Editorials
After 20 Years, Is ‘Devil May Cry 2’ Still a Toss Up for Fans?
After Capcom’s Devil May Cry hit the scene with its stylish action and cool-as-hell protagonist, fans were hungry for more from Dante and company. To say that the sequel didn’t exactly live up to expectations was an understatement. Gone were Trish and Dante’s iconic one-liners and attitude, and in their place we had Lucia and a Dante that was more concerned with coin flips than cracking smart. In the years since the release of Devil May Cry 2, Capcom, much like the fans, has acted as if the first sequel never happened.
And really, looking back at the game now, it’s plain to see why.
After battling demons at a museum with the aid of a mysterious woman named Lucia, Dante is invited to Lucia’s homeland of Vie de Marli, an island sanctuary. There, the Uroboros corporation has installed itself, looking to harness “special ores” found on the island. In reality Uroboros is headed by a man named Arius who seeks to absorb the power of a demon named Argosax for his own purposes. Dante sets off to stop Arius, while Lucia seeks to gather the Arcanas, holy relics that are found throughout Vie de Marli that Arius needs to summon Argosax.
As you might have guessed, rather than only having Dante to play as this time around, in Devil May Cry 2, players can also choose to play as newcomer Lucia, who wields dual swords and throwing knives. Playing almost exactly like Dante, Lucia is quicker than the Son of Sparda, but also deals less damage. Still, as a trade-off, Lucia’s speed can help with juggling foes during your combos (and netting more of those red gems as a result). Regardless of who you choose to play as, the characters do meet up along their respective journeys at certain points, and also share stages.
Having multiple characters to play as isn’t the only new thing in DMC 2. Devil Hearts are a new feature that augment your Devil Trigger, and can be used by either Dante or Lucia. The Devil Hearts grant you new abilities such as flight, enhanced speed, or augment your attacks with elemental damage. There are nine hearts in the game, though Lucia is the only one who can make use of all of them (since she’s the only one with a water level).
Along with the Devil Hearts, there are also new weapons available. Dante can find guns such as a shotgun, dual machine guns, and even a missile launcher to complement his sword. Lucia, on the other hand, can find crossbows and “Cranky Bombs” that can function like a grenade or a mine, depending on how they’re used. And as in the previous game, you also have upgradeable primary weapons for each character, though none of the weapons Dante wielded from the first game make an appearance here.
Rounding out the new stuff is the ability for Dante and Lucia to make use of a wall run, that when combined with being able to double jump or jump off of walls, allows for some cool-looking acrobatics as you dish out punishment on your enemies. Dante can also now use his guns to push himself further into the air, or keep himself airborne while firing on enemies. You can even aim and fire in two opposite directions, perform somersaults and overall make combat look like something out of The Matrix.
Sadly, that’s probably where the good things about Devil May Cry 2 end for many players. Once you get past the flashiness, the game’s problems and shortcomings quickly become apparent, as the sequel just can’t build on or capitalize on what the original brought to the table.
The problems with Devil May Cry 2 began from its inception. While Capcom made the smart decision to begin development on a sequel to Devil May Cry while that game’s production was winding down, the execution was full of missteps. Instead of being helmed by Hideki Kamiya (director of the first Devil May Cry, and the legendary Resident Evil 2), the sequel was handed off initially to Noritaka Funamizu, whose experience at that time was in fighting games. Indeed, the entire team that was first assigned to DMC 2 had almost exclusively worked on fighting games.
To be fair, you would think with a background in fighting games, the team would be able to harness some of that frenetic fast-paced action, and incorporate that into DMC 2. Heck, just keep what the original had and build on that. That sadly wasn’t either case. In the first game, Dante’s stylish and speedy combat style focused on you juggling enemies with guns and swordplay. This was all balanced by an upgrade system for your weapons and abilities that made for some great customization. In the sequel, we now get a slower style of gameplay that throws off your timing for combos, and attacks that while stylish, are no longer unlockable. Instead, you just upgrade the existing attacks for greater damage. Heck, you don’t even get a taunt button this time to extend your combos!
Making the payoffs for combos even worse is the game’s AI, which for some reason is woefully inept this time around. Your foes will literally stand around as you walk up to whale on them, or you can literally just run past them, avoiding some fights altogether. It’s even worse when it comes to the bosses, which unlike the first game, don’t require that much strategy to beat. You encounter a returning Phantom from the first game (aka that giant spider boss), which this time around, has none of the patterns you have to memorize to score a hit and avoid damage. You can literally walk up to him and unload your guns in his face. To say that there’s a distinct lack of challenge when compared to the first game is pretty appropriate.
Graphically, DMC 2 is a mixed bag. While the team did carry over the gothic look of the first game, the environments themselves look and feel repetitive. It doesn’t help that as mentioned before, Dante and Lucia’s quests overlap locations, making the sameness more apparent. The environments are larger, but there are also stretches where you’re literally just running from one end to another to get to the door, with no enemies popping up to break the monotony.
Speaking of enemies, they’ve also been given a bit of a downgrade graphically, but that seems only to allow for the game to have more of them onscreen at once, and with more variety. As for Dante and Lucia, their character models models look pretty good. And if you ever wanted to see Dante or Lucia rocking Diesel jeans (seriously), you can unlock these costumes by completing the game with that respective character.
To top off Devil May Cry 2’s litany of disappointments is its story. Admittedly, Devil May Cry never had the greatest story, but it was made up for by Dante’s cocky attitude and one-liners. Here, the story just breeds confusion and nonsense, and Dante’s personality is non-existent. No wise cracks, and hardly any of what made fans fall in love with him in the first place. You could sort of justify this reserved Dante as a result of having some sort of emotionally-scarring event that affected him in between this game and the first. But, that would have required some sort of explanation by the writing. Instead, we now get a Dante flipping a coin to determine his next course of action, and one quip. Lucia doesn’t far any better. Her character development is as undercooked as Dante’s. And what we do learn about her is pretty cliché.
Time really hasn’t been kind to Devil May Cry 2. There are certainly some good ideas that would be fleshed out in later installments, but the overall experience just feels hollow when you compare it to the original. The gameplay ups the stylish aspect, but combat becomes a chore and a bore to play once you scratch below the surface. Dante just isn’t the character that we loved from the first game. The upgrades system has taken a step forward with the new Devil Hearts mechanic, but the new weapons don’t feel worth the effort to upgrade. With Capcom barely acknowledging Devil May Cry 2 as the series has gone on, that’s probably a cue to skip this one and move on to Devil May Cry 3.
Here’s what we know about Longlegs so far. It’s coming in July of 2024, it’s directed by Osgood Perkins (The Blackcoat’s Daughter), and it features Maika Monroe (It Follows) as an FBI agent who discovers a personal connection between her and a serial killer who has ties to the occult. We know that the serial killer is going to be played by none other than Nicolas Cage and that the marketing has been nothing short of cryptic excellence up to this point.
At the very least, we can assume NEON’s upcoming film is going to be a dark, horror-fueled hunt for a serial killer. With that in mind, let’s take a look at five disturbing serial killers-versus-law-enforcement stories to get us even more jacked up for Longlegs.
MEMORIES OF MURDER (2003)
This South Korean film directed by Oscar-winning director Bong Joon-ho (Parasite) is a wild ride. The film features a handful of cops who seem like total goofs investigating a serial killer who brutally murders women who are out and wearing red on rainy evenings. The cops are tired, unorganized, and border on stoner comedy levels of idiocy. The movie at first seems to have a strange level of forgiveness for these characters as they try to pin the murders on a mentally handicapped person at one point, beating him and trying to coerce him into a confession for crimes he didn’t commit. A serious cop from the big city comes down to help with the case and is able to instill order.
But still, the killer evades and provokes not only the police but an entire country as everyone becomes more unstable and paranoid with each grizzly murder and sex crime.
I’ve never seen a film with a stranger tone than Memories of Murder. A movie that deals with such serious issues but has such fallible, seemingly nonserious people at its core. As the film rolls on and more women are murdered, you realize that a lot of these faults come from men who are hopeless and desperate to catch a killer in a country that – much like in another great serial killer story, Citizen X – is doing more harm to their plight than good.
Major spoiler warning: What makes Memories of Murder somehow more haunting is that it’s loosely based on a true story. It is a story where the real-life killer hadn’t been caught at the time of the film’s release. It ends with our main character Detective Park (Song Kang-ho), now a salesman, looking hopelessly at the audience (or judgingly) as the credits roll. Over sixteen years later the killer, Lee Choon Jae, was found using DNA evidence. He was already serving a life sentence for another murder. Choon Jae even admitted to watching the film during his court case saying, “I just watched it as a movie, I had no feeling or emotion towards the movie.”
In the end, Memories of Murder is a must-see for fans of the subgenre. The film juggles an almost slapstick tone with that of a dark murder mystery and yet, in the end, works like a charm.
CURE (1997)
If you watched 2023’s Hypnotic and thought to yourself, “A killer who hypnotizes his victims to get them to do his bidding is a pretty cool idea. I only wish it were a better movie!” Boy, do I have great news for you.
In Cure (spoilers ahead), a detective (Koji Yakusho) and forensic psychologist (Tsuyoshi Ujiki) team up to find a serial killer who’s brutally marking their victims by cutting a large “X” into their throats and chests. Not just a little “X” mind you but a big, gross, flappy one.
At each crime scene, the murderer is there and is coherent and willing to cooperate. They can remember committing the crimes but can’t remember why. Each of these murders is creepy on a cellular level because we watch the killers act out these crimes with zero emotion. They feel different than your average movie murder. Colder….meaner.
What’s going on here is that a man named Mamiya (Masato Hagiwara) is walking around and somehow manipulating people’s minds using the flame of a lighter and a strange conversational cadence to hypnotize them and convince them to murder. The detectives eventually catch him but are unable to understand the scope of what’s happening before it’s too late.
If you thought dealing with a psychopathic murderer was hard, imagine dealing with one who could convince you to go home and murder your wife. Not only is Cure amazingly filmed and edited but it has more horror elements than your average serial killer film.
MANHUNTER (1986)
In the first-ever Hannibal Lecter story brought in front of the cameras, Detective Will Graham (William Petersen) finds his serial killers by stepping into their headspace. This is how he caught Hannibal Lecter (played here by Brian Cox), but not without paying a price. Graham became so obsessed with his cases that he ended up having a mental breakdown.
In Manhunter, Graham not only has to deal with Lecter playing psychological games with him from behind bars but a new serial killer in Francis Dolarhyde (in a legendary performance by Tom Noonan). One who likes to wear pantyhose on his head and murder entire families so that he can feel “seen” and “accepted” in their dead eyes. At one point Lecter even finds a way to gift Graham’s home address to the new killer via personal ads in a newspaper.
Michael Mann (Heat, Thief) directed a film that was far too stylish for its time but that fans and critics both would have loved today in the same way we appreciate movies like Nightcrawler or Drive. From the soundtrack to the visuals to the in-depth psychoanalysis of an insanely disturbed protagonist and the man trying to catch him. We watch Graham completely lose his shit and unravel as he takes us through the psyche of our killer. Which is as fascinating as it is fucked.
Manhunter is a classic case of a serial killer-versus-detective story where each side of the coin is tarnished in their own way when it’s all said and done. As Detective Park put it in Memories of Murder, “What kind of detective sleeps at night?”
INSOMNIA (2002)
Maybe it’s because of the foggy atmosphere. Maybe it’s because it’s the only film in Christopher Nolan’s filmography he didn’t write as well as direct. But for some reason, Insomnia always feels forgotten about whenever we give Nolan his flowers for whatever his latest cinematic achievement is.
Whatever the case, I know it’s no fault of the quality of the film, because Insomnia is a certified serial killer classic that adds several unique layers to the detective/killer dynamic. One way to create an extreme sense of unease with a movie villain is to cast someone you’d never expect in the role, which is exactly what Nolan did by casting the hilarious and sweet Robin Williams as a manipulative child murderer. He capped that off by casting Al Pacino as the embattled detective hunting him down.
This dynamic was fascinating as Williams was creepy and clever in the role. He was subdued in a way that was never boring but believable. On the other side of it, Al Pacino felt as if he’d walked straight off the set of 1995’s Heat and onto this one. A broken and imperfect man trying to stop a far worse one.
Aside from the stellar acting, Insomnia stands out because of its unique setting and plot. Both working against the detective. The investigation is taking place in a part of Alaska where the sun never goes down. This creates a beautiful, nightmare atmosphere where by the end of it, Pacino’s character is like a Freddy Krueger victim in the leadup to their eventual, exhausted death as he runs around town trying to catch a serial killer while dealing with the debilitating effects of insomnia. Meanwhile, he’s under an internal affairs investigation for planting evidence to catch another child killer and accidentally shoots his partner who he just found out is about to testify against him. The kicker here is that the killer knows what happened that fateful day and is using it to blackmail Pacino’s character into letting him get away with his own crimes.
If this is the kind of “what would you do?” intrigue we get with the story from Longlegs? We’ll be in for a treat. Hoo-ah.
FALLEN (1998)
Fallen may not be nearly as obscure as Memories of Murder or Cure. Hell, it boasts an all-star cast of Denzel Washington, John Goodman, Donald Sutherland, James Gandolfini, and Elias Koteas. But when you bring it up around anyone who has seen it, their ears perk up, and the word “underrated” usually follows. And when it comes to the occult tie-ins that Longlegs will allegedly have? Fallen may be the most appropriate film on this entire list.
In the movie, Detective Hobbs (Washington) catches vicious serial killer Edgar Reese (Koteas) who seems to place some sort of curse on him during Hobbs’ victory lap. After Reese is put to death via electric chair, dead bodies start popping up all over town with his M.O., eventually pointing towards Hobbs as the culprit. After all, Reese is dead. As Hobbs investigates he realizes that a fallen angel named Azazel is possessing human body after human body and using them to commit occult murders. It has its eyes fixated on him, his co-workers, and family members; wrecking their lives or flat-out murdering them one by one until the whole world is damned.
Mixing a demonic entity into a detective/serial killer story is fascinating because it puts our detective in the unsettling position of being the one who is hunted. How the hell do you stop a demon who can inhabit anyone they want with a mere touch?!
Fallen is a great mix of detective story and supernatural horror tale. Not only are we treated to Denzel Washington as the lead in a grim noir (complete with narration) as he uncovers this occult storyline, but we’re left with a pretty great “what would you do?” situation in a movie that isn’t afraid to take the story to some dark places. Especially when it comes to the way the film ends. It’s a great horror thriller in the same vein as Frailty but with a little more detective work mixed in.
Look for Longlegs in theaters on July 12, 2024.
4 New Horror Movies Releasing This Week Including ‘Late Night with the Devil’ at Home
Spring 2024 Horror Preview: 12 Horror Movies You Don’t Want to Miss
The ‘Scary Movie’ Spoof Franchise Is Getting a Reboot at Paramount!
‘Ready or Not’: Radio Silence Filmmakers Tease the “Absolute Banger” of a Sequel That’s Taking Shape
“We Built Every Creature” – ‘Alien: Romulus’ Goes Heavy on the Old School Practical Effects!
You must be logged in to post a comment.