Sterling May Cry
No, I'm not crying, but if you know me, you know I love Devil May Cry. So at some point I was going to sit down and write about it, and today is that day!
Specifically, I want to talk about the HD Collection, because it's the most accessible way to play the original trilogy right now, and because I have personally gifted it to a hilarious number of friends. If you are one of those friends and you are reading this: you're welcome, and also, yes, I will make sure you actually play it. But before anyone goes in blind, there are some things about it that I think deserve to be said clearly.
The HD Collection bundles Devil May Cry 1, Devil May Cry 2, and Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition into one package. That sounds straightforward, and it mostly is. But "HD Collection" is doing a little bit of work in that title, and it is worth understanding exactly what was and wasn't done here.
I'm going to get a bit technical, as I often do when I talk about things I love, so get ready! What you're getting is essentially the PS2 games running at 1080p, with trophies and achievements added and not a great deal else. The menus are still in 4:3. The maximum resolution is 1080p and it was not updated further when the collection was ported to PC and newer consoles in 2018. It runs well and it is perfectly playable and readily avaiable. But it is a port, not a remaster, and the distinction matters.
Here's where it gets interesting: The PS2 was a notoriously unusual piece of hardware, and a lot of its visual effects were deeply tied to its native resolution of... 640x448. When you upscale from that to 1080p, certain things sadly are bound to break or vanish entirely because they were position-based and never designed to survive a resolution change. The people who ported the collection either could not or did not fix this, and the result is a version of these games that is missing a handful of impressive visual details that the originals had.
The most famous casualty is the moon in Devil May Cry 3. Even if you haven't played DMC3, you've surely seen the moon I'm talking about: The one from Dante and Vergil's first encounter. In the PS2 original it looks atmospheric and genuinely beautiful. In the HD Collection... the bloom effect is gone and the moon texture, and I am not exaggerating here, looks like something straight from Minecraft. I have seen both versions side by side and the comparison is not kind. Devil May Cry 1 loses a bloom effect over a sunset bridge scene and Dante's blur effect when firing mid-air. His hair in DMC3 loses its transparency, which is a smaller issue but still visible if you know to look for it.
The controls in Devil May Cry 1 were also changed. In the original US and European PS2 release, Triangle was your sword and Circle was jump, which felt counterintuitive but was just the way it was. The HD Collection standardises this to modern controls, making Cross the jump button. This is probably the right call for accessibility and I suspect most people will not mourn the original layout.
The difficulty is also slightly different for DMC1. The HD Collection is based on the Japanese PS2 version, which was a touch easier than the western release. The difference is not dramatic but it is there.
Now... about Devil May Cry 2. I will keep this brief because the game itself is brief in terms of the number of things it gets right. Devil May Cry 2 is not good. Dante in this game barely speaks, barely has a personality, and barely needs to try in combat because the balance is completely broken in the player's favour. It is a fascinating thing to experience once maybe, purely to understand why DMC3 exists and why it overcorrects so aggressively in the opposite direction, but it is not a game I would recommend for its own sake.
DMC3: Special Edition, on the other hand, is where the series found itself. It is a prequel, it is stylish to a degree that borders on criminal, it has Vergil in it, and it is the version of the game you want. The original western release of vanilla DMC3 was notoriously brutal because someone at Capcom's US branch decided that Normal difficulty should functionally be Hard (Payback from DMC2 being easy? Who knows!) The Special Edition available in the collection follows Japanese difficulty scaling, which is still challenging but is at least the version the developers intended for the majority of players.
So! Should you play the HD Collection? Yes, with the caveat that you now know what it is. It is a convenient, stable, well-priced way to play three foundational games in a genre that would not exist or at least wouldn't be the same without them. The visual differences are real but they are the kind of thing that bothers you more if you played the originals first. If you are coming in fresh, you won't notice, and this is fine. And if you are the kind of person who absolutely cannot abide the moon scene looking like that, well. There are mods for PC. There are always mods.
I'd like to say this whole tangent was partly inspired by Nvidia's latest AI slop bs filter, which has been making the rounds and which has a talent for doing to games exactly what the HD Collection did to that poor moon: technically higher resolution, yet visibly worse with the extra of killing the artistic vision behind the scene. But that AI thing is much, much, worse...
The other reason I wanted to write this is because Devil May Cry is not just a series I love. It is one of those that genuinely shaped the way I think about stories and characters, about style, action scenes and all.
There is a lot more to say, but not today! You have suffered enough tech talk for one post, so I will spare you. For now.