Zero Punctuation: Devil May Cry 4

[Logie--bear]

I cracked up when I heard the intro song, brilliant choice lol

 

[Mstrswrd]

As always, great review. He does point out some annoying aspects, like the camera, but that Torture chamber jumping section isn't that bad, even on Dante must Die mode. Just don't touch control stick, and it's fine. I'll also admit that Nero was just a bit Emo at time (And he was far cooler then Raiden, though Raiden isn't that bad). Either way, still a greta review.

 

[NeoSpriggan]

Being a fan, and at the same time sane, i cant really help but agree on most points, the ones i dont being the ones that are a part of the series and make it fun. But the retreading of everything i already did just annoys me, the adding of a "replacement" when Dante is only 29, the fact that they took Dante's moves and tried to "mix it up a bit" by cocking them up and made him react so fast that my fingers got cramps stringing combos together. But my biggest gripe of all is its too dam EASY! Devil Hunter is what Human mode should be, its an insult to play this after DMC3, where i fought with every ounce of my being to prove my gaming caliber, only to be thrown some twats "idea" of what the next game should be. I would have settled for a half assed story with just Dante and the difficulty double on what i would call the easy mode.

And as for Nero, why did they make the dam arm of his so ridiculously effective? Every move it does knocks off insane amounts of health on otherwise fairly tough enemies. The lack of new weapons is sad too, the gloves and boots are shoddy copies of BeoWulf's ones, the weird dart throwing shoulder majigger (i cant even be bothered to remember its name) is barely useful, Pandora is cool but takes too long to transform and leaves you vulnerable.

Sorry if i annoyed anyone with this rant, i was just so disappointed in it, especially since it took so long to come out, they had more than enough time to design more levels and weapons!

 

[zombielifecoach]

The difference is, Nero's a "p*ssy", Dante's a "c*nt"! Lol. Great review!

 

[Caer]

Personally I'm currently playing DMC 3, never having played a DMC game before. The gameplay is okay, but the camera is making me nuts. I dislike the idea of a game being hard because I can't see when an enemy is about to bolt at me so I have to jump constantly to be safe

Just a tip: most enemies won't start attacks if they are outside of the screen, meaning you don't have to worry much about those you can't see. Also, every attack in the game is preceded by som kind of audio clip (a growl or suchlike). Once you get used to that you can dodge pretty much everything by jumping or rolling when you hear the sound.

More on topic, I love DMC4 but the dice game is stupid as hell. Still, love how Dante just cuts it in half and keeps on walking when he gets to it. It's just what you would have liked to do the first time around. =)

 

[tsukihanyou]

I will admit that the DMC series as a whole isn't exactly Shakespeare (especially DMC2...), but I still like DMC4. I liked 3 too, but I never finished it, just because I couldn't get past a boss because I was the genius that decided to play the damn game on a hard setting. -.- But, yeah, I really enjoy DMC4. It's fun to play and some of the cut scenes are funny as hell. (Lucifer, anyone?). Not only that, any game where I pretty much get to play Vash (from Trigun. Nero and him have the same voice actor) is an instant win. XD

 

[stacia123]

A bit of a problem with women this week, I take it? Good, good.

 

[X nosgoth X]

Someone should explain this Advent Children reference to me. I've watched the movie several times and all I can think of when he mentions the motorbike is the fact that Nero can rev up the handle of his sword.

 

[SomeBritishDude]

Great review and all but seriously, saying the amber spy glass is bad seriously isn't cool. Take the mic out of the movie when it comes out *shudder*

 

[myopiczeal]

Perhaps a transcript?

It would be very narrow-minded of me to say that all Japanese cartoons suck. That's like saying that all glam rockers are paedophiles. The fact is that there's bound to be at least one thing to your taste in all the different varieties of anime, whether you're into samurais, or giant robots, or serials about awkward young men very pointedly not having sex with a selection of eager women, but it would be fair to say that there are certain popular trends in anime that tend to set off my cynicism alert. I would list them, but thanks to Capcom, I don't have to. Now I can just point at Devil May Cry 4 and say, "Pretty much that."

Now don't get me wrong. I'm not some spectacle-adjusting model railroad enthusiast who cannot function without absolute realism at all times. Leaping eight times your own height, swinging swords the size of small cars around, and deflecting bullets with other bullets are all fine with me, as long as it's entertaining. I'll even accept that getting a seven-foot katana jammed through your torso is totally survivable, if a bit homoerotic. The game starts widdling on my chips, however, when it populates itself with smug, self-satisfied dick-spurts and starts neglecting gameplay because it's too busy letting them swagger invincibly about until I want to flatten their androgynous faces with a kayak paddle.

Allow me to expand. The abominably lengthy intro cinematic contained a total of three high-energy bombastic fight sequences, and my entire contribution to them was to sit on my arse taking a drink every time someone defied the laws of physics. There was no reason why these fights couldn't have been playable, but the game seemed afraid that I would cramp its style. It's like Devil May Cry 4 invited me out to a bar, then left me alone in the corner, nursing a Strongbow, while he busily tore up the dance floor with a giggling society girl. Eventually she was called away by her cackling friends, and he came back to our table with fresh drinks and apologies, but I won't forget this betrayal, oh no.

Capcom seemed to be pulling the Hideo Kojima gambit with this installment, wherein the beloved established character is supplanted for most of the game by a whinging pubescent successor whose motivation can best be summarized as, "pussy-whipped". It seems, however, that after all the hilarious fanboy rage that Metal Gear Solid 2 ate, that Capcom are trying to pull the wool over our eyes by making the new character, Nero, look, dress, behave, and speak exactly the same as the old character, Dante. If you're having trouble telling them apart, remember that Nero is a pussy, while Dante is more of a ****. Anyway, if you want to know the story, Nero spends most of the game chasing his cardboard-cutout love interest, while Dante concentrates on wearing too many belts.

Devil May Cry 4 is a game that really makes me want to hate it, since everything about it is as aggressively juvenile as a 12-year-old on Pixy Stix, but there's really nothing wrong with the core combat gameplay; it's as obsessed with style as everything else, but building combos is fairly intuitive, and if you seriously don't find something entertaining about launching an enemy into the air, and keeping him afloat with a cushion of bullets, then it's time to reassess your standards. But the lone shiny gold star I stick on for the combat is almost immediately torn off for some truly obnoxious level design. Jumping puzzles, fine. Timed jumping puzzles, fair enough. Timed jumping puzzles with fixed cameras, now we've dropped into the ocean of shittiness. But then they hit us with a timed jumping puzzle with a fixed camera where enemies spawn in every time you fail, and now the ocean of shittiness has closed in over our heads with no rescue boat in sight.

Breathlessly intense punch-ups aside, Devil May Cry 4 strikes me as a rather lazy game. Several moments come across as artificially lengthened, like what my spam mail seems to think I should be. Take the recurring board game segment. There are certain rooms throughout the game which, for some demented reason, you're not allowed to leave until you've thrown a big spiky dice a sufficient amount of times to make a big representation of yourself move across a bunch of squares. There's only one path, so there's bugger-all strategy involved; it's just pointless delays, like a hallway full of balloons. After the first time it happened, I assumed it was just some idea that the lead designer's girlfriend had had, that he'd agreed to put in for the sake of his sex life, and we'd never see it again, but then for the entire last hour or so of gameplay, it came back, bigger and more of an embuggerance than ever. This led me to deduce that the developers genuinely thought that it wasn't terrible game design, and that, in turn, led me to deduce that the developers were all pillocks.

Not that there was any shortage of evidence to that effect. Virtually the entire midpoint onwards consists of revisiting all the previous levels in reverse order. This was a bad idea in Silent Hill 4, and time has not sweetened it. Considering how short the game is anyway, I can't help wondering if this is some kind of cry for help. "Please," go the Devil May Cry team, "please stop buying these games so we can do something else. We have totally run out of ideas. I spent the last six months rendering the glisten playing off the greasy exposed breasts of some athletic hip-cocking slut, and now I want to kill myself."

Let's face uncomfortable facts, shall we? No series on any form of media has ever still been good after being shaken down for sequels, with the possible exception of the Back to the Future movies. Devil May Cry 4 is the agonized grackle squawk of a series being put through the wringer, utterly submitted now to the fanboys and the weird girls who write erotic crossover fan fiction and smell like old meat. The combat is all I can recommend, but it's hardly worth buying for that. You could probably replicate it by putting a wasp next to a spider, playing some Slipknot in the background, and pouring red and green Gummi Bears on whoever wins.

 

[tiredinnuendo]

What bothered me most about DMC4 is that every single time Dante spoke, he did this stupid flippant "Heh!" laugh that got old after the first time.

And also, the existence of Nero in general bugged the hell out of me.

- J

 

[Zera]

If there is one thing I cant stand, is people wailing on games they didnt actually play. So to the half of you on this board, shut up you have no right to poke at the game.

I however can since i have boughten, played and beaten it. Now I say its not terrible, but it wasnt worth my money. Though he had the right idea on all the faults, the only thing I would slightly disagree is the cheesy lines and cutscenes. They are like this because well thats how DMC is. Its like faulting Mario Kart for having karts in it. But overall this has to be one of his best reviews.

I also agree with his anime comment, there is a series for everyone really, you just have to look for it. Hmmm I wonder if he likes any anime series....

 

[Jiki]

Same, it's one of my favourite books, and definitely the best in the series.

I have a weird feeling like we were reading different books. 1. book was just magnificent and even the 2. one as enjoyable as the first one, but even his writing style seemed boring in the 3. The ending which should have been much shorter took like 100 pages where they basically cried and made some underage vision of love. I figure the author ran out of stuff to write about so he thought "hey, why not end it all in a REAL drama and use like half the book to really stump it into the reader and then call it a day". Like getting paid per word. Total disappointment.

 

[BurnOutBrighter]

Great review! I love the combat system which is heaps of fun to master, and I love the over-the-top cutscenes, although the story is nowhere near as good as DMC3, and is very jumbled because there's no exposition; characters and locations suddenly exist, you're not introduced to them, you're just thrown in and expected to believe everything you see.

The worst part is definitely the repetitive backtracking and torturous, punish-you-for-falling-into-a-bit level design (they didn't call it the torture room for nothing, did they?). This plagued DMC3 as well, but not to the same extent.

 

[X nosgoth X]

Jiki, are you German? I don't mean anything by that, but the way you put a period behind numbers instead of saying 1st, 2nd and 3rd is something German grammar also does.

And I agree with the cheesy lines and cutscenes. That's what makes DMC what it is, I guess. The way Nero stopped that fire demon's sword with the tip of his own sword was ridiculous, but awesome in a DMC way.

Aside from that, I didn't finish the game. I am now in control of Dante and for some reason I just can't make myself play this game anymore. Maybe after I finish Lost Odyssey...

 

[Veev]

Phillip Pullman NOOOOOOOO!

The Amber Spyglass wan't that bad was it? A little confusing....maybe.

The recent movie mucked up the Northern Lights though something firece.

 

[Murray09]

Great laughs!

 

[k_rafftry]

Fantastic review, I think I'll get this. Also:

...with ony portal and psyconaughts as accseptions its a good game if ...

Usually I just ignore spelling mistakes when I'm trawling through the comments, but I really couldn't let this one go. I swear, I actually registered just to point this out so here we go. What the hell! What age are you 4? Accseptions?? Where are you from, I want to write a letter to the education dept there.

But I'm getting a bit off topic, an excellent review (when are they not?) and I'm already waiting for next week's one

K

 

[mGoLos]

Fantastic review, Í will avoid that game. Beowulf is kind of fun though