Perhaps Reading Too Far In: Devils Never Cry

 Theme and Sincerity: Now in Electro-Metal Industrial Form!  

I’m going to be super real here for a minute, and not just in my usual performative sense, but just so we’re clear here: the Devil May Cry series was heavy influence on me in my teenage years. I don’t think I realized that until just now when I got the urge to write this. See, I used to be shy, bowlcutted, sorta just… soft. I got bullied a lot as a kid, and still to this day I have complexes about it- anxiety, depression, the sort of stuff that would be inadvisable to experience even as character building. Thing is, because I was soft, and because I was shy, and because I liked geeky things, I assumed this was my lot in life. After all, it’s what a lot of media depicted around my formative years- the nerd who was wrong to be nerd and right to be shamed for it, because you want to be the cool kid instead, dontcha?

Really, looking back, it’s kinda horrible to see how prevalent it was.

Anyway, it’s sort of amazing the sort of effect videogames can have on the trajectory of your life when you don’t see beating them as an actual accomplishment but, rather, the thing that inspired you to try harder and see how that works out. Case in point, with Devil May Cry, a game that stars a huge fuckin’ nerd, but who is nonetheless a huge fuckin’ nerd up until the point he starts murdering with his huge fuckin’ sword. I wanted to be Dante, so I actually tried. In doing that, I found that for one, I could actually say the things I thought to the face of the narrowassed, frosted-tip, mayonnaise Nelly in a denim FUBU leisure suit when he tried to make me in my Ramones shirt look like the asshole in the room. And for two, if he didn’t like the taste of it and wanted to take it out on me, he’d have to do it eye to eye. Dante didn’t take shit from gangly-ass marionettes made out of sailcloth and dried piss, and fuck if I was gonna either.

That’s my story. Never confuse beating Dark Souls with being hard, kids. That’s not how it works.

And here’s where you listen to the song.

Devil May Cry has the company of series like Sniper Elite and Saints Row as being the smartest dumb games ever. They are functional, polished games with solid core gameplay loops, which involve heavy, tightly implemented and flexible action, often featuring ludicrous or outright comical setpieces. Devs take the very simplest things the game needs to do, make sure they execute well and logically, and then polish them to as much of a mirror sheen as the game industry allows. And then, they play with the possibilities of them. Sniper Elite, as mentioned before, allows for long distance realtime castration of Adolph Hitler. It also allows for domino shots through multiple enemies, bank shots off of hard surfaces into soft fascists, hell, even setting off grenades hanging off of enemy soldiers’ webbing by shooting them. Saints Row, an open world game that started life as a miserable, edgier GTA, has blossomed into an open world game where you play as a superpowered President of the US that battles Aliens in a virtual world. You also can enlist the help of Keith David and Rowdy Roddy Piper, because why wouldn’t you? I mean, if you could, wouldn’t you?

Devil May Cry is a game series where you play as a half-demon who is also a demon hunter named Dante. His tools of the trade are a pair of giant John Woo handguns and a zweihander inspired by the music of Rammstein. Both need to be reloaded equally as much, which is to say, never. One of many techniques present in the games is using your sword to golf swing weak enemies into the air and then hold them aloft with rapid gunfire until the laws of physics intercede and the enemy explodes, possibly from sheer goofiness. In this game, every environment could be an 80s metal album cover. In this game, the phrase “flock off, featherface” is a sick burn.

This game is dumb is fuck, and it’s made by people who cared that it was exactly so, with love and sincerity. Forget the stillborn DmC, made by people who didn’t understand what they had, and thought they could make it different and better. Maybe even forget 2, subtitled “Camera Has Issues” (or alternatively “Personality Takes Vacation”). But hell, what you’ve got left over, those three games? Shiny chrome on a hotrod, made with care, by hand. My personal favorite of the bunch is 3, for a number of reasons. It has my favorite arsenal of weapons in the series, it has boss fights and setpieces that reach heights of mayhem I don’t think the series has surpassed, and it has a giddily funny script that is like pro wrestling in its excess and unsubtlety. And like the rest of the solid entries in the series, it all runs and plays like maintained industrial machinery- the massive weight and complexity of everything actually going on disappears behind the hum and vibration of gameplay, boiling down to a satisfying feel of “yep, that’s working like it should.”

Then there’s the soundtrack. Devil May Cry has always played with an electro-industrial sound, frenetic, grungy, make-you-want-to-kill music. At big moments, it becomes orchestral- the world is ending, put your shoes on, we’re going to Church. But for the most part, it could be described as “Fear Factory yelling ‘fuck you’ at Lords of Acid from a moving car.” Music doing what the game demands of it, playing something you’d dance on a rusty floor to.

In 3, though, I think the music went in a little more ambitious, leaned in just a few degrees harder to the turn and took it noticeably sharper. It, like its game, is big and dumb and energetic. It, like its game, is also complex and multilayered, with many interesting moving parts to latch onto. No more is this more present than in its title track, Devils Never Cry, a version of which also becomes the combat theme after a certain point in the game. After a distant, mournful arrangement on organ with choir, the song proceeds into familiar territory as twittery electronic embellishments creep in over predatory baseline, chunky electric guitar and cringing male vocals rasping lyrics like Stepping forth a cure for soul's demise / Reap the tears of the victims cries. That Powerman 5000 10 piece with dipping sauce, right there.

Then it does something unexpected: it brings in clean vocals. Now, sorry if I’m spilling metal fan everywhere and all over you, here, but I gotta state my bias: when a song goes from harsh to clean vocals, I have a pavlovian response of “wait, hang on, now something’s going somewhere.” And that’s how I became a Strapping Young Lad Fan. It’s this gear shift that goes from big and xtreme (get those e’s out of here, they have no place) to distant, quiet, melancholic but also powerful that really nails home the spirit of DMC3, and the Devil May Cry series as a whole. Like your perspective of the game changes when you realize what the gameplay is doing versus what it’s visually and audibly presenting you, so does the song tip that same hand when it sheds its big dumb outer shell and lets its inner complexities take over.

And then they start singing a duet. And you get what this game is getting at, sincerely. That it flies the Big Dumb flag high and waves its proud, but that the developers and workers behind it know exactly what they’re doing. They’re not dumb- they have a plan, they have several plans, and they’re all good, and they all work together, despite sometimes not seeing like they would. This is a game where you can ride an enemy like a skateboard while shooting other enemies from its back; this is also a game that in realtime tracks how you move and fight, grading you based on your variety of moves, damage dealt and damage avoided, so it can thus award you bonus upgrade currency from killed enemies. Very dumb and very smart, at the same time, and only in their best ways, refined to the best condition circumstances allow. Am I talking about the game or the song?

Yes.