So, when writing the big post about Kat and Vergil things (andpost addition), I had to rewatch all the games cutscenes. I wanted to make sure I got everything and I didn’t want to depend on my memory which may or may not have embellished things. But during the rewatch, one of the things that caught my attention had nothing to do with Kat and Vergil. It had to do with Dante, and his confrontation with Mundus in mission 19.
Dante, both preboot and reboot, gets this reputation in the fandom for being…really stupid. Sometimes, it feels fair to say this is an earned reputation. Reboot Dante especially is not intelligent in the way reboot Vergil is. And preboot Dante puts up a very good front hiding behind humor and dumb jokes that make it easy to ignore much else about him. The idea of the Sparda family brain cell is very funny to joke about and I do it to. It’s fun! It’s super funny! Do not take any of this as a condemnation on that, I would like for the jokes to continue. Also, it’s fair to point out that the fandom also jokes about Vergil’s intelligence, it’s not like Dante’s the only Sparda getting this treatment, all of them are. And it’s very funny, I don’t want it to stop.
But as a result, I think Dantes intelligence canonly is very under estimated, both in the preboot and the reboot.
I think this willingness to write Dante off as the less smart leads a lot of us to overlooking what he actually does, myself included. I’m about to write this post about something I flat out didn’t notice for 9 years because of it, and I got the reboot day of release. Honestly, some of you probably did notice this (maybe most of you have), but I want to talk about it anyway because I thought it was really interesting.
An analysis on Dante, starting with mission 19 and spanning a lot of the game, under the cut. A rewatch of mission 19 is not necessary I think, but it might illuminate a bit of what I’m getting at if anyone wants to do that.
I promise, this one’s very short! It was only like, two pages.
I don’t know if I’ve ever said it but I really don’t get the sentiment “if the reboot wasn’t a DMC game it would’ve done great” like bruh
Look at it this way: if it WAS its own game, it would still be compared to Devil May Cry and to many other hack and slash games of the time. And I don’t think it would “do great” either. People would look at the character of Don'te and compare him to Suda51 action game heroes and to Bayonetta, to InFamous or to Raiden of Revengeance.
People don’t vibe with his personality already, so how come they would think they’d vibe with him even if it was an original title??
Friendly reminder that if any small thing about the DmC reboot seems interesting to you, it’s probably a good idea to consider playing the game or watching a playthrough of it. A lot of the crap surrounding it comes from the fact that it’s ‘not DMC’ which I’d agree with but if you ignore the ties to the original series, it’s really not that bad of a self contained title. Some of it is pretty swick actually
Friendly reminder that if any small thing about the DmC reboot seems interesting to you, it’s probably a good idea to consider playing the game or watching a playthrough of it. A lot of the crap surrounding it comes from the fact that it’s ‘not DMC’ which I’d agree with but if you ignore the ties to the original series, it’s really not that bad of a self contained title. Some of it is pretty swick actually
