Late to the Party – Devil May Cry 2

I really gotta finish those reviews but lately, I’ve been having a lot of fun playing through the Devil May Cry games on stream. When devs or publishers send me keys, I try to get to it off-stream (as I’m not sure if it’s okay for me to stream it in the first place) but lately, I’ve only really been able to play games on-stream and not at other times. Maybe, I’ll get to it today though… For now, I need to apologize for being late to the party called Devil May Cry 2. Frankly, I don’t have to apologize. Nobody would hold it against me if I had skipped this one completely. Heck, the only reason for wanting to play Devil May Cry 2 is that you either want to enjoy Devil May Cry 3 even more… or you like boring games. Either way, that’s fine.

But Devil May Cry 2 doesn’t actually start off too bad, weirdly enough. Originally, I was quite excited about a few changes. Devil May Cry 1, after all, has a few issues with its controls. For starters, you can’t double jump until you unlock the “air hike” ability. Devil May Cry 2 has that from the get-go. On top of that, you can roll around to quickly evade attacks without any issues in DMC2 by hitting the “B” button. Shooting is still on “X” while DMC1 had shooting on both “X” and “B”. Instead of having to unlock combo moves, you already have them unlocked. So, you can perform rising slashes and aerial combat from the get-go. That’s cool.

So, overall, in the first two minutes of gameplay, I noticed that Devil May Cry 2 seemed pretty cool… but then the dread came. It was dreadful. The story? Non-existent. We find a coin… and there’s Lucia who is not getting a backstory until later on… also corporate evil. There is this evil guy who is rich and has a company that wants to create a demon paradise for no reason and he uses demonic powers for whatever reason. That’s quite lame. We need to stop him for whatever reason and honestly, it’s just so darn boring to deal with him. DMC2 is incredibly grindy because you can only use red orbs to upgrade your weapons… and you find like… three swords and four guns or something… and each takes 5000 or 10,000 red orbs to be upgraded to Level 2 and then it increases to 10,000 red orbs for your swords and 30,000 for your guns, meaning… yeah, you won’t do this. I even regretted upgrading my swords because frankly, the game is very much not melee-friendly. Quite ironic for a “Hack & Slash” title.

Most of the boss fights that I encountered were essentially punishing you for going into melee range if it was possible to go into melee range at all. Holding down the shoot button always seemed like the best choice to actually deal damage. There was one cool fight where you were fighting off against a minotaur but apart from that one, most of the fights were frustrating and ranged heavy. Another boss fight pitted you against a skeleton warrior with two wolves. This guy would constantly counter you and deal MASSIVE damage to you if you were caught in its attacks. When you ended up staying afar, you needed to battle with the camera controls so that you can target the actual boss instead of the wolves that keep leaping at you. The wolves themselves had way too much health and would constantly annoy you if you tried to get close to the skeleton warrior… eventually, I did it by shooting non-stop no matter who the target was before dodging into any direction. This fight took me ten minutes.

Later, you’re introduced to mages which is cool… and “Savage Golems” that regenerate when you don’t kill them. There are also infested tanks… that are just tanks that were infected by demons… these tanks wouldn’t be able to hit you if you stood on top of them but even at close range, your guns deal more damage to it compared to your swords, so I used the guns because whittling away at it with swords felt punishing. And then, the infest chopper is introduced, a helicopter that is infected by demons…

This one was incredibly tiring and exhausting. That was not the case because of how “hard” the fight was but rather because it just took too long. The chopper chases after you and you don’t have to defeat it. I defeated it once and then made my way outside and it was there again, so I just ran off to the top of one building, only to find that it was still there. I assume that had I killed it at every stage of this chase sequence, I probably would have done this for an hour and a half… killing the chopper just once took 26 minutes in the end there. Most of the time, the chopper can’t even hit you but you can’t get close to it because it’s very high above the ground. Hence, you just shoot it as it fires off into the distance… nowhere close to where you are… And shooting it with your guns takes 26 minutes every time… So, I completed this mission eventually but it just was incredibly tiring.

A nice addition to the game’s formula was “amulets” which allow you to customize your combat style a little bit. Amulets have three slots that essentially modify your demon form. Your demon form isn’t tied to your devil arm/sword anymore though… instead, you just enter the ultimate form from the end of DMC1. With one of the gems, you can fly in this form. I didn’t find any other gems for this slot, sadly. The other gem slot changes the element of the demon form attack, meaning that you either do electric or fire damage in it which didn’t seem to make a difference because none of this is explained in the game. Are there elemental weaknesses? I doubt it. I think it’s just to feel cool about it, I guess. The last one either enhances your attack in the demon form or your healing. Most of the time, I took the healing one because of how stupidly overpowered guns are and because of how little healing you get. When I was at full health, I’d switch to the damage boost on the fly. When I was 50% or less health, I’d grab the healing boost. Most of the time, the damage boost was barely noticeable though.

And well, eventually, you fight against the “bad guy” Arius and this fight is just such a laugh because it’s literally Arius shooting you… with a gun… and then nearly hitting you with demonic powers… while you massacre him. He also spawns enemies into the fight… a common theme for this game. These are not worth dealing with as he just spawns more, which is why I’d just slash him a bunch of times while he was sitting there doing nothing. And then, I’d run to the other side of the room because he teleported there and was sitting there now. Eventually, I killed him. This was one of the fights where the sword was the better choice. When we killed Arius, Lucia revealed that she was a demon created by Arius to which Dante responds that “Devils Never Cry” (which is the same thing he said to Trish in DMC1 who was also created by the antagonist, Mundus, so that was corny as heck). Lucia is touched, I guess. Arius, however, started the ritual already to tap into Argosax’s power but since it was incomplete, it shouldn’t have worked… but it did… for whatever reason… and Argosax possesses Arius and wins, turning him into an amalgamation of most of the bosses from DMC1 and DMC2.

This was basically another tedious fight where we spammed the gun button. The “boss”, Argosax, is basically a big blog with parts of the Griffon (DMC1), the Phantom (DMC1), the Minotaur (DMC2), the Tentacle-Thing (Jokatgulm) (DMC2), the Big Baby (DMC2), and I probably missed something. Here, you essentially shoot one of the sides until it dies… and then, you proceed to do the same for the other sides. By moving to the Gryphon’s side and basically just sitting there at the right/left-most spot from it so that you can still shoot it but its attacks don’t reach you, you can cheese the fight easily and just place a weight onto your shoot button, go for a walk, come back, and you’ll defeat the Gryphon. Then, you do the same with the next boss… and the next boss… and the next boss… I mean, they’re all one boss but you essentially have to fight all of them and getting up close and personal gets you punished, so just cheese it to get over it. It’s a boring fight again.

But then Argosax transforms into his true form: The Despair Embodied. Now, Argosax looks like a flaming angel with an androgynous appearance in two forms. Argosax basically is a joke in this form. Then, you finally beat the game. You can play the game again on harder difficulties but why would you do that? You can play the game as Lucia as well but she just has fewer missions and you only learn about her that she’s actually called “X (Chi)” which is revealed by her X tattoo on her arm… or something… and you can also unlock Trish from DMC1 by finishing Dante’s campaign on hard-mode… but… why would you want to do that.

Overall, DMC2 started off well until it got boring. I was excited about fewer invisible walls and more open areas but the first area really is just a bait as that isn’t quite the case. You’ll find worse areas the longer you play that are more closed off and won’t get your “secret finder sense” tingling. The camera controls are still abysmal. The fights are incredibly boring. The weapon upgrade system is incredibly grindy. If I were to play him again, it would have to be for charity. I hate this game. It’s so bad. I can now understand why everyone on Twitch told me that they wouldn’t mind if I skipped this one. Also, the lines are never “edgy” and always just “lame” or “corny” or “cringy”. It’s still not “bad-ass”… It’s just… ugh, please don’t. The good thing about DMC2 being so bad was that DMC3 seems so much better now that I’m playing that. Expect a post on that soon-ish!

This post was first published on Indiecator by Dan Indiecator aka MagiWasTaken. If you like what you see here and want to see more, you can check me out on Twitch and YouTube as well. If you find this post on a website other than Indiecator.org, please write an e-mail to me. Thank you!