Hideki Kamiya

Devil May Cry And How Character Action Burst Onto The Gaming Scene In Style

The character action genre is hard to fully define considering how wildly different one title can be from the next, but it largely comes from the stylish combat defined by Capcom’s 2001 milestone, Devil May Cry. DMC’s action design was so strong that it could seamlessly transition between melee and ranged combat, where you can launch an enemy into the air with your sword and juggle them with gunfire. These fast fights are made from a simple yet complete moveset that works well at different distances. Director Hideki Kamiya translated hack ‘n slash games and brawlers into three dimensions, emphasizing twitch action and fair but challenging difficulty by imbuing it with fighting game mechanics and systems that grade your performance in real time. It offers players the means to create spectacular combat sequences where the goal isn’t just to defeat your enemy but to stylishly wreck them.

To understand how it all came together, we have to look at DMC’s family tree.

Unleashing The Wonderful 101’s Box of Action Figures

Action games are complex ways of playing with action figures, equipping the one connected to your controller with more than just karate-chop action to live out heroic battles against evil. These figures have always been a great way to let a show or comic’s fans act out their favorite character’s stories, but videogames directly provide the means to embark on adventure. Unfortunately, both games and figures have a problem with how many characters a player can hold at once, but Hideki Kamiya’s The Wonderful 101 lets you simultaneously control an army through a season long television show that proves that even the smallest heroes can defeat galactic threats if they unite.

Bayonetta’s High-Flying, Pistol-Stiletto Burlesque

Lights Down, Curtain’s Up

Bayonetta’s prologue starts conservatively, with a nun clad in white quietly praying over a grave. It primes the world’s Victorian aesthetics with a puritanical morality up front that wouldn’t fool anyone who had seen even the box art. That a flock of angels descend from heaven and cut off her clothes to reveal the scantily-clad Umbran Witch underneath who lithely dances around shooting them in the head is perhaps the proper way to open the show.

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