The first Devil May Cry game came out in 2001, when Japanese games still dominated the Western console business and, to some extent, the minds of Western gamers. The original Devil May Cry was everything hip and trendy about Japanese gaming at the time: challenging, innovative, and stylish in the over-the-top tradition of Japanese animation, which also enjoyed a tremendous surge of popularity at the time.

Fast-forward three sequels and about ten years later to find that the Western opinion of Japanese gaming has changed dramatically. Now Japanese-made games are often criticized for being stale, backwards-looking, and focused on absurd characters rather than meaningful gameplay. Despite this, Capcom released Devil May Cry 4 successfully for the 360 and PS3.

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Still, there's no reason for the company to think that an old-fashioned, cartoonish Devil May Cry 5 would keep controllers in the hands of its fans. It was time to reboot the series to draw in a new generation of fans accustomed to how Western developers do things. Enter Ninja Theory, creators of the story-driven but unabashedly Western-style action game Heavenly Sword.

DmC is so complete a reboot of the Devil May Cry series that Capcom is now careful to point out that it has nothing to do with the original. Dante's flamboyant bare-chested, red-coated look and anime-style shock-white hair are gone. The new Dante has gone through at least of a couple of designs, judging from the available screencaps, but he's basically a more realistic-looking dark-haired Caucasian guy with a more toned-down action-hero physique. He's still able to execute over-the-top two-gun combos and hack away at demons with enormous swords and other melee weapons. Instead of his Devil Trigger forms being elaborate creatures, Dante now appears to take on a glowing aura that turns his hair white.

Combat in DmC clearly has a very different pace than in prior Devil May Cry games. Where speed was the order of the day in Capcom's entries to the franchise, DmC's combat already has more of the look and feel of other Ninja Theory games. While battles are still flashy and still involve a combination of shooting and slashing, combat is in general much slower. Part of this seems to be a shift from DMC4's 60 frames-per-second animations to DmC's 30 FPS animations, but part of it just seems to be a deliberate stylistic choice on Ninja Theory's part.

Capcom VP of Strategic Planning and Business Development Christian Svensson admitted to IGN that Capcom expected the fan reaction to Dante's new look and DmC's new direction to be controversial. Despite this, members of the Capcom Japan staff overseeing the project asked Ninja Theory to go far away from the original look of Dante and come up with some wildly different. The idea is clearly for Ninja Theory's fresh approach to reinvigorate a franchise that, like all game franchises, was trending toward formula.

Fans are now left wondering, though, if such a radical departure from what they know as Devil May Cry deserves the name at all.

By Alicia Ashby
CCC Contributing Writer