Complexity and Complication in Devil May Cry

Did you ever notice Devil May Cry games really don't like having you just play Dante anymore? It's a bit odd when you think about it. Dante's popular, he's the face of the franchise and few people really seem to want him to go anywhere. I think because of that the common refrain, especially circa DMC4 about 12 years back, was "why can't I just play as Dante." It makes more sense though when you think about the games in terms of complication.

For those unaware, Devil May Cry is a series of action games that first started in August of 2001. They essentially redefined how 3D action games would work and created a sub-genre perplexingly referred to as "Character action." These could be best summed up as "the principle character's moveset is as complicated as a fighting game character's, but in an action game." Structurally they are one of the many heirs apparent to the beat-em-up genre, the Final Fights and Double Dragons of the world. They are kind of an inherently difficult genre to teach to new players because of how much they tend to demand the player understand a very large number of moves. While the genre has made strides in this direction, Devil May Cry 4 and 5 shows why that particular franchise tries desperately to keep players from playing its leading man too much and, especially, too early.

So, after Devil May Cry 3, Dante's playstyle was standardized. DMC1 and 2 are very early games and hard to go back to, they feel very strange. DMC3 however sets the idea of how Dante functions. He has 4-5 melee weapons he can use, and 4-5 guns. He has 4-6 "styles" that change what one of the buttons does and allow him to emphasize evasion, offense, counters etc. While DMC3 initially limited how freely he could swap between these (2 guns, 2 melee, 1 style chosen at save points), 4 and 5 opened the floodgates. This is the immediate illustration of why he is no longer the first or primary playable character. Put simply, playing Dante is complicated. Like... really complicated. An expectation made of the player is that they're going to actually be using at least half of the tools available to him, constantly changing melee weap9ons, guns, styles, whatever will let him trounce whatever he's fighting. Dante is immensely complicated in a game that is already quite complex. The complexity of the gameplay though is the heart of the game, that can't be ratcheted down. Dante is also well understood to hardcore players so completely reworking how he functions would upset them, so to cut the knot, you don't.

Let's contrast Dante with his protege Nero then. Nero is pretty straightforward, he has a big sword and a big revolver, he can launch enemies, he can pull them towards him, he can launch himself toward them. Nero has basically all the moves he needs to fight most enemies comfortably, he has to work harder to look cool doing it, but he is not lacking for ways to be effective or stylish. Nero is in this sense scientifically designed to be a player's introduction to how to play these kinds of games, as the player understands Nero's moveset and what everything in it does, they start to understand how these kinds of games construct their movesets, they look for equivalents if they play similar games. If they do so they'll find that Raiden in Metal Gear Rising Revengeance, Bayonetta in Bayonetta, etc all have movesets that have at least a fair few similar tools to Nero's. Nero definitely has unique tools to him, he rewards extremely precise timing with stronger attacks, in DMC5 he has a number of abilities that can be used and swapped between, but he is archetypal. Nero is built only to require an understanding of the things you need to know on a basic level to succeed in the genre. When Nero has new moves or features given, they are limited. Importantly, in Devil May Cry 5, his new features are only usable one at a time.

Let's compare actually. Dante has his bevy of guns, styles and swords, he can swap between all of them at any time. Nero's closest equivalent is introduced in DMC5, his devil breakers. Devil Breakers are basically sets of prosthetic arms Nero can use, each of them has a special ability, many of them similar to Dante's. Devil breakers can slow down time, they can propel nero around as an evasive maneuver, they can do special attacks that control crowds. Devil Breakers give Nero very Dante-like tools. Nero can't actually use them as freely thoough, if Nero is attacked while in the process of using one he breaks it to escape the attack he's been hit with and it's gone. Not only that, Nero can't actually swap between them, he can only move to the next one when the current one breaks. By doing this Nero is made complex, but he remains uncomplicated. Nero can if desperate overcharge his current Breaker and make it execute a more powerful attack, breaking it in the process. This allows a player who understands the game to blow them up on purpose to get to the breaker they need now, but also requires them to accept they are willing to not use the current breaker until they replace it. The choice here is binary but impactful, it is complex but uncomplicated. The design of Nero is meant to avoid the scope creep of the player's actual number of options. Where Nero has 10 things he could reasonably do at once, Dante has 100.

The problem here isn't "new players couldn't understand Dante" it's "there's no good way to teach them how to use him." Dante is an accretion of years of design, he is consistent across games while always getting new tools and options. To make Dante uncomplicated would be to make a new character. So for everyone's sake, instead Dante's a treat. After you've played a bunch of the game as someone else, now you play as Dante. Where other characters may struggle, Dante is basically designed to be functionally invincible to an average enemy. He hasn't got "an answer" for everything in the game like Nero, he has his choice among 10 different answers. Since he's only played for a smaller portion later in the game the player isn't "required" to understand how all of his gameplans work, but they can by this point know the game enough to acclimate to at least one of them. In his giant hodgepodge of tools is something that is intuitive to the (relatively) new player who just spent a third of the game playing as Nero.

There's something there though, a complex game likely has some complication, but the appeals of complexity and complication are different. By simplifying the decisions to be made the developers err on the side of complexity over complication, something that's seen likely as more mass market. My personal feelings would be that it's the right move but it'd be unfair to say complication has no appeal, but in a game of this nature when the game itself is already so fast, better to go light on mandatory Dante no matter how much the fans love him. Complication and complexity at that speed are a limited audience.

Being a limited audience isn't a bad thing, and that's why Dante-style characters will never fully leave. Fighting games are known for catering to this too, people need those Zekus and Jack-os as much as they need Ryus. That said, in a game that is a linear single-player experience, the developers are incentivized to focus on introducing the complexity before forcing the player to deal with complicated. They are however fully incentivized to cater to the person who loves complicated complexity, simple tools can have infinite outcomes, but complicated tools can produce larger infinities.