Like so badass you’ll end up fighting two-and-a-half unwinnable battles against him before it’s all over. It’s all very “What if The Happening, but Cloverfield, and also demons?” Nero, Dante, Trish, Lady, and newcomers V and Nico all set out to save the world and slaughter some demons while being incredibly badass.Įxcept, this demon is extremely badass. The basic premise of Devil May Cry 5 is this: a demon more powerful than Mundus or any other ever faced before in the franchise has brought a gigantic demonic tree over into the real world which is destroying everything and draining the blood from the human populace. But a ten year break has proven to work out well for Dante and his companions in the endless quest against bigger and badder demons. 18 years and five main line titles is plenty of time for a franchise to drift far away from the initial premise or stall out and crumple. Meanwhile, Devil May Cry would be handed to the stewardship of Hideaki Itsuno from the tail end of development of Devil May Cry 2 up through the latest offering.
It’s been 18 years since Capcom gave birth to the Devil May Cry franchise under the directorship of Hideki Kamiya, who would go on to launch a thousand discourses (and some very good writing and discussion too) about sexuality and objectification in games with the landmark Bayonetta. It’s loud, colorful, and revels in the ridiculousness of a world where hot dad bods are frequently impaled with unreasonably large swords as a matter of course. But Devil May Cry 5 is big and brash enough that perhaps it deserves to be discussed in the same terms. That’s a big statement for mid-March, and a bigger statement for me, generally. Aside from the graphical potential of the RE Engine, it’s just not what a AAA game looks like in 2019.Īnd, real talk? It might be one of the best games I play this year. In a lot of ways, Devil May Cry 5 feels like an anachronism. It’s a mission-based character action game that comes in well under 20 hours of playtime. There are no major puzzles, and the narrative is entirely linear-it doesn’t even fork. There are meaningless corridors filled with meaningless rooms where enemies spawn in waves. There’s no crafting system, or the dozens and dozens of loot types that would feed it. It’s not open world, and there are no outposts or incidental world quests to pick up.