Devil May Cry 2

So in my Devil May Cry 3 review I did say that I will find and review Devil May Cry 2 to see why it was so discarded and ignored by everyone who has played or even made it.  So I found it and played it, and you know what, those people are right to ignore Devil May Cry 2.  I'm sure that this was all a good idea at the time to make some changes to the game play and all but the end result is something as non-Devil May Cry as your mind is able to imagine.  So without further delay, unfortunately, let's dig into Devil May Cry 2.

So some time after the first Devil May Cry game Dante has gone silent.  By some reasons that I can't comprehend, he busts in a museum and helps some chick named Lucia kills some things and get a coin.  Lucia throws a knife at a map on some island which equates to Dante going there.  He's then told that he has to destroy Arius, a head of some powerful corporation, who has both made the island a demon paradise and is out to summon the Demon King Argosax.  So Dante goes off to destroy it in the big city...which is part of the island.  Meanwhile, Lucia is off running around getting Arcanas so Arius will be unable to summon Argosax.

So did the plot resembled anything coherent?  If it does it's only for the fact that I looked the plot up at Wikipedia to try to make some sense out of it.  The plot may be one of the worst-written games in recent memory because it leaves out such fancy things like details and transitions.  The game starts with a cut scene at a museum with no explanation, then to the island with little explanation.  Then you get to the metropolis with no explanation to a factory with NEGATIVE explanation and then back to metropolis with no explanation finally going to the Demon World with actual explanation!  So yeah...I know action games have a weak plot and God knows that the first Devil May Cry had a weak plot but at least it told a complete story where you knew where you were going and why.  The first level is Dante going to some house and when you get there, IT EXPLODES!  I had no idea why I had to go to that house, what was so important and why it suddenly exploded when I got there!  And this happens a lot dammit!

Another fatal flaw is that this game is way too easy.  I know what I said about the first Devil May Cry being extremely unfair but this is just as bad.  If there's no challenge, it's boring and believe me it is so mind-numbingly boring that it sucks the will for you to do anything else that might result in escaping from this game.  I can count all the times that I died on one hand where in the first and third game my death count was in the double digits easy.  The worst thing about all this is that this game is still horribly cheap.  A few bosses delight in knocking you down and making sure they stay down.  If it wasn't for the fact that there attacks are weak and they will mess up providing you an opening it would be very annoying to play this game.

The saddest thing in this game is not the lack of challenge or the incomprehensible storyline, it's the complete Badass Decay of Dante.  The decay is pretty simple and drastic, there's no trash-talking to the bosses.  In fact, he doesn't say a damn word to any boss except the Big Bad.  This is even worse when Phantom, the first boss from the first Devil May Cry shows up to avenge his butt-whoopin' you gave him last time.  You would expect some sort of trash-talking, one-liners or even a damn acknowledgment but nope, we have nothing.  When Dante is even bothered to actually say words there's no personality in them at all, he seems as bored as the player.  But the biggest horror is that not once does Dante says "Jackpot", he had the perfect opportunity to do so at the end of the game but remains silent which is stupid!  There's only one line in the whole game where the sparkle of old Dante shines when he says "King?  Here's your crown."  The sad thing is that at the end of Dante's story leaves a pretty good send-off to Dante as he goes and recreates his father's legacy.

The big gimmick of this is that there's a second disc in which you play as Lucia in her own separate story and by separate I mean only 45% different from Dante's story!  And it's even worse than Dante's story since Lucia is even more boring than Dante and her story decides to up the dramatics but in So Bad it's Horrible ways(compare that to Devil May Cry 1's So Bad it's Good dramatics).  Then this story also demands swimming and it's even worse than the first game's swimming mechanics.  It's in 3rd-person view instead of the first's 1st-person view making swimming a horrible experience.  Then it has the gall to always equip bombs as your secondary weapons instead of the bow gun necessary to kill everything underwater and you have to re-equip it every time you go swimming.  It does answer a few questions about the story though but not enough to make a coherent story.

This game is even worse the first game!  This game does looks great and it has responsive controls but the story makes no sense, Dante's a boring character and playing as Lucia is a horrible attempt at replay value.  It's a wonder that there are two more Devil May Cry games out considering how horrible this game is and how overrated the first one is but at least Devil May Cry 3 is a great game.  I haven't played the fourth game yet due to me not having a PS3 or an XBOX360 so if anyone wants to donate either of those consoles and the fourth game then contact me.

3/10