Capcom Unveils "Classic Dante" DLC for DMC: Devil May Cry

[Gigano]

"They changed 1990's smartass Dante into 2013's smartass Dante in the 2013 reboot, they're so evil!"

"They are selling the option to play as 1990's smartass Dante, they're so evil!"

You just can't win.

 

[JonnWood]

So "a million years" is less than a month?

One wonders what they're going to do in the scene where classic Dante's wig blows onto his head.

Just occurred to me, but isn't Ninja Theory the group behind Metroid Other M? These guys seem to be developing a track record for angering fans of long running franchises through alterations to main characters.

1. That was Team Ninja, of Ninja Gaiden and DOA fame.
2. Actually, that was mostly the director, Yoshio Sakamoto's fault. He wrote the game, and said he literally cried at some parts of it. Even TN said "look, that wasn't us".

http://www.g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/716536/team-ninjas-yosuke-hayashi-talks-ninja-gaiden-3/#ixzz1YkFVArKB

 

[bafrali]

"They changed 1990's smartass Dante into 2013's smartass Dante in the 2013 reboot, they're so evil!"

"They are selling the option to play as 1980's smartass Dante, they're so evil!"

You just can't win.

That is more like covering a dog with the skin of your kid's deceased dog and expect him to appreaciate the effort. In other words, barks don't match.

 

[Gigano]

...
That is more like covering a dog with the skin of your kid's deceased dog and expect him to appreaciate the effort. In other words, barks don't match.

It doesn't fix the complaints about gameplay, no, only those about new Dante's looks.

Though in all fairness, the radical update to the visual design should've given a hint that the gameplay might have been updated as well. Anyone buying "The Edward Cullen Lookalike Challenge 2013" expecting "Devil May Cry 3 V.2.00" was being more than a little optimistic.

 

[Therumancer]

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.

"Their opinions suck, mine are right, they should quit."

What a load. It is amazing how fanboys cry about how some game didn't fit up to their notions of what the game should be, so the reviewers were paid off/are bad at their jobs. Here's a concept: perhaps they thought the game was good? Maybe they thought that this is a decent Devil May Cry game after all?

Many reviewers praised Mass Effect 3 while noting that the ending wasn't all that great. Many have praised this new DMC game, while also pointing out its flaws. A childish amount of swearing, boring antagonist, combat in later levels can be boring compared to early sections where you have more options... all of these things were said in incredibly positive reviews about the game. Positive reviewers haven't blinded themselves to DMC's flaws: they're just willing to try something new, whereas a lot of the people bitching in this thread are the sort to bury their heads in the sand because they didn't get exactly what they wanted.

Honestly, I might buy the game full-price after having seen all the fanboy tears of rage flying around the forums. They're bloody delicious and I could use a decent hack-and-slash, even though I don't necessarily like the political themes I've seen from the game's trailers.

There is more to it than your considering is my point. When your dealing with an established franchise or series the point of continueing it is to create more of the same, that's the point, people liked it, so you give them more. If you change what the product is, and then claim it's the same thing, that's an issue. A huge issue in gaming, and media in general, is one of brand identity, where they try and pass off anything they want to try and do as being part of an existing series, when it really shouldn't be. Expanding on something and adding new features to an existing game is fine, but when your altering everything from the look and backstory of characters, to the way the game plays, to reducing the number of options, that's a problem when you decide to slap a label on it and say "this is part of an established franchise".

The thing is with DMC is that it's not being presented as just a modern beat em up with swords and guns, it's being called a "Devil May Cry" game, and the vaguely similar protaganist with a few carried over story elements (resembling a knockoff of a popular character trying to avoid a law suit that we'd see in other mediums), does not make it a "Devil May Cry" game. By being part of that franchise and series it should be reviewed entirely within the scope of the series up until that point, and failing at the basics invalidates anything else it might accomplish along the way.

There wouldn't be an issue with DMC if they had started a new franchise and not called it "Devil May Cry", and not tried to say this protaganist is Dante.

When it comes to reviewers, understand these guys are supposed to be professionals. An encyclopediac knowledge of games, their history, and evolution up until this point, and detailed knowlege about the series a game is part of (when it applies) is exactly why these guys are pros, and they warrent a pay check and a platform. Your looking to a professional reviewer for a greater depth of knowlege and perspective than simply asking some fanboy, or even your typical hardcore gamer.

Changing major series elements but otherwise lionizing and rating a game highly because of the things it manages to do well is simply incompetant behavior, and why reviewers are increasingly called sell outs. The pressure is because someone rating Mass Effect 3 highly despite the acknowleged problems is contrary to what these people are supposed to stand for. If you don't have the basics right, including the ending, how good the gameplay you stack onto that turd is becomes irrelevent. A game about vomiting and eating your own vomit might control really well and do out to simulate what it does perfectly, but it still sucks because at the end of the day it's still a game about eating your own vomit.

Now, I want to give one other point here which I think seems to be missed by some of the other people responding as well, even positive ones. We're discussing reviewers NOT critics, there are substantially differant at their core. A critic is a guy who simply knows (or think he knows) something about a subject matter, sometimes he might even know a whole lot, who can phrase his opinions in an entertaining way and gets a platform because of it. A REVIEWER is someone of a much higher order who takes this to a professional extreme and is supposed to have such incredible knowlege of the subject matter and such time invested in his opinions that he can represent an actual standard. I suppose it hasn't come up much in gaming media yet, but it's a big deal in other venues. Critics are basically a dime a dozen, any newspaper can have one, but real reviewers are a much bigger deal. Critics come and go based on the popularity of their schtick and their audience can turn on them at a moment's notice (the ones that endure a long time can be quite special though), Reviewers operate in a way where regardless of what you might think of them what they say carries weight due to their knowlege and the way they arrive at their conclusions. Want someone's opinion ask a Critic, want to know what someone actually is, see a reviewer.

You'll notice that both Bob Chipman and Yahtzee have gone out of their way to say in the past that they are critics and not reviewers. There is a reason for that distinction, and I've even defended some of what Bob's said before (even if I didn't nessicarly agree with it) on those grounds.

The thing is that a lot of the sources doing these ratings, contributing to metascores, and the like, present themselves as reviewers, and wind up carrying a lot more weight than they probably should. On a lot of the major sites for example they will say a "game review of X" when all they did was have a critic give their opinion, oftentimes without much real backround or grounding in the subject. Dismissing issues that should be extremely important to the product as a whole (and remember that's what it is, the gameplay isn't the only reason why someone buys a game with a "Devil May Cry" label, the label carries specific IP weight and expectations, and when it fails to meet them the product as itself fails. It's like buying a silk brush and getting a camel hair brush sold as a silk brush, it might be a perfectly servicible brush, and even better in some things, but it's not what you paid for, and the guys selling it lied in saying it was something it wasn't... thus the product deserves to be slammed and have the BBB crawling all over them.. this DOES apply to IPs though it has yet to get to the point where it's taken seriously, and I see reviewers as being the guys that have to work towards seeing that happen to end a lot of the corperate label-slapping stupidity we see like has happened with other products).

When you get down to it a lot of people who are capable of being reviewers and even started that way have degenerated into mere critics, which is part of the problem. It wouldn't be so maddening if you weren't dealing with people that have substantial platforms who really should know better. What's worse is that I think reviews have gotten sloppy and lazy, where you hear people, both critics and reviewers, talking about how they "don't have the time to put hundreds of hours into games" and "have a life", or whatever other excuse for simply not doing the job they are paid to do properly and making the kinds of mistakes a professional from either camp should never make. The bottom line is that it's not supposed to be fun, it's work, your getting paid, people come and read what you have to say because you immerse yourself in the kind of dedication they can't or won't... or simply put if your a reviewer in paticular as long as you have that platform and audience and a paycheck for it, your pretty much a slave to the subject of your reviews and that audience. If you burn out and can't do it, then it's time to step down.... and oddly there have been some wierd tales written by writers and such who have moonlighted as reviewers or critics who in understanding that have produced freaky crap about what if it manifested literally. Or in some cases slammed their audiences for being ungrateful due to the amount of time they put in (but for that to have meaning, first you have to do it right, and generally critics can't get away with that).

Such are my thoughts, and a further explanation...

 

[Baron von Blitztank]

I think after people have finally played the game, people are having a lot more issues with the new Dante than his clothing and hairstyle.
There are quite a lot of things wrong with him that no amount of hairspray can fix.

 

[Therumancer]

[

I agree with you that a video game that is based in a well established series should definately be scrutinized to a degree for changing characters to a point where in which they are more just people with similar names and that's it. I HATE, the new Dante, Virgil is a dishonourable fuck, and changing it so that they are brothers AND Angel/Demon hybrids kinda just makes the title, "Devil May Cry" and the original series very redundant. However, this is still a game, and there would have been people (Mostly 10 to 15) whom would have never played the original series and would have none of these biased opinions. Also, seeing as how "DMC Devil May Cry" is essentially a reboot/different universe's version, it is easy to see how a reviewer can put their opinions and the original franchise behind them and focus on the new game just as if it were an entirely new title. While most people will agree the game is crap compared to the originals, the new game is alright, if you can get past the main character being an angst ridden emo.

[.

I wrote another lengthy post on the subject, but I wanted to respond to a few things you said here specifically.

I'd point out that if they want to cater to a crowd of people who might never have played the original, and who have differant sensibilities, then they should create a new, similar, IP. There being 10 to 15 year olds out there who never played the original is irrelevent. They slapped a "Devil May Cry" name on it, and that right there is saying it's part of an existing series/franchise, and intended to get the people who like that franchise and want more of it, and a continuation of the character and world they know and love, as they know and love them.

To be brutally honest the entire alternate universe thing is no excuse when they are using the Devil May Cry label straight out. When someone wants to do a new version of something that is already/still popular enough for the label to have meaning, and create an alternate version of it, the correct way to do that is to make a point of continueing the original series/continuity, and creating a clearly labeled alternative universe which is released parallel, but not in excess of it.

An example of this would be how Marvel Comics foolishly goes through phases where they fail to really "get" their own business and audience (seriously I swear they must be lobotomized at the executive level at times) and thinks that somehow rebooting their characters with a more modern sensibility and origins will bring in more readers. Marvel (and DC to a lesser extent, simply because it scored more epic fail points here) has at least generally had the brains until fairly recently to keep this kind of thing to an alternative universe like say their "Ultimate Universe" and leave their main continuity which people actually want to read about more or less unchanged, and ensuring it's status quo is restored to the baseline people want.

What Marvel seems to fail to get is that their increasing greed with comics prices has made actual comic books unapproachable to a new, young, audience to begin with. That barrier, more than the subject matter has been their downfall. The price per book, combine with their once clever gimmick of scattering stories between sometimes dozens of differant titles to get people to buy them all means that comics are a serious investment of cash to follow, more expensive than many other forms of entertainment, just keeping track of say "Spider Man" or the "X-men" would probably set you back more many months than a video game. Kids and young folks generally don't have a lot of money, despite the perceptions some companies have of them being "huge piles of expendable summer/part time job income with no responsibilities", and what money they do make/get from parents is also divided among other things since comics got to the point where if you were to seriously follow them the way marvel set it up, that's all you'd do. The end result being that the main Marvel consumer IS that 40 year old neckbeard that yells on their forums every day, because really nobody else could up in the time and money to keep them afloat... and ironically that's the guy they keep trying to stab in the back, while wondering why their reboots and such fail or get so much criticism.

This applies to things like "Devil May Cry" because at the end of the day that liscence has value because of the guys who bought the original games, and played them enough, investing enough energy due to spin offs, fan fics, fan sites, etc... to keep them alive. That's the guys to which the "Devil May Cry" label has value. To that 10 or 15 year old who is ignorant of this it having that label it doesn't matter, but to the audience that made it and is the target that is going to loyally and consistantly support it even after those kiddies move on to the next thing, it DOES matter. When you stab core customers in the back you shouldn't expect a positive response, and you shouldn't expect people to accept an IP as being the same thing just because of the name, it's what the name represents that goes with it.

In the final equasion the 10 to 15 year old doesn't care if it's Devil May Cry or not, because they have no attachment to it. Attaching it to a product directed at them is thus pointless, and does nothing but irritated followers of the IP and arguably destroy the entire product as a result since it simply cannot BE a good Devil May Cry product, it will never be anything more than a knockoff no matter how high a quality a knockoff it might be, it still deserves the scorn of a knockoff pretending to be something it's not.

As the series is defined Dante is not an Emo (as you put it), having him as an "extreme" yet Emo guy running around with sentiments that echo the Obama "Yes We Can" youth rallies (which was never as popular as many think, still nearlt 50-50 polarized) or whatever the politics you mention are (but I'm making an educated guess based on stereotypes) just isn't Dante. The whole character was supposed to be a flashy swahsbuckler, with a devil may care attitude, and little or no reverance for anyone or anything no matter how powerful it was, he had a dark past, and some angst ridden moments, but that was the exception to the rule. Even the name "Devil May Cry" was all about the reaction he got from people, specially powerful beings by basically being a arrogant jerk in the face of increasingly insane situations that nobody should be able to act that way in. Heck, I'm not a huge fan, but when I played it 90% of the point seemed to be how crazy you could be in response to increasingly crazy odds with huge combo counters building up and feeding your ego by telling you how stylist you are, all the while Dante seems like he's having the time of his life while hacking demons and unspeakable monsters to death. He dresses the way he does because he's supposed to be a somewhat flamboyant twit (or comes accross that way) even if he's very much a good guy, "WTF is he wearing" is part of the point since he pulls it off when nobody should be able to, and that's what makes it awesome to the fans. In short Dante is the exact opposite of everything that this game has turned him into by reports, and as such it fails as a "Devil May Cry" product and should be reviewed that way. You can't have "Devil May Cry" without Dante, and this is *not* Dante as defined by the IP the label goes with.

 

[Vyress]

Seriously, I'm done with Capcom. I have been for a while now. The only IP they haven't ruined - yet - is Monster Hunter. Everything else? Well, let's see...

Breath of Fire: I even forgot that Capcom made this. But admittedly, this was rather a niche series. It could have been so much more but that would have required something called "work" and we know how Capcom feels about that.

Mega Man: No continuation of the X storyline. ZX Advent had a GIANT cliffhanger ending and still has no sequel. X wasn't even in Marvel vs Capcom lol. They just stopped making anything Mega Man X-ish. Apparently they had to take the X away from him to put it between "Street Fighter" and "Tekken"... So now we're stuck with the normal Mega Man again. ^^
Mega Man 9 was nice and 10 was ok but why would you stop the whole main storyline just like that?

Resident Evil: They have the guts to call Resident Evil 6 a success because it sold a little, ignoring all the negative feedback it got? They expect those same people to buy the next one after this abomination of a "horror" game? Yeah good luck. Some friends of mine - who were HUUUUUGE RE fans - gave up on the series altogether after the mediocre 5th and now the horrible 6th game.

DMC: yeah uhm... after ignoring the requests of the community - you know, the guys who actually brought the IP to where it was - they give this final "Fuck you" in form of DLC to them... "You want old Dante? Sure pay us more and at least he will look a little more like him. Happy?"

Another interesting thing is this Metacritic chart [http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-3/dmc-devil-may-cry] on favorable and unfavorable reviews of the game.
So the average User score is 4.1 out of 10 with 130 negative reviews out of a total of 224 reviews. At the same time, no negative review from a 'video game critic' can be found... coincidence?
Paying the sites and critics to give good scores to a bad and - let's be honest - hated iteration of a game won't make it good. And it ain't smart marketing either.

Oh and there was Marvel vs Capcom 3 and Street Fighter X Tekken with the whole On-Disc DLC affair. Need I say more?

Obviously, Capcom doesn't really care about their customers. Otherwise they'd not charge you for something that's on the disc which you bought already. They wouldn't stop the story of one of the most recognizable characters in video game history on a whim. And they would actually listen to any customer feedback and act on it. I mean hate on SquareEnix all you want: at least they listen to the community and tried to make the sequel to FF13 meet their taste. And they are doing the same with FF13 - Lightning Returns bringing the whole thing to an open discussion even!

This is much more than I can say about Capcom. They don't give a shit about you or me. It is a company which means they want to make money - which is FINE. But you can also make money without pissing your customers off or scamming them.
Just saying.

 

[C117]

Ninja Theory, you crafty bastards. This was your plan all along, wasn't it? To create a new Dante just so we would hate him, and then bring back the old one via DLC. Very clever indeed.

But I don't want the DMC3 Dante. I want the DMC4 Dante. Basically everything that DMC3 Dante is, but with broader shoulders and a beard, thus making him about 30% cooler (especially when compared to Nero and this new Dante...).

 

[ninjapenguin1414]

I'm not even sure I care anymore, this DLC is really par for the course now with capcom. Although everything in the game "gameplay" wise doesn't seem that bad just a lot slower than all previous games. Also anyone who says this game is worse than DMC2 hasn't played that game in awhile cause its just terrible and shouldn't be called a game.

 

[Ninmecu]

...Does anyone else miss the times where things like this were considered neat little "unlockables" for being particularly good(or patient) at game X Y Z? Instead of cop out cash outs? Ahhh, the good old days.

 

[anthony87]

Another interesting thing is this Metacritic chart [http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-3/dmc-devil-may-cry] on favorable and unfavorable reviews of the game.
So the average User score is 4.1 out of 10 with 130 negative reviews out of a total of 224 reviews. At the same time, no negative review from a 'video game critic' can be found... coincidence?
Paying the sites and critics to give good scores to a bad and - let's be honest - hated iteration of a game won't make it good. And it ain't smart marketing either.

That's probably because the average user is a whiny little cry baby who doesn't like change. Besides, what does the user score have to do with anything besides reinforce the idea of "If other people don't like it then I don't like it!"

Not that I disagree with anything else you said but yeah, Metacritic user scores aren't worth shit as far as I'm concerned.

 

[Mr.Squishy]

Oy vey, capcom gonna troll like a *****.
And what the fuck is this saying about video games and the industry these days?
Fucking hell, why don't we just reboot goddamn borderlands or Mass Effect. Hell, let's reboot dead space!
Yes, I mad.

 

[PunkRex]

Not sure how to feel here... I hate Capcom for scummy buisness practices BUT this is what the fans wanted... I don't like the fans because they're a bunch of winging cry babies BUT I can't say the new Dante holds up when compared to the old one, even if he is a twat... I JUST DON'T KNOW WHO TO HATE!!!

 

[PunkRex]

at this point, how Dante looks is like 4th or 5th on the list of 'things wrong with this game'

AND HOW!!!

Sorry, the above quote is pretty much perfect. This game would have be totally redesigned to be anywhere near close to as good as the third game and ninja theory just doesn't have the talent.

This game isn't even a step up from DMC 2, the worst one.

Oh come on! I know DMC2's dark tone was kind of silly and basically copy pasted the same five hour game twice but at least it had some varied design choices.
Unlike 4 which just took the same two hour game and copy pasted it twice. 4 had a solid set of machanics but it was boring. Nero was grating as f*ck and don't even get me started on that bloody board game thing. Im not saying the design choices of 2 were perfect but at least they were interesting.

 

[The Wooster]

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.

This is so wrong it physically hurts to quote it. I mean, just look at that sentence. Jesus.

There's a common misconception that "the fans" have a coherent, singular voice. They do not. There is a common misconception that change is bad. It is not. There is a common misconception that vocal minorities speak for the entire fanbase. They do not. There is a common misconception that reviewers should have to kowtow to the needs of a highly select group of fans who consider themselves the "core audience." They should not.

A review who capitulates to the whims of a special interest group is shit as his or her job, no matter what label that interest group might choose.

DmC's radical departure from previous games should factor into reviews, but to approach change as an inherently negative force is not only mind-numbingly stupid, it's damaging to the medium as a whole. That line of thinking is what leads to sequels churned out on a yearly basis, characters that never grow or learn and the money-hungry stagnation of the AAA sector of the industry.

Edit: And oh sweet baby Jesus on a bicycle made of dicks, people are quoting Metacritic as if it's a source rather than a breeding ground for morons looking to vent their anger. Try subtracting every review of 0 from that score (and don't come at me with the whole subjectivity argument; the fact DmC works is enough to put it above several titles, meaning a score of absolute zero is ludicrous) and you might have something that resembles a coherent public opinion.

 

[antipunt]

thank god capcom isnt the biggest troll of all those publisher...

in other news:
crapcom

LOLOL OLO. That gif is the perfection encapsulation about how I feel.

 

[Khrowley]

So Capcom pisses off fans by changing Dante to look like an even bigger douchebag than Nathan Drake and now they're saying fans can have the "old Dante" back and have a piece of mind as well.....by paying for it........I guess having the buy the "True Ending" for Asura's Wrath wasn't a big enough FUCK YOU!!!! to the fans.

 

[bug_of_war]

I wrote another lengthy post on the subject, but I wanted to respond to a few things you said here specifically.

I'd point out that if they want to cater to a crowd of people who might never have played the original, and who have differant sensibilities, then they should create a new, similar, IP. There being 10 to 15 year olds out there who never played the original is irrelevent. They slapped a "Devil May Cry" name on it, and that right there is saying it's part of an existing series/franchise, and intended to get the people who like that franchise and want more of it, and a continuation of the character and world they know and love, as they know and love them.

Oh don't get me wrong, I think the whole catering to new people is annoying as hell, but I can understand and accept that when you're making a game you want to try and maximize the amount of people purchasing the product. For example, while they probably could have made their money back and kept faithful to the original franchise, they made the decision to change the story and try and deliever something different to pull in gamers out there who were like, "I didn't like the old games"/"I never played them, so it'd be awkward to jump in now". Yeah, it screws with the original fans, and I REALLY hate new Dante and Virgil and their background. This being said though, I see why they made it so, it was a good business decison.

To be brutally honest the entire alternate universe thing is no excuse when they are using the Devil May Cry label straight out. When someone wants to do a new version of something that is already/still popular enough for the label to have meaning, and create an alternate version of it, the correct way to do that is to make a point of continueing the original series/continuity, and creating a clearly labeled alternative universe which is released parallel, but not in excess of it.

An example of this would be how Marvel Comics foolishly goes through phases where they fail to really "get" their own business and audience (seriously I swear they must be lobotomized at the executive level at times) and thinks that somehow rebooting their characters with a more modern sensibility and origins will bring in more readers. Marvel (and DC to a lesser extent, simply because it scored more epic fail points here) has at least generally had the brains until fairly recently to keep this kind of thing to an alternative universe like say their "Ultimate Universe" and leave their main continuity which people actually want to read about more or less unchanged, and ensuring it's status quo is restored to the baseline people want.

What Marvel seems to fail to get is that their increasing greed with comics prices has made actual comic books unapproachable to a new, young, audience to begin with. That barrier, more than the subject matter has been their downfall. The price per book, combine with their once clever gimmick of scattering stories between sometimes dozens of differant titles to get people to buy them all means that comics are a serious investment of cash to follow, more expensive than many other forms of entertainment, just keeping track of say "Spider Man" or the "X-men" would probably set you back more many months than a video game. Kids and young folks generally don't have a lot of money, despite the perceptions some companies have of them being "huge piles of expendable summer/part time job income with no responsibilities", and what money they do make/get from parents is also divided among other things since comics got to the point where if you were to seriously follow them the way marvel set it up, that's all you'd do. The end result being that the main Marvel consumer IS that 40 year old neckbeard that yells on their forums every day, because really nobody else could up in the time and money to keep them afloat... and ironically that's the guy they keep trying to stab in the back, while wondering why their reboots and such fail or get so much criticism.

I could not agree with you more about the 40 year old neckbeard part you just wrote. Anyways...Yeah they should have firmly established that it was an alternate universe, yes they should have been more careful in slaping the "Devil May Cry" title on the game when they changed some huge parts of the game. And yes, Marvel and DC seem to love creating convoluted, contrived, hard to follow comic series. I've personally never been into comics because no one in Australia really is...well accept for a niche group. So I agree with you, I really do, it is wrong what they did, but as a business they have to do shit like this sometimes. It's not fair to the audience, and it's not just for the original incarnation of the characters, but in the end, the only way a company can continue making money is by expanding their products so as that they can make more money to make the next game. It's that simple, and you can see it happen in all areas of business like you just pointed out with the comic book shenanigans.

This applies to things like "Devil May Cry" because at the end of the day that liscence has value because of the guys who bought the original games, and played them enough, investing enough energy due to spin offs, fan fics, fan sites, etc... to keep them alive. That's the guys to which the "Devil May Cry" label has value. To that 10 or 15 year old who is ignorant of this it having that label it doesn't matter, but to the audience that made it and is the target that is going to loyally and consistantly support it even after those kiddies move on to the next thing, it DOES matter. When you stab core customers in the back you shouldn't expect a positive response, and you shouldn't expect people to accept an IP as being the same thing just because of the name, it's what the name represents that goes with it.

In the final equasion the 10 to 15 year old doesn't care if it's Devil May Cry or not, because they have no attachment to it. Attaching it to a product directed at them is thus pointless, and does nothing but irritated followers of the IP and arguably destroy the entire product as a result since it simply cannot BE a good Devil May Cry product, it will never be anything more than a knockoff no matter how high a quality a knockoff it might be, it still deserves the scorn of a knockoff pretending to be something it's not.

From memory I don't believe I ever said that the company should expect good reviews based core consumer response. What I believe I was trying to say was that while the company should have respected the franchise and it's consumers, they obviously wanted to expand upon the consumer market, and whil you're right that those whom never played a DMC game and have no investment, that doesn't mean that they can't gain an investment in the series. So, rebooting the series and changing things from the original series, while it pisses off fans of the original, it gives newcomers a chance to experience what a Devil May Cry game is like (albeit, a really terrible version of DMC in my opinion). Again, this comes down to a company trying to make the most profit they can and that is not a bad thing. Seeing as how they are not an indie developer team, they HAVE to make a minimum profit to stay alive. So while I don't like what they did, and I know they're not getting my money, I'm sure there are people out there whom enjoy it.

As the series is defined Dante is not an Emo (as you put it), having him as an "extreme" yet Emo guy running around with sentiments that echo the Obama "Yes We Can" youth rallies (which was never as popular as many think, still nearlt 50-50 polarized) or whatever the politics you mention are (but I'm making an educated guess based on stereotypes) just isn't Dante. The whole character was supposed to be a flashy swahsbuckler, with a devil may care attitude, and little or no reverance for anyone or anything no matter how powerful it was, he had a dark past, and some angst ridden moments, but that was the exception to the rule. Even the name "Devil May Cry" was all about the reaction he got from people, specially powerful beings by basically being a arrogant jerk in the face of increasingly insane situations that nobody should be able to act that way in. Heck, I'm not a huge fan, but when I played it 90% of the point seemed to be how crazy you could be in response to increasingly crazy odds with huge combo counters building up and feeding your ego by telling you how stylist you are, all the while Dante seems like he's having the time of his life while hacking demons and unspeakable monsters to death. He dresses the way he does because he's supposed to be a somewhat flamboyant twit (or comes accross that way) even if he's very much a good guy, "WTF is he wearing" is part of the point since he pulls it off when nobody should be able to, and that's what makes it awesome to the fans. In short Dante is the exact opposite of everything that this game has turned him into by reports, and as such it fails as a "Devil May Cry" product and should be reviewed that way. You can't have "Devil May Cry" without Dante, and this is *not* Dante as defined by the IP the label goes with.

I never said that original Dante was an emo, I said that the new dante is an angst ridden emo. Old Dante was a badass who was chilled out about most things and would go up against insane odds with pizza in one hand and a smile on his face. So yeah, I agree with you that new Dante is only Dante in name and nothing else. I also agree that the new game has zero resemblance to the old game, I'm not saying fans should sit back and take in this new Dante. I love the old games, I aint buying this one. What I am saying though is that I understand why they changed it, and it makes sense. I don't like that they changed it, and they probably would have made more money just sticking to the original, but they wanted to bring in a new audience, and there's nothing wrong with that. The problem wasn't the plan (the plan wasn't changing Dante, it was brining in new audience), the problem was the execution (Changing everything). Think about how Team Fortress 2 was made Free 2 Play, that was to increase the community, and it worked, I never wanted to play TF2 until I could play it for free. Soon afterwards I ended up spending 10 dollars in game for some keys for boxes and to unlock the full version. THAT was a well executed plan, Ninja Theory's however was horribly done, and hopefully they'll learn from it.