't forget to keep on killing, and I was happy when it finally came to a close.

These games are one of those that I will never go back to. I didn't 100% them, I didn't try to get perfect scores on every fight or even try to touch the games on any other difficulty than easy, and I'm perfectly okay with that.

The story is horrible, the game play is annoyingly difficult to do too little, the characters are annoying, the graphics are dated (even with the HD version which said it was 'remastered') which is sort of important to have good visuals on a game which has so many attempts at visual flairs and 'wow' moments, which made the entire series one that I rushed through just so I could said that I had finished it and shut up those people that keep talking about it the way I talk about some of my favorite games.