To be honest it seems to me that everyone has hated Dante's look once they changed it from the original. I'm kind of amazed Capcom hasn't just done the rational thing and just put the series the way people want it. I personally can't get behind it being "all a scam to sell DLC" since it seems to have been going on far too long.
I'll also say that this article in an offhanded way could be taken as a slam on reviewers. To be honest I think there is a problem when a reviewer evaluates whether a product is good or not purely on it's own merits as a game when there are other issues involved. To be honest when your dealing with franchises and ongoing intellectual properties the characters and how they are treated is part of the overall property. A game that might play well, but is disrespectful to the established continuity and characters, deserves to be slammed on those elements. Beyond a certain point you have to make the distinction between whether something is a good game, and whether something is a good game of X label. If a game decides to slap a franchise or series name on something but changes so much that it no longer resemebles or continues to build on previous parts of the series, that should be viewed as an epic failure, and scores should reflect that.
I point this out because as time goes on I'm becoming increasingly irritated to hearing how something "reviewed well" despite outrage from the fans. Perhaps the most epic example of this being "Mass Effect 3". If a reviewer doesn't get what the big deal is, and his reviews and criticisms reflect this, and he might outright say "I don't understand the big deal" I increasingly feel that's a sign that someone doesn't belong reviewing. A reviewer is supposed to be telling the fans, the users, if they are going to like a product or not. As a professional your allegedly supposed to be tied into the pulse of gaming enough to make an informed desician. If there is a massive group of people complaining, and someone even overreacts to the point of a presidential petition, and your reviewing the game highly... well obviously your out of touch and not doing your job well since your score is hardly reflecting the reality. This is also part of why you see people becoming so hostile towards reviewers, and increasingly focusing on how their livelyhood, or perhaps more accuratly that of their hosts, is tied to the industry, and the technique of padding review scores in hopes that high reviews and good hype can turn that into reality virally since it's worked before, but is becoming harder to do as reality increases.
I think a good reviewer today is not just someone who can say whether a game works well on a technical level, and how good it is on it's own merits, but understands things like how what color the jacket of the protaganist of an ongoing series is can actually make all the differance and why that is. If you don't understand this, and it seems like I'm talking alien to you or way out in left field, your kind of demonstrating why you shouldn't be a reviewer.
A bit lengthy and in an odd direction given the article, but it's largely what I thought of in reading this. Truthfully I've never been a big DMC fan, but I'm aware of the issues, and honestly I don't like people messing with my favorite franchises and characters that way either (as I've gone off about in other cases). This article mentions the uproar over the game, as well as the review scores, so I think it serves as a good example of the overall problem, which I think actually came to a head during the entire "Mass Effect 3" fiasco (which is still ongoing) with critics, reviewers, and inudtry watchdogs somehow not really getting how an ending can decimate not only an otherwise solid product, but an entire franchise retroactively.
Given the fan reaction the first question when dealing with a game series or franchise is whether it's a true continuation of that franchise, above and beyond anything. If someone trots out "Devil May Cry" but with rebooting, a main character that doesn't even look the same way anymore, etc... that should automatically be a "fail" before it even enters consideration because it's not truely the product it's claiming to be. Sort of like the differance between an action figure of "Spider Man" and one of "Spider Warrior"... the Japanese Knockoff. Sure it looks vaguely similar, and might be a perfectly servicable toy that functions just as well as an actual "Spider Man" one, and might even have a few extra points of articulation that could make it better, but at the end of the day it's not "Spider Man" and your kid who is a Spidey fan is not going to accept it as the same thing even if you paint the name "Spider Man" accross the chest. You failed to please your child, the toy sucks, as he is the final arbitor of whether it's good or not. As a parent if you thought it was "good" or "the same thing" you failed in your analysis if you thought so genuinely (as opposed to trying to save a few bucks) just as a reviewer fails when he say tries to pass off a counterfeit Dante with the franchise name emblazoned on it as the real thing.
