Post by angelzeromatt on Jun 30, 2008 17:33:27 GMT -5
Welcome to the Real World - Episode III
Name: Devil May Cry
Console: Playstation 2
So, an action/adventure game, I think, you take the role of some kind of demon-slaying mercenary guy who gets lynched into going to a haunted castle to fight demons and save the world from some guy who wants to let all Hell break loose on it... Literally. ... Shut up. Well, with an explanation like that, you should know what's going on. With that in mind, let's get rolling.
Story: 2/10
So... Here we are. The biggest mess-up of the game is its story. The theme is way overused, the beginning offers very little explanation; not that that's needed to know that Dante's supposed to be something like God when you're not playing him. I mean, they make it a point to show that by impaling four or five times with swords and other pointy objects. I mean, that's just too much. It makes you, the player, look like a complete wuss for losing any life whatsoever.
The basic story is that some typical hot chick comes in on a typical motorcycle and asks you in a typical way to do a typical horror movie mission at a typical castle on a typical island. This story screams typical the entire time to me. It's built like a Hollywood movie: no real depth to the story, all you know is the main character is close to God and the only female in the story, even though you know she's going to turn on Dante and be evil, ends up chasing after him due to some kind of romance formed in a time never shown in the game.
Put simply, if this game had been made into a movie, it wouldn't even be B-List. It would be one of those straight-to-video knock-offs they show on Sci-Fi channel late at night. Hell-themed games are such a bore ever since Doom started the whole thing and kicked some major ass out of all the hellspawn in the world and hell.
It also didn't help that Dante came off as an Ash rip-off. Yes, I said it! Ash from Evil Dead and Army of Darkness! He has that same snarky personality as Ash and also that whole "I'm badass and everyone else just sucks, even that knight dude in the armor who's supposed to be my brother." Seriously...
Gameplay: 8/10
Now to what seems to be the part that the developers focused most on. As far as mechanics go, the game has a lot going for it. Instead of a regular bash the crap out people game, you need to bash the crap out of people with different moves at a time to build up what seems to be a Style gauge or something. It goes from Dull to Sizzlin' (yes, they had no g) and the higher the Style rank, the more red skulls you get to put towards power-ups and abilities.
Okay, let's stop there for a moment. The game isn't even that long in the first place. You won't be able to unlock too many abilities just going through the missions because the enemies just don't drop enough of the red buggers in the first place. Also, the Style rank goes away too quickly, considering every bloody move you have knocks enemies away from you and you can't run back to them fast enough to keep the chain going. This results in the "wall and ambush" problem where you get an enemy up to a wall and beat the living daylights out of him only to have your ass sliced and chomped off by the other bad guys who were surrounding you slowly while you try to get to Cool or whatever the B rank was.
I digress. Every mission has some sort of puzzle that you have to solve, but the puzzles are often too easy and sometimes the limiters they give you when holding items are such crap. All in all, everything was a bit too obvious, or maybe that's so for me because I have such a powerful mind that I even wow my professors at class.
Music/Sound: 5/10
Okay, ambience music goes for the horror route, but there's nothing horror about the setting due to its typicalness. Also, when you get into a fight, the music goes from horror to punk rock or heavy metal or whatever. Now, the fight music is sometimes pretty fun to kill the puppet and ghost things with, but it should have matched with the ambience. No, the focus is on trying to make Dante, the main character, be more godlike as he beats the crap out of things while listening to metal in the background.
The sounds are also often very gory, but also seem like they're ripped from other games at times. Not to mention the voice acting doesn't exist outside of the short cutscenes. All of Dante's grunts are just too deep for the speaking voice he has, and hearing them with every move he makes is annoying. He should have at least done the Duke Nukem thing and had witty remarks for when he kills and lands hits.
Presentation: 6/10
Like I said, the game is presented like an American Hollywood movie that should have been taken to the back and shot. The voice acting is only average and the special effects are so gory and filled with blood. Again, too many times do they impale Dante and he pulls the sword out or pull his body up through the sword, guard, and hilt (what the hell?). Honestly, is it horror or a typical hero movie? It's a game about this guy who's the strongest and blows things up just to look tough (hey, like Master Chief and all those other guys).
Special effects were most likely good for their time as far as games made by Americans, but they were sometimes overdone blood-wise and while the graphics were really good for how old it is, that didn't help too much.
Overall: 6/10
I can't give Devil May Cry that good of a score after its poor attempt at making a story alongside a game that's really only good for beating the crap out of things. At least with Halo, you blow sh*t up and know more about what's going on, and you have allies who say funny stuff along the way.
All in all, "DMC" seems to be a bad idea for a cheap movie turned into a video game to justify its existence. Dante, who seems to not give a sh*t about somebody, risks his life to save a girl he has almost never interacted with just because he has an Oedipus complex. Then he gets all bent out of shape when she dies after being a b**ch to him. There is no ground for this story. It's like they think the bloody thing can float on just gameplay alone. It can't.
Unless it's American and made in America. In which case, the gameplay is all people will look at because they're such attention-deficit bastards that good stories end up being ditched for games with way too much action and flash, showing off like some two-bit... Anyways... Personally, I'd only play the game again if I had a random urge to see how hard the Hard Mode really is. After all, I have 2 and 3 as well, and those feel a lot better than the first one controller-wise. Don't expect a review of them anytime soon, though. I think I'll only stomach more of Dante when he isn't the main character, in Devil May Cry 4, once I get a d*mned X-box 360.
Name: Devil May Cry
Console: Playstation 2
So, an action/adventure game, I think, you take the role of some kind of demon-slaying mercenary guy who gets lynched into going to a haunted castle to fight demons and save the world from some guy who wants to let all Hell break loose on it... Literally. ... Shut up. Well, with an explanation like that, you should know what's going on. With that in mind, let's get rolling.
Story: 2/10
So... Here we are. The biggest mess-up of the game is its story. The theme is way overused, the beginning offers very little explanation; not that that's needed to know that Dante's supposed to be something like God when you're not playing him. I mean, they make it a point to show that by impaling four or five times with swords and other pointy objects. I mean, that's just too much. It makes you, the player, look like a complete wuss for losing any life whatsoever.
The basic story is that some typical hot chick comes in on a typical motorcycle and asks you in a typical way to do a typical horror movie mission at a typical castle on a typical island. This story screams typical the entire time to me. It's built like a Hollywood movie: no real depth to the story, all you know is the main character is close to God and the only female in the story, even though you know she's going to turn on Dante and be evil, ends up chasing after him due to some kind of romance formed in a time never shown in the game.
Put simply, if this game had been made into a movie, it wouldn't even be B-List. It would be one of those straight-to-video knock-offs they show on Sci-Fi channel late at night. Hell-themed games are such a bore ever since Doom started the whole thing and kicked some major ass out of all the hellspawn in the world and hell.
It also didn't help that Dante came off as an Ash rip-off. Yes, I said it! Ash from Evil Dead and Army of Darkness! He has that same snarky personality as Ash and also that whole "I'm badass and everyone else just sucks, even that knight dude in the armor who's supposed to be my brother." Seriously...
Gameplay: 8/10
Now to what seems to be the part that the developers focused most on. As far as mechanics go, the game has a lot going for it. Instead of a regular bash the crap out people game, you need to bash the crap out of people with different moves at a time to build up what seems to be a Style gauge or something. It goes from Dull to Sizzlin' (yes, they had no g) and the higher the Style rank, the more red skulls you get to put towards power-ups and abilities.
Okay, let's stop there for a moment. The game isn't even that long in the first place. You won't be able to unlock too many abilities just going through the missions because the enemies just don't drop enough of the red buggers in the first place. Also, the Style rank goes away too quickly, considering every bloody move you have knocks enemies away from you and you can't run back to them fast enough to keep the chain going. This results in the "wall and ambush" problem where you get an enemy up to a wall and beat the living daylights out of him only to have your ass sliced and chomped off by the other bad guys who were surrounding you slowly while you try to get to Cool or whatever the B rank was.
I digress. Every mission has some sort of puzzle that you have to solve, but the puzzles are often too easy and sometimes the limiters they give you when holding items are such crap. All in all, everything was a bit too obvious, or maybe that's so for me because I have such a powerful mind that I even wow my professors at class.
Music/Sound: 5/10
Okay, ambience music goes for the horror route, but there's nothing horror about the setting due to its typicalness. Also, when you get into a fight, the music goes from horror to punk rock or heavy metal or whatever. Now, the fight music is sometimes pretty fun to kill the puppet and ghost things with, but it should have matched with the ambience. No, the focus is on trying to make Dante, the main character, be more godlike as he beats the crap out of things while listening to metal in the background.
The sounds are also often very gory, but also seem like they're ripped from other games at times. Not to mention the voice acting doesn't exist outside of the short cutscenes. All of Dante's grunts are just too deep for the speaking voice he has, and hearing them with every move he makes is annoying. He should have at least done the Duke Nukem thing and had witty remarks for when he kills and lands hits.
Presentation: 6/10
Like I said, the game is presented like an American Hollywood movie that should have been taken to the back and shot. The voice acting is only average and the special effects are so gory and filled with blood. Again, too many times do they impale Dante and he pulls the sword out or pull his body up through the sword, guard, and hilt (what the hell?). Honestly, is it horror or a typical hero movie? It's a game about this guy who's the strongest and blows things up just to look tough (hey, like Master Chief and all those other guys).
Special effects were most likely good for their time as far as games made by Americans, but they were sometimes overdone blood-wise and while the graphics were really good for how old it is, that didn't help too much.
Overall: 6/10
I can't give Devil May Cry that good of a score after its poor attempt at making a story alongside a game that's really only good for beating the crap out of things. At least with Halo, you blow sh*t up and know more about what's going on, and you have allies who say funny stuff along the way.
All in all, "DMC" seems to be a bad idea for a cheap movie turned into a video game to justify its existence. Dante, who seems to not give a sh*t about somebody, risks his life to save a girl he has almost never interacted with just because he has an Oedipus complex. Then he gets all bent out of shape when she dies after being a b**ch to him. There is no ground for this story. It's like they think the bloody thing can float on just gameplay alone. It can't.
Unless it's American and made in America. In which case, the gameplay is all people will look at because they're such attention-deficit bastards that good stories end up being ditched for games with way too much action and flash, showing off like some two-bit... Anyways... Personally, I'd only play the game again if I had a random urge to see how hard the Hard Mode really is. After all, I have 2 and 3 as well, and those feel a lot better than the first one controller-wise. Don't expect a review of them anytime soon, though. I think I'll only stomach more of Dante when he isn't the main character, in Devil May Cry 4, once I get a d*mned X-box 360.
