Capcom Says The New Dante Needed To Be “Completely Different”
There has been a lot of controversy over the new design for the main character of the new Devil May Cry reboot, the hero we all know as Dante. Capcom’s VP of Strategic Planning and Business Development, Christian Svensson, was nice enough to shed some light on why Capcom decided to completely redesign the character.
Here’s part of the interview:
“The original concepts that came back for Dante were actually extremely close to the Dante everyone knows and loves. The feedback that came back from [Keiji] Inafune and [Hideaki] Itsuno was, ‘No guys, this needs to be completely different, we need you to go much further and be much more creative.’
And literally dozens of potential iterations later became what we as a team felt comfortable and actually happy with.
I will argue that any changes will bring about a knee-jerk reaction from fans,” he said. “We know that; we knew that going into it. To be fair, I think some of the strategy here was to create that discussion and dialogue, and I think it drastically raises the visibility of the title versus if we had just done another Dante.
This is meant to be an origin story, so this is Dante before you knew who Dante was. There is going to be some interesting changes and twists to what people think they know about Dante or where he came from. We aren’t planning on deviating greatly from the path that is there.
There may still be some tweaks here or there – I’m not privy to what’s going on – but by and large that will be the direction the team is going down.”
A more full interview will be posted at IGN later this week. Svensson says that Capcom has no intentions of changing the character back to the way he looked in the first copies of Devil May Cry. This is their creative vision, and it will stay that way. Hopefully this helps players understand why the decisions were made to change what the company felt necessary to change.
