The dialogue, their actions and their general characterization are kinda... well, in spanish we say postizo, which is a word to describe a false replacement of very specific kind, in this case hair, teeth or body parts, namely those you can remove or exchange. False isn't the right word. Maybe sprayed on or even cosmetic? It's there but isn't quite real enough. Stock?
The word you're looking for is counterfeit, I think. "Made in imitation of something valuable with attempt to deceive". It checks out, given the plot of 5 is a rehash of 3 with sprinkles of 4 (and the DMC1 novel), and we're all supposed to care about these characters because they look like the ones we saw before and have a great connection to.
I know he's obsessed with power but he should know to talk about other things. It's like making a character who places his honor above everything else and making every other word that comes out of his mouth is 'honorable.'
It's so funny you say that because it makes it so obvious that the development team either forgot or ignored that when Dante
asked Vergil to his face in DMC3 what he would even do with all the power he sought because it wouldn't put him any closer to being Sparda, Vergil
refused to answer and tantrum-blurted "
you're wasting time!"
Plus, those funny moments throughout the third game where he unceremoniously dispatches various defenseless adversaries (the groveling Hell Vanguard, a fully blinded Beowulf, Arkham in the middle of a sentence). He gave none of them the faith of an actual 1-on-1.
Straight up, Vergil didn't know what to do with the power he wanted. He didn't think of an answer. If he had (if the
writers had), he'd have been able to reason it out and defend his position.
People there are hailing Itsuno as the great savior, one of them, even, but if you point out that Itsuno preferred DmC they lose their collective s**ts. There are people who actually think that's offencive to Itsuno and if you post the evidence you will never witness cope of this magnitude. Everything DmC, to DMC5 fans, gets red hate and I don't get why they get so ravenous except that that's how fanboys fanboy.
4chan be 4channing. There might be people in this very forum that will flip their wig if you quote Itsuno's "Ninja Theory are the kings of style" (paraphrased). It's not like he's wrong. Anyone that's played Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice and is waiting for Senua's Saga knows that Ninja Theory can actually make a good game, and more importantly, marry the narrative to the game mechanics and level design to get the story across
while you press buttons, instead of the trap of video games being "movies where the plot stops and you press buttons to make the story keep going".
The failure of Capcom to tell DMC5's story in 5 (and 4's story in 4) is Capcom's alone. We're here looking up novels, manga, dev interviews, Twitch streams, artbooks, and whatever else just to figure out what's going on in one game. Everything that's told in a cutscene comes to a dead stop when the gameplay happens and the gameplay is "Beat up the enemy stylishly. Rinse, repeat." Level design, what's that?
Why did we need a book to tell us that Berial ruled Hell alone after Mundus's defeat when he we saw with our own eyes that he was dispatched like some cheap fodder and he himself never mentioned ruling all of Hell, just "the Fire Hell" implying other elemental Hells exist? We had a novel tell us that actually, DMC2 happened before 4 and Dante met Lucia again, he just doesn't care about her. Just ignore that the artbook for the tetralogy before 5's release was
3142 not
3124. What? Continuity? F You.
But nah, Ninja Theory bad, and
only Ninja Theory, according to fanboys. They will never admit that when they saw the first trailer for DMC5, they didn't
recognize Nero. They
rationalized it was Nero. And Morrison being a black dude when he was white in the anime is a direct response/echo of Phineas in DmC and that character was voiced by a black actor.
Yeah, but that's everyone. Dante got his power up by stabbing himself, which means they made a meme into canon, Nero did the Dragonball thing and Vergil ate the fruit. No one earned their power up, the plot just needed them got one and they got it.
I don't disagree that the unearned b.s. happened to
everyone and that Dante is a massive meme (I've said that in some other post), but the fact that we've been hovering behind Dante in every game in the series softens the blow
somewhat. This was his Super Saiyan God ritual after we've already followed him around for most of his life where he got beaten up, Zenkai'd, and had training montages, and his victory against Mundus remains a narrow defeat/clutch victory thanks to Trish's intervention. 5 can't erase those events. Developer incompetence might, though.
Vergil eating from the Tree of Might is just egregious in comparison, like if Raditz came back and pulled that exact plot from the movie and now he's stronger than Black Freeza (thereby stronger than UI Goku and UE Vegeta).
Nero had a Gohan moment and got into his feelings super hard. Can't wait for him to repeat that character arc a dozen more times on loop, exactly like Gohan. DMC6 will feature Nero losing his arm
again. And Kyrie will be kidnapped and in danger
again. And Nero will care about another dead family member that he didn't show feelings about in the game they actually died in
again.
Yeah, but Dante got it worse. He was originally supposed to have intellect far above that of a normal human and how he thinks hitting something is using his brain too much. In his case it wasn't retroactively, it was intentionally and purposefully.
Insert my post of how the anime hoed Dante's characterization here.
Remember when he repeatedly trashed characters for wanting revenge for their siblings' unjust deaths and wrote off victimized/possessed humans as lost causes he wouldn't bother to save?
At this point we have no clear reasons why he even does his job except for the fact that he's been doing it in the last few games, and he simply wants to kill things and humans leave messy corpses. The intelligence he had in DMC1 that had him determine on sight that Trish was a demon is not exhibited anywhere beyond that game, otherwise he would have pegged V as bad news and not allowed Trish and Lady to go ahead of him to fight Urizen.
Yeah, I noticed that, too. More than anything, those two have lost the thing that made them, well, them. The light or the fire they had. or whatever poetic term you want to use. This isn't a 5 issue, this is a 4 and on issue. If they don't know what to do with Dante then they really are at a loss as who and what Lady and Trish are and who they're supposed to be. These personalities are not them nor what made them significant.
It's tragic; Lady and Trish served their future characterizations on a silver platter to the dev team at the end of their debut games but Lady becomes "gold-digger who throws her work on Dante's lap" even though it was her mission to stop more Arkham-type enemies from cropping up, and Trish is content being a sociopath who gets people killed even though she's the closest thing we have to seeing how a devil behaves when they awaken their humanity.
That would've been hilarious. But, yeah, that's a good way to describe all the major plot points in this game. Convenient. Well, it sure is convenient Dante's sword can now combine him and Sparda together. Isn't it great that Dante had Rebellion at all, considering it was shattered a month ago and he clearly didn't pick it back up. It sure is convenient the fruit had the same effect on Vergil otherwise his father would've clearly left him the short end of the stick. It sure is lucky that Dante didn't want to know the important plot points from Trish and V otherwise it would've spilled the plot. And how great is it that Nero's powerups now work off willpower and not Kyrie love.
Oof, you said it. It's the worst kind of plot contrivance. Like, we're all adults here, we
know that no fictional story exists without the writers deciding what goes into it. They're not making a documentary of a glimpse into an alternate universe where the events happened and are unalterable. This is a story, and to some degree, things are convenient whether to add stakes or humor or whatever else. But we're also here to be "deceived" in the sense that a story is most moving when its logic flows naturally and we believe that the actions characters take are the ones they would
if they were around in reality to do it.
There's no sense in Dante unlocking his Sin form by pulling a meme on a hunch, or that Dante's and Vergil's swords have some weirdly disparate abilities from each other that they never exhibited before but somehow totally complements their characters, because it means Sparda was
ridiculously clairvoyant to give Dante and Vergil the exact swords that they would need to unlock their abilities in that moment and no sooner. Sparda could somehow tell when his kids were the tender age of whatever, that Dante would need the Rebellion to carry him through his journey and Vergil would need the Yamato, that they would be driven apart through things beyond their control, etc. etc. So uh... why didn't he protect his family better? He gave his sons the perfect Devil Arms but he couldn't tell that Eva and the kids would be attacked soon after his death? If he even
is dead anymore?
Only as long as the story fits it. Once it's inconvenient it goes away, too. It's very possible, if there is a next game, that none of 5 will matter, either. I said this when DMC5 came out (5 years ago, if you can bloody believe it), but we care more about the DMC canon than capcom does. Hell, we probably care more about it than most fans who are intentionally blind to any defects this game has.
We were the true fans all along. Cue sappy music, roll credits!
Anyway, If you look at the second part of that, the test dialogue, it shows that in DMC1 Dante was orphaned at the age of 4. It's clear that in Visions of V they're older than that. That just seems like one more thing they changed from 1. In the original story Vergil was taken as a child and he joined the underworld. That's not the case now. I still think his age is the same, since I don't even think that people currently at Capcom knew that. In this case, for DMC1, it really did take place 20 years ago. Now... I've mentioned before that everything in DMC seems to take place in 10 year intervals. I think the ambiguity was very much intentional. Nothing was exact and that would add an air of mystery to the whole story. Basically, with all the info that we have we can assume nothing is as literal as we hope it is. Now, 20 years might just be a rounded off number. As much as it irks me, the truth is DMC lore is fluid and what one game says the others will contradict.
The sample script is interesting, but he seems older than 23 in the actual game. Like, he has a flashback to the last birthday he and Vergil had, and I doubt he'd remember the words his mom said when he was four. Does anyone remember things from when they were four? That, and Kamiya stated that DMC1 Dante was "a similar age to [Space Adventure] Cobra", who was 29 in his anime (older in the manga).
It was the one consistent thing across the new media: Dante is 19 in the third game, the manga takes place "nearly a year" before, and in the manga, Arkham relates a tale about Eva's death as a decade ago:
"About 10 years ago…a woman was killed at the edge of town. It was an unusual death. Her home burned to the ground, and the cause of death was unclear."
Dante/Vergil lose Eva (8yo)
-> 10 years later the manga happens (18yo)
-> one year later the game happens (19yo)
-> Trish comes by and says Dante lost his mother and brother 20 years ago, setting this game nine years after the third one (28yo)
-> the anime happens, where Trish took a notable absence from the shop to work freelance (??yo)
-> DMC2 happens? I guess? (??yo)
-> DMC4 happens after Dante gets out of Hell in DMC2, and Nero is either "the same age as Dante in DMC3" (19) per Kobayashi, or he's 16-17 per the novel Deadly Fortune (placing Dante around 35-38yo) by Bingo
-> DMCV: Before the Nightmare is 5 years after the Fortuna event, and the anime and DMC2 are set a decade prior.
So then Dante is 40-43yo, the anime and 2 happened when he was 30(?) -> DMC5 proper is a year after BtN, thus 6 years after 4.
If Nero was 16-17 in DMC4, he's now 22-23. If he was 19, he's 25.
And the DMC1 novel now happens sometime before DMC3, where Dante gets amnesia after Eva died, fixes his amnesia an untold number of years later, fights Gilver who is Vergil, forgets that and doesn't bring it up when he
actually sees Vergil nor reacts accordingly, etc. etc.
Of course, they
did retcon Vergil's status post-childhood demon attack. Him being abducted by Mundus and brainwashed for 20 years makes perfect sense for why Dante wouldn't recognize his own brother that many years later. Dante not recognizing Vergil when the last time they saw each other was 9 or so years ago just makes him dumb (ignoring the novel). This is a fault of Capcom and Bingo being a bozo, as Bingo consulted Kamiya over that exact fact that Vergil being alive in 3 contradicts his kidnapping/presumed death, and Kamiya "approved" in the sense of, told him to make it clear it was an alternate universe, only for it not to be an alternate universe but main continuity.
I call Bingo a bozo here because he's also on record saying that "Vergil had no pre-existing design" and acting as if Vergil with a katana was his invention based off the existence of Yamato, when Vergil clearly had a human form design with a katana back in the DMC1 artbook, as his design then was based off of
Sho Kosugi from Blind Fury (1989). It's right in the book:
It was decided from the beginning that Dante's brother Virgil would be a character with a Japanese sword, as opposed to Dante who handles a gun. He was drawn based on the concept of having a more vicious look than Dante, but the same height. The image was that of the villain in the movie "Blind Fury" (1990, USA). In the beginning, he was not supposed to look like a black knight, and he was to wear a suit while Dante was dressed roughly.
So like, whatever.
Everything was a decade ago, everything Sparda did was 2000 years ago. Things are canon until they're not. This timeline is The Simpsons.
