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Forum - View topicGAME: Devil May Cry: HD Collection
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Kit-Tsukasa
Posts: 930 |
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Not quite sure I follow of how this gets an overall A if Graphics, Sound/Music, and Presentation all received relatively low scores, especially compared to the Gameplay score.
To be honest, the best thing I've found about Devil May Cry games aside from gameplay are the Heaven or Hell Modes. They really give you quite the challenge, more so than Demon Souls or Dark Souls. |
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gerbilx
Posts: 138 |
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A wonderfully informed, fair review. You are perhaps the only reviewer I've seen who actually understands these games. (>")>
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sainta
 Posts: 989 |
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DMC3 is my favorite game thanks to its fast combats. Besides, being slower DMC1 is significantly harder than its sequels to the point I was defeated about five times by the third boss the first time I got it. By the way, I have never played DMC2.
"I should have been the one to fill your dark soul with light!! LIGHT!! LIGHT!!" |
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Anime World Order
 Posts: 390 Location: Florida |
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There's simply no way that you of all people could have written that sentence without thinking of Bayonetta, which for me eliminated one of the biggest roadblocks that kept me from ever having beaten Devil May Cry or Devil May Cry 3: the difficulty curve. I'm no expert at dodging and countering. If your combo requires I perform air juggles, then odds are that I can't do it. When I beat God Hand, my average level was between 2 and 3. And so it was that on Devil May Cry, even at the Normal difficulty level, cleaned my clock. There's "difficult, but passable" and then there's "too difficult." The line between the two is somewhat thin. Give me 30 lives with 5 continues, and I at least have a shot at beating the early Contra games. Restrict it to just 3 lives (or make it a very expensive upgrade) like the later Contra games, and it's doubtful I'm clearing the second level. Devil May Cry lives in that second category. Health and powerups are one thing, but this is a game that requires you to spend in-game currency on purchasing your continues, and even then you're limited to just a few. I don't think I even got past level 3 or 4 in DMC3 because of this. Certainly, the designers threw in an Easy Automatic mode for the people who just want to see the story and have visually interesting things happen every time they push a button, but that's not really solving my problem is it? I'm not looking to circumvent the entire game in favor of seeing the cinematics. If I was, then I'd just skip buying the game and watch it all on Youtube. I just want to try, try again if at first I don't succeed. Because losing a lot at first is one thing, but losing a lot without ever quite understanding WHY you've failed while being deprived another chance to get better is another matter entirely. I need to see that I'm gradually getting better, like the hero in a 1980s movie training montage. So I never did finish the first or third games, and that domino effect meant I never bothered with playing the second game or the fourth. And, though some of the gameplay footage looks okay-ish I remain tremendously skeptical of the upcoming Ninja Theory DmC: Devil May Cry. That Devil May Cry eludes me at every corner concerns me. The genre of action game it established is one of my favorites, and one of the few types of games I can name for which Japan is still a leader on the world stage. Surely Ninja Gaiden (particularly Black) was even tougher than DMC, and I survived it and its "let's spawn the Black Spider guys on you right after you load your save without restoring your health" hijinks. Bayonetta's enemies had to have been faster and more numerous. And the damage inflicted by a single enemy could kill you in 3-4 rapid combo hits in God Hand, a game that literally punished you the better you were doing at it. Maybe I'll never do those combos where you're switching weapons midway through or knocking people skyward and continuing to hit them. But I should be able to at least DO this, so I'll get the 360 version once I can do so for about $25. I figure that'll be in about 2-3 weeks time. Actually PLAYING it, well... |
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Taiyz
 Posts: 202 Location: Canada |
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Bayonetta on the other hand, if you look at the movelists for each weapon combination, there are only really two variations, and they're still quite similar to the default. Equipping different combinations can change certain combo-enders, but apart from varying speed and damage, you never really have to learn anything new. While Bayonetta's a high quality production with some refreshing environments (compared to DMC's castles and courtyards) and the dodge mechanic is fun, I still find that DMC3 offers much more challenge and variety in the gameplay. |
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daveriley
 Posts: 117 Location: Philadelphia |
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If I'm talking about "surpassed," Bayonetta does a ton of stuff I love, but doesn't hit nearly the high notes that DMC does. Admittedly fighting Jeanne is an amazing set of rival battles, something Kamiya is super good at. Nero Angelo can't really compare to that, but the other bosses in DMC are off the chart. The mostly-faceless (pun intended?) bosses of Bayonetta are fun, and up to Kamiya standards, but can't hold a candle to Phantom or Nightmare.
A lot of the fun in Bayonetta is getting your mitts on the outlandish weaponry and the visceral chopiness/slowdown of dodging into witch time, but that has little bearing on who you're fighting: most of the enemies aren't that memorable. Meanwhile, fights with standard Devil May Cry enemies, like Shadows, are burned into my memory. Back in the day I broke a controller trying to kill three Shadows at the same time. Not because I was mad and threw it at the TV (though that did happen, once or twice), but because I was rapid firing my guns so hard that I ruined the square button for further use. I don't appreciate a game costing me another $35 bucks (especially since I was in college), but I do appreciate the underlying sentiment: in Devil May Cry, you always feel like the bad guys are just as dangerous as you are. Where in Bayonetta you feel like the entire point of the game is to make fools of them, which is what last-second dodges into witch time basically is. That can be a recipe for a thrilling game too, and I suppose it's a matter of preference, but it's a primary reason why I'd rank DMC higher than Bayonetta, even though I love them both. EDIT: Did some extra thinking, and probably one of the best parts of Bayonetta is its sense of scale. Those bosses are huge and the things you do to them are absurd and that is super-great. I would have to play Bayonetta again to really get into the nitty-gritty of it, but in the end I think DMC excels with its meat and potatoes style where Bayonetta reaches for the stars, and often succeeds, but the end result is the game often feels like it's spread too thin (also, the last 3rd is way too long). Also, your complaints re: the difficulty curve are a little odd, because I agree Ninja Gaiden (post-flying swallow nerf) and God Hand are absolutely harder than the first Devil May Cry. If you beat Bayonetta, which is WAY more focused on dodging, you shouldn't have too much trouble with DMC. To that point, I'm surprised by both your post, sainta, that marks DMC1 as the hardest. I think it's considerably easier than 3 on a point for point basis. In my playthroughs for this review, I didn't die once during DMC1, except for during the shooter segment towards the end. DMC3 gave me way more difficulty. That just might be that I've played 1 a million times and 3 only two or so, but I haven't played either in at least five years. 3 is hyper-fast, as you note, so maybe I simply don't have the reflexes to keep up like I can in 1, whose much smaller movelist focuses on a few bread and butter attacks, like the Kick 13 autocombo, or charged Ignis punches on Nightmare's core. Daryl, you'll be pleased to know that the version of 3 on this collection is the special edition that allows for free continues right in the room right before you died, which came in handy as Angi and Rudra caused a handful of deaths before I remembered how the fight worked. I remember them being the bottle neck that a lot of players, including myself, complained about back in the day.
Most of this is explained by issues with the HD rerelease. An unexciting reissue of classic games warrants a middling grade for presentation. The graphics hold up pretty well, especially in the first game which is eleven years old, but there's some goofy stuff where most "particle effects" are actually just really hazy sprites and being in high def makes that really obvious. However, these games are hallmarks of their generation, and that's more important than the sum of whether or not some textures look cruddy or a lack of director's commentary or other special features. Hence the overall A. Last edited by daveriley on Tue Apr 17, 2012 11:26 am; edited 2 times in total |
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williamflipper
 Posts: 32 Location: London UK, Trieste Italy |
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I feel strange about all those HD collections of ps2 games but because they are cheap I'm quite happy to throw money for them at least they looks greatly better than upscaled/emulated ps2 games (shinobi, God Hands) I bought recently from psn.. Ans Yes I'm going to play DMC1 and 3 skipping 2 without regrets.
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darkslayer709
Posts: 55 |
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Does anybody know if they made the controls customizable for DMC1 in this port? One of my biggest roadblocks for not going back to the original game is the fact that I can't change the controls. Maybe that makes me a bad gamer or maybe I've been spoiled by a default that has come into play with a lot of action games but in a game as difficult as DMC1 I really do need those controls to be how I'm used to them being and on the current set up you just can't do that since you can only pick from control set A or B.
Regarding Bayonetta; I bought that game because it had the DMC credentials behind it and to be honest I found it pretty dull. I couldn't get into the main character, the enemies I encountered were pretty meh and took far too long to die and I'll be honest, I just couldn't get to grips with the difficulty. I wouldn't say that Bayonetta is harder than DMC because I just don't think that is true, but there was something about that game that I just could not get to grips with. I think I gave up on it after getting creamed over and over again by Jeane during that flashback sequence... admittedly I probably did not give it a fair chance but there is only so many times I can die before I get annoyed and find something else to play. Usually in those circumstances the storyline has to have a decent enough pull on me to make me go back to it. Give me Nelo Angelo anyday, at least he was a character I cared about (and I probably died just as much the first time I fought him). |
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daveriley
Posts: 117 Location: Philadelphia |
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There's no control scheme variants that didn't exist in the original versions. These games are all just straight ports. Which sucks, because you're right: the controls in DMC 1 can be pretty crappy. The thing that bugs me the most is needing to hold down a shoulder button to fire your guns with square, yet the square button isn't used for anything else in the game AND if you're in the air you DON'T need to hold the shoulder button.
I have a lot of good memories of the Nelo Angelo fights -- a lot of terrible memories of Nelo Angelo 3 on DMD, but a lot of good ones too. Homing kicking into his back with Ifrit is still especially satisfying. His first fight (along with Phantom's first fight) really blow the lid off in telling you "this game is for real." Between those is the first Shadow fight and, as I basically said in earlier in this thread, Shadows are one of the best fodder enemies in any video game ever. But if I had to give the "Hideki Kamiya's Best Rival" to someone it's still gonna be Jeanne. It's said you gave up when you did, because her second and third fight are too good. Not only for the "throwing missiles back and forth" parts, but also for things like dodging motorcycles and running around on the walls/ceilings, things that in any other game would be a quick time event. Here, they're just part of the gameplay. Dodging her wicked weave attacks, then going into witch time and countering with your own is a combat cycle that borders on the sublime. It never gets boring. Would that the other bosses in Bayonetta could live up to her standard. |
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