Technical Difficulties

Videogame fans are one of the most difficult demographic to please when it comes to adaptations. I can't say I know why that is but the record is consistent. I also know that when studios try too hard to follow fan whims and outcry, they often shoot themselves in the foot.

Season 2 is hopefully not the last season of NDMC because it gives the studio even more time to trust the process they've started. I actually felt season 1 was kind of weak but season 2 far exceeds it in writing, storytelling, art style, animation, and more. I also think they addressed some fan complaints ie. rolling back on Lady's cringe swearing habit (I counted two fucks per episode up to around episode 4 and those uses were justifiable) and even having a scene actually acknowledging the silliness of it ("don't swear, kid"), steering away from the military-religion-America focus, Vergil siding with Mundus under duress/mistaken truth because of manipulation and regularly surprising the audience with his allegiances (which turned out to be, obviously, only for himself, in a sense).

I've seen some complaints about mischaracterisation, such as Vergil speaking ill of Eva, but I swear audiences these days have little to no concept of characters being able to lie about their own thoughts/feelings and that two ways of thinking can exist at once in a person if we must go so far. Obviously he still loves Eva - when he saw her body in the Trismagia vision, he still reacted VERY viscerally when otherwise he HAS been rather unemotional most of the season (another characterisation criticism I don't think makes sense - you all know he's had a lot of heightened emotion in the OG games?? Anger is an emotion, so is mild amusement/smugness/pride, these are not exclusive to NDMC, this has been present throughout the games too. Your perfect alpha male who looks sooo gorgeous in everything but NDMC (and DMC5 in some people's opinions) is not as emotionless you would like him to be). Vergil can love his mother and still view her negatively after years of demon anti-human rhetoric.

Yes, some of the lore is messed up and remixed. I wasn't huge on that in season 1 alone and was at times a little flabbergasted with what they chose to do in season 2 as well. However, if you come at NDMC with a lens of "I want to watch something sick as hell featuring a lot of fun references to my fav series" then I think you can actually have a good time watching it, some minor complaints aside.

Another post mentioned it seemed NDMC was making fun of the 2007 anime and I would say I disagree. The psych eval scene recounted from both their perspectives says more about the goofiness and light-hearted fun the writers and animators had doing more experimental style and variation, and then also how Dante and Lady view each other and respectfully gloss over what really happened because their vulnerability in that scene is between them, no matter what a quack asks them.

Also, I don't think people are getting pumped enough about how season 2 ended. We've been complaining about how NDMC Dante feels an awful lot like DMC4-5 personality-wise where he's already worked through a lot of trauma and is now just silly about it, but I actually think the signs from this latest season point to Dante being actually beat to the ground and coming out of that final battle truly embracing his more depressed, coldly sarcastic/snarky personality from earlier in the franchise. Less of the silliness. Not only did he find out Vergil was alive, Vergil forced him away and left him (look, I know it isn't exactly like DMC3 but the emotions are the same imo), Enzo died, a lot of people died, Lady ALSO left him hanging to go figure out how to find her dad AFTER she said she'd stick around and main antagonist dude told him she viewed Dante as a temporary balm for her wounds AND she basically confirmed that in her letter and tried to say she wasn't really that into him, it was just their trauma connecting them (I call bullshit, mind you) - given all of that, I think we're going to see a truly alone, truly downbeat Dante in the next possible season. We should be celebrating, I think he really is going to have a character arc in a reverse order to then get back close to where we started. This gives the writers a lot more to work with too given two seasons of character history the audience has seen for them to play around with.

Also I think Mattie might be a stand-in reference to Patty Lowell but maybe I'm crazy.

I also saw another theory that maybe Nero will wind up Dante and Lady's kid and I'm not ruling that out - I hope it's NOT the case but NDMC in general is like an AU fanfic so, hell, if they want to explore what changes given the parentage changes, be my guest. I think a lot of NDMC is about revival - not in the sense that it rewrites canon but it plays with it in a way that entertains and draws in more attention to the franchise as a whole.

Do I think there is a problem with the primary media available on DMC being this Netflix adaptation? Yeah, kinda, I see how it works out for other things (I have long-standing issues with Percy Jackson and other retellings being considered the face of Greek mythology) but this isn't the worst videogame adaptation out there to exist. I enjoyed NDMC season 2. The budget was clearly way higher than season 1, they amended some things fans had issue with without compromising all their own storyboarding plans, the soundtrack was killer, and the references like the plastic chair were funny. DMC as a franchise is SUPPOSED to be batshit crazy, random, unexplainable, and full of sick music, action, and demons. I think season 2 stayed true to the spirit of DMC.

I might have a more thorough review/argument to write some other time. Before anyone asks, my credentials are: knows all the DMC media, thank you.