I’ve only really played the first DMC game back in the day and I absolutely loved it. The first sort of action hack and slash game I played and fell in love with the aesthetic and the story, Dante was a character I thought had a great blend of serious story whilst also adding various elements of humour. Think I did start to play DMC2 but didn’t actually finish the game for one reason or another.
Coming through to DMC5 I was tempted to get back into the franchise and received the game for free after a purchase of a graphics card, stored the game away and didn’t touch it until recently. The game is stunning graphically with very smooth combat and reminded me so well of the original DMC game, got a taste that this game was a multi-character game like the original and I was excited to play through the story. The story began a little cheesy but I still held hope that I’d get to experience some seriousness along the way, after playing with Nero I got a feeling there were a lot of mechanics that were not explained well.
Trucked on with the game until I got to experience my first ‘other’ character, V. They decided to step away from the normal hack and slash here and have a character that was based around ranged attacks through the form of summons. Didn’t really land very well with me as the gameplay then just consisted of standing back and pressing 2 buttons in order to get the ‘SSS’ rank with little to no effort at all. This coupled with the ongoing cheesy storyline and the terrible if not awful characters and VO I was beginning to lose hope. Resting my remaining hope with getting to play with my beloved character Dante I carried on, once I got there I was getting more and more frustrated. The worst part about Dante was the replacement VO who didn’t sound like Dante at all! the voice was too young and just not what I remembered.
This all being said the combat was sort of enjoyable however the boss encounters were sort of repetitive. Each boss you encountered you sort of had to repeat the same encounter with the other characters and nothing really changed so you just ended up repeating the same mechanics over and over. All in all I’ll summarise the game as terrible and I couldn’t suggest playing it unless I guess you get it for free or something?!