This Week In Retro: Devil May Cry (Patreon)

August 23, 2001: Slash Slash Boom

by Diamond Feit

I'd like to think I've been very open and upfront about my fandom for Resident Evil, especially given that the original game turned 25 years old this year. Besides occupying a constant mental loop of re-examining the events and mechanics of each game for the past six months, I've also watched all the CGI animation and challenged myself to play the entries in the series that I never got around to when they were new (Resident Evil 4, I will get to you, I promise).

Yet whether I've played them or not, I've been such a committed Resident Evil fan for so long that I'm pretty well aware of all the games by now, having at least watched full playthroughs of the first seven mainline games plus the three HD remakes of the original trilogy. Playing them and watching them are different experiences, of course, but I'm armed with enough knowledge that there's not a lot of surprises in store for me should I log on and enter Capcom's world of survival horror. That fact leaves my obsessed brain with only one recourse: It is time to learn more about the many games inspired by or derived directly from Resident Evil.

20 years ago this week, Capcom released one such title themselves. At first glance, there's little apparent connection between Devil May Cry and Resident Evil aside from the production credits, but behind the scenes the "stylish hard action" game would not exist without its survival horror senpai.

I think the very first thing the audience is supposed to believe when they see Devil May Cry is "goddamn this is cool." This starts with the protagonist Dante, who is front and center of all promotional material, including the front cover of the game as well as on the disc itself. With his long red coat, dual pistols, giant sword, and platinum mane of shaggy hair, he oozes late-90s style. Also, because Devil May Cry debuted in the year 2001, Dante absolutely knows that he is cool and this attitude informs every decision and action that he makes.

Looking at the specific combination of giant coat, double guns, longish hair, and big sword reminds me of a film from this same era, Ryuhei Kitamura's Versus. While everything produced in this time period drew a lot from The Matrix, Dante in Devil May Cry has so much in common with the hero of Versus I was sure the reference was implicit. However, I discovered that despite the film's year-2000 copyright, it did not premiere in Japanese theaters until September 2001, making any and all connections to Capcom's video game simply a sign of the times.

Of all the adjectives I would use to explain my fondness for Resident Evil, "cool" isn't in the top 20. The series excels at putting me in tense situation after tense situation, making me frightened about what could possibly lie behind the next door. Yet the heroes are nearly all cops who need a half-dozen carefully-aimed shots to take down even a single rotting zombie. In Resident Evil, the best strategy is to treat the monsters as obstacles instead of opponents and run past them whenever possible.

Devil May Cry rejects that premise outright. Even though Dante is more agile than anyone in Resident Evil, he's not interested in evading enemies. Dante's goal is to kill as many underworld creatures as he can as fast as he can, all while looking awesome. The game rates players on how well they can dispatch monsters; combos begin at "dull" but score enough hits and you'll earn an "awesome" or even "stylish" rating. That same scale is used to judge Dante's performance on each mission, rewarding "stylish" players with extra in-game currency, funds which can unlock more moves and allow Dante to execute even more elaborate combos. In the world of Devil May Cry, the cool get cooler.

Since these games have little in common, why do I insist on comparing Devil May Cry with Resident Evil? This isn't a sign of inflated Osaka pride or desperation to connect two unrelated video games. When Devil May Cry began, it was supposed to be a brand-new Resident Evil game for the PlayStation 2 according to director Hideki Kamiya. Kamiya wrote in 2001 that Shinji Mikami asked him to deliver such a title, and while he and his staff were excited at the prospect, he also yearned to create something new. The PlayStation 2 could handle more polygons than its predecessor, and that meant a new game didn't need to rely on pre-rendered backgrounds to present an illusion of 3D.

As the director of Resident Evil 2, Kamiya also knew exactly what I acknowledged above: Resident Evil wasn't "cool." In his words, "I wanted to present a stylish, heroic figure as a main character who fires guns at the enemy." Mikami respected his wishes, telling him "the theme this time doesn't have to be 'fear'" and the project was freed to go off in another direction.

Kamiya was looking for action and Resident Evil wasn't going to fit the bill, but he did find inspiration in a different Capcom survival horror game. Devil May Cry was in production at the same time as Onimusha, and while Kamiya wasn't a part of that development team, he could see what they were making. As he tells it in a recent Twitter thread, "each time Samanosuke slashed the enemies, they would fly into the air. I said 'yo this is fun!' but the response was 'yeah that's a bug we're trying to fix.'" Kamiya took that experience straight back to his team and told them what the Onimusha crew sought to correct, he wished to exploit. "I wanna chop enemies and send 'em flying!" is how I'd translate his exact request.

Even without hearing Kamiya's personal anecdotes, there's some vestigial Resident Evil DNA apparent in Devil May Cry as seen in its use of fixed camera angles. The environments are full 3D and Dante can explore them in ways no member of S.T.A.R.S. ever could, but he's just as trapped inside the frame as they were. However, Dante does not respond to so-called "tank" controls; he moves relative to the player's viewpoint. This means it's far easier to send Dante in different directions with a flick of the analog stick, but it's also easy to run through a camera change and get confused about which direction to push.

Knowing that Devil May Cry was born from other survival horror games, it is interesting to consider how its popularity led it to loop around and influence that genre. As Resident Evil turned more towards action, it would also embrace "cool" in ways it never did in the 90s. Just look at Resident Evil 5, where villain Albert Wesker makes a triumphant return dressed head to toe in black leather and moves like Neo. Wesker's superpowers are attributed to the magic of bio-technology, but even "normal" people in the Resident Evil universe are seen performing incredible feats with no narrative justification—it's just "cool."

20 years later, the line between "action" and "horror" is fuzzier than ever. Video games seek wider audiences and have no qualms with blending genres in order to appeal to the largest possible number of people. Scary games still need combat, shooting games can include stealth or spooky levels, and everything's at least a little bit of an RPG. Devil May Cry, Resident Evil, hell, even Final Fantasy games are now populated by impossibly hot people who can ignore the laws of physics at will.

The only thing that hasn't changed is Dante. Two decades later, people roll their eyes at turn-of-the-millenium fashion, attitudes, and music, yet a dude in a long coat with a sword and two guns? He absolutely still rocks, baby.

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.