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Was DmC: Devil May Cry The First Game To Ever Go Woke?

I only played DmC: Devil May Cry Definitive Edition and Devil May Cry 5 and I actually like DmC a lot, more than 5. DmC had very interesting level designs and imaginative setpieces (the nightclub level, and news anchor level), while a good part of 5 took part in like generic video game underworld or destroyed city. Don't remember anything particular about 5, besides the fact that you were forced to switch characters every few levels, so you have to go through the different levels with characters and their move sets I didn't like much.

Agreed. I really tried to like DMC 5 I thought it looked incredible and the combat was fun. My main two issues:

1. Felt like I was being stopped for a video\cut scene after every other battle it was way to much.
2. Switching characters so much.
 

MMaRsu

Member
Hey now... I like RE5 as much as the next horror fan, but let's not go bringing it up as some sort of victim of pre-woke wokeness. I know that gamers like to push back and say there's absolutely nothing racist or questionable about RE5 cause der der African zombies should be African, and, honestly, even with the white savior thing, for much of the game, there isn't anything particularly offensive, but I'm sorry.... the tribal stuff is... problematic.

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Why is it problematic

Its a game about frigging zombies its not supposed to be realistic is it
 

Moochi

Member
DMC wasn't woke but it was gay. "Problematic" is a woke word and if you use it you are woke. If those villagers were 18th century white peasants or Celtics in wolf cloaks and Braveheart face paint, you wouldn't have a problem with it.
 
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Why is it problematic

Its a game about frigging zombies its not supposed to be realistic is it
Okay, guess I'll just post this again...

Art does not exist in a vacuum. RE5's tribal imagery is problematic because there is a rich racist history of Africans being depicted as backwards cannibals. Like in this Disney produced nonsense below.



Look, now that I've told you that it is a thing, it's on you whether or not you want to acknowledge the history of these types of images. And before you say that the RE5 designs meant no harm, I agree with you. I quite enjoy RE5 and I can accept the horror tropes that it utilizes; including the cannibal trope. At the same time, though, it's important to recognize such images as problematic lest we forget that they can leave lasting negative impressions on society as a whole. Heck, just last year, Hatian immigrants were being accused of being cannibals. Like, what the hell. In 2024 that racist garbage was still being peddled.
 
No, it went emo. Funny they mocked the OG Dante for being gay, but theirs looked more like a twink.

And thinking the government is not to be trusted and that people are brainwashed by the media isn't woke. Woke people normally use the appeal to authority fallacy. They want the government and media to fix their imagined crises.

I think the actual first woke game was Mass Effect Andromeda. They were DEI hiring before DEI was a thing. The hired a woman who hadn't coded a game in years. The director was a racist and posted pics of him and his white tears cup.
 
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Katajx

Member
I don’t think so, but it definitely wasn’t what I wanted for a DMC. I think it works best through that Japanese lens and trying to westernize it and using a European team it loses much of what made it entertaining.

I think some of the only times I didn’t know any better were old Rare, and Mercury Steam.
 

Jigsaah

Gold Member
Sigh

For those who are just obvious bandwagoners for the woke crowd...a "Woke" game requires there to be some sort of social agenda. It is usually coupled with some shoehorned message the game is trying to convey. DragonAge the Veilguard is woke. The Last of Us Part 2 is woke....well done, but definitely woke. Hell, some might say Spiderman 2 is woke.

Just because it's a story about a Southern Black family does not make the game woke and those who assume it is are being intellectually dishonest or altogether simply ignorant. Just because people who may not be black decided to make a game with this kind of story, does not make the game automatically woke. You gotta look deeper than the simple trailer before just assuming the game is woke.

I been screaming this about Naughty Dog's game too.
People just seem so fuckin sensitive. Instantly offended by even the slightest possibility that a game might be woke when half of you don't even know how to describe it.

It's infuriating.
 
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Are people intentionally trying to obfuscate the term woke now, and why? Because we started labeling games with all those modern tropes as woke, and those games bombed, so rather than go back to the drawing board and give consumers what they want these corporate astroturfers destroy the meaning of the word so we can't use it as a label and they can continue shoving modern tropes into their games.
 

PeteBull

Member
Are people intentionally trying to obfuscate the term woke now, and why? Because we started labeling games with all those modern tropes as woke, and those games bombed, so rather than go back to the drawing board and give consumers what they want these corporate astroturfers destroy the meaning of the word so we can't use it as a label and they can continue shoving modern tropes into their games.
Yups, its known pattern for clownworld zealots to do it, they tried their best with calling sane ppl all kinds of stuff before, fascists, nazist, racists, mysogynists, narcisists etc all to soften/change the meaning of words, proof enough is just ask any wokeist what is a woman and they cant do it w/o using word "woman" itself.

To any1 pretending they dont know what woke actually is- its forced diversity/feminism/way of thinking. Its super ez to recognize unless person pretends to live under a rock last 10-15years.
Leftists nowadays went so crazy, that compared to them even cnn from early 90s looks like most based tv channel:
 

taizuke

Member
Is inFamous2 too then? Since they changed badass first game Cole to an average dude that was even worse in the first gameplay shown to "please" more audience?

While Sucker Punch were surprised by the fan backlash over the new design of Cole, they respected the fans and course corrected. Had they kept the new design against fan wishes then it would be a symptom of tone deaf developers that can be associated with being woke even though it's not necessarily.

And thinking the government is not to be trusted and that people are brainwashed by the media isn't woke. Woke people normally use the appeal to authority fallacy. They want the government and media to fix their imagined crises.

My point isn't whether you agree or not with the social commentary they added to the game. My point is adding any political themes to a franchise that didn't have it or wasn't known for.

I'm not against any social commentary or lecture a creator might want to inject in their own project, but I do take issue when it's done to an existing ip. Time and time again we see these kinds of things with creatives taking something popular and adding their own political agenda.
 

Clear

CliffyB's Cock Holster
The framerate was the go-to example for why the engine choice was bad for the hardware it was running on, but that was just an obvious thing people could point to before release that showed how Ninja Theory was a bad choice of developer. There were other very real problems that were clear once the game actually saw release. Just off the top of my head you have colour-coded enemies that lock you into fighting them with specific weapons from the stance system (a wholesale import from Heavenly Sword), no hard lock on so inputs for some moves like Stinger were made worse, they removed the style button for a launcher button so you have less moves and options total, Devil Trigger was badly designed and implemented, and there are lots of little broken things like the scythe's launcher letting you lift and lift enemies forever.

People talk up how Itsuno wanted to iterate on it, but that's either Japanese politeness or a frustration with how limited his design space was in a post DMC4 world - OG Dante is at a ceiling for how powerful playable characters can be.

Honestly I don't have an opinion on it. Its just that I'm fairly sure I remember people commenting positively when it got the 60fps upgrade, which just suggests to me that people warming to it isn't a new thing and actually predates any "woke" controversy.

Last DMC I played was 4 myself, so not really up-to-date with the franchise. I think I have Donte buried somewhere deep down in my pile'o'shame somwewhere, but not in any rush to dig it out even though I have heard positive stuff among the negative :D
 
Yups, its known pattern for clownworld zealots to do it, they tried their best with calling sane ppl all kinds of stuff before, fascists, nazist, racists, mysogynists, narcisists etc all to soften/change the meaning of words, proof enough is just ask any wokeist what is a woman and they cant do it w/o using word "woman" itself.

To any1 pretending they dont know what woke actually is- its forced diversity/feminism/way of thinking. Its super ez to recognize unless person pretends to live under a rock last 10-15years.
Leftists nowadays went so crazy, that compared to them even cnn from early 90s looks like most based tv channel:

I was thinking this can't be real. Like, it's obvious what is and isn't woke that shit is crystal clear lol. So how can all these different accounts simultaneously start posting this nonsense about woke being unclear and/or undefined. I'm glad I'm not the only one who saw this bullshit for what it is 💪.

This thread topic is a clear example because in what fucking universe is DMC woke. There is no political agenda in the story, no forced diversity or ABC's, no Mary Sue female characters, no evil white man, etc. I must be missing something so I guess I should replay it to find out.
 
My god, please stop misusing woke for anything that differs from your taste. We should have a chart of woke sample from Starfield to Veilguard and have said poster mark where the equivalency is.
 

mopspear

Member
It wasn’t the first.
Remember when Resident Evil 5 had to change the skin color of its zombies?

Do we have any proof of this, maybe from Capcom? I'm going back through the earliest trailers of Resident Evil 5 right now and this matches up to young-me in high school watching this same footage on the Game Trailers website wondering where everyone got this idea from. The very earliest trailer from July 2005 doesn't show anything useful but the second trailer which is the E3 2007 trailer, before the trailer where Sheva is even introduced, has some Arab(?) or Indian (?) looking zombies. One guy is to Chris's left when he is first shown in the second trailer and the guy he kicks in the chest later on (don't be confused by the black guy with the same striped shirt texture). Also, I just noticed another probably not-black guy when they start throwing axes and they exist in the concept art too. N'Gai Croal made his complaint which I can date to at least April 12, 2008 from an MTV article and an article intervieweing Sheva's voice actress says "There was a huge uproar a E3 2007, where it was just the Chris Redfield character in the trailer." so those dates are important.

I can't reasonably believe, with the information that I have, that they added non-black zombies to the game after some people complained. It is possible they tweaked the spawn rates of them in the final game but that's harder to tell.


 

taizuke

Member
This is probably going to get ignored, but I want to make it clear that I don't think DmC is woke. Just that it shares a lot of similarities with fan backlash over "woke" games.

My mistake was using the word. I take ownership of that. Maybe I should've asked:

"Was DmC: Devil May Cry The First Ever Game To Give Rise to Entitled Developers?"

But, I didn't and gave you the wrong idea of what I meant. And, I hope that even if you still don't agree, perhaps meet me halfway?
 

R6Rider

Gold Member
This is probably going to get ignored, but I want to make it clear that I don't think DmC is woke. Just that it shares a lot of similarities with fan backlash over "woke" games.

My mistake was using the word. I take ownership of that. Maybe I should've asked:

"Was DmC: Devil May Cry The First Ever Game To Give Rise to Entitled Developers?"

But, I didn't and gave you the wrong idea of what I meant. And, I hope that even if you still don't agree, perhaps meet me halfway?
No.

Glasses No GIF by nounish ⌐◨-◨
 

Kacho

Gold Member
This is probably going to get ignored, but I want to make it clear that I don't think DmC is woke. Just that it shares a lot of similarities with fan backlash over "woke" games.

My mistake was using the word. I take ownership of that. Maybe I should've asked:

"Was DmC: Devil May Cry The First Ever Game To Give Rise to Entitled Developers?"

But, I didn't and gave you the wrong idea of what I meant. And, I hope that even if you still don't agree, perhaps meet me halfway?
Don’t let the screeching get to you. Entertaining thread.
 
dante looked like a dork, but aside from that it was a pretty good game, they should have just made him look like a younger dante, they went too far with the redesign and totally missed the mark.
 

Fbh

Member
To me woke is poorly integrated DEI.
DMC didn't suffer from that, they just took a very Japanese franchise and westernized it in a way that was very off putting to fans of the original.
If you ignore that and just take it for what it is, it was actually a fun game.

I only played DmC: Devil May Cry Definitive Edition and Devil May Cry 5 and I actually like DmC a lot, more than 5. DmC had very interesting level designs and imaginative setpieces (the nightclub level, and news anchor level), while a good part of 5 took part in like generic video game underworld or destroyed city. Don't remember anything particular about 5, besides the fact that you were forced to switch characters every few levels, so you have to go through the different levels with characters and their move sets I didn't like much.

DMC 5 was really underwhelming IMO.
The combat is good and it was well optimized, but everything else about it felt half baked. They removed the light exploration from previous games and now you just walk through corridors from one combat encounter to the next. The environments are super boring too, the first half is a bunch of boring urban settings and, to steal a comment I saw somewhere, the environments in the second half look like a colonoscopy.
 
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I am genuinely trying to understand what woke is, but I swear to god the definition keeps changing or expanding everytime someone talks about it.


  • She is a strong black female leader because.... she is a strong black female leader.
    • I think it was because she was the leader of a PMC. And she's South African, so flip a 10 sided die on the race where 8 of the sides are black.
  • She ALWAYS win any cutscene she is part of because... she is a strong black female leader. Nate always loses a fight (any sort of conflict against her, to be honest) just beucase... you got the idea.
    • Trained leader of a small army vs a retired treasure hunter and his older brother who spent almost 15 years in prison and smokes like his life depends on it. So yeah, she won all those physical confrontations. Nadine never won against Rafe until the very last cutscene she was in for UC4.
I'd suggest you play Lost Legacy to see how the character evolves but I don't think you'll like Chloe either lol


It's an enjoyable, but flawed, game. In other words, like almost every other game out there. I can appreciate wanting to try new things and I really enjoyed it as well.
Bringing narrative into this discussion is pointless because it all depends on what the writers decide to craft. Your reasoning is flawed if you only focus on 'she’s the leader of a small army' vs 'retired treasure hunter,' while completely ignoring the actual gameplay. Nathan Drake, during gameplay, consistently takes down entire armies, performs superhuman stunts, and has killed hundreds of trained men, pirates, and criminals, often barehanded. He’s proficient with almost every weapon, including military-grade equipment, and displays near-superhuman strength and stamina. That’s what he’s done in every game, and yet you’re trying to frame him as some kind of frail old retiree—it just doesn’t hold up. This is a game, and you can’t just ignore what happens during gameplay as if it’s not part of the character’s reality.
 

HoodWinked

Member
Gone Home was probably the start of it. Gaming press glazed it and won awards so it basically gave the signal to other studios to copy the same themes.

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Loomy

Thinks Microaggressions are Real
Bringing narrative into this discussion is pointless because it all depends on what the writers decide to craft. Your reasoning is flawed if you only focus on 'she’s the leader of a small army' vs 'retired treasure hunter,' while completely ignoring the actual gameplay. Nathan Drake, during gameplay, consistently takes down entire armies, performs superhuman stunts, and has killed hundreds of trained men, pirates, and criminals, often barehanded. He’s proficient with almost every weapon, including military-grade equipment, and displays near-superhuman strength and stamina. That’s what he’s done in every game, and yet you’re trying to frame him as some kind of frail old retiree—it just doesn’t hold up. This is a game, and you can’t just ignore what happens during gameplay as if it’s not part of the character’s reality.
Uncharted the gameplay vs uncharted the cutscenes are 2 very different things. If cutscenes played out the way gameplay did, there would be nothing that could stop Nathan. The cutscenes portray him - and most other people in the game - as regular humans. Nate the Terminator capable of using every wepon known to man and surviving shotgun blasts to the chest is there for gameplay reasons only.

Yes, Drake takes down hundreds of enemies, ties a rope to a truck and gets dragged through Madagascar, swings from tree to tree with that same rope. But he bumps his head in a cutscene and is knocked unconscious. Why do you think that is? And let's not act like this is the first time Nate's gotten his ass kicked in a game.

Nadine in Lost Legacy gameplay is similar to Nate in that she - along with Chloe - fights off hordes of enemies. But they get cornered in cutscenes, like Nate does, get pushed away, like Nate does, and loses, like Nate does.
 
It wasn't woke just tryhard cringe from people who didn't get DMC. The self insert was real and was mocked on this site and others until they redesigned it
 

Kronark

Member
Ahh yes the not gay version of Dante... The one who looks like he's ready to suck anything for his next Heroin fix.

The DMC reboot wasn't woke, the problem was just that Capcom trusted a bunch of 40 year old Europeans to know what was cool. They then designed the European equivalent of Poochie.

The Simpsons Guitar GIF
 
No, DMC was not woke. Cringe but not woke. On a scale from 1 to bigot sandwich, it's probably a crumb. It wasn't until the PS4, when we actually started to see university politics enter games.
 

proandrad

Member
The game wasn’t woke, but it was the start of game devs speaking down to their customers and trying to tell them what they like is wrong.
 
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Puscifer

Member
"Not in a million years" and yet the same director did his hair white at the end of the game when he unlocks his devil-mode something.

This was definitely humorous attempt, trying to depict Dante IS a punk but by end of game he will grow.
DmC was never given a chance to flourish. I believe DmC-sequels progressively would have gotten more better, darker and edgier.
Screenshot-2025-02-17-104913.png
People give this game shit but vergils downfall really set up a game I wanted to play. Not to mention the original director of DMC 3-5 was ALL OVER THE PRODUCTION.
 

Puscifer

Member
Virgils downfall in DmC was just dumb and forced to set up the final fight for the sake of it.
What do you mean? It was an origin story and eventually at some point you'd know Vergil would turn and it's not like he didn't have certain actions like murdering that woman in cold blood that hinted STRONGLY at it.
 

taizuke

Member
Whether or not he's trolling is another question entirely 🤷‍♂️

Not trolling. I am just pointing out similarities between the backlash over DmC (which isn't woke i agree) and the backlash over "woke" games. I asked the question not to necessarily get a yes or no answer, but to make people see that a none-woke game like DmC got the same treatment/reaction (devs/fans) as "woke" games today. That's why i asked if DmC was the first because it sure feels like it.

But, as i said later on i admit not being clear enough.
 
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AgatonSax

Member
Well I remember enjoying the hell out of it back in the day. But back then rampant projection wasn’t running wild, so….
 
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Uncharted the gameplay vs uncharted the cutscenes are 2 very different things. If cutscenes played out the way gameplay did, there would be nothing that could stop Nathan. The cutscenes portray him - and most other people in the game - as regular humans. Nate the Terminator capable of using every wepon known to man and surviving shotgun blasts to the chest is there for gameplay reasons only.

Yes, Drake takes down hundreds of enemies, ties a rope to a truck and gets dragged through Madagascar, swings from tree to tree with that same rope. But he bumps his head in a cutscene and is knocked unconscious. Why do you think that is? And let's not act like this is the first time Nate's gotten his ass kicked in a game.

Nadine in Lost Legacy gameplay is similar to Nate in that she - along with Chloe - fights off hordes of enemies. But they get cornered in cutscenes, like Nate does, get pushed away, like Nate does, and loses, like Nate does.
That's a well known issue in Uncharted narrative, but it's writer's fault in the first place. You could just say "it's a game" and be ok with that. But considering Nate cutscene and Nate gameplay as two different characters it's a big issue. Narrative wants Nate to be a good goofy guy vs gameplay wants him to be an action hero. However he is a Terminator and we can't just ignore the fact that things in gameplay happen in the game world. Uncharted is a great series but its writing has those incoherence issues and that's it. They even justified the fact that he's a bullet sponge saying that he is not actuallly take damage, but it's his "luck" that prevents him from dying. Also they added in Uncharted 3 a swimming animation when he throws the museum guard off the cliff because he doesn't kill innocents. At the end of Uncharted 2 during the final bossfight cutscene Lazarevic asks Nate how may men he's killed. Just sayin
 

kevboard

Member
Not "woke".

More Tameem's take on 'cool'. Many of us did not agree.

Decent game though. It was an odd choice by Capcom, but NT did a decent job. I preferred DMC4.

did they do a decent job tho?
they made a game that looked worse than DMC4 while running at half the framerate.

and they made a combat system that is so easily exploitable that it wasn't only easy to beat enemies, but also easy to get SSS scores in every fight without doing much of anything except spam the same thing over and over.

the only decent parts of the game was the general feel of the controls, which was probably as good as it was because Capcom did periodically send over developers to check in on that part specifically. with some insiders saying that at one point the Capcom guys had to step in and fix their controls. (which I am inclined to believe given how absolutely god awful Heavenly Sword was)

the good parts of DmC are the ones that came directly from the previous source material DMC3 and 4, as well as Capcom employees.

of course, since then the Definitive Edition released, which fixed a lot of the issues of the original, by being 60fps, having an improved scoring system, making color coded enemy types less annoying to fight and fixing some of the exploits.

but in its launch version it was just the wish.com version of DMC4
 
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