The End is Nigh: Devil May Cry 4

By Martin Gaston

‘The End is Nigh’ is a weekly column by Play.tm’s Martin Gaston, pondering the nature of videogame endings and why we do or don’t choose to finish the games we play. This time: Devil May Cry 4 and its handling of difficulty…

This week I put another 20 hours into Devil May Cry 4. I didn’t achieve what I wanted and probably won’t.

It was an unplanned return, spurred on by a friend who, due entirely to her own shortcomings, couldn’t topple the final boss. It’s simple, after all: spend hours upon hours (at normal difficulty, times by ten for the game’s hardest ‘Dante Must Die’ mode) learning the villain’s intricate audio and visual cues and then subsequently exploit at every given opportunity – provided the camera doesn’t get in the way, that is, or you have the audacity to consider blinking.

I killed the boss in question on my second go; it had been about a year since I last played. My friend still hasn’t done it, despite them spending the best part of the evening trying, but they have dropped over twenty-five hours into Bayonetta (a game so similar it’s basically a spiritual sequel) since its release on Friday. They prefer Platinum Games’ effort because, other than it being newer and trendier thanks to hype and a dubstep remix of La Roux in its advert, it’s far more forgiving – without chiding the player – on earlier difficulties.

Devil May Cry 4’s fiddly, fussy and unremarkable last adversary, for her at least, was the final nail in the coffin. Another good friend of mine lost all enthusiasm for the game after he realised the second chapter of the game was simply the first part in reverse and, having never extensively played the series before, was left puzzled on how to unleash deuteragonist Dante’s exorbitant amount of moves and styles in a game designed around current-protagonist Nero’s unique skills. In short: too difficult, not worth the effort.

Now, I’ve mused over difficulty in the past. I understand there are different viewpoints on the matter, but I’m militantly entrenched within the camp that prefers a game being too hard rather than too easy: I probably wouldn’t hesitate to lamp anyone who completed Uncharted 2 (Resolution’s unanimous Game of the Year 2009; even Lewis loves it, he just doesn’t know it yet) on Easy difficulty. Devil May Cry 3 was also, back in the day, the reason I finally indulged in a Playstation 2 and a game I can proudly boast, having sunk the best part of almost a hundred hours into it, of finishing on the aforementioned Dante Must Die mode. It’s a wild beast of a game, one that I fondly spent a summer trying to tame with about as much success as a drunken fresher on a rodeo bull.

It’s a somewhat damning indictment of the fourth game that I didn’t play it to the same extent. I never finished it on Dante Must Die. I haven’t even got halfway. I returned to the game this week with the express purpose of achieving this feat (out of beloved nostalgia for the third game, mostly) but have already given up. It goes wrong in too many areas: imitating facets of past games without knowing why it’s doing so; relying on countless dry, tedious cut-scenes so boring even Hideo Kojima would fall asleep; trying to win in new fans and revitalise the series with new-protagonist Nero but desperately backpedalling and lazily throwing in Dante to appease the vanguard; peppering the experience with enough awkward, bouncing, helium-filled breasts to make even Itagaki blush. I just can’t muster up the enthusiasm to carry on.

Despite its flaws, I’ll always have a soft spot for the series; I’ve even got two copies of the remedial Devil May Cry 2 on my shelf. But development on the fourth game was clearly rushed, and if Capcom didn’t give it the attention it deserved (there’s a spectacular experience in there at times) during development it comes as no surprise that neither myself nor the two friends I mentioned will ever complete it in a manner that will adequately satisfy us.