Of all the games I’ve played over the past year, and there have been A LOT, DMC: Devil May Cry is without question one of my top two favorites. Maybe even number one. It’s a tough call. As someone who was familiar with the franchise but never actually played the series, I figured this would be a nice jumping on point as it was pegged as a sort of “reboot” for American audiences (i.e. not anime stylized).

While I was expecting the game to be good, I did not expect to be sucked into its world so easily, and in the blink of an eye, 3 days of my life had passed and the game was finished. It was addicting, pure and simple, with a ho-hum story but ruthlessly fun battle system. I literally could not put it down.

Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for the graphic novel.

Though that was kind of expected, to be honest. How many successful video game-to-comic transitions are there? Not many that I know of. The game’s story isn’t really anything special to begin with. Dante, our hero, slices and dices monsters in a demon-infested Limbo. The comic serves as a sort of prequel, focusing on Dante’s brother, Vergil, and Dante’s soon-to-be partner (in the game) Kat. It can be pretty confusing at times, jumping rapidly in time, and in and out of Limbo. Basically, Vergil needs to find and rescue Dante but needs a psychic (Kat) to help teleport him though Limbo to find an imprisoned Dante.

The whole thing just felt unnecessary to me. Like, I wasn’t gaining anything from reading this. Plus, if you’ve played the game (and most likely you have or else you wouldn’t be reading this), the whole plan feels like a fool’s errand since we know how the video game starts. Of course, the characters themselves don’t know that but, come on.

I did, however, enjoy the artwork. Patrick Pion’s style is very fitting for the DMC universe, his vision of Limbo and its inhabitants are beautifully, or hideously depending on your point-of-view, recreated here on the page.

I’m sure there are a lot of hardcore DMC fans out there that will disagree with me here, but, personally, I’d have to give the book a pass. If anything, it just made me want to pick up the game all over again. Which I think I might just do!

Excuse me…