Devil May Cry 2

is a 2003 action-adventure game developed and published by Capcom for the PlayStation 2. In terms of chronological order, the game's events are set after Devil May Cry and Devil May Cry: The Animated Series and prior to Devil May Cry 4.

Set in modern times, in the fictional Vie de Marli island, the story centers on demon hunter Dante and island guardian Lucia in their fight to stop a businessman named Arius from raising the demon Argosax and achieving supreme power. The story is told primarily through a mixture of cutscenes using the game engine, with several pre-rendered full motion videos.

Handled by a different team that lacked experience, Devil May Cry 2 had a troubled production which was reflected in its reception. The game received mixed reviews and has been criticized for a variety of decisions, which made it considerably different from its predecessor; chief among these were the lowered difficulty and changes to Dante's personality. Despite that, Devil May Cry 2 was a commercial success, established a number of series conventions, and motivated its development team to improve their work, staying with the franchise for future entries.

Gameplay

thumb|left|In-game screenshot showing Dante swinging his sword, Rebellion, towards a Goatling.

In Devil May Cry 2, the player guides either Dante or Lucia through a number of environments, fighting groups of monsters in fast-paced combat. The game consists of missions with specific goals in the play area of the game itself. The player's performance in each mission is ranked from D (poor/"Don't Worry") to S (excellent/"Showtime") based on the time taken to complete the mission, the amount of Red Orbs collected, the overall "style" displayed during fights, item usage, and damage taken. In contrast to the rest of the gameplay, the style judging system used in the game has been cited as being the harshest in terms of how it judges the player's performance.

Combat itself is based on the "style" the player demonstrates during a fight. The rating the player gains for style is improved by hitting enemies continuously while avoiding damage. This ranges from "Don't Worry", progressing to "Come On!", "Bingo", "Are You Ready?" and peaking at "Showtime". If the character takes damage, the style rating falls back to "Don't Worry". Dante flips a coin in answer, and decides to help when the coin lands on heads. He heads off to exterminate demons and find Arius, while Lucia collects the Arcanas.

Both fighters spot and chase a Uroboros helicopter flying from headquarters towards an oil platform. Lucia reaches it first and faces Arius, who reveals her origin as his rejected artificial creation. He claims that she is bound to turn on humans someday, then warps her away. Shortly afterward, Dante meets up with Lucia, who gives him the last of the Arcana and leaves. She infiltrates the Uroboros tower to kill Arius, but fails and is held hostage. Dante then encounters Matier, who asks him to take the Arcanas to save Lucia. Dante flips the coin again to decide if he will help; it lands on heads, and he departs to aid Lucia. Dante arrives and trades the Arcana for Lucia, then attacks Arius. To escape, Arius forces Dante to decide between saving Lucia or killing him.

Lucia, worried about the ritual and conflicted about herself, wonders how they will stop Arius. Dante waves her off, stating he will find a way. Dante leaves Lucia to think as he departs to defeat Arius. Matier arrives a short time later, reaffirms their mother-daughter bond as stronger than blood ties, and persuades her to rejoin the fight against Arius. Dante arrives at the tower to find Arius in the middle of his immortality-inducing ritual. However, Dante is not worried as he switched the Medaglia with a non-sacred coin. Another fight ensues, in which Dante finishes Arius off with his pistols. Outside, Lucia confronts Dante and demands that he kill her because she fears she will become a demon herself. Before the issue can be resolved, a large stream of energy strikes the tower and a portal to the demon world is opened. Dante and Lucia argue over who will enter and close it from the inside; Dante offers to leave the issue up to fate. He flips the coin and it once again lands on heads, leaving Dante to enter the portal to deal with the partially summoned Argosax, after leaving the coin with Lucia.

After Dante departs, Arius returns to life bearing demonic power. While Lucia fights Arius, he finds himself injured and attempts to distract her, a tactic which fails, and Lucia goes on to defeat him. Within the portal, Dante fights and defeats Argosax. Finding the portal closed behind him, Dante instead drives further into the demon realm on a motorcycle. In the aftermath of the battle, Matier attempts to reassure Lucia about Dante's fate, insisting that Sparda returned from a similar trip. Lucia examines the coin Dante left with her and discovers that both sides are identical. Sometime later, in Dante's shop, Lucia muses about Dante. Outside the sound of a motorcycle echoes, and Lucia leaves to investigate. The player is not shown whether or not Dante has returned.

Development

Background

Throughout the turn of the millennium, Team Little Devils—a group within Capcom Production Studio 4 helmed by Hideki Kamiya, who previously lead the successful Resident Evil 2—developed Devil May Cry. As production on that title wound down in the summer of 2001, company management greenlit a sequel, to be made by the arcade-centric Capcom Production Studio 1, for release soon after the original to capitalize on its high awareness and popularity.

The first director of Team Devil was a planner who had worked under Studio 1 General Manager Noritaka Funamizu. Kamiya believes the change happened due to a lack of consciousness over directors' influence on game style, and an attempt to balance profits due to a company attitude against concentrating major titles in a single division. While working on the localization and finishing touches of Devil May Cry, Kamiya first heard about the sequel from its original director, who asked him to share that game's screenplay and design document so they could develop the sequel. as well as the fiction section of the Devil May Cry manual. Morihashi—who juggled his Capcom job with a career as a professional novelist—only made small dialogue augmentations and wrote subtitles, cautious of limits due to newness. By the point he got to work on its writing, the script was in the translation process, while bosses and stages were already done. So when the finalized scenario was submitted, he was asked to not make big changes.

The game's entire cast has few lines of dialogue and never takes drastic action. To Ikeno, "[Dante's] sudden silence almost seemed to imply that something terrible had happened between the events of 1 and 2". Both Ikeno and Morihashi feel the lack of any warm moments from Lucia hurt her likeability, the latter also thinking the same of Matier. Multiple Team Devil members were fond of Arius because "it was neat to have a CEO as a villain"; as "a symbol of high contemporary culture", he became the precedent that allowed writing opportunities in sequels beyond the "fantasy world" setting of the original. To Morihashi, who sees "love" as the central theme of the series, Devil May Cry 2 "is about Dante's love for his father. He follows in his father's footsteps by protecting something that his father once protected".

Ikeno sees the series' visual style as aligned with action-packed Hollywood B movies, as such approaching it like a live-action adaptation of a comic book. He made the main cast's wardrobe aiming for clothing that real people would wear. The new characters' designs were made to complement and contrast Dante's, with Lucia's also working as a counterpoint to Trish's design while fitting a Capcom tradition of prioritizing fighting ability over attractiveness in female characters. Arius' face is an homage to Colonel Douglas Mortimer, a character played by Lee Van Cleef in For a Few Dollars More; his noble look and palette "imply that he's compensating for a deep, dark evil that he harbors within".

Despite fluffier hair, Dante's redesign emphasized his elegance, but the accompanying personality change did not endear all: future series character designer couldn't play the game because "Dante's face was a little too scary". Capcom Design Room illustrator Naru Omori created four cover images for Devil May Cry 2, which he found unsatisfactory due to a short three week deadline, though content with one used on the packaging; as well as the logo pose render, made during an all-nighter. Cutscenes were outsourced near the end of production to the CG animation and motion capture studio Links DigiWorks, who'd contributed to games by other Capcom divisions. Their work impressed Tanaka, which led to a television commercial blending pre-rendered CG with live-action.

Besides playing a role in the contrast, Lucia's skin color, as well the accent she shares with Matier, reflect Vie de Marli's multicultural origins. That factor also played a part in the creation of demons, whose names are derived from languages such as Latin, Greek and archaic Japanese. Ikeno turned to the roots when crafting their designs: "Ancient portrayals of demons rarely incorporated elements that weren't already known to people at the time, so they might have the head of a lion but the body of a human, for instance. It was in this spirit that we decided to make most of our monsters proper chimeras". Inspiration derived from western imagery includes woodblock illustrations of the brazen bull, Norse mythology, the Bible, alchemical symbolism, and rituals with pagan roots. Eastern imagery came from yōkai and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

Possessed Arius was partly based on deep sea lifeforms and Arius-Argosax on east asian dragons because Ikeno thinks that "the strongest-looking demons tend to be humanoid dragon ones". In his estimate, Argosax the Chaos—an amalgamation that recycles resources and attacks from previous bosses—"probably received more time and effort than anything else in the game", with peculiar coloring because he "really just wanted to make it look weird". Team Devil's arcade background was reflected in the approach to texture mapping: the lack of experience with realistic resources meant most of their textures were handmade, which made its visuals and essence more drawing-like in comparison with Devil May Cry, whose modelers tackled realism by making textures out of photographs.

The option of running through Devil May Cry 2 with Lucia was a result of player feedback per Tanaka:

Global player surveys about the original influenced the sequel's design: "people complained of the locked camera viewpoint being disorienting. A lot of effort has been put into addressing this issue and making scene transitions smoother. [...] The two areas people seemed most pleased with in the first game were how cool a character Dante was and the level of action. So we upped the action and made him even slicker". Devil May Cry 2 was set up for an easy first playthrough, with an increasing degree of challenge as the player goes through its unlockables.

Both characters received new, more acrobatic moves to achieve high action possibilities in wide spaces. Itsuno was asked to "reorganize the project" in a supplementary role, which effectively meant taking over leadership, as upper management saw it as director-less. In exchange, he would go uncredited, but ended up the only director listed in the final version of the game. He joined under poor conditions:

Itsuno was angered at his assignment and took on the job in a "burning [his] own bridges" way; he originally planned a complete overhaul which would detach the game from the Devil May Cry intellectual property: "part of me was dissatisfied because I hadn't started with the project from day one. As far as I was concerned, that didn't amount to a proper level of involvement with DMC". According to Nara:

Morihashi, who handled a multitude of odd jobs, found the toil taxing, to the point of coughing blood: "I was living close to the company, so I'd get home around dawn, bathe, change clothes, and then head right back. I was practically sleeping at work so I wouldn't be late. (laughs) I'd even take naps during lunch breaks". Despite the situation, he was still invested in the series, and asked for Kamiya's advice on how to tackle a sequel featuring Vergil. When he joined Team Devil in February 2002; the story, characters and designs were largely finished; with much to do about gameplay: "The stages were mostly there, but not the missions. [...] It was like we had all the trappings done, but not the filling, which made things very hard". At some point, the game's release date was moved up four months. A trailer was showcased later that month at E3. Tanaka was vague in disclosing many of the game's features; no concrete information could be given about the orb system because Team Devil was still working on it. Enemy voices and sound effects were recorded at Soundelux in July. Devil May Cry 2 was 65% complete around then. With a combination of media and visitor votes, it was one of fifteen titles that won the Award for Excellence of the inaugural Game Awards Future category at the CESA Game Awards; Tanaka stated Team Devil were in the final stages of development during his victory speech. That demo was released on a Dengeki PS2 bundled disc.

Three features emphasized on previews as bringing accessibility to both casual and dedicated players—but cut from the final game—are automatically scaling difficulty, fully customizable controls and multiple paths for all missions; Tanaka felt the uneven mission lengths of Devil May Cry was an issue, and saw the last feature as a way for players to pace playthroughs out to match their preferences. Dante's motorcycle would have played a larger part through driving missions and as a weapon, Pre-release stills showcased him brandishing Alastor.

Marketing

Due to the focus of Devil May Cry 2 on style, Capcom partnered with the Diesel clothing company, which has a history of working with game developers. Per Ikeno, the collaboration happened via Tanaka, who was an ex-Diesel employee: "People on both sides talked at the time and felt that DMC 2 and Diesel's visual styles would work well together and could be quite appealing to the casual audience". Three costumes (one for Dante, two for Lucia) made of pieces from Diesel's 2002 Autumn/Winter collection—which were almost entirely sold out by the point the game came out— and a belt designed by Team Devil's visual staff, were featured as unlockables for players. Devil May Cry 2 posters and kiosks showcasing a demo and trailer were placed in Diesel stores across Japan.

In Japan, a charm bracelet with a detachable steel miniature of Dante's sword Rebellion was distributed in a first come first served basis to people who preordered Devil May Cry 2 through participating retailers. The South Korea-exclusive limited edition contained both the bracelet and a black blouson emblazoned with the game's logo. After a test period during which Capcom sought 1,000 pre-orders as a proof of demand, the Devil May Cry 2 soundtrack was released to the public on October 15, 2004, as a two-disc set, with Masato Kohda, Tetsuya Shibata and Satoshi Ise credited as producers.

Reception

Critical reception

The game received mixed reviews, according to review aggregator Metacritic. The combat system was also criticized as being less refined, with individual weapons being weaker or stronger variants of the same weapon instead of different weapons with their own advantages and disadvantages. Boss battles were criticized for requiring less strategy than the original. The environment was less detailed than the environments of the first game, trading detail for open space which also made stringing moves and combos together more difficult since enemies were more spaced out, nullifying one of the primary attractions of the first game. Furthermore, Dante's personality change did not sit well with reviewers. The addition of a second disc was seen as a cheap way for the developers to increase replay value since Lucia's missions are simply recycled material from Dante's own missions, with only minor variations. GameSpot chose Devil May Cry 2 as the Most Disappointing Game of 2003. UGO Networks ranked Devil May Cry 2 19th on its list of "The Biggest Disappointments in Video Games", adding "Devil May Cry was so good [...] There was no way Devil May Cry 2 could've lived up to the hype, but it didn't have to fail so spectacularly."

However, the game received some positive reviews. PSXextreme, for example, countered arguments by many critics, stating that the environments only looked worse due to their range, and that the only reason Devil May Cry 2 failed to surpass its origins was due to the lack of challenge. Electronic Gaming Monthly praised the game's control scheme and new ideas, as well as the idea of featuring the two protagonists on separate discs. Play called Lucia's side of the story "a cruel sonnet of self-realization wrapped in a story steeped in religious overtones", stating that the story alone was reason to purchase the game.

Sales

Capcom positioned Devil May Cry 2 as a blockbuster title for the fiscal year. It sold well, becoming one of the top ten best-selling games in the United Kingdom for the first half of 2003. It earned the 500,000 yen Gold Prize at the 2003 for selling between 500,000 and 1 million copies in Japan by July. However, it did not meet corporate expectations: slightly below their 1.66 million forecast, itself a reduced estimate from initial projections. As of 31 March 2022, over 2.9 million units have been sold.