As I mentioned, there is a downside to Dante’s mechanics and they’re easy to identify if you’re paying attention to the game balance. Dante seems like an afterthought in that the enemies aren’t really designed to account for his move set. Oh, they can present a challenge at the right difficulty level, but I got the sense, both back in 2008 and now with the Special Edition, that these enemies had to be modified after the fact to pose any threat to Dante, who is far more versatile and dynamic than Nero. As a result, enemies generally seem ill equipped to deal with you once you’ve got all the weapons and unlocked all the skills at Dante’s disposal. That said, being able to play this version of Dante in this setting against these enemies is still a lot of fun and those looking to push their style to the absolute limit have a great deal to play with here. It’s never been easier to show off as Dante and that’s an essential part of the character. Don’t take this to mean that playing as Dante is ‘easy mode’. On the harder difficulties, it can still be quite challenging. But it’s not outside the realm of possibility that he was added in only after it was learned by vocal fans that he wasn’t the main character of the story and many feared he wouldn’t even be playable. Lending even more credence to that tin foil hat theory is that Dante only has one original stage in the entire game. The rest are all retreads of Nero’s levels, played in reverse with some slight changes to make it feel a little different.
Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition offers new enhancements that are sure to interest long time fans. The game is rendered in 1080p and plays at a smooth 60 fps and I saw no significant performance issues on the PS4 build over 35 hours of play (and still going). Overall, the visual upgrades are great and the game looks fantastic. There was a strange blur effect that distorted background and foreground elements during some of the cutscenes, but it always seemed to correct itself in a few seconds. Still, my eyes kept having to readjust to these graphic corrections and they were frequently distracting when the game was telling its story.
And speaking of the plot, I wouldn’t call it terrible but I’d definitely say that it needed some further exposition to give us a greater understanding of where the characters are and what their motivations might be. My ability to intuit events when the game asked me to was constantly under siege from the badly-written and, at times, badly-acted dialogue and plot points. By no means does Devil May Cry represent some narrative bastion of video game storytelling. I wasn’t expecting The Last of Us when it came to narrative. I will posit, however, that the stories in the first and third games of the series made sense without me having to stop to think about them at any point. Here, characters do things that are supposed to make sense but are poorly presented and only serve to further obfuscate events. For example, when Agnus is standing at Sanctus’ bedside in one scene and summoning demons through science in another, there is no scene that explains whether or not they were even aware of each other’s ambitions. Were they helping each other? Was one of them taking advantage of the other? It’s never really clear to me just from the sequences in the game. Even reading the character bios didn’t help me much and I had to really process events just to try to make sense of them. It’s a good thing the characters are so likeable, cheesy dialogue and all, because they were frequently my port in the storm of this incoherent plot.
The most significant difference between this version of Devil May Cry 4 and the original release is the inclusion of Lady, Trish and Vergil as playable characters. You can choose who you want to play as when you get into the game’s menu, and you have three different options: Nero/Dante (the original campaign), Vergil or Lady/Trish. To play Dante or Trish in the story mode, you have to play through the Nero (for Dante) and Lady (for Trish) chapters first. Don’t try making sense of Vergil’s presence in Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition. Canonically, he’s dead (or as dead as anyone can be in this series). Lady and Trish, on the other hand, easily fit into the main campaign and with some revision to their own storylines and a couple of boss battles, it’s easy to envision them doing their thing behind the scenes while Nero and Dante hog the spotlight. I’m a little let down that Trish’s chapters don’t show how she infiltrated the Order, as I feel adding some meat to the story from her point of view could have been used to flesh out some of the more convoluted plot elements. But being what it is, I still accept now, as I did back in 2008, that there is some Devil May Cry bible, even if it’s only in the writer’s head, where all of this makes any kind of sense.
As for the new characters and how they play, let’s just say that if Devil May Cry 4’s Nero-centric combat was creeping into Dante’s gameplay, it’s spilling over into Vergil’s, Lady’s and Trish’s. Vergil plays similar to how he did in Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition with some fun new maneuvers thrown in, but his speed, mobility and the sheer power of Yamato make him all but a god in Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition. The ambitious young warrior may ‘need more power’, but you wouldn’t know it from playing him here. Trish is mostly recycled elements from Dante’s and Vergil’s Gilgamesh/Beowulf techniques with a little lightning thrown in for good measure, and she wields the sword of Sparda to perform some interesting combination attacks. I’d say that with Vergil, you need to crank the difficulty and Trish won’t have much of a learning curve to experienced players. Lady, on the other hand, is the most interesting addition to the cast because her weapons of choice are firearms and the combat engine has a heavy melee bias. Her melee attacks are slow and make her vulnerable due to long recovery times, but learning how to properly charge up her firearms and employ her grapple line makes her quite formidable in this game. Most enemies don’t have projectile attacks and good players will find her exploitable since what the other characters have in melee efficiency, she makes up for with massive ranged damage.
The music of Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition is the same as it was in the original version, which is fine because this game has a magnificent soundtrack that perfectly fits and evokes a sense of the series’ rebellious attitude and lighthearted anarchy, especially with the signature track “The Time Has Come” as well as the church bell chimes of both the mission starting screens and traversing environments between battles.
The enemies are vivid and wildly imaginative, evoking the spirit of a warped circus touched by the abyss and unleashed on an unsuspecting world. This is what enemies in Devil May Cry should look and feel like, and the game’s irrepressible style and mood are very well expressed through them to give it its own unique identity that nobody can copy without being derivative. The environments are still among the best in all of the action adventure genre. One thing Devil May Cry has done better than any other series of its type is place the player in unique settings with obstacles one must fight around and factor into their combat approach. Barriers, constricted passages, obstructions and different elevations give players both more and less to work with at the same time. It requires some creativity and skill with the combat engine to deal with these factors, and it gives the level design an organic nuance as a result.
Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition is the ultimate version of this game, so it’s fitting that both its strengths and weaknesses are more noticeable than ever before. Everything that was good has stayed good or gotten better and everything that was limited or unsatisfactory has been exposed all the more because of the addition of the new characters. The mechanics still remains engaging despite the enemies being balanced mostly for Nero and on the highest difficulty settings, it’s an enthralling challenge no matter who you choose to play as. There are a ton of goodies to unlock, from new costumes to ‘super’ versions of Dante, Vergil and Nero to art galleries and title screens that are randomly generated every time you load the game up. The controls are still amazing, the game looks great and anyone looking to perfect their technique could spend hours honing it to a keen edge with either old characters or new and find a lot to play with here. I’d recommend this game to any fan of the series in a heartbeat, and at a 25 dollar entry point I think there’s enough there to keep those who enjoy the hack-and-slash genre occupied for a good long time. It was underrated back in 2008, so I’m giving it the rating it deserved and still deserves.
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Review Copy Purchased by Author
