Please help

A) The game's controls are all busted in multiple ways:

1 - Lock-On triggers from entirely too far away (as in, if an enemy exists in the zone, you're probably locked on, no matter how much you might try and fight against it). The game gives absolutely zero ♥♥♥♥♥ about the direction you might be holding the stick to try and manually aim. And on top of that, it loves to switch targets mid-combo. You can mostly prevent this by holding manual lock-on, but this is; A, not foolproof as sometimes the lock will just break or switch without any real reason; and B, a good way to exacerbate the next major problem. And for all the ♥♥♥♥ people love to throw at 1's RE-style fixed camera, 2's panning is busted, frequently seeing you trying to drag the camera over toward your objective because the autolock has decided an enemy in the opposite direction is more important.

2 - The directional inputs for Stinger/High Time (and Lucia's equivalents) are botched, you can get a Stinger off of a directional input 45 degrees to Dante's side (conservatively; it often feels like 80 degrees to the side will be read as "toward enemy"). Combined with the fact that your different ground strings are activated by holding the stick while swinging, and you have a situation where if you're trying to focus on a single enemy, you more or less are restricted to spamming the neutral combo, unless you want to deal with random Stinger spam.

3 - The actual hitboxes all feel really shoddy, and knockback is poorly implemented. Very often, you'll slide past a stationary target while swinging at it (again, with no ability to manually adjust targeting), or the first hits of your combo will push your target away from the rest of the combo.

4 - You have zero ability to cancel your attacks. Rolling, jumping, etc., are all completely locked until your swing completes. Now, this isn't objectively a mistake, but it results in you being much slower which; A, eliminates one of your principal defensive options from DMC1; and B, is not something the enemies were designed around.

B) Speaking of the enemies, they come with their own set of problems:

1 - Their difficulty, and specifically their AI, is balanced in an extremely weird way. Rather than changing how frequently they attack, the moves they have available, which moves they use more often, etc., difficulty literally changes the effectiveness of attacks, and the intelligence of their movements. For instance, projectiles that are supposed to track you will wizz by you while you're standing completely still on Normal, but track you through multiple dodges on Must Die. Rather than building your skills, seeing a dangerous attack infrequently at lower difficulties, learning how to deal with it, and then being put under pressure by frequent use at higher difficulties, the game is braindead on Normal, and what little you learn doesn't apply later.

2 - Their patterns, speed, and armor do not take into account that every melee attack from you is a gigantic commitment (see point 4A about the controls), to say nothing of entire combo strings. Bad enough that combat with engaging neutral has been reduced to a game of "dodge until it's your turn" (not an inherent flaw, but also not what we're here for), but enemies can just steal their turn back before you've even completed one swing, since anything above the trashest of trash mobs takes multiple hits to stagger, and after having their attack dodged is completely free to just attack again, even though you hit them cleanly, with nothing meaningful you can do to prevent it (which is fundamentally a flaw). The only reason this isn't considered more of a problem is that the health/damage ratios are enough in your favor that you can usually win by brute forcing it. Something which does not maintain throughout the higher difficulties.

DMC1 is not my favorite, and Kamiya's love of sticking gimmick genre-change sections in his games is off-putting to me to this day, but 1 didn't have the flaws I listed above as egregiously as 2 does. Example: the only time I really found myself fighting 1's auto-target was in Nelo Angelo 1, after his second teleport, when I wanted to Stinger to get around the bridge faster to fight him and could only Stinger directly toward him. Compare to 2, where the auto lock distance is an "every fight" problem.






This is copied from Reddit but i agree with it, no i don't use Reddit, credit to u/Sai-Taisho