![]() Scrolling down the release list, you'll find an inordinate number of commercial flops from Japanese developers with strong track records. Lost Odyssey looked decent but played rough. That's partly because it was an overall quiet year for game releases (2007 had just come and gone, leaving us with BioShock, Mass Effect, and more), but also partly because there was a major crisis going on with Japanese developers: they weren't transitioning well to the high-definition graphics era. In the United States, Brawl beat out Grand Theft Auto IV in sales, and it was Wii Play that topped the charts. Brawl beating out Call of Duty World at War in global sales. The top-selling games of the year worldwide were Wii Sports, Mario Kart Wii, and Wii Fit, with Super Smash Bros. If you were a Japanese game developer making first-party titles for low-end platforms like the Nintendo Wii, 2008 was a good year for you. Let's hop in our time machine and take a look back.Ģ008 was a rough year for Japanese game development It was a game that did plenty of things right, but in an era where Capcom and other developers weren't ready to learn the lessons from its success. ![]() Instead it would be five years until Capcom attempted to reboot the series with Ninja Theory's DmC: Devil May Cry, and eleven years until it reversed course and continued the story of Nero, Dante, and Vergil.įor completely the wrong reasons, that means DMC 4 was a key inflection point in the history of the series-and in Japanese game development. With success like that, Devil May Cry 5 should have been right around the corner. ![]() Though I remember plenty of shrugs about Nero as a character (The Escapist's Ben "Yahtzee" Croshaw thoroughly eviscerated the game for trading in Dante's bona fides for an angsty 20-something yearning to save his girlfriend), the new gameplay mechanics and high-definition graphics drove the game to 2.32 million in sales during its first year, and a battery of favorable reviews from Famitsu, Game Informer, GameSpy, and beyond. On paper, it did! DMC 4 was a critical and commercial success for Capcom. But would the game live up to my expectations when it finally landed? Would it live up to the rest of the world's? I was excited for a plot-heavy adventure where it seemed Dante was the bad guy. I was convinced that the lore of the Devil May Cry series was deep and interesting.
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