Devil May Cry 4—the smash success that "doomed" the franchise
In 2008, an insecure and awkward 17-year-old Bryant Francis thought that Devil May Cry hero Dante was the epitome of cool. After spending hours with Devil May Cry 3, I thought "this is it. This is style, this is grace. He rides motorcycles down towers and has an electric guitar for a weapon." I was hotly waiting for Devil May Cry 4, hoping that new hero Nero could live up to Dante's pinnacle of coolness.
I was convinced that the lore of the Devil May Cry series was deep and interesting. I was excited for a plot-heavy adventure where it seemed Dante was the bad guy. But would the game live up to my expectations when it finally landed? Would it live up to the rest of the world's?
On paper, it did! DMC 4 was a critical and commercial success for Capcom. Though I remember plenty of shrugs about Nero as a character (The Escapist's Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw thoroughly eviscerated the game for trading in Dante's bona fides for an angsty 20-something yearning to save his girlfriend), the new gameplay mechanics and high-definition graphics drove the game to 2.32 million in sales during its first year, and a battery of favorable reviews from Famitsu, Game Informer, GameSpy, and beyond.
With success like that, Devil May Cry 5 should have been right around the corner. Instead it would be five years until Capcom attempted to reboot the series with Ninja Theory's DmC: Devil May Cry, and eleven years until it reversed course and continued the story of Nero, Dante, and Vergil.
For completely the wrong reasons, that means DMC 4 was a key inflection point in the history of the series—and in Japanese game development. It was a game that did plenty of things right, but in an era where Capcom and other developers weren't ready to learn the lessons
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