Devil May Cry

Summary: >

Dante is a freelance mercenary who's specialty happens to be killing demons. Not only is his profession a bit odd, it's even more strange that he's rather good at it. In fact he rather enjoys it. He's no mere human however, being half demon himself. Debts tend to mount, so Dante finds himself taking oddball jobs he's not accustomed to, although often there's a devil behind it all. The biggest threat of all the demons, may be the one who works mostly unseen and doesn't seem to ever face Dante outright.

Thoughts: >

Based off a video game, Devil May Cry is a franchise which helped to solidify the Playstation 2 in game history due to it's basic premise of ass kicking with style. Remaining true to that seems to have worked against the anime, which didn't bother to expand on much of anything. Not even the story.

The characters other than Dante exist simply to have more characters, but in particular the young girl Patty is curious. A game about killing demons, made into an anime, where the only other characters are luscious eye candy females... where does this little girl fit in? For the demographic the game was designed for, this bratty cutesy girl is as misplaced as Queen Elizabeth at a Slayer concert. Lady is a character who only fires her big gun and spouts bad dialog. Trish, while always nice to look at; has no depth at all, making her appearances seem almost conspicuously placed keep you awake.

Ignoring them as they are quite ignorable, Devil May Cry revolves around Dante. He's cool, collected, he kicks ass but sometimes he's a nice guy even if he doesn't show it much. After 12 episodes you're not going to get much more in depth character development than that. Even worse is that Dante may kick ass, but he never seems to be even remotely challenged or struggle killing the demon of the week.

Each episode Dante gets hired for a "mysterious" job, a bunch of stuff happens and the plot would thicken if there was much of one to do so. Eventually the poorly designed demon shows up and Dante predictably kills it. A few things build up in the last few episodes but by this point you're so used to the anti climatic demon killing that the entire thing is on auto pilot.

Devil May Cry isn't utterly terrible, as I did watch all 12 episodes, but I can't say there was any anticipation nor excitement in doing so. The animation at fist glance seems interesting, but then you realize that most of it is actually implied and things aren't really moving so much as it is dramatic posing with camera panning. The demons also were terribly designed. The real drawbacks of this anime come down to the episodic predictable uninteresting story, and especially the lack of any struggle AT ALL from Dante. A few interesting points here and there, but not enough to warrant watching 12 episodes for the rare occasion you see one.

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