Every Now And Then, I Remember That People Don't Know How Much Of A Game Changer (no Pun Intended) The

Every now and then, I remember that people don't know how much of a game changer (no pun intended) the first Devil May Cry was. Namely in the action genre and combat-driven games. I remember that before Devil May Cry, combat in games weren't really all that focused on combos and skill; at least not in the way the franchise does it. Even games like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter, there wasn't anything quite like Devil May Cry.

There's a reason why a lot of games that follow that combat style are referred to as "Devil May Cry clones" or "uses the combat style of Devil May Cry". A lot of games wouldn't really be a thing if Devil May Cry didn't happen. God of War. That weird Jack Skellington game. Bayonetta. Ultraviolet. Darksiders. Ninja Gaiden. Nier: Automata.

Hell, even Capcom has used that combat system in their OTHER games. Like Okami, for example.

Don't know where I'm going with this. Just gushing at how Devil May Cry changed the game (lol)

It is sad but true that historical innovations become less appreciated over time. TV Tropes has a page for "Seinfeld is unfunny" to document this trend. We don't appreciate how hard the Forty-Niners had it because we can fly to California in an afternoon and drive around Beverly Hills today.

Devil May Cry started its life as a RESIDENT EVIL game. Which is why the first game had such a dark gothic foreboding atmosphere. Hideki Kamiya was inspired by a game bug in Onimusha, another Capcom game, where they were able to juggle enemies in the air with sword attacks indefinitely. That sort of gameplay didn't fit with the style of game they wanted Onimusha to be, but Kamiya liked that concept so much that he wanted to incorporate it into an intentional element of his own game. Eventually the game they were developing deviated so much from the spirit of Resident Evil, becoming so action oriented, that it was decided that they should divorce the project from any association with Resident Evil and let it be its own thing. (How times change, huh?)

Devil May Cry literally created the character action genre. There was NOTHING before Devil May Cry that was anything like it. "Oh there were hack and slashes before DMC" no dude, calling DMC a hack and slash is like calling What Remains of Edith Finch a First Person Shooter. It's not the same thing and you know it. There was nothing like Devil May Cry before Devil May Cry. And it was such an innovation that an entire genre was born, games that took direct inspiration from Devil May Cry and built upon its foundations.

Now, sadly, because of how much progress there's been, people go back and play the original DMC1 and it feels "clunky" in comparison. It has fixed camera angles (because it was originally a Resident Evil game) which has an impact on move inputs being relative to camera direction, and that doesn't feel natural to what people expect from the genre based on modern standards. It only has two melee weapons, and the melee attacks are based on a one button input. There's no "special moves." The game is limited by memory to only allowing one enemy type in a room at a time so you'll never see mix and match encounters. THERE'S SWIMMING LEVELS!!!

People consider DMC1 "skippable" because it "hasn't aged well." The concept of a game "not aging well" disgusts me to my core tbh. The game is exactly the same as the day it came out. It's the world that has aged around it. Better games have come out since Devil May Cry, but they only EXIST because of Devil May Cry. There would be no Bayonetta or God Hand or Wonderful 101 without Devil May Cry. It is the root from which an entire genre sprang up. Of course they didn't get it perfect the first time, they didn't even know what they were doing.

But sadly video games don't really get respected as an art form. People judge them based purely off some kind of nebulous constantly shifting "objective standard" of pure entertainment, and if a game doesn't measure up then it isn't worth wasting time with. I think media should be appreciated in the context of when it was released. And DMC1s historical importance and everything it innovated relative to what its contemporaries were doing in 2001 deserves to be appreciated.