Nerd Mentality

XBOX 360 REVIEW – Dante's Inferno

Posted March 14th 2010 by J Edison Thomas.

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Well now we know that nearly everything would give in this attempt to harvest select organs from the poem while it sleeps in a bathtub full of ice.  For the most part it seems the plan of attack was to abstract any direct religious references the same way God of War abstracts Greek mythology into a form more appropriate for an action game.  This meant leaving the body that held all the disparate organs together—the story—crumpled in that bathtub. And really, I think that's fine.  Visceral is making a goddamn video game; they don't have an obligation to reconcile their button masher with some deep abiding respect for the poem that inspired it.  God of War certainly didn't take any flak for committing blasphemy against Greek mythology or anything.  But the difference is that what God of War changed to develop its Greek mythological narrative is interesting stuff; what Dante's Inferno injects into its Medieval vision of Hell is garbage.

The "tragic hero paying for his sins" plot they push is lame and uninspired, and it doesn't even work with the personality (or lack of) that they've drawn up for Dante himself.  The dialogue mostly sounds like it came from an especially poorly-written episode of Thundercats.  Villains alternately cackle at your feeble efforts and curse at how you've ruined their plans, a cut-and-paste job from any children's action cartoon from the past 40 years.  What's so ironic is that the game's major stumbling block, the story, is the only part that was already done when they started.  They threw that out and started fresh, and veered off a cliff.

Oddly enough, it's not like the poem begins with 80 pages of exposition to get things rolling, some mammoth lump that needed to be excised from the rest to make it workable.  All that happens is Dante is lost in the woods, chased by some beasts, and Virgil helps him escape through Hell at the behest of Beatrice.  Maybe you'll follow me on this one, but if that's enough of a foundation for a thousand pages of story, it seems sufficient for an Xbox game.  The bloated, cliché, meaningless mess of a plot Visceral replaced it with seems like a monumental waste of effort.  Because ... how much motivation do I really need to fight the Devil? You've got a man trying to reach his woman, and the Devil himself standing in the way.  The setup could literally not be any more archetypal.  Jordan's assertion that the game "has to be a joke" struck me as poignant, because to a large degree my enjoyment of it rested on what side of the joke I perceived its creators were on.  While a lot of the game approaches farce, it's hard to get over the idea that they spent actual time and money replacing a simple plot with a convoluted one that required constant support from out-of-nowhere flashbacks of exposition.

The really weird thing is you'd think the whole point of dumping the poem's religious story would be to avoid the hokey blend of religion and gaming, but that hokiness is in there anyway—in essence, they threw out the baby but kept the bathwater.  Despite giving Dante an X-treem version of Death's scythe to chop through Hell, there are hints of that awkward Bible Adventures vibe.  There's something about running around shooting crosses that just feels weird.  Like the way it'd feel to have a Jewish ninja throw Star of David shuriken or something.  The biggest chunk of the poem's plot that wasn't scrapped comes from Dante meeting damned souls and struggling with whether to pity them out of human compassion or condemn them out of righteous fury.  In the game, Dante meets some of these very same people, and is tasked with either "punishing" them with a stab through the head or "absolving" them and sending them to Heaven.  The way Dante absolves people is in a mini-game where little orbs of sin fly in from the four directions of a cross towards the center, and pressing the corresponding button of that direction absolves that sin.  When the time is up your successfully-absolved sins are counted up and multiplied to give you "bonus souls" (the game's currency).  I couldn't stop laughing the first time I saw it.

All the same, being able to absolve souls you meet eliminates a significant advantage this title could have over the powerhouse God of War series, namely: you're in Hell and Hell is terrifying.  The power of absolution completely destroys the whole narrative power of these encounters, which lies in the fact that there's nothing Dante can do to help these people from suffering twisted torture for eternity.  There's one point in particular in which Dante meets a loved one in Hell that, despite everything else about the game, had worked up some emotional resonance.  Even though Dante is unlikable and the game begs not to be taken seriously, the heaviness of the subject material had me following along.  And then Dante just up and absolves the person and their soul fades up into Heaven, and all the tension of the scene evaporates along with them.

Beyond that, there's the simple question that arose often for me during my playthrough: How can Dante do this? Now, I'm not holding the game to some absurd standard of Catholic orthodoxy—that ship has sailed.  My point is that even within the context of the game, Satan clearly tells Dante that even if he defeats him, God's law dictates that any who die and are sent to Hell can never leave, so he wins anyway.  Dante barks back that the souls he's absolved will help him get out, or something.  I'm not sure how that's supposed to make sense.  Whatever the case, the question of the source of Dante's abilities is never dealt with, and an answer isn't suggested in the sequel teaser at the end (spoiler?). I'm getting tired of making the comparison, but you've got Kratos, whose strength is rationalized as a deal with Ares, and is later explained further.  Even the Dante from Devil May Cry is at least the son of a demon.  Bayonetta is a witch. Inferno's Dante is just a dude whose many sins don't even put him square with the Big Man.  Granted, he has Death's scythe, but it's not like Death gave him the scythe due to Virgil's intervention or as some kind of political plot against Satan or anything.  You just beat the shit out of Death when you die and take it from him somehow.  Now, in cases like this the Rule of Cool would certainly apply (see: Dr. McNinja).  But Dante isn't cool.  At all.

This is amazing to me, and I think it's the main failure of the game that makes the rest of it that much less palatable.  At first look, this Todd McFarlane reject is so over the top, initially it dispelled the misgivings I had about the game—they weren't going for a misdirected adaptation at all; they were making a bombastic, blasphemous farce of a game that boiled over with irreverent, campy awesomeness.  Slapping "Based on the epic poem!" on the front of the box would have sealed it.  Because an over-the-top brou-ha ha between Heaven and Hell could actually work.  But instead they have this badass who drops into Hell and cuts up every son of a bitch in the room, and somehow he's just kind of a crappy forgettable loser.  He's a completely flat stock hero-type who runs breathlessly into every scene shouting empty declaratives like, "Beatrice doesn't deserve this!!!" in a cliché accent I can only identify as Video Game British.  You know the kind I'm talking about.

Beatrice herself jumps in with banal damsel lines that exclusively revolve around how she doesn't have a choice in allying with the Devil, and she's so sorry, or whatever.  Satan himself drops bombs left and right with incessant villain chestnuts about his imminent rise to universal domination, how you're powerless to stop him, and—obviously—how this is all your fault.  Dante has some Dark Past thrown in, which would be okay if it wasn't completely contradictory to his character.  Instead, the cool stylized flashback scenes catalog a lifetime of prickish behavior, and he's such a whiny douche in the present that none of it is remotely redeemable no matter how many demons he rips in half.  To a degree, I didn't really want him with me when I crossed the finish line of this quest, and when I did I took no satisfaction in his victory.

I just sat there for a few seconds of credits, and then jumped back in for a second quest because, well, I had some cool moves I hadn't yet unlocked.  And in spite of everything, gravity-defying combat in Hell is still kind of fun.

I'm not sure the last time I played a game that's provided an experience like this.  It's a near-constant stream of nit-picking possibilities buttressed with several elements that I genuinely hated, yet I would frequently play it until 3:00am.  The RPG elements of reaching new levels and buying new moves makes the combat fairly addictive, which is a ploy I always consider unfair yet find myself helpless to defend against. (Apparently I am not alone.)  And this might be the only game I ever play with an end boss that does battle with his massive black dong swinging freely, which must be considered a plus.  There are actually solid ideas in there, too, like a difficulty setting that can be changed at absolutely any time—I never found a reason to use it, but it seems like a sensible answer to the ever-present dilemma of game difficulty.

I have to emphasize that enjoyment of this title requires a very open willingness to look beyond its context which is, admittedly, very difficult in a game as brazen about its aping of an established action series and as brutish in its handling of classic religious poetry.  I know for me it was almost impossible to see a singular game past these looming comparisons.  But as an unapologetic God of War clone, it's not unambitious—it makes for a decent enough poor man's version, by which I mean PlayStation-less man's version.  As a result, there's a decent, polished game underneath a mountain of garbage, and it's just appealing enough to make you a party to all the garbage.  This is its ultimate sin.  And mine is succumbing to the temptation to actually use such a hackneyed pun in this review.  See you in Hell!

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Tags: dante's inferno, god of war

Posted in: Reviews, Gaming

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