Board 8 > Bane plays the Devil May Cry series for the first time [spoilers as I go]

(+) Yeah! (+)

So the DMC5 trailer hyped me the fuck up, particularly due to that INSANELY good song Devil Trigger. So I decided hey fuck it let me play through the series finally. Before this I had played DmC through Playstation Plus (yes that makes that one my first devil may cry game I'm sorry) and I thought it was super fun! Some of the story beats and characters were not as ideal as they could have been yea but overall I thought it was very enjoyable. Music is bangin, gameplay is fun, good times all around.

So while that was the first Devil May Cry game I played, that was not my introduction to the series. Back when DMC3 was coming out I saw advertisements for it all over and thought it was the coolest thing I'd ever seen. Now being 13 years old, my parents did not agree with purchasing a game like that for me. But I still followed stuff about the game, despite never being able to play it.

Back to present day, I just finished up DMC1. Fun times! Super janky in a lot of spots but it was 2001 so I give it quite a bit a leeway with that. The story.....not much to it actually, I was surprised how little to the story there was. And Vergil got sandbagged super hard! I didn't know he was in the game like that, and Dante kind of just forgets about him after beating him the final time. But the game itself is nifty. Having double jump with Alastor helped me out a TON. I didn't really end up using Ifrit because I was having too much fun with Alastor. And I dunno how common it is to do, but I ended up using the shotgun like 95% of the time. I really enjoyed the shotgun.

Now time for DMC2. I'm extremely excited to see what makes this game so loathsome to people.
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This party's gettin crazy
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Oh and I'm not particularly great at this type of game, most missions in DMC1 I got like a C on, some B's scattered in and a few A's. I never got an S lol
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I assume I should start as Dante for 2
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taaag
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Bane_Of_Despair posted...

I assume I should start as Dante for 2

I don't think it really matters both campaigns are forgettable
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Lets rock baby
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https://www.goombastomp.com/dante-must-die-how-devil-may-cry-perfected-difficulty/
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Bane_Of_Despair posted...

The story.....not much to it actually, I was surprised how little to the story there was. And Vergil got sandbagged super hard! I didn't know he was in the game like that, and Dante kind of just forgets about him after beating him the final time.

DMC1 has almost no plot to speak of, yeah. For how big of a character Vergil becomes it's kind of amazing how he barely exists in 1 at all.

But the game itself is nifty. Having double jump with Alastor helped me out a TON. I didn't really end up using Ifrit because I was having too much fun with Alastor. And I dunno how common it is to do, but I ended up using the shotgun like 95% of the time. I really enjoyed the shotgun.

Double jump is god tier in every game. I think the shotgun is especially effective in DMC1 but I don't think it's very good in the other games. Ebony & Ivory are really really good in 3 & 4.
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Alright so starting off 2, feels a bit slower. But I like this dedicated Dodge button! And damn jumping in the air and shooting your guns down to slow your descent looks really cool.
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Bane_Of_Despair posted...

And damn jumping in the air and shooting your guns down to slow your descent looks really cool.

Is this not in 1? Man it's been a while since I played that.
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You can theoretically do it in 1 but I don't think it slowed your descent like it does here
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The campaigns take place at the same time, but each relies on you having already played the other to understand the story, so nothing will make sense.
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Ok so there's a weird half second stuttering that's happening every so often that wasn't happening with DMC1, hmm
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Oh geez so much DMC on the board right now, this is awesome. (Tag)
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oh wow just looking at the upgrade selection, way more red orbs used in this one huh
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DMC2 has a lot of problems, but first and foremost is they turned guns into actual powerful weapons like your sword instead of combo and juggling assists. You can beat basically the whole game by shooting.

I haven't seen the game in forever though, so feel free to correct it i'm misremembering.
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I just finished Mission 1 and uh, yea guns are super fucking good lmao. I mean I was still using them for combo assisting and such but yea I could totally see just using guns and jumping around and stuff.

I gotta say the movement and animations seem pretty fun so far >_>
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Alright 3 missions through, just killed the giant monkey

So yea uh I definitely see the lowered difficulty concerns but....I'm kind of fine with that? The monkey fight was basically a nothing fight but eh. It does seem like it's sort of out of spirit of the series to make it so easy I guess but it feels pretty fluid so far.

I have the say the animations that Dante does like doing Matrix flips off walls and such are super nice.
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Just finished Mission 5 with the Infested Chopper fight. That was......a bit awkward to say the least.

The game is trying to be somewhat adventurous with the environments which I appreciate. The abandoned cityscape was pretty cool.

I am getting more and more of the dumbed down Devil May Cry-ness of this game, you really just have to shoot and swing your sword once in awhile and rinse and repeat. It's kind of nice how mind numbing it is and somewhat relaxing, but gameplay wise that's probably not what it should be aiming for. Boss fights have had a bit more of a challenge to them though, that hydra creature nearly killed me with some of the damage it combo'd me with with its tentacles. Well, actually that was probably the only boss fight that took some challenge, the Chopper wasn't actually hard, just tedious. And the first boss with the monkey I said was already pretty easy.
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Honestly that helicopter fight is the only thing I really remember about that game the rest I pretty much erased from my mind
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My friend beat DMC2 without using the sword at all pretty much

I hardly even played the game and mostly just watched him play, but that's all I really needed to disown it
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Alright well there was just another boss fight for Mission 6 as well, some dude that came out of a building. The cutscene is actually pretty cool.

And yea easy boss fight. He hit me a few times because I didn't get how his light beam attack worked at first but then I got the hang of it.
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Man, DMC3/4 would be so boring if you could spam guns and win
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Oh good lord that little train ride you take and enemies spawn in that tiny room with you.....what a fuckin way to rack up red orbs and S style. Enemies have no chance.

Honestly with how good guns are in this game I've been actually experimenting MORE finding ways to get actual combos and not just spam guns lol
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Alright I think I'm done for now, up to Mission 8. Some Heihachi motherfucker was walking towards a helicopter with a dope ass coat, and I think his silhouette is in the Mission 8 start menu. Intriiiiiiiiiguing
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Dmc3 hype bump
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Oh hey good timing I was gonna bump this

I'll probably play more tonight
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The only reason I never beat dmc2 to this day is cause my disc froze only a few missions in.
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I just did Mission 10 with fighting the giant moth with the larva......either I didn't fully understand that fight or it was really bad. Stupid thing was always in the air so you couldn't hit it without guns most of the time, and those larva it spawned did stupid damage to you so the only thing I could do was keep jumping in the air like a moron and fire my guns. And the fact that the fight doesn't end when you kill the moth and all the larva HAVE to be killed as well was dumb.
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oh my god I just got submachine guns, that seems like something that would be absolutely BROKEN with how this game deals with guns
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Jesus Christ that fight with the skeleton dude and the two wolves, the wolves are there just to fuck with your targeting and not be able to hit the boss, and since the wolves have no life bars they just eat the hits. When you actually DO hit the boss you do decent damage so that's good, but geez that was obnoxious.

I think that's enough for tonight, up to Mission 12
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Bane_Of_Despair posted...

Stupid thing was always in the air so you couldn't hit it without guns most of the time, and those larva it spawned did stupid damage to you so the only thing I could do was keep jumping in the air like a moron and fire my guns.

Sounds about right
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ok glad I'm not crazy then
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Bane_Of_Despair posted...

Back to present day, I just finished up DMC1. Fun times! Super janky in a lot of spots but it was 2001 so I give it quite a bit a leeway with that. The story.....not much to it actually, I was surprised how little to the story there was. And Vergil got sandbagged super hard! I didn't know he was in the game like that, and Dante kind of just forgets about him after beating him the final time. But the game itself is nifty. Having double jump with Alastor helped me out a TON. I didn't really end up using Ifrit because I was having too much fun with Alastor. And I dunno how common it is to do, but I ended up using the shotgun like 95% of the time. I really enjoyed the shotgun.

Shotgun's a good time but the handguns are really useful for mobility and getting quick hits in to build DT, and the grenade launcher hits like a truck. Did you know/discover about how you can use rolls or jumps to reduce its recovery time?

Also, you didn't even use Ifrit against Frosts?

DMC doesn't have as many weapon options as some of the later games but I really liked how they all had their clear niche.

After playing DMC3 I kinda wish Vergil would have stayed with his total lack of personality as in DMC1. I'll take that over the "too cool for school" shonen anime rival he became..

DMC2's not a very good game though I'm glad you discovered some of the movement tricks. Honestly it's one of the most fun DMC games just to move around in. Too bad it's the worst in most other ways.
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NeoElfboy posted...

Did you know/discover about how you can use rolls or jumps to reduce its recovery time?

I almost never used the grenade launcher so no lol

NeoElfboy posted...

Also, you didn't even use Ifrit against Frosts?

I think I discovered that but honestly I liked Alastor so much I just stuck with that
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Ok so two nothing boss fights back to back, the latter one being the main villain that we've seen like once and the game is trying to build a story out of it but hasn't actually done any set up to make it feel right? Like I STILL don't know who Lucia is really! And then she gets kidnapped and I'm supposed to care? And then Dante gives him the artifacts that we've been collecting apparently that I didn't even know we were doing, and then he talks about his plan like I was supposed to know about it already?

Like geez DMC1 had an almost non-existent story but it still loosely flowed together and it was simple enough to basically work, this one is trying to shove a story that hasn't been set up or developed!

And Dante's lack of character is really showing now that we've gotten some more cutscenes, he sounds bored half the time and even his snarky lines aren't really flying.
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Oh wow bringing back Phantom huh

He was fine, although he did that grab attack he had in the first game except this time it wouldn't let me break out of it and he did half of my life bar and killed me. So that was lame.
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Good, good

Let the hate flow through you
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Wow a boss that you can only hurt with guns, it's like the knew what they did with the guns in this game

Trimagia has a few ideas going, 3 heads each with its own element going back and forth, but when you make it so you're stuck on a platform with them floating around and basically the only way to hurt them is with Devil Trigger gun mode.......yea that's not great
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Alright I'm not gonna front that coin switch and Dante going "A false coin....for a false god" was pretty good

Arius is such a dweeb
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Alright beat game with Dante

First part of final boss was neat in the idea of it, being every boss you fought (and even Griffon from DMC1) and as you rotate around it it does different attacks pertaining to what boss it is. The execution.....could have been better. Some of the parts were just annoying to hit with a sword so I had no choice but to use a gun on them + devil trigger. Second part had some cool moves but boy he was annoying to get chances at sometimes with how he would go for periods of time with no cooldowns between attacks. That pretty much made me, yep you guessed it, have to stick with my guns and whittle him down + devil trigger.

And now Dante is in Hell. Kind of a limp ending, but now it makes sense with the DMC5 trailer and him. So that's neat.

So final thoughts on this game.....yea it's rough. I was pretty open to it when it started but as it went on I started to see more and more of why it was bad. The one thing I absolutely WILL give it is that Dante's animations are still super cool. Dodging is super nice, Matrix wall running will always be welcome. Oh, and the environments for the game weren't the worst. They tried to mix things up and go for different ones, and I appreciate that. The cityscape near the beginning and the building you're climbing up at the end were nifty.

Now for the bad.....basically everything else. The upgrades are severely downgraded from DMC1, and they weren't even that much in DMC1 to start! You can't upgrade moves or anything, only upgrade your weapons and then buy items. Super disappointing. The swords you get seem to not really matter in which you use, they say one has a longer reach and whatever but I don't think it's enough of a difference. The guns they clearly put more effort into, and yea are super powerful for no reason. The gameplay ends up being mindless which I enjoyed at the beginning but as the game went on I liked it less and less. Like it's serviceable but yea for a series like this, definitely not ideal. There are multiple bosses that are very poor. The story like I said earlier, really just got rushed on towards the end. Very weird. Dante himself has most of his character sucked out of him. He gets a good moment here and there but mostly not doing much.

And I still don't really have much of an idea about who Lucia is. I assume that would get slightly filled in if I play her story.....but I'm not sure if I want to. I'll think about it.
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Not sure if you want to play Lucia's side, eh? I want to take this chance to include a quote from a review when DMC2 came out, blessedly preserved via the game's Wikipedia page.

"Play" called Lucia's side of the story "a cruel sonnet of self-realization wrapped in a story steeped in religious overtones", stating that the story alone was reason to purchase the game.

This is one of the most baffling lines of text I've ever read in my entire life.
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I probably will to at least check out if they put any effort into her or not. And it looks like she has less missions than Dante? So that's cool.
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Man, it's going to be wild seeing your reaction to just the very first mission of DMC3 going to it straight from 2.
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LapisLazuli posted...

Man, it's going to be wild seeing your reaction to just the very first mission of DMC3 going to it straight from 2.

Been waiting on this since the opinion of DMC2 started devolving. Can't wait. XD
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Xiahou Shake posted...

LapisLazuli posted...

Man, it's going to be wild seeing your reaction to just the very first mission of DMC3 going to it straight from 2.

Been waiting on this since the opinion of DMC2 started devolving. Can't wait. XD

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Well sorry, I decided to start Lucia's campaign! I need to know everything about DMC2, EVERYTHING. Well except Trish's playthrough because fuck playing through again on Hard.
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This is now a DMC3 waiting room
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Bane_Of_Despair posted...

Well sorry, I decided to start Lucia's campaign! I need to know everything about DMC2, EVERYTHING. Well except Trish's playthrough because fuck playing through again on Hard.

This is extra funny because I've heard a lot of people say Trish is one of the only saving graces of DMC2. I wouldn't know, I was bored to tears by the time I finished the second disc!
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