Devil May Cry 5 – the boys are back in town

GameCentral gets to play several hours on Capcom’s stylish new action game and discovers just how different new character V is.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim review – Persona with robots

Last time we played Devil May Cry 5, last August, Capcom were still celebrating the success of Monster Hunter: World and the positive buzz from their reveal of Resident Evil 2. When we played the game again last week though it was after Resident Evil 2 had come out and the company’s financial results showed they’d had their most profitable year ever. All of which puts a lot of pressure on Devil May Cry 5 not to break the combo, but everything we’ve seen so far suggests it’s a very safe pair of hands.



Devil May Cry 5 is out in March so what we got to play last week seemed to be from an almost finished version of the game. Previously we only got to play as Nero but this time we got a go on Dante and new character V as well. Playing three separate missions and the prologue it seems that in some cases you can pick the character and other times they’re chosen for you, with the prologue starting off with the now one-armed Nero.

Although Nero’s basic moves are similar to his debut in Devil May Cry 4 his big new gimmick is that to replace his arm he has a range of robotic ones he can pick up, all with different abilities or the option to blow them up and take out a group of enemies. You can still do perfectly well without them but the ideal is to have a range to pick and choose from, depending on the circumstances.


The prologue ends up with Nero joining Dante in a fight against a very lackadaisical demon, slouching on his throne, who easily beats the pair of them and is apparently responsible for Nero’s limb deficiency. He’s also the one behind the emergence of a giant demonic plant in the middle of what looks exactly like London, but in the game is referred to as Redgrave City. That may not sound too bad but it’s the vanguard of a demonic invasion and has turned most of the population into piles of ash.

We don’t get the chance to see many cut scenes but between the cheesy rock music and equally dairy-based dialogue it’s clear that this has all the cocky charm of the previous games. But the first proper mission we play – Mission 04 – is with new character V and he’s very different to Dante and Nero, in terms of attitude and abilities.

Whatever V’s backstory is we miss it, so we’re a bit shocked to discover that his style of play is completely different from the other two. Despite being fairly young (he looks not unlike Adam Driver) he uses a cane and cannot fight enemies himself. Instead he summons his own demons and uses them to do the job for him – although as they point out to him, only he can finish of an almost defeated monster.

He has nothing to do with the actual fighting though and instead you have to keep him out of danger as you instruct Shadow the demonic panther to attack close range and Griffon the machinegun-equipped bird to attack from a distance. If you build up V’s Devil Trigger special move you can also summon Nightmare, a giant Hulk-like monster that fights on their own for a few seconds.

Devil May Cry 5 – Redgrave City is London but with more demons

We weren’t prepared for a character that played quite so differently from the other two but as director Hideaki Itsuno and producer Matt Walker emphasised in our interview with them later, his basic controls are still the same in terms of button layout. That explains how quickly we managed to get the hang of him, even making use of his ability to read some kind of spell book – making himself extra vulnerable – in order to build up his Devil Trigger gauge. He also has a neat homing attack when finishing off enemies, so the sense of stylish combat is retained even though V himself is quite slow.



V’s style of play is a shock but it’s one we immediately take to and it’s almost a disappointment to have to play as the others. It’s not actually though, as playing Mission 07 as Nero involves a trip into a demon-infested version of the London underground, where the RE Engine (the same graphic engine used in the last two Resident Evils) once again proves how good it is at dark environments, full of sinister shadows and dripping wetness.

The game features a lot of references to the original Devil May Cry, more than we realised before we talked to the developers, and this includes the Sin Scissors enemies – grim reaper style enemies with giant scissors. There’s also some giant lizardmen style enemies, and we particularly liked how even though you’re not actually dismembering anyone the attack animations really make it look like you’re cutting chunks out of them when you use your sword.

Devil May Cry 5 – Nero still can’t wipe that smirk off his face

Mission 10 is the first one we get to play with Dante who, as the original protagonist of the series, proves to have the most complex controls. The basics are still similar to Nero but because he doesn’t have a robot arm he’s able to switch weapons quickly with the trigger buttons – guns on the left and between swords and fists on the right. He’s also still got his Devil Trigger form which turns him into a demon for a few seconds, with different abilities depending on his selected weapons.


But there’s more to it than that, as he can also change styles via the D-pad, emphasising attack, defence, and movement depending on the situation. That combined with the ability to switch weapons in an instant is what makes him more complex but there’s still relatively little in the way of Bayonetta style combos, which makes him – and the game in general – more accessible to newcomers.

You can buy new moves and abilities from shops dotted around each world, which does slowly increase the complexity, but the game seems to have found a good balance between pleasing existing fans and not putting off new ones. You can see our full discussion with the developers below but what struck us, in chatting with them informally afterwards, was how relieved Itsuno was that everyone seemed to like V. We were certainly very impressed and we think everyone else will be too when the game is released next month.

As usual Walker is translating for Itsuno, but as we enter the interview room, which is halfway up The Shard, we’re struck by the magnificent view of London – even if the weather is a bit grey out.

MW: Beautiful, isn’t it? It’s really cool, if you played Mission 02 – the one at Gamescom – you were essentially playing on top of that church. And Borough Market, that’s essentially the setting for Mission 04.

GC: So what made you want to set your game in a post-Brexit apocalypse?

All: [laughs]

GC: Is the game meant to be a vision of the future?


MW: That’s where the back plot comes from, it’s from Brexit!

GC: [laughs] But seriously, is there any particular reason why you chose London, or not-London, for the setting?

HI: I came to London constantly, working with Ninja Theory on DmC Devil May Cry, and I kind of fell in love with this amazing architecture, where you have these buildings that have clearly been around a long time and they have this amazing gothic look and then on the first floor it’s a McDonald’s! And I fell in love with that mix of the old and the new and thought that it would work really well with Devil May Cry. I had been here all the time, so I sent some of the dev team on a trip to do location scouting, to get a sense of what it is.

MW: Yeah, so me and the art director and a couple of the other artists, we came here and we did all kinds of scouting and getting reference pictures and stuff.

GC: After the success of E3 and Gamescom, and now Resident Evil 2, is there a buzz at Capcom at the moment? All publishers have their ups and downs, but you’re definitely on a high at the moment.

HI: We’re all kind of aware that, yeah. We’re really lucky in that Monster Hunter was received well, it did well. When we announced RE2 and DMC5 at E3 everyone was excited about that and now RE2 came out and it got a 91 Metacritic. And so we’re all cognisant of that and we’re all really happy that we’re doing this well and that people are enjoying what we’re making. But of course, that means there’s all this pressure… for example, Devil May Cry hasn’t come out yet so we know we have to keep all this going!

GC: As soon as I got to the demon bird firing machineguns out of its wings, that’s when I was sold. That’s old school… not just Capcom but old school video game logic and design. What was he anyway, an eagle or something?

MW: His name’s Griffon. You played Devil May Cry 1, right?

GC: Sure?

MW: So Griffon is one of the bosses in Devil May Cry 1.

HI: He was a lot bigger in that one!

GC: Oh, wow. Yeah!

HI: And so a lot of those moves that you see him doing, if you go back and watch the videos from Devil May Cry 1 you’ll go, ‘Oh, that’s that move! He’s doing that same move!’ Only it’s a much smaller version of him.

MW: And Shadow is the panther. He was… not quite a boss character but kind of like a mini-boss character in one of the first couple of stages.

HI: There’s this little garden that you can go into in Mission 3, or something like that [it’s Mission 4 – GC], and there’s a statute and you put this key item in the statue and then the statue crumbles and this black shadow comes out.

GC: I remember!

MW: That’s right, and Nightmare – his Devil Trigger – is a boss from Devil May Cry 1 as well.

GC: That’s great, but I would not have made that connection.

MW: Ain’t that cool? [laughs]

GC: Does the game reference their origins? Do they, maybe, apologise to Dante or something?

HI: You won’t see it during this preview, but there are instances where there are very specific throwbacks to previous games.

GC: OK, I didn’t expect that. But I love that it doesn’t seem that you’re being restricted in terms of the game or art design. I hate the word grounded. You’re making a video game, what do you want to be grounded for? If you want to be grounded don’t play a video game.

MW: [laughs]

GC: Is that something you feel is much easier to push for at this point in time? This generation or perhaps this post-Monster Hunter: World era for Capcom?

HI: [laughs] I feel the same way you do. It’s a game, so because it’s a game you should be able to do all this fun stuff. The stuff that wouldn’t happen in real life. Or, like in Devil May Cry 5 you have these photorealistic graphics but let’s try to do these things where, okay, it can’t happen in real life but let’s see what it would look like if it did. And how can we make that look as fun as possible? And that’s something we’ve put a lot of work into and have a lot of fun implementing.

GC: I became fascinated by the chu-ni concept [a Japanese word describing things which teenage boys tend to consider cool] you mentioned at Gamescom. I ended up talking to Suda51 about it.

MW: Cool!

GC: And it turns out he doesn’t like chu-ni!

MW: No way!

GC: Are you trying to get back to something that games have lost in the last few years? That idea that you never know what’s coming next in a game – you could be riding a dinosaur one minute, a hoverboard the next, nothing was off limits.

HI: Yeah, I think so. I love to think about… OK if we did do something like that what would it be like? This fantastic stuff, because it’s just so much fun to envision what that could be. The fact that anything goes is what’s really fun about it.

GC: Which segues nicely into V from Devil May Cry 5. Where did the idea from him come from? because he is a radically different type of character.

HI: When we decided to make DMC5 one of the things we said off the bat is, ‘Let’s make a new character’. And very similar to DMC4 it was a matter of, ‘Well, if we just make a character that’s similar to the other characters then it just becomes a skin at that point’. And really there’s no point in doing that. It makes sense to differentiate between.

So Nero and Dante differentiate from each other, and V is differentiated from them. And at the same time we kind of came up with the idea of it should be a completely different character, and it should be this character where you separate what you have to protect – V is what you have to protect. And it was at that point we also thought, ‘Well, what if the fighting portion are these demons that he’s summoned?’ And putting all that together, that’s how we came up with V.

(We’re interrupted by the PR guy telling us our 15 minutes are up.)

GC: Is there not a danger that he’s almost too different to Nero and Dante? I think I’d be happy to play a whole game as V, and I was a bit reluctant to stop playing as him in the demo. Does that not unbalance the trio a bit, where one is very different and the others are more familiar?

HI: It wouldn’t have made any sense to make a new character that was too similar to the other ones. And so we had these different ideas for, ‘This is how we can create something that you have to approach in a different way’. But the interface is the same. Melee attack does melee attacks for Shadow, the ranged attack button does ranged attacks with Griffon, and Devil Trigger summons Nightmare.

GC: That’s true.

HI: So we very much were cognisant of that and we thought, ‘OK, let’s make sure it still works in the same framework. Because that’s what makes it Devil May Cry’. And that’s why you were able to play as V right off the bat. You’re already accustomed to playing Devil May Cry, and so there was that similar portion in the same framework but at the same time it’s still something you have to approach with a different way of thinking.

GC: My concern on seeing the initial artwork, rather than anything I’ve seen today, was the fact that you’ve got these three playable characters but they’re just three white guys. Was that not a concern? That you’d want to mix things up a bit in terms of diversity? Especially as Devil May Cry has a number of prominent non-player female characters.

HI: I know what you mean, I know what you mean. I’m not going to say… what was that thing Kojima tweeted that time? About having a story reason for…

GC: Oh god, for Quiet. Yeah, that didn’t really pan out did it?

MW: [laughs]

HI: So I don’t want to come off that way but once you beat the game we’d love to have you come back to us with that question.

Both: [laughs]

Devil May Cry 5 – Dante’s gunslinger style is… well, you can probably guess what it’s used for

GC: OK… there’s a few things that could mean. But it’s interesting that you’ve obviously thought about that issue.

MW: Just personally for me, I like to see all different kinds of characters in video games. Like Street Fighter was always a great example back in the day. You had Chun-Li as the strong female character who at the time wasn’t over-sexualised at all. And when Street Fighter II came out I was about 11-years-old and for me it just made sense, that you had these strong female characters that aren’t over-sexualised. And that’s just how it was then.

GC: As a kid at the time you didn’t really realise how rare female protagonists were.

MW: Maybe we don’t realise it now but there were a lot of really strong female characters back in the ’80s and ’90s. SNK had… Mai Shiranui became very sexualised but at first it wasn’t like that. You had Yuri in King Of Fighters, Athena in… a lot of these are SNK games, aren’t they? [laughs] And at least the way I felt about it back in the day, just having strong female characters in games made sense to me.

But back then it wasn’t as multicultural as it should’ve been. And these days I think a lot of people are trying to be more cognisant that it only makes sense to be more inclusive. Nothing good comes from being insular. And I know we’ve talked about these characters, and you make good points, but play some more of the game and let’s talk about it again! [laughs]

(The PR guy warns us again that we have to stop.)

GC: Is V based on a real person? His feature looks too specific to be computer-generated.

MW: These guys are all models [points to artwork of all three characters]. So you may have seen them before in magazines or somewhere.

GC: I kept thinking V looks vaguely like Adam Driver from Star Wars.

MW: [laughs] That’s just dumb luck. But that is something we noticed. [laughs]

GC: Given everything we’ve said about Capcom, and a general resurgence from Japanese developers, do you already have an idea what you want to work on next? Maybe something that can push things even further in terms of not having any restrictions?

(PR guy becomes extra agitated.)

GC: That’s it, that was my last one!

HI: [laughs] Yeah man! We definitely got some ideas.

GC: Well I can’t wait to see them. It’s been a pleasure as always.

MW: You too man, good to see you again.

HI: [in English] Thank you!

Formats: Xbox One, PlayStation 4, and PC

Publisher: Capcom

Developer: Capcom

Release Date: 8th March 2019

Email gamecentral@ukmetro.co.uk, leave a comment below, and follow us on Twitter