16 December, 2014

Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition - Vergil?

In case you haven't watched the teaser yet, DMC4 is finally getting a Special Edition, over 7 years after the fact.

Guys, I have one central question to this reveal:
Are they going to fix anything?
Or in other words, are they going to finally release the completed, supposedly originally intended game?

Look, to understand where I'm coming from, here's a summary of my history with DMC4:
I bought it on release date for the PS3 back in 2008, and like many other DMC3 players, I was disappointed. In short, we all felt like it was an unrefined, unfinished version of the game that could've been. I hated the story and the characters, I hated how whole 20 missions thing was laid out between Nero and Dante and most importantly, I was split between disappointed and hateful with many of the changes, features and nerfing Dante got.

So now we're presented with the reveal that a Special Edition is coming with Vergil in it. We don't know if he's going to be playable yet, but I think it's fair to assume that he will. Otherwise, what's the point?

In truth, DMC4 doesn't need Vergil. It never did. What it always needed was to be either completed, or at the very least, fixed through patches, but they never came to pass. The PC port didn't address any of the problems the game originally had, they just added the Turbo setting and Legendary Dark Knight mode.

I won't go into heavy detail about every single little thing they should've fixed, but the bottom line is this: they only had ONE job, and that was to give DMC3 Dante the ability to switch Styles on the fly. That's it.

But instead, they copied only a portion of his moves, forced heavy nerfs on some of them, and senselessly remapped some of those moves. Only Rebellion was greatly improved, and even then they messed up Round Trip tremendously.

So again I ask the central question: are they going to fix anything?

The teaser is just a picture of Vergil behind the DMC4 logo with the Special Edition subtitle, with Daniel Southworth's voice over it, whom is the original voice actor, and he says “I need more power!”

Two things to note.
1 - Vergil isn't moving.
It is literally just a picture, and I think it just looks like a re-render of his DMC3 model. Not the one from the CGI promotional pictures, though. His in-game model. I think this is the case because of his hair. In the original DMC3 CGI picture, all of his hair is slicked back or spiky, with a clear hairline showing.

In the DMC4SE teaser, you can see short little hair strands hanging over his forehead, and that's what Vergil looks like in DMC3, both in the cutscenes and in-game. The sleeves look the same, the collar looks the same, the back seems to look the same, and the only thing that's different in the design is the straps on the shoulders. I can't decide if it's good or bad that he looks nearly identical, personally I would say they could redesign him a bit more but I'll let you decide. Though I obviously wouldn't mind if he looked exactly the same, there's nothing fundamentally wrong with the original design.

The point is, either way, it doesn't seem like they put any effort whatsoever in this teaser. It's just a picture of a cheap re-render, I think, and it should've at least been minimally animated. Even what little you can see of Yamato looks wrong, it's too dull and flat.


2 – The line sounds like it was re-recorded.
Basically it means they put Daniel into a sound booth and got him to record new lines for the game. But I don't know what else to infer from it because nothing else is specified in the teaser. At any case, the line is taken directly from DMC3's plot. And apparently now it's his only character trait?

But let's think about this for a second. There are a few possibilities:

a) He's going to be playable, and nothing more.
If this is true, it means he won't have any relevance to the game's plot, we won't have cutscenes, etc. and he'll be there just as a playable character. The recorded line will serve as a taunt or whatever.

b) There will be new cutscenes with him.
One of the main problems with the plot in DMC4 is that it provides no insight on what happened to Vergil after DMC1. All we learn is that living armours (Bianco and Alto Angelo) were crafted from pieces of Nelo Angelo's armour and that Yamato was found broken. Later, Nero has kind of a Devil Trigger awakening – similar to Dante's in DMC3 – while angrily quoting Vergil on the “more power” thing, and this awakening somehow repairs Yamato and brings it to his hand.
The novels don't count, sorry.
But anyway, cutscenes with Vergil can mean he will be playable too, or maybe he will be a boss character that Dante has to fight as some point.

c) Prologue!
Like with DMC3 SE, DMC4SE might have Vergil playable on all 20 missions with only a couple pre-main-plot cutscenes when you go into mission 1, and that'll be it. This would be... acceptable, I guess.

d) Full campaign.
It's just not going to happen, is it? Everyone can agree that the original DMC4 came with a very awkward campaign, with Nero taking 13 missions while Dante took 7 very crappy missions. They're the worst missions in the game, and I'm pretty sure they were supposed to have their own separate campaigns.
So, finally, even though it's HIGHLY unlikely, Vergil might get his own campaign, with his own cutscenes and his own set of missions, but if this turns out to be the case, it's going to make everyone feel cheated that the other two characters remain in that awful state.


Well, I think I've gone on long enough, so I'll just leave the central question again at the end.

Will CAPCOM fix any of the problems with DMC4 in the Special Edition?

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