It’s easy to understate how easy a game the original Devil May Cry is to just pick up and play. RELATED: 'Devil May Cry's Dante to Return in 'Shin Megami Tensei III Nocturne HD Remaster' DLC It’s a game that welcomes replayability, as you’re ranked on every mission, and the different upgrades allow for various playstyles. As you play through various segmented missions, you’ll be leveling up Dante’s abilities and weapons. When he’s not battling said demons, you can find him eating pizzas at his shop. In Devil May Cry, you take on the role of Dante, a demon hunter and the son of Sparda, as he tries to defeat the demon emperor that previously murdered his family.
While every other mainline Devil May Cry title has you taking on the role of multiple characters, the first is different in that it’s truly the Dante showpiece of the franchise. The likes of Vergil do appear, but not in the same way as he would in later games. However, in the franchise’s first installment you won’t be seeing a lot of the familiar faces that will pop up in later entries.
The Devil May Cry series is one that boasts a truly fun cast of characters to both play as, and interact with. It’s game mechanics like this that have players concentrate and focus on certain aspects of the game which you might have otherwise just button mashed through. If you do fail, you’ll see that whatever items you might have used in your previous run won’t reset and be back in your inventory. In a staple of the series, you’ll probably find yourself having to retry bosses every once in a while. The game is also one that’s not afraid to push back. While it isn’t as refined or even as enjoyable as later entries, there’s still so much satisfaction that you can get out of stringing together combos in both mid-air and on the ground. Devil May Cry is a series that’s renowned for its combat, and the early foundation clearly shows that. While it shares similarities to Resident Evil 4, the same can’t be said when it comes to its combat system. Both he and Dante carry that “devil may care” attitude, as each finds themselves unloading quips left and right in wildly outlandish situations. Dante himself even appears as if he’s an early prototype version of RE4’s iteration of Leon S. While you explore a large castle for almost the entirety of Devil May Cry, the architecture and environmental design feel straight out of Resident Evil 4. If you’ve played both games, that connection becomes clearly evident very early on.
Kamiya and Capcom would undertake Devil May Cry, a game which started development originally as Resident Evil 4. RELATED: Here's How Remakes and Remasters Are Revitalizing Video Game Franchises in 2021 With so many great titles under his belt, the first game in the DMC series still remains a standout in his illustrious career. His love for the genre can’t be overstated either he would go on to create Bayonetta at Platinum Games, another character-action game that’s clearly cut from the same cloth as Devil May Cry. Though Kamiya has long since left Capcom, it’s clear his influence on the series still remains. At the helm was Hideki Kamiya, a young star at Capcom who was coming off the massive success that was his directorial debut, Resident Evil 2. It’s a franchise that has remained relevant, while many other series of that era have fallen into obscurity.
A staple of both the hack-and-slash and character-action game genre, Devil May Cry continues to endure two decades after initially releasing on the PS2.