Devil May Cry 2

Devil May Cry 2 Overview

Devil May Cry 2 is the sequel to the ever popular Devil May Cry game for the Sony Playstaion 2. This game starts with Dante and Lucia meeting in a museum where Dante agrees to fight the international businessman, Arius, who is looking to control the world with demonic power. This game offers more hack and slash combat and received much lower ratings than the original, one of the biggest complaints being that this game was much easier than the first. Although this game got mixed reviews it is still a pretty fun action RPG.

Devil May Cry 2 Screenshots

[Show as slideshow]

Devil May Cry 2 Featured Video

Full Review

Devil May Cry 2 Review

By, Jason Ferguson

Backdrop

.hack Part 1 Infection (Dot Hack) begins with a bang. Something disastrous happens to your character‘s real world friend, while innocently playing a 20 million-subscriber base, wildly popular online RPG game (MMORPG), The World. To unravel the mystery of your friend’s misfortune, you become an online, ingame rogue hacker, exploring every corner of The World, even some virus-infected ones.

The hero is armed with the special skills of Data Drain and Gate Hack, and some colorful, talented fellow adventurers to fill the two other available party slots. Different adventurers must accompany you depending on the plot‘s development. You have some control over the others in your party, including upgrading them through trades or gifts. You can play only a single class, Twin Blade. Other characters are from different classes, with varied strengths and weaknesses, from a mage type (Wavemaster) to a bully (Heavy Axeman).

Gameplay

Gameplay takes place in three principal areas – towns, fields, and dungeons. Towns house The World’s servers. There, the player can save the game, buy magic scrolls and useful and unique items, store items, buy equipment, and talk and trade with lots of other players in character online. One town has an unusual ranch to check out, a patent homage to an enduring feature of just about every Final Fantasy.

The town’s Chaos Gate provides instant teleportation to a particular wide-open Field, containing monster encounter hotspots, a mystical spring, treasure, and lots of mysterious food. You enter three distinct keywords, some known at the game‘s onset, and others learned through play. Whatever keywords are entered, the difficulty level of the destination is helpfully revealed. This prevents a low-level party from being massacred. Once the keywords are entered, you travel through the Chaos Gate. (You can enter specific keywords learned to continue the plot, do side quests, or do unlimited exploring. Or, you can instruct the Gate to enter random keywords, and take your chances. There‘s also an option to enter any keywords you wish from a word list.) Every Field houses a single Dungeon. The dungeons, where you spend much of the game fighting for your life, are not overly large in size, and always range between three and five average levels.

Many have compared Dot Hack to Phantasy Star Online Episode I and II (PSO) on the Gamecube. Let us gently discredit this. We feel Dot Hack has far better graphics than PSO. The Fields and Dungeons contain many colorful, over stylized backdrops and settings, including weather effects. Dot Hack’s monsters resemble the beautifully-drawn monsters of the later Final Fantasy’s. Dot Hack’s world is gigantic with a seeming infinite number of locations to explore. PSO’s world is relatively small, and plot is threadbare, with meaningless, though fun, side quests, which instill no enthusiasm in the player. Dot Hack’s plot is deep and complex, with each subplot advancing the story just a little bit further. (Remember though, the end of this game in no way comes close to wrapping up the story, to be completed in the three games to be released later this year.) One visual treat, however, was lifted directly from PSO – the cascading rings that accompany the teleportation of characters to and from different areas.

Combat

Dot Hack’s combat engine can best be described as modified real-time. Much like the action-RPG, Kingdom Hearts, button mashing can be effective to beat monsters. Monster combat icons appear as large yellow twirling landmarks. As you approach, the landmark dissolves, monsters come at you big-time, and, undoubtedly, players will feel a healthy adrenaline rush. Some of Dot Hack’s many monsters do not stand around waiting to be pummeled, rather some you need to catch. Dot Hack lets you turn combat almost into a turn-based affair. The player needs only to hit Triangle in the middle of battle to pause the game instantly. From there the player can give orders to the others in the party, anything from healing someone, reviving another, casting a spell, designating a target monster. Without jeopardizing your party from the hailstorm of monster blows, combat becomes a calmer, more strategic, experience. This will help the many action-challenged. Camera angles play a big role in successful combat. You must be facing a monster to do any damage. As in many games, manipulating opposing environmental elements, like fire vs. water, is a key to successful monster combat.

Dot Hack’s cyberspace setting provides a wealth of Wow-inducing outbursts. The Data Drain option in combat is a great example. When a monster’s approaches zero, the player can Data Drain to reduce a horrendous, gigantic steel robot, for example, into a sniveling, puny monster, easily defeated with a single blow. Data Drain always results in a nifty, rare item or essential Virus Cores so you can Gate Hack areas of The World now closed, but needing investigation. One bad side effect – if you defeat, a Data Drained monster, but a single experience point is earned. One REALLY bad side effect – if you Data Drain too often without giving the skill a rest, you may overload and explode. Game Over. In the case of Boss monsters, Data Drain works the same, but what remains is no sniveling puny monster, but a full-blooded slightly less tough monster. All of this makes for interesting and captivating combat, a large part of the game.

Fresh Features

Dot Hack is replete with new and interesting features that kept us riveted.

To start, the entire background and story of a real world gamer becoming a rascal hacker, penetrating deep into a virus-infected online game, is quite novel. Combine this with Dot Hack’s emulating the look and feel of an online game universe. (Message traffic on the web shows many gamers mistakenly believe Dot Hack is a real online MMORPG, along with monthly fees! No real Internet connection is required.)

Just like in the real word, Dot Hack replicates your excitement level when “New” appears before a popular forum or on your email screen. Some of the game involves receiving emails as the plot develops, as well as new, crucial information surfacing on The World’s Board. (Look out for emails challenging you to a strange game of Tag.) The online game world looks very familiar with a bunch of characters wandering around the game’s towns, with the ubiquitous balloon icons talking typical “trash” to each other, even criticizing “newbies“.

Combat grippingly called for surprisingly strategic decision-making to succeed, not related to the usual attack or defend choices. Do you go for experience and upgrade your character or try for some special equipment or a Virus Core, vital to Gate Hacking? The innovative control of other party members became second nature to us after some practice. The game rewards a player taking chances, like entering a Field or Dungeon rated 5 levels above the player’s current level. On the other hand, the game scoffed at players entering areas much lower rated the their current level, by awarding negligible experience points for victory.

Dot Hack takes progress reports to a new level, by slowly unlocking books that contain much in the way of statistics and information. There’s even a monster compendium with tips for defeating them.

Some might complain about the minimal “Save Game” ability, but we thrived on it. You explore a very hostile cyberspace environment without the facility to save. Only in a server-hosting town is saving possible at the local Recorder. We may be a solitary voice in the Wilderness, but we like this throwback to the good old RPG days. Those of you old enough to remember the Wizardry series, may recall those fingernail-biting multi-combat treks back to the Castle just to save the game. In case you’re really stuck deep in a dungeon, a common item will teleport you to the outdoor field, from where you can simply gate back to town from the command menu.

Many pieces of equipment come with distinctive powerful attack, healing, and status skills, essential to combat dominance. The player must tradeoff whether to equip something that will raise defense or offense or something less vigorous that lets you use a powerful skill. Trading is the most successful way to upgrade equipment.

In a first, Dot Hack comes with a 45 minute anime video. This gives some great background on what’s going on in The World, as well as provide clues for completing the game. In a nice twist, voiceovers for game speech can be set for Japanese or English presentation. Listening to the authentic Japanese voices really keeps you glued to the game.

Though some may scoff at what follows as meaningless, we liked the game’s unlocking of some nifty new “toys” to like, some only available when the game is cleared. You can unlock many different background music play lists. Tired of creepy tunes, just switch to something more upbeat, or futuristic. Just like real world gamers, who constantly change their desktop wallpaper, new and different wallpapers are unlocked along the way. Some are concept art of characters, while others are full blown anime renditions of the characters. This makes for great fun, and seems to pump additional energy into the game. As you progress over a dozen special cut scenes or movies will become viewable after defeating the game.

Though Dot Hack’s extras and new wrinkles enhance the RPG game experience, much of the gameplay will ring true to those who enjoy RPG‘s. Expect plenty of exploration in a huge 3D world, frequent monster combat, tons of treasure to earn and discover, upgrading your character’s weapons and armor, and needing to level before tackling pivotal story dungeons. The status screens for the characters and all equipment are well laid out and easy to grasp.

Time for Completion

Game length in hours always concerns many purchasers. A short RPG normally takes a lot of flack, and many online are asking about Dot Hack‘s time for completion. (Some have questioned whether Bandai should have released a single 80 hour game for $50, rather than four 20-hour games for $200 for a single story. This matter is beyond the scope of this review, but our high opinion of this game as a standalone is obvious.) Our experience, playing the plot without doing side quests or extra exploration, is in the 12 to 15-hour range. Players side-questing and extensively exploring, aside from the main plot, can expect to spend 25 hours to complete the game. You can even continue to advance your character, after game completion, to get a jump start on Part 2 due in May. In the next game, your character can be imported from Part 1.

Furthermore, imagine trying to explore every nook and cranny of the fields and dungeons accessible by a large number of 3-word combinations. Doing that would put the game in the 50-hour range, if not more. However, at a certain point, new items dry up, and a single experience point is earned for any defeated monster, no matter how tough.

Shortcomings

While, as is evident above, there is much to recommend in Dot Hack, certain concerns to varying degrees deserve mention.

From the “Why oh why did they leave this out?“ File. Pregame game board traffic and information about the Japanese version released months ago had many salivating for replaying the game in “parody” mode. This mode apparently converted all Dot Hack’s game world characters into satirical comedians. Sorry to say, this highly-anticipated feature is missing from the version released here.

The game requires massive amounts of button pressing. Every item or treasure uncovered from combat victories or exploration (opening chests, searching expired adventure remains, collecting food for Grunty’s, as examples) must be confirmed with a button press. When there could be 50-100 such occurrences in a single dungeon or field, over the course of the game, finger cramps seem inevitable. Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance also required lots of bashing for buried treasure and chests, but the items literally flew into your inventory, a much better way to handle this.

The manual is woefully terse and lacking in some crucial information and guidance. While the ingame tutorials fill in many of the gaps, one extremely important gameplay feature is missing from both the manual and tutorials – instructions on control your characters directly during combat.

Final Word

We got a kick out of Dot Hack. The feeling of “just one more dungeon” dominated our lives for the 3 days to completion. The engaging environment held our attention without much effort. The strategic nature of combat, plus the convoluted plot kept us going for hours on end. The constant unlocking of both frivolous and important gameplay features created a “what’s next” anticipation. Now, if I could only read Japanese better, Dot Hack Part 2 is already out in Japan!

Final Grade: B

Everybody’s favorite demon slayer, Dante, is back in Devil May Cry 2. With the huge success of the previous game, Devil May Cry 2 had some high expectations, but unfortunately it fails to deliver in many ways. It’s a decent action game, but fans of the original are likely to be disappointed.

One of Devil May Cry‘s weakest points was in its story, which I’d hoped would be fixed in the sequel. To say this game’s story is weak would be a pretty big understatement. An evil millionaire is trying to gather ancient artifacts to unlock a great power that will allow him to take over the world and Dante has to stop him. It is more of an action game as opposed to an RPG, so a strong story really isn’t expected, but the attempt at a story here was almost funny. The cutscenes generally serve to relay the storyline, but such a poor job was done that you either can’t tell what’s going on or it’s so lame that you don’t care. There’s little mention of what the artifacts are, what powers they grant or who Dante’s new friend Lucia really is.

Speaking of Lucia, Devil May Cry 2 added the bonus of a second playable character, so if you can’t get enough of the game you can play through again. Lucia’s part in the story is pretty poorly explained, but what’s even worse is that Dante is just as bad. He’s got dialogue that would make even James Bond look less cool, and he just seems like a different character than in the first game. But, if all you care about is the action then you may still find yourself pleased.

Gameplay in DMC2 is similar to the first game with lots of monster slaughtering and intense action-packed battles. Dante can do plenty of cool new things, like run up walls and wield new weapons (unfortunately the weapons aren’t nearly as interesting as in the first game). Like the first game, you collect orbs, which have different purposes depending on their color. Collecting 4 blue orbs will increase your max HP and red orbs can be used to buy items and traded in to increase the level of your weapons. You can also equip amulets that you’ll find throughout the game, which will give you different abilities when you transform into Devil mode. There are multiple different amulets you can equip and they do everything from increase your HP to allowing you to fly! The new weapons customization was a little dull and not nearly as creative as in the previous game, but the amulets were a welcome taste of something new.

The game’s action is pretty good, and both Lucia and Dante can perform several moves and use an arsenal of different weapons. Dante smacks enemies into the air, double jumps with ease, levitates while blasting his guns, and does all sorts of crazy acrobatics while slaying monsters. Unfortunately the game provides little challenge, and simply firing your pistols or merely swinging your sword around will be enough to get you through most areas. The bosses have obvious patterns that can be learned quickly, and since the whole game can easily be finished in less than 10 hours, it’s not exactly something that’s going to occupy a lot of your time. There are a few different modes to play in though, and the second character playthrough may be of some interest.

The graphics are one of DMC2‘s highpoints, with beautiful cutscenes, detailed backgrounds and fluid character movements. The backgrounds may not be as impressive to behold as in the first game, but DMC2 has open, larger environments with a lot of attention to detail. Watching the characters move is perhaps most impressive of all, and the amazing detail that was put into every motion is quite impressive. Somehow this game allows you to run up walls and do other crazy stunts and make it look real. The game is a visual treat…except for the camera, which is best described as awful. Often you cant’ even see the enemies you’re fighting, and making jumps can be tough because the camera switches on you halfway through the jump. Fortunately there’s an auto-lock so you can keep track of the enemies even when the camera starts acting up.

The music was very similar to the first Devil May Cry, which is a good thing. There’s the same old mix of heavy metal and opera music playing throughout the game, and it really seems to fit in well. Other than that the background noises are good, but with all the noise from hacking and slashing enemies, it’s hard to hear what else is going on. The voice acting was of mixed quality. The actual voices sound all right, but as mentioned earlier, the dialogue is horrible. Gone is the cool dialogue between Dante and the bosses he’s going to slay. Now Dante says “cool” things like “Don’t speak, just die.” (that was an entire conversation he had with one of the bosses!).

When not being compared to its predecessor, DMC2 is a decent action game. If you’re looking for some good action in a game then you might want to give this game a shot. It’s certainly not worth purchasing though, and renting it for a few days should be more than enough time to get your fill of it. People who played the first game will probably be disappointed by this one, and those who haven’t played the first one would be better off playing that instead.