Since I’ve talked about how much I hated DMC 2, I suppose I should talk about the other two. Until I bought the DMC Collection I’d never played a DMC game. It was one of those series I missed out on during the PS2 era (God of War was also another series). I’d regularly hear sh
it about how DMC was so balls to the wall hard & that it’s for ha
rdcore players & it’s comparable to Ninja Gaiden 2 etc., just making me less likely to check it out when the collection was announced. Then I eventually watched DSP play Shotgun May Cry & I liked the look of it. I eventually bought it early December & thankfully it was nowhere near as hard as people make it out to be (at least until DMD). Didn’t take me long to beat it either since I had some idea of what I was doing. I’ve always thought the secret missions thing was stupid though, especially the placement of some of them & completing the task of some requires you to know a certain method or have a specific move. Killing the 3 shadows wasn’t even that hard once you get their pattern down, did it on my first try (not bragging or anything, just saying). As I’ve said before, the combat is pretty wooden & stiff as well as there not being many combos, at least not ones the game will ever tell you. Sure, using the guns doesn’t net many orbs needed to upgrade but unless you’re
killing enemies with an A or S combo, the extra orbs are insignificant. Once I found out rolling after firing the grenade launcher negated the reload time, I was constantly doing it, not like I wasn’t gonna gain enough orbs to get all the moves in 1 playthrough just through combos.
Hard mode would’ve been far harder if I didn’t increase the health bar from all the blue orbs found in random spots & secret missions, not to mention they force you right into a hard mode playthrough as soon as you’re done. Dante Must Die was pretty much a slightly easier Hard in terms of normal enemy placement but now there’s a time limit to kill all enemies in that area or else they’ll activate devil trigger and become a pain in the ass. It only ever happened once early on in some garden area where the enemies kept coming, fortunately I didn’t have to fight off the rest. I actually did many runs of normal mode before attempting DMD since if you knew the item placement you could just keep picking up holy waters, vital stars, untouchables etc. to get past a lot of things and I really needed them. Unlike the normal enemies, the bosses are brutal in DMD to where they’ll easily kill you in like 2-4 hits. But no boss could compare to the true final boss of the game: The camera. That thing made DMD far harder than it needed to be and got me killed on many occasions, especially in rooms where walking one or two feet in one direction will alter the angle completely. Nelo Angelo’s second fight was unbearable because of it (his third fight had one, but I’d saved many holy waters purely for that part). On normal and hard, when fighting Phantom I’d normally stand in his face, tanking the hits & just using stinger till he died, I was curious to try it on DMD and only got halfway since all bosses have like 3 times more health.
Oh, and Nightmare. Good lord, this guy lives up to his name on DMD, his third fight in particular. Fighting the previous bosses inside of him on DMD is almost as bad as fighting Nightmare himself, he took so little damage once his weak points turned red that the fight took ages, and I used so many untouchables on that **** just so it wouldn’t kill me in 2 hits. Didn’t help I tried not to use too many items because I still had Mundus to come (who I cheesed since I knew exactly what takes him out fast and leaves him unable to do sh
it). Also forgot to say last time that I actually liked Dante’s design in DMC 2 the best, that’s enough compliments for now.
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After having played through DMC 2 before I got to 3, it makes DMC 3 which was already a fairly good game look far better in comparison. Since I’d heard about how hard the third one was, I actually did the first mission over and over for 15 minutes just to grind orbs so I could buy blue orbs and get a decent health bar since I knew I’d need it. Good thing too since the boss of the second mission nearly beat me when I was done (which later becomes a somewhat normal enemy). Seems to me like the difficulty is more of a result of having so little of anything to start with and you have to face a boss like Cerberus so early who’s actually rather difficult for a boss anyway (at least compared to some others). For a majority of the time playing I stuck with the Trickster style since the roll is honestly kinda shi
tty, covers little distance & you can still be hit during it. The Trickster dash that replaces it covers a big distance & you’re invulnerable during it, plus you can do it three times at level 3. Aside from having to level the other styles to 3, I only used ones like Swordmaster for those combo statues that only break when your style meter is high enough (the ones requiring a stylish combo or higher I found stupid because some weapons are hard to combo moves with even when using Swordmaster).
While I enjoyed the game, I got a little bored around halfway through due to the backtracking with a few missions and some stupid objectives I had to do making it clear they were just padding, also coupled with me not having taken a break yet. It got my interest back when I got to the Lady boss fight, which surprised me because I didn’t think it would be like hide & seek, makes sense though. Then came the laughably easy Doppelganger boss who’s probably the easiest in the game IMO just due to how basic his pattern is. The boss rush after was a little annoying though, sure you can just fight 3 specific fights & get through it quick (those being Cerberus, Beowulf and Agni & Rudra), unfortunately they just
had to be three bosses I’m not very good at fighting. Cerberus has an attack or two that’s hard to tell until he’s just about to use them, Beowulf has many AoE attacks, he’s fast for his size & hits like a truck, and I just never figured out how to counter A&R effectively (I managed to down them on DMD and do like 50% damage before they got back up but I have no idea how). I had less trouble when one of them used the other as a sword. Arkham was just, well, a fu
cking blob. Couldn’t even tell what the hell he was doing most of the time, not to mention they handicap you halfway into the fight which is stupid. I holy watered his ass as soon as the second half started on DMD.
But the final fight, Vergil 3, it was the first time I can actually remember wanting to literally throw my controller at the wall. That fight pi
ssed me off so much. The guy blocks or counters almost everything and spams teleports like crazy. For a while I could barely even touch the guy, then I soon found out the Beowulf weapon was the best way to fight him (the weapon I rarely used up till that point), by doing cannon strikes over & over until I hit him during a point where he doesn’t have any invincibility frames since he can’t interrupt the kick. It was more annoying because the first two encounters are easy (the second is a little annoying because he keeps doing the dive kick himself). Since I grinded orbs by fighting this **** on easy many times in order to fill up my inventory for hard & above, I had a really easy time with him by the time I got there on DMD. I rarely even used a majority of the items I stockpiled, it was mainly 1 or 2 vital stars on bosses at very hard or DMD. Also another thing, devil trigger sucks ass in 3 compared to the previous games. Strength increase is really minimal, health regen is small & it runs out so fast that you don’t get much health back anyway. Speed is good though. Oddly enough, there aren’t really enemies that I can look at and immediately go “This guy right here’s a cheap fu
cking ****.” (except those Enigma enemies only on hard and above where they suddenly turn into projectile wh
ores & run like pu
ssies when you get close, plus they fire red projectile spikes that can attack me even if I’m in the middle of comboing the guy, because that’s totally fair)
The one thing that makes DMD frustrating isn’t the bosses; it’s the normal enemies, unlike DMC 1. There you had a time limit to take out enemies before they DT, here you get no such privilege. These guys will DT at the drop of a hat. Even if I kill 1 enemy in a room of 8 guys, the rest will usually DT seconds after. If they got a strength boost & health increase, that would be fine, but they get like 5x more health from it. I literally spent nearly 30 seconds at one point continuously comboing one guy in the corner, of course his buddies didn’t jump in to help lest they get clipped & join him. But that’s still ridiculous, I ended up avoiding fights where I wasn’t forced to kill anyone just so it wouldn’t take 5 minutes to clear the room. Enjoyed it though despite the complaints (aside from DMD enemies).
