one of my more contravercial opinions that tends to raise a few eyebrows is my feelings towards DMC2, it's a game that is pretty much universally reviled by the series fanbase and known by a lot of others as a game thats just "bad", but i think that's dumb and i disagree with basically any of the points that usually get raised against it, i think DMC2 is not just a great game, but i think it's one of my favourite action games and i think i like it more than both DMC 3 and 5 (though less than 4SE). i think it's cool and stylish, i think it has a fun cast and a good story, i think it has the series best OST and some of the coolest combat, it's characters are all fun to play and most importantly to me, it's on the easier side and more accessable than the first game was, a game i liked a lot, but 2 is where i really fell for the series.

the thing that i think sets DMC2 apart from the rest for me is its style, this is where the aesthetics and style of DMC both really solidified and also hit its peak. you have dante being brooding and hot but still throwing out some of his best one liners, he has by far his best design in this game and is at his hottest, he's just too damn cute here with how edgy and tsundere he is with helping people and idk he's just hot okay i don't need a reason, the gameplay while simpler also gives you things like how you can have each gun target a different enemy even behind you or the wallrun which is just the coolest and i will forever miss it. the areas are cool cityscapes and towns which replace the castle of the first game, here you have big capital cities, small rural towns, more DMC1 style ruins and even a whole industrial oil rig as one of the games highlights, it *feels* so ps2 in a way thats hard to fully quantify, you know, the villain even looks like a lost mishima from tekken 4 and he even has a boss fight where he just teleports around and smokes a cigar to mock you, that's cool. the soundtrack, which is by satoshi ise (of jojo dreamcast, capcom Vs SNK and the super underrated capcom fighting jam), masato kouda (of the original DMC, street fighter alpha, monster hunter, ape escape 3, the later wild arms games and more recently games like el shaddai, wonderful 101 and the my hero academia games) and Tetsuya Shibata (of power stone, auto modelista, MVC2, dead rising, resi outbreak and even the resi 4 remake & babylons fall more recently) is also amazing, some of the series best ambient tracks especially in the village and with the inbetween levels music and also some really killer rock and electronic battle themes and the game on the whole just has a real visual kei style to it, something it sadly lost very hard with the most recent game which took a huge step back in style (and music and level design and level variety and especially its representation of women) and that to me does a lot, more maybe than even deeper mechanics would because i can go other places for those mechanics, beyonetta or bujingai or whatever, but for that mid 2Ks visual kei edge? this is where it's done at maybe its best and that's special to me.

the game also added a ton of great, meaningful things to the first games base, you have those more stylish moves like i mentioned before, and while you do lose the gauntlets in favour of just the 3 swords which you find and unlock slowly as with all weapons, you have a ton of guns here with the duel pistols and shotgun being the most fun, a weapon upgrade system for things using the red orbs you find from kills or via destructable objects and you have a cool system for customising your devil trigger (this games super mode), you can fly, go super fast, regen more health, add elemental damage or stuns and add stat buffs, you even have some moves that are easier or automatically done in DT like the extended combo, plus the other big thing here was the new characters, the game shipped on 2 discs with each being a main character with their own campaign which is now a series staple, you had dante who had the longer campaign but you also had lucia who is one of my favourite characters in the series, she gets throwing knives, bombs and some really cool duel daggers and kicks and she's so fun to play, fast and stylish and meaningfully different to dante with even having some of her own exclusive bosses including a better end boss ,though some of her ranged options are very hard to use, like the bombs which were difficult to aim or the bowgun which only works for maybe 2 stages, her campaign is shorter but honestly i think i prefer it, she gets some really cool underwater levels which look amazing with how the water effects distort the image and a cooler final boss.

you also have one last character for beating the game on hard, trish, she's just a costume change in that she can be used on either campaign and has no cutscenes, but she plays wholley uniquely from the others, she gets guns more similar to dante's in 1 but fully maxxed out from the outset, but the big differences here are her sword sparda, which can be thrown out to enemies for extra damage and a mild stun and while this is done she shifts to a fist moveset which is really cool and if you equip her with the ariel heart she even gets an alt air gun attack for her DT!. it's other big addition was the bloody palace mode, which works here by taking you to a lot of the secret mission areas from the basegame and gives you thousands of floors of, i think, random enemy placements as you see how high you can go, it's not my favourite ideration and some of the enemy numbers can be absurd but it's a fun time, my maximum was 9003 for the record when i went for the trophy for it, it took hours and i used the infinite DT cheat just as an occasional last resort when i needed a heal, but i had a great time anyway. it's not super long either, it's quick and has a lot of variety in its runtime, maybe 3 hours per character with dante's being a little longer, but if you really wanted to dig into bloody palace or trish's campaign, that does add a good bit to your playtime if you want it.

i touched on it earlier but it also just looks really good for its time, tons of level variety including the infamous DMC2 room which hurts my eyes but looks amazing and the designs are all great, lucia is for sure deserving of a shoutout because she looks amazing and has my favourite DT design in the whole series and some of the enemies look cool too like some of the bosses like the undead vehicles, arius and his final form and the rly cool goat men but the levels look so nice, with some pre-rendered (?) skyboxes and tons of detail especially in places like the city and the oil rig, on a ps2 with a CRT the game has some if the series best vibes to it, cozy but also so ominous a world to exist in. the story is also a lot of fun, the more reserved dante makes for a real change of pace,the guy seems really depressed after 1 which you can't really blame him for but lucia is the real standout here, it's basically her story and it's a good one, it really hit for me and i wish we got more of her in the later games or the anime, it's corny and cheesy yes but it's still a good time and it has some kind of emotional writing for me, i got a little sad at points and the themes of humanity in hers rly stay true to the series while theming, i think this is an important game to play for that. dante's one liners also hit so much more here with how more rare they are and that coin is just peak dmc, peak video game writing, maybe even my favourite series moment right there.

but with how good all this is why does this get so much hate? to be honest i don't fully know nor do i get it, i watched a lot of videos on this to try and understand but i never really got it, many of the games big issues seem to just be fan expectations, which isn't fair on it at all and feels mostly like revisionism when applied historically and does get applied retroactively with people claiming it was always recieved bad which was just never the case at all, complaints about it being easy which are just silly to me since it has harder modes and the bloody palce stages are plenty hard but even beyond that this should never be reason enough to act like something is "the worst game ever" which is something about this game i've seen thrown around a bunch. sometimes it's just plane old dmc fan elitism (fans of the later entries tend to be very like this and i think it's unfortunate as it does paint a bad image of the games fandom and the difficulty elitism feels really icky and like they're missing the whole point of the series when they act like that) and "i didnt play it but people say it is bad and therefore it is bad" which is just silly, play it and make up your own mind on it.

port wise you have a few options here, i think the original ps2 ver looks the best since the HD versions have some annoying graphical glitches that makes all of 2's cutscenes look very weird, but for the tradeoff you do get it all on one disc and it has trophies (plus 2 other games), there isn't any super massive benefit to any version i think and none are rare for physical copies, unless you want the PAL italy exclusive platnum release, which ngl i kind of do. the series would go big places from here with 3 being the big return people wanted, though personally i just enjoy 2 a lot more and 4 was even better, especially for me since its special edition is my favourite game in the series, the next 2 ended up being a little more divisive for me, DMCDMC didn't click at first but i very quickly came to love it and more recently it's dlc and i think that much like 2 it also gets much too much hate and really deserves another look, it was 5 which is still the most recent game that i didn't massively click with because of its big aesthetic changes and maybe kind of issues with misogyny, it's something i plan to write a lot about in the future because i do have a lot to say about it and it does have me worried about the future of the series i have to admit.

there was also an anime that i love, it may even bemy favourite piece of DMC, it was one of my first anime long before i played the game and something about its style and music and characters always stuck with me, it has my other favourite dante and i've rewatched it probably 4 times now, that dvd is probably super worn out, though the new anime i'm just not into, i really didnt enjoy netflix's other game anime with castlevanias pretty bad writing and dragons dogmas, well, litterally everything about that anime was terrible, edgy garbage in the most derogatory meaning, but i hope this can escape that legacy. this game would also be itsuno's first game in the series he worked on and he'd grow to be super important to it, helping to make every other game DMCDMC included where he had a supervisory role, he also made a ton of other games with capcom like auto modelista, capcom vs SNK and power stone 2, him and the rest of the team at capcom studio 1 (also responcible for many early monster hunter games, onimusha dawn of dreams and resident evil outbreak, plus the cool wii port of deadrising) also worked on the dragons dogma games and it just had its sequel come out, which does look very good, though i wasn't a fan of its character creator demo, the men were much too masculine and to make satoru gojo from JJK and aventurine from honkai i had to use the female preset, not a big deal but slightly annoying haha, the game looks great though and i hope it does well, for now i think you should play this game though, it's short and stylish and fun, don't listen to it's haters and go in to make up your own mind on it.