About the "half a game" argument, while I do think it was quite shitty and I really wish we got new levels, bosses and enemies for Dante, it's not nearly as relevant as a lot of people make it seem when comparing games. It's a very big flaw, I'm not downplaying it, but we're talking about genres defined by replay.
So in 20 playthroughs of each game, I see each level of DMC4 twice as many times I see each level of DmC. Wow, that changes everything.
I believe the biggest issue with the backtracking levels thing are having less bosses than we would otherwise, but if we're comparing it to DmC, each has 7 boss fights (DmC has 8 if you include the DLC, which was really really good, DmC Vergil is better than DMC3 Vergil gameplaywise IMO), of those 7, only one was garbage in DMC4, in DmC, aside from that one garbage fight, no boss is as good as any of the other 6 in DMC4. That plays a larger role in which one is my favorite than the amount of individual levels.
I know, not everyone plays the games for the same reasons, and some people follow the series from the beginning and don't even care about playing it through more than once, and I can respect that, but it seems like quite a few people just can't begin to comprehend how someone would prefer the "half game" over the "complete game", because "you play through the same thing twice".
Well, it's DMC, I play through the same thing a million times.
Well, yeah there's some depth to be found in the combat system but it was hindered by a couple factors. Like I said in my first post I've not had the chance to play the re-release so I'm only comparing the originals from what I can, but at the time at least there was a lot of limitation from the color coding, which apparently has gone and that can only be a good thing. But with that aside I still felt that combat in general was a bit on the slow side for the franchise. There was also a few exploitable tricks such as being able to fly to whatever height through spamming a certain attack. I guess a few things like that just added up to make the combat feel like it got less attention than it usually would.
The biggest change definitely came from the way damage could be exchanged though, but it's also really hard to characterize what I mean by that. There was just something about the way that bosses in particular would flow in DMC4 that I never found in DmC, perhaps it was that I never found the combos, but I also found the scripted scenes throughout the bosses regularly intruded on it.
But you see, "for the franchise", you'd never get me against you saying that.
Color coding is
bullshit, and I don't think DmC matches the depth of DMC4 at all, doesn't come close. I'm not even sure a DMC5 by Capcom would match DMC4, Uncle Dante is just too ridiculous, but none of that has anything to do with DmC being on the same level as NT's other games.
You can't let DmC's issues get in the way of things that are objective. DmC is far beyond what they achieved with Heavenly Sword and Enslaved, when it comes to combat depth, it really isn't up to discussion.