DEVIL MAY CRY 2
sometime around the third run thru chapter 5 i thought maybe i was in hell., maybe hell is shooting an infested tank and then another infested tank and then another infested tank and then an infested chopper. maybe it's holding down a button forever and seeing health bars drain at a geological rate. maybe it's the completely fucked animations on everything from stinger to knockdown recovery. dante, do something!!!!! do... Something!!!! i read a review where someone said they played worse shit as a kid and to that i have to say I'm Sorry Your Parents Are In Jail Now
it's an ennui chamber. a bad time generator. all signs and symbols of Most Gratifying Killings scraped and hollowed of all meat and musculature. the inputs remain, as do the triumphant escalating ranks and combos and methods of obliteration, but with any and all sense of spirit sucked out thru the gaps. a dried lakebed or ghost town for too big healthbars and infinite bullets. normal. hard. must die. costumes. characters. all serving nothing, accomplishing nothing, resulting in nothing. an emptiness best exemplified by the thousands and thousands of floors of its bloody palace: a kingdom for no one
in this sense you could frame dmc2 as (unintentionally) being one of the best examples of an action game completely removing all romanticism and pleasure from the act of violence, doing so in a far more convincingly unpleasant way than anything that actually attempted the same goal deliberately. admittedly tho, it's hard for me to cross over from wow i hate almost everything about this (bad) to wow i hate almost everything about this (good) even if i can understand how someone could land in the latter category if their mental game was unfathomably strong. it would be easy to assume dmc2 fans are disingenuous due to how loathsome it is to vermin like me, but some people really are just perfect mindsoldiers and i'm not gonna assume the worst about anybody, let alone folks with the latent psychic potential to scanners my head all over the food court at a moment's notice
but yeah this shit's jinxed. type of thing you find at the bottom of an ancient temple and decide to leave there. by the end i'd started to come down with something and my partner joked the game was making me sick and i'd be amazed if there wasn't some malignant psychosomatic aftershock going on from prolonged exposure. still, it's worth mentioning stuff that doesn't make me wanna nap for a week straight
stuff i like:
• the water pillars
• the Diesel product placement and dante in raw denim (Sick)
• nefasturris (Sick)
• trish having the dmc1 dante moveset (Sick)
• not having to go back