Devs May Cry: Why All Glitch Hunters Should Play DmC

DmC: Devil May Cry is a wondrous game in many ways. The questionable rebooting and the fan/developer back-and-forth is a lot to talk of in itself, as it pretty much defined the game as far as industry view is concerned. That’s not the subject for today though.

Today we are going to be talking about why DmC is the most enjoyable experience a glitch hunter could ask for. There are naturally piles of glitches as with any big release, but the severity of some of the more ingenious ones stack on top of one another and create a literal museum to explore and test with. The destruction to this game was not laid by myself, I merely helped route with the combined exploits as well as finding some new tricks and nuances here and there.

The majority of the waste was courtesy of YouTube glitch hunter Findlestick, who I wouldn’t hesitate for a second to call a top-rank game destroyer (glitch hunters, follow him now). Following with tech improvements that further brought the game to it’s knees was AKheon, a very cool guy with an extremely keen eye for mechanics. Further route drops were done by another Heaven or Hell runner TehLordson (or Aph0x to the rest of us).

Lots of heavy progress was made extremely quick with this game, a pace at which I haven’t seen since. What we are left with is possibly the most glitch-execution reliant run ever. Your times will be determined by how well and how optimally you can chain glitches together. To some this may be extremely deterring. To the hunters though, it’s solid gold in speed game form.

---

Fly My Pretty, You Are Released

After toying around and finding some interesting bugs within the console demo, Findlestick found the first pieces of what would eventually pierce the game in two, the original incarnation of the Infinite Glide glitch. It used the Angel Whip and simply needed any whippable enemy present to be possible.

Immediately further breaks were underway. As all spectacle fighter runners are accustomed to, multiple Infinite Jumps had already been sussed out (even before release) and compared to enable maneuverability even more so. You could now explore the game from almost every angle you could think of, it was open for inspection. Findlestick even worked to improve the Infinite Glide in it’s state at the time.

It came as a minor surprise to then see AKheon come out with a fairly convoluted method to activate Infinite Glide without the need of enemies. This time, it was a wall that you needed. Still a step away from the absolute freedom now achieved. Routes were being extended and finalized for the first set of runs. All of the sequences were being broken and those involved were frankly happy as can be about it. The game was already begging for mercy.

The final blow to the limit of possibility occurred when AKheon found a way to get Infinite Glide off of the Charge Shot animation for Ebony & Ivory. This was all it took to free the game from it’s creators bounds. You could now do whatever you want in any way you pleased. It is still surreal to me just how busted this game is, years of running it won’t change that ever.

---

Heaven or Heaven

Something that no doubt pushed hunters and runners alike to find new things and cut the game time down further was the presence of two things, Heaven or Hell mode and Super Dante. The former makes everything in the game (including yourself) die in a single hit. The latter gives you infinite Devil Trigger, which removes any and all randomness from battles. Every fight became glide in, Devil Trigger then hammer Ebony & Ivory. Absolutely all of the focus the runners had was being put into the practical parts of the game, as battles strategies were no longer applicable.

What came next was a spree of new strategies as Aph0x and I started hammering full-game and IL runs out. New skips were popping up every few days to get that little bit more out of routes, such as a trifecta of variations on skipping Virility, the second biggest mission the game had. The most involved development tech-wise once these started was the discovery that you could build Infinite Glide speed on walls and zip out of them and past triggers with an attack instead of flinging wildly across a room and hoping you end in the right place. Eventually research was finalized.

---

As it stands this game is magnificent to me. The unfortunate patching of the digital and console versions of the game hit a huge blow to the community reach, since you could no longer do the Infinite Glide. The developers also tried to patch a few of the Infinite Jumps but they somehow messed up and you can still do half of them. This entire product should be a war story for other developers, a warning about the danger of any mechanic being exploited. For me it’s the ultimate glitch game. An everlasting stroll that I can still spend hours on just searching around, checking out oddities and ends.

Anyone reading who has even the slightest interest in what glitches can really do, get yourself a copy of DmC 1.0 on PC. I 100% guarantee you will have a blast tearing this game to pieces in your own unique way, as we all did.