As
Shroob
said. You’re entitled to have that take. They’re both just as silly as each other. But classic Dante’s sarcastic asshole persona that he never lets down just never sits right with me. Like, to me, it makes him off putting as a character.
I compare it to Peter Venkman from ghostbusters. Specifically how they wrote him in the ide comics. And because I think comparing ghostbusters and DMC is fitting. He’s always smiling, laughing in the face of impossible danger, and cracking jokes. But especially in the comics, if something that actually matters to him is on the line he can be incredibly serious and emotional. Like how he talks to Dana Barret after rescuing her from Tiamat. Barely a quip.
Classic Dante never lets his guard down with anyone. He meets and grows close to people, but (and I stress that I haven’t read any tie in novels or manga because you shouldn’t have to do that to make the story in the games interesting on its own) he never seems to care about any of them. To the point that him doing all this world saving stuff almost doesn’t make sense for him. Why is he doing it? Why does he care. Nobody is paying him. Is it because of his family and backstory? Ok. But he never seems to care about that either. The one time he shows any on screen emotion other than cocky sarcastic asshole is in DMC 1, and the delivery in that moment is so bad that it’s rightly been memed to death, and honestly is probably part of the reason Dante has never let the facade down in any game sense, even with people he should be really really close with like Trish.
Meanwhile, in DmC, I see the characters journey. He exhibits a variety of emotions. We establish his motivation and he goes through a definitive arc. I’m not saying the game doesn’t have problems. But I just like it better.
Also, and this is coming from the queen of overreactions, but people who say that it “insults the games people actually like” are overreacting to hell and back. It’s one like about the ****ing white hair and I guess some stuff the developers might have said before launch that’s been lost to the sands of time. The game plays so similarly to the classic ones, and it mostly does it’s own thing with that one crack at the beginning. Heck, when Dante goes into Devil Trigger, his most powerful state in the game, his hair turns white and his coat turns red. If anything that should mean more than one joke in the first chapter.
Plus Dante’s mother being an Angel and his father being a Demon is way cooler than him just being half demon half human and him having a different hair color than vergil in addition to a different preferred clothing color helps establish a thematic identity.
Not to mention this game lets me kill demonic billionaires and a stand in Fox News anchor. 10/10.