Moosey May Cry Part 2.

If you missed it, here's a link to part one, covering Devil May Cry, and a brief history of my experience with the series as a whole. I was pleasantly surprised with how it held up, and well, now let's get to the sequel.

Part 2: Sophomore Slump.

Since Devil May Cry 2 was the only game in the franchise I hadn't played before, I wasn't entirely sure what to expect. My biggest fear going into it was not that it would be bad, but that it would be bad in the most boring, uninteresting way that it gave me absolutely nothing to write about. Well, thankfully I was wrong! No, not about it being bad, because it's bad! And not really about it being boring, because large chunks of it are pretty boring. But those other chunks? The changes to the core combat? They range from comically stupid to utterly baffling, and believe me when I say those are two things that give me plenty to write about!

But I'll get to that. First though, a quick history lesson!

Originally released in 2003, DMC 2 had a development so troubled it would be BioWare-esque if it wasn't so short. Rather than Hideki Kamiya and Team Little Devils continuing the series forward, instead a different team, formerly more focused on arcade games, was given the project. I know arcades have maintained a greater relevance in Japan than in the West (which is to say, they still have some), but the writing was on the wall even at the time. Still, putting a different group without direct experience on a sequel is one of those things that can result in an interesting spin on something established, or...

The most succinct way to get to the heart of how troubled this game's development was is to talk about its director. Not the credited director, the original one. As far as I can tell, this person's identity is not publicly known. In the final months of development, this mystery person was removed from the position, and Hideaki Itsuno was instead tasked with salvaging it into something they could put on store shelves. I haven't done extensive research, but if their identity is known, it's not widely enough to get on the Wikipedia page. I know not being actually credited was fairly common back in the eighties, especially with Japanese games because of worries that talented employees would get scooped up if their names were out there, but this is an unusual case. While problems still persist with how people do and don't get credited for their work on games, there being no known record of who this person was is kind of unheard of for this time period.

The only other “new” name to mention here is Bingo Morihashi. Not exactly a household name, nor was his role in DMC 2 that large, but he becomes more important later in the series, especially with the story/narrative side of things. Originally a novelist, he was hired to work on DMC 2, but came in so late he didn't have much impact on the game's story. He was, however, involved enough to feel the horrors of video game crunch firsthand, which I won't go into the details on. I don't need or want to just be copying and pasting sections of the Wikipedia article, or its sources.

Anyway, DMC 2's development sounds like an absolute nightmare, and the fact that the game is playable is...not an achievement, but impressive, in its own way. Okay, enough behind the scenes, what about the game itself? Well, as I said with DMC 1, I should note that I am playing the HD Trilogy Collection version of the game, which I do think is relevant because I wonder if some parts of this game aren't as hideously ugly with the lower resolution of a 2003 era CRT. I'm specifically talking about the skyboxes, and the pre-rendered cutscenes. They look terrible! They are so blurry that I can't help but assume they just didn't have access to the original assets for the remaster? That, or this being the weakest of the trilogy, maybe it didn't get the same level of care as the other two?

That's not to say the game part looks great either. Some parts of it look fine, I think Dante and series newcomer/co-protagonist Lucia both have cool outfits, and are pretty well animated. Dante has a darker, sleeker design, and Lucia has a better “sexy action lady” outfit than what we get in the vast majority of modern games. Other than how her hair clips through her scarf, I think she looks cool. And I think she's the only non-white playable character in the whole franchise?

The environments, on the other hand...some look okay, but mostly they don't. Which is weird because I think the first game holds up pretty well, even in the year 2025. How much of that is a result of the remastering, or just the original art, I can't say. DMC 1 “looks like a PS2 game (complimentary),” whereas DMC 2 “looks like a PS2 game (derogatory),” is the most succinct way to put it. Just very bland, drab, and dull.

The same applies to the enemies. Outside of a couple of the bosses, I think every single enemy was composed of different shapes of brown and grey. At least almost all of them, I just remembered some wolves that were probably more white than grey, and one particularly stupid encounter with them (more on that later). I remember a criticism of the Xbox 360/PS3 era being that too many games were all grey and brown, but DMC 2 was clearly ahead of the curve there! Indistinct brown clumps of polygons lumbering around while Dante or Lucia mindlessly hack and slash at them, while their almost impossible to see health bars (because they're also so dark and against dark backgrounds) deplete.

I don't know if this was an issue in the original, or introduced in the remaster, but there's even hitching in some areas. Only in larger/more open areas, and I feel like they tend to happen right as enemies spawn in? Thankfully it doesn't plague the whole game, or it would have driven me up a wall.

Speaking of going up walls, that brings me to the most baffling part of DMC 2, the combat. Now, as I said previously, DMC 1 established a kind of unique feeling combat that the core of can still be felt all the way up through DMC 5. Many changes and additions along the way, but that core is still there. So, logically, one would assume that DMC 2 would either be an evolution of that style, or just a copy and paste rehash. Probably the latter, considering this game isn't well regarded, and had such a troubled development, right? I'm no developer, but it seems like the easiest thing to do would be to copy what already worked, and people already liked.

To refresh on the core fundamentals of DMC 1's combat, it's the pausing to determine which combo, and directional inputs while locked on for certain moves. Forward on the stick and attack to do the charging Stinger, or back to do the uppercut High Time.

In DMC 2, the lock on and directional input moves are still there, but the mid-combo pauses are not. Instead, there's a new system that technically has a greater number of different combos. Rather than pausing for a different length of time after the second hit, the combos are dependent on which hit in the combo the required action is done. So, that part of it is more like what the series would later settle on, but... “required action,” you might ask?

Instead of pausing after the hit, you move the left control stick in a direction, then keep hitting the button and Dante/Lucia do a different combo. They also do other, more powerful combos in Devil Trigger. Okay, I imagine just reading this has left some scratching their heads, so let me answer some questions. No, it doesn't matter what direction on the stick, that has zero impact. If this was a system where hitting down on the stick was a low combo, up a high combo, or it corresponding to left or right, that would make sense. Other games like For Honor, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, or even Red Steel 2 have done similar things. The key difference is, those are good games that make sense, and two of them used motion controls for swinging a sword.

Yes, Red Steel 2 was a good game, and yes I remember there's a lineage between it and For Honor. Back on topic.

The other question, is how does this work with Stinger and High Time? The answer is it doesn't. Stinger and High Time only work when manually locked on, whereas the new combos only work when not manually locked on. Meaning that using both requires going between manual lock, and relying on the game's auto-lock on, which seems far more interested in targeting the wrong enemies than the ones I'm pushing the stick toward.

“Moosey, that sounds awkward,” you say. And my only response is, “You're right, it is!” Awkward enough that I barely ever used the manual lock on, really only when I wanted to try to do some air-combos. I say try, because somehow the timing on it doesn't feel right? Half the time the enemy would fall before I could even hit them in the air??

In DMC 1, dodging also required the lock on, but here it's just mapped to a button. The precursor of Dante's Trickster Style, in a way. It's fine, and I like the animations for it, Dante looks cool when he's flipping around. Doing it near walls will put him into various wall runs, which again, look cool, but they don't seem to serve any purpose? Other than looking cool, I mean. Dante and Lucia can double jump by default, in addition to the wall jump from the original game, so the wall run isn't useful for navigation. I also couldn't really ever work it into the combat, like I don't think you can shoot while wall running, or do any attacks during or out of it? Those all feel like things the devs wanted to do, but never finished.

On top of all that, there's way less variety in the weapons this time around, which is impressive considering the first game had two (2). In DMC 1, Dante's sword(s) and Ifrit felt extremely different. The swords used the pauses for combos, whereas Ifrit's punches and kicks were powerful charge attacks. All the melee weapons for both Dante and Lucia have the same exact moveset (which, by the way, you don't unlock more moves for, the upgrades are just damage). Their descriptions imply they have different ranges and damages but...they don't really feel like it.

Even Dante and Lucia themselves, while Dante still has his big greatsword, and Lucia smaller dual blades, functionally they have the same inputs. They both use the stick direction thing. The only difference is Dante has fewer swings per button press, so it was easier to judge when to move the stick, meaning I felt like I had more control over what I was doing with him. That's not me saying Lucia has more depth, or is trickier to master, that's me saying I didn't care enough to count how many swings she took per button press.

There's more variety in the ranged weapons, and this time you can swap between them with a tap of L2. That's handy, and functionality that survived all the way up through DMC 5. And I will say, using a missile launcher to shoot cultists at close range was very funny.

The environments (mostly) look bad, the enemies look bad, the characters look cool but don't play well compared to the first game, but how are the enemies to fight? They fall under one of two categories: Brain dead or annoying. Those little goblins that hop around dancing? Brain dead. The automatons(?) that throw saws at you from off screen? Annoying. Giant demon goats? Brain dead, they do almost nothing. Mothra larva that eat you during that moth boss fight? Annoying! The “Savage Golems” are both brain dead and annoying, because they stand around and do nothing, but will run away and regenerate their lost limbs if you don't finish them off. That's...almost interesting.

This is where the game's biggest issue lies. The core combat is awkward, but with a few tweaks I think it could have been okay. Except, even the best combat system in the world means nothing if the enemies aren't fun to fight. Look at NieR: Automata, for example. 2B's moves all feel great and she's exceptionally well animated. Yet the enemies are mostly brain dead and don't put up a fight. The main difference is that game had something to say and being over-powered was thematically relevant. Plus at least the robots had a good/kind of cute design.

In DMC 2, the enemies aren't fun, they're ugly as hell just like the rest of the game, and the difficulty is either way too easy, or frustrating. And even the frustrating parts aren't hard enough to require numerous attempts! A few bosses took me a couple tries, but never in a good way. Never in a “I need to learn their moves” way, more of a, “I just need to pay more attention and not get bored to death” sort of way. I mean I guess that's better than banging my head against something obnoxious, but I dunno. Maybe frustrating bad would have been more interesting?

There's bosses in this game that I swear if you were patient enough, you could defeat by just standing still and holding the shoot button. A lot of them holding shoot is definitely what you need to do, only with some dodging, because they're some giant thing that you either can't hit with melee, or rarely hit.

I think that about covers the combat, but those aren't the only baffling parts of this mess! This time doors don't require a button press to open...except when they do. Why? I couldn't tell you! I don't really like how you just go through them (and thus a loading screen) without a confirmation button, but then when I do need to hit a button, that isn't clear, so I ended up getting stuck wandering around for a bit until I thought to interact. The map doesn't show where you are in it, so that renders it basically useless, especially with how huge and empty a lot of areas are. There's an amulet system with different gems to socket in that affect Devil Trigger, but like everything else it feels half baked at best, and outside of the one that lets you fly, it has little impact.

There's Secret Rooms, but the ones I found were just generic “fight these enemies” “challenges.” The first one I swear didn't even give me a Blue Orb chunk! They somehow made the swimming significantly worse than the first game, but only Lucia actually gets any, so at least Dante was saved from this watery fate. The camera is too far out, there's melee now, the movement is slow, and you even need to solve a “puzzle” underwater. The only upside is at least you don't need to worry about running out of air.

The split between the two main characters is maybe the worst I've ever seen in a game like this. They both have enough unique levels that if you are a broken human being like me that truly wants to experience all of this mess, you need to play through both of them. BUT, they also both have enough of the same levels/bosses that it feels like a copy and paste job. It's even more egregious when the worst/most tedious parts were the ones they both have to slog through.

The levels are nonsensical, and all begin with some of the most bizarre quotes. I don't even know how to describe them, they're just weird, even if they do try to tie into what's happening. Really, the game gives so little context about what's going on that I absolutely would not call any part of it coherent. There was one level where I thought Dante had somehow sneaked onto a helicopter and flown it to an oil rig, but then that oil rig had an underground magma room and a train. I later realized that someone else had taken the helicopter to the oil rig, but Dante had to go through a factory (with underground magma room) and take the train to the oil rig. Which makes...only slightly more sense, but speaks volumes about how nonsensical this game is.

It just doesn't give the context for anything! Why is Dante here? How do he and Lucia know each other? Who is Arius? What are these artifacts? Who's that old lady? Why do she and Lucia sound vaguely French? Why doesn't Dante have any shred of his personality from the first game? Where's Trish? Why is this game split into two separate stories, each of which only tells maybe one third of a complete narrative, instead of at least combining the two into one? Why were the characters, in the original release, on two separate discs when most of the game is the same areas they go through??

Whichever character you pick first, you're going to be left scratching your head. Play Dante, and Lucia's “big reveal” will come in the form of a throw away line of dialog from her near the end of the game. But play Lucia and you won't actually see the times when Dante saves her! That makes the latter half of her story all but incoherent, even already knowing what happened with Dante!

I'm not going to say DMC 1 had a great, or deep story, but it was at least coherent. I knew what was going on, and why. Trish's background was intentionally mysterious, and the reveals at least had some semblance of weight behind them. And while it's easy to make fun of stuff like the “fill your dark soul with liiiiiiiight” line, at least he sounded like he was trying. Can't say the same for anyone in DMC 2.

And the reward for finishing the game?

Diesel branded outfits for Dante and Lucia.

Yay?

Finishing it with both unlocked the Bloody Palace, which I believe makes it the first time for the series. A sequence of increasingly harder levels that eventually leads to a final challenge, it's a series staple. I've never actually made it to the top in any of these games, so I'm more of a scrub at these games than my love of them might imply.

Initially I ignored the Bloody Palace, thinking I had played more than enough of this mess. Well, me being me, months later (after The Summer of Death Stranding 2: On the Beach), I decided to at least try it for the sake of due diligence, and even this simple mode managed to baffle me! It's pathetic and boring as expected, each encounter just a slog through the normal combat with an odd assortment of enemies in a bland box of a room. But after each fight, three glowing circles appear on the floor with no context. Each one sends you a different number of levels further up the tower. One, ten, or...one hundred??

Maybe this is just me being too used to how 5 does it, but there it's entirely linear. And I assume maxes out at floor one hundred? Here, based on the Trophies, it goes at least “Over 9000.” I quit the game around level 520-something (again, using those hundred level portals). I didn't know in the moment just how high the Bloody Palace goes, but I can tell you that I would have to be paid money to make me try to get to level 9000 in DMC 2.

I've not done this, because I can't bring myself to play through it again, but apparently beating Hard mode with Dante unlocks Trish. For whatever reason, she has Dante's moveset from the first game, complete with the mid-combo pausing. Meaning...they could have just had Dante play like that...

Here's the thing though: This game sounds really bad, and it is, but also... It's kind of funny bad. At least at times. Enough times during Dante's story what was happening was just so stupid that I burst out laughing. The first boss fight is a giant ape demon named Orangguerra. Orangguerra actually shows up again a little later, but this time before I could defeat it, it threw me out of the arena and into a fight with an Infested Tank. That then led to a not so thrilling chase across rooftops against an Infested Helicopter, including a tower I got knocked off in a way that gave me horrible flashbacks to Resident Evil 6's blizzard mountain.

One encounter saw Dante in a highway tunnel against a pair of wolves. These wolves jumping around so rapidly, and so wildly that I could barely hit them, but it was just so silly that I cracked up. This game is stupid! It's so stupid! If more of it had been silly and stupid instead of boring, I'd be willing to go to bat for it as a “so bad it's good” game. The problem is that like, maybe half of Dante's story was “so bad it's good,” whereas the other half was just bad. And Lucia's...was almost all bad. At least her's is shorter.

It's funny, in a way, to try to think about what this game is in relation to the first one. DMC 1, especially now all these years later, feels like a game that even the developers weren't entirely sure what it was they were making. A project transforming from one genre to another midway into development will do that, but yet they managed to finagle it into something that's still fun decades later.

Here though, they already had that first game as a blueprint, and yet what came out is even more confused and baffling than the first. In the first, the action felt tight, and fast, whereas here it's as muddled and clumsy as the game is dark and grey. This is a game about wandering around giant, dark areas with little idea where to go, then mashing Triangle for a bit to slash at brown clumps of polygons vaguely moving like enemies until they die. Rinse and repeat. If you're lucky something stupid will happen to break up the monotony, like a giant demon ape throwing Dante into a tank, or wolves hopping around a tunnel. But that luck runs out eventually.

Oh, and one last thing. The letter grading for how stylish your play is, it's not just letters, there's words associated with them, like the first game. Except here, they...I'm just going to list them out, from lowest to highest.

Don't worry.

Come on!

Bingo!

Are you ready?

Show Time!!

So, was DMC 2 as bad as its infamous reputation? Overall, yeah. I certainly enjoyed it more than I expected, but the majority of it was a slog. Again, it reminded me of RE6 in some weird ways, because early on I was kind of having some fun with it, but it just wore on and on, and by the end of the second story, I wanted to be done with it. And unlike RE6 which is long for its series, DMC 2 is only like...maybe six or seven hours long. That's for both stories, it only took me three and a half hours for Dante, and less than that for Lucia.

But like I said, baffling as it was, at least it gave me some things to write about it! And now I never need to play it again.

Devil May Cry 2 may have been pretty bad, but that badness may have ended up being good for the franchise as a whole. Itsuno got saddled with getting the game across the finish line, but he wasn't happy with the end product. I can't see how anyone could be. Whatever his reasoning was, he wanted another crack at it, this time from the very start, so he led the way on a fresh new start for the series...

Tune in next week for the next installment of Moosey May Cry, where I cover a game that some still consider the best in the series. Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening.

Part 3 is live now!