Nerd Mentality

XBOX 360 REVIEW – Dante's Inferno

Posted March 14th 2010 by J Edison Thomas.

It's hard not to be cynical about a game like Dante's Inferno.  What it represents is an unholy plural marriage between a pillar of Western literature, a religion that over a billion people still observe today, and a 100% obvious ripoff of a hot commodity action video game.  Playing through the game, it's hard to claim that rape isn't occurring before your eyes in some form or another. Like, EA's Visceral Games studio is sexually violating Sony's acclaimed God of War series, and in the process kind of directing its defiled body into performing subsequent debasement upon Dante Alighieri's epic poem and the Catholic Church. Some serious inverse gangbang of intellectual property appears to have taken place in its inception, a consecutive rape multiplier bonus scored across several parties.  This is a crime in which you, as the player, are now a willing accomplice. Of course, like many other egregious slights against God and man, Dante's Inferno is actually pretty fun.

That might strike you as an odd thing to say: "Heresy, rape... fun!"  It feels weird writing it.  But at a very basic level, it's fun to button mash through hordes of demons, and Visceral has built a very solid game around doing just that.  It's actually kind of impressive how much went into a game that seems so utterly cheap in concept. In his impressions based on the demo, Jordan describes the combat as "boring," which I think has more to do with the limited moveset that Dante begins with than anything else.  I'd only agree insofar as the fighting mechanics are simple, but from there it's a matter of taste.  Combat is streamlined so that long combo chains don't need to be memorized.  All the combos in Dante's Inferno come from the successive mashing of the X, Y or B buttons, which results in quick melee, strong melee, or projectile-based combo attacks respectively. You can keep a combo going by alternating between these buttons, but it's all the same attacks that you would have been using with basic repetition, just switching between each type.  For instance, whether you press YYYY, XXYX, or XBYY, that third Y is the same move you'd get from the YYYY combo.

Personally, I found it a lot more fun to experiment with making my own combos from the template provided than having to check and memorize pre-set combo strings to find out how to do different moves, like in the Ninja Gaiden series.  There's more immediacy to it, because you are using whatever move type is most appropriate for that exact second, rather than scrolling through your mental Rolodex to figure out what kind of combo you want to do in advance, and hoping that enemies don't move in a way that makes your attack useless.  It reminds me of the Super Smash Bros. series' approach to combos (which not-coincidentally is one of the few fighting series to hold my sustained interest).  It certainly leaves open the criticism that the game is a "button masher," and arguably it cuts into the potential for difficulty, but I found it enjoyable.  Dante never suddenly stops moving because you pressed a button out of order, or does some lame combo you hadn't intended.  You basically do exactly what you want, and removing that barrier is probably what the game does best.

All the same, combat does get repetitious, partially because you never earn any new weapons beyond the two you start with: Death's scythe for melee attacks, and Beatrice's cross for projectile energy attacks.  It's very deflating, the moment when you realize that.  You do earn a variety of magic spells/attacks, but one of them – which turns you temporarily invincible and refills some of your health – is so useful that there's literally never a time when using the others wouldn't be a waste of magic.  Of course, there is a substantial amount of new abilities you can buy for your two weapons, which certainly opens up plenty of new possibilities in how to mix combos together.  But when it comes down to it, buying a new move for an existing weapon is never as fun as getting a whole new weapon.  Maybe they could have tossed Excalibur in there; I don't know.  They play pretty fast and loose with the mythology, so I doubt anyone would have cared.

It doesn't help that there's a serious lack of variety in enemies.  Doing a mental check, I'm thinking there's only around a dozen regular enemies to fight, and most of the best ones come early.  The early level Lust brings in some slutty harem-looking girls who moan, lean back, and unfold a giant phallic tentacle out of their vaginas.  Arguably you can't do better than this.  Soon after, there's Gluttony with its giant fat slobs who puke and shit on you.  In terms of effect, neither are topped by the later enemies.  Even the set design gets noticably less inspired the further you plunge through the game's Hell.  While for the most part, each level attempts to approximate the visuals Alighieri provided for each Circle, the grandeur of earlier levels isn't matched in the later ones.  At some point you're just moving through Forest Level or Desert Level, which while technically on-target for the areas they're trying to convey, don't add to any kind of unique aesthetic.  Towards the end, the ten sub-levels dedicated to Fraud, known as the "Malebolge" in the poem, are basically just a series of arenas where you have to pass some gameplay challenges.

This is the trajectory the game takes: from a giant swirling tornado filled with lustful souls to a square platform and the visual prompt "Kill all enemies without using magic!"  A voiceover of Virgil introduces each of the ten areas with something like, "The boiling pitch of the politicians, among the worst of the liars."  But there is no boiling pitch.  There are no politicians.  There's just a big stone platform where you try to protect two cowering innocent humans from kamikaze exploding demons until time runs out.  And I'm not even going to get into the whole "what the—how are there innocent people down here in Hell?" issue because it's pretty clear nobody gives a damn at this point.

Honestly, it's as if during each status report on progress, a middle manager wandered the halls of Visceral Games until he reached a cluster of workers to deliver his news: "Super job on that last level, team.  We really slammed that dunk.  But the word upstairs is that the release date is putting us in a time crunch, so we need to try to tighten it up a little bit going forward."  And then again and again, until you're left with a series of bonus rounds to finish off a game that began in a convincingly twisted hellscape.  I can't think of how else this could have happened.  I mean in a way it's appropriate to the subject material for the experience to get worse as it moves along, but that's not the kind of immersion I'm interested in.  And it's unsettling to think this scenario wouldn't be far off from the way EA has done business in the past.

Anyway, I'm digressing into something else entirely.  The point is that in spite of all its absurdity, the game really puts its best foot forward as you first step into Hell, but it fails to impress the more it goes on. It's a case of diminishing returns that follows in nearly every aspect of the game. Early bosses like Minos, the judge who sentences souls according to their sins, and Cerberus, the three-headed guard of Gluttony, are massive and imaginative freaks of the Underworld that dwarf Dante in both a literal and figurative sense.  Later on, you fight... your dad.  And... your brother-in-law.

I think this gets at the heart of most people's prime frustration with the game: not that it puts its own spin on the story or adds its own original ideas, but that it does so at the cost of comparatively much better ideas that were already there to begin with.  Like many people, I read Dante's Inferno in high school, and later in college I spent a semester studying it along with the other comparatively-boring canticles of The Divine Comedy.  I was actually in this class when I first heard of the game, going through the same mix of excitement and dread that most people probably did when they first got wind of it.  As ripe as some of the imagery in the Inferno seems for visual adaptation, it's wrapped in a thick protective layer of a guy walking around talking about Jesus, which is hard to jive with mass-market consumption.  I think everyone could foresee that something would have to give to make a game adaptation of the poem; it was just a question of how much.

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Tags: dante's inferno, god of war

Posted in: Reviews, Gaming

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