Gamers have been furious since the reboot announcement of Capcom’s Devil May Cry series. English developer Ninja Theory of Heavenly Sword and Enslaved: Odyssey to the West fame has received the majority of the backlash, but what if gamers have it all wrong?
There have been many complaints. Team DmC even expected the harsh response. But perhaps they were mistakenly blamed for the reaction. In fact, the whole blame for the situation falls on Capcom. In an interview with IGN, VP of Strategic Planning and Business Development at Capcom Christian Svensson talked about the protagonist’s new design.
I will argue that any changes will bring about a knee-jerk reaction from fans. We know that; we knew that going into it. To be fair, I think some of the strategy here was to create that discussion and dialogue, and I think it drastically raises the visibility of the title versus if we had just done another Dante.
The team at Ninja Theory that started working on the concept imagery definitely meant to pay homage to Hideki Kamiya’s original vision.
The original concepts that came back for Dante were actually extremely close to the Dante everyone knows and loves. [But] the feedback that came back from [Keiji] Inafune and [Hideaki] Itsuno was, ‘No guys, this needs to be completely different, we need you to go much further and be much more creative.’
So maybe now people will lay off Ninja Theory a bit. It’s already been over a month since the initial reveal of DmC, so maybe now you can watch the trailer again and see if any of that hatred has settled down.
