Devil May Cry is winned. In other words, I beateded it. That's one more off my backlog to make up for the three, four, five or six I added to it. I'm pretty sure Mr. Dreds is doing much better than I am as far as backlogs are concerned.

Devil May Cry -- the original -- is really odd to me. It was touted as Hella Stylish, from the characters to the combat and everything in between, but many of the story elements -- cutscenes, characters, dialog -- didn't scream "stylish!" but rather "cornball!". The ending was so full of cheese it'd give my lactose-intolerant friend hellish diarrh- well, let me not get potty-mouthed now. The voice acting was -- eh -- not bad, but the dialog just made a lot of it barely tolerable. Further, and more important, I just didn't find anything super stylish about the combat. Even when I first saw the game back when it was released as my friend was blazing through it, I thought, "Certainly looks fun, but what's so 'stylish' about it?" Maybe it's a matter of taste, because to me, "stylish" combat equals Tachibana Ukyo of Samurai Shodown fame.

Then there's the mission structure, which just weirded me out. Devil May Cry seems like a game primed for continuous, organic progression -- and yet it breaks everything up into bite-sized missions. You've got this great big castle to explore but you can only consume it in chunks, and if you happen to fail a mission, you start over from the beginning. Is this necessarily a bad thing? Not at all -- but it does feel very odd in the context of the game's castle design.

One thing that's frustrating is dying and restarting, because there's no Retry button unless you have a yellow orb. However, I'm not talking about retrying from where you died -- I'm simply talking about how the interface is designed. When you die, you look at the YOU ARE DEAD! screen for a few seconds, then have to read as the game tells you, "You can restart from a save point." *pause* "Visit the load screen? Yes/No", then you choose yes, and then the load screen comes up, and then you have to wait for the file to load, and then you go back to the mission start screen where you have to buy your power-ups again. I'd really, REALLY just like for the YOU ARE DEAD! screen to give me three options: "Restart Mission / Go to Load Screen / Quit Game". That's it. If I hit Restart, just send me back to the beginning of the mission without having to spend the seconds to sit through loading and re-buy my power-ups. Yes, it's a small thing. No, it doesn't make DMC "zomg terrible gam". But it does get irritating. This is the same problem that the GBA Castlevanias had for years -- booting you back to the title screen every time you died.

The combat, though, is way fun. Again, I didn't find it super stylish, but that really doesn't matter when you're having a lot of fun. It's fun because it's easy to pull off moves that are well-animated, do what you expect them to, and pack a hefty punch. It's fun because as easy as it is to pull off those moves, the enemies' behavior and sheer strength (in either numbers, how hard they hit, or both) make it really difficult for you to succeed. So what you're left with is all the tools you need to succeed -- just like in any good, challenging game (Ninja Gaiden, Ikaruga) -- and you just have to be good at the game. You're never gimped at any point in the game, having to make extensive use of health refills or whatnot (in fact you can only carry one health refill at a time). The game rarely feels cheap, and even on those occasions where it does, you do have some power-ups at your disposal (Holy Water is DMC's version of a shmup's Smart Bomb, essentially). So, no, it's not perfect in that regard, but it's very close. The boss battles are awesome -- I enjoyed how they mixed the encounters up between bosses whose pattern you had to learn and bosses with quasi-random behavior who you had to just wail on and then roll out of the way before you got fried.

There was a point in the middle of DMC where I got sick of it and just wanted to stop, but somewhere in between chapters 13 and 15 it just clicked. Oddly enough it was the mission structure that helped -- knowing that each mission is bite-sized made me realize that whatever objective I was trying to accomplish just shouldn't take very long, and if I was ever wandering around without a clue in the world as to what to do, then I was missing something really obvious. Its "puzzles" are very straightforward, if you can really call them puzzles in the first place, so knowing that made me remember to just keep it simple, stupid.

Will I be replaying it again on hard? No, not likely. I want to keep moving through my backlog, and the reason I tried to blaze through DMC was so I could get to the much-acclaimed DMC3: Special (Wussy) Edition. I'll probably be spamming that one next. But first, GMAT studying, and then Yakuza..........