Phils Story Corner: DmC Has Slightly More Gameplay Than Story

DmC Devil May Cry is, without a doubt, one of the better hack-n-slash titles I've ever played in terms of story progression. For the most part, levels have a story purpose, and you can feel that you're making progress toward a goal as you make your way through each one. This is shocking, because hack-n-slash games are notorious, at least to me, for containing series of fights one after another that exist just because these are games in which you fight things and not necessarily because those you are fighting are true story obstacles in your quest.

Savvy readers will notice that I said "for the most part" above. Ninja Theory does good work here, as we have come to expect from them, but they aren't perfect. Case in point is mission four.

Before mission four there is a cutscene in which Dante, Vergil and Kat talk about what they can do to take down the demon Mundus. The first step, they decide, is to take down a plant that makes soda. So Dante and Kat set off to do just that. 

At the beginning of mission four, Dante and Kat are walking down the street toward the plant when a camera spots Dante and drags him into Limbo where demons can fight him. The whole mission, then, is about Dante fighting demons in the street until Kat can help him get back to the real world. They eventually figure it out and continue on to the soda plant, where the actual story continues in mission five.

So what was the point of mission four? More or less, it is there to give you for gameplay. In terms of the story and its progression, it serves no purpose.

I do feel a little bit bad picking on Ninja Theory for this because, as I said before, they are pretty good about staying on task in this game. But I still feel compelled to point this out because levels and sequences like this one are all too common in games. How many time sin the past year have you played a game in which your player character has had to struggle to get to where his or her story is supposed to kick in? Remember when Leon and Helena were riding in a bus on the way to the church in Resident Evil 6 only for the bus to crash for no reason, forcing you to walk the rest of the way? Remember when Master Chief was trying to make contact with the Infinity but was being jammed and had to spend an entire chapter of Halo 4 trying to turn off the jamming? These are sequences that extend the gameplay experience but slow down the story immensely. 

And if Ninja Theory, who are among the best storytellers in games today, can fall into this trap, then you know it's a real problem. Too, it wouldn't be fair to them to let mission four slide when we criticize the game. Ninja Theory and Alex Garland are masters of their craft, which I intend as a huge compliment even though the bar for storytelling in games has been set pretty low. Other developers can learn a lot from their successes, and even more, perhaps, from their failings. I single out this mission DmC precisely because it stands out from the rest of their outstanding work in this game. When a game is a general failure we tend to point many other problems it has first, and we may miss the subtle issues. 

But when analysing this game, which is generally a success, an issue with story progression like the one I am discussing becomes all the more obvious and particularly worth of discussion.

Ninja Theory: you made a really good game, and one that has quite compelling gameplay -- I say that as somebody who generally does not enjoy the hack-n-slash genre all that much. Once you learn to tighten up your stories so that the games you make don't have any pointless sequences, you will achieve true greatness. I'm holding my breath that that will happen.