One of my biggest takeaways from playing Devil May Cry 5 at this year's TGS is just how damn fun Dante’s motorcycle, The Cavaliere, is as a weapon. You can split it in half and wield it to eviscerate enemies, or just hop right on it and run them down. It was by far my favorite weapon in my hands-on time with the game. So much so I couldn’t resist asking the developers how it came to be and if they were worried that, perhaps, it was too much fun and would deter people from using other weapons.
So, what’s behind giving Dante the motorcycle in battle? You better believe it had to do with the cool factor “In Japanese, we have this term called ‘chuuni,’” explains director Hideaki Itsuno. "One way to translate it is it’s kind of like Peter Pan syndrome... stuff that kids in their pre-teens think is cool. So whenever we come up with weapon ideas for Dante, we start with the idea of chuuni, ‘Okay, what’s cool from like a pre-teen perspective? In Devil May Cry 3, we had the guitar for instance, and motorcycles are the same kind of thing.”
While motorcycles have been in the game since Devil May Cry 2, this is the first time they were able to something much more for Dante. “Ever since, DMC 2, we’ve wanted to make a motorcycle weapon, but for different reasons we weren’t able to do it – we never really had the time. In DMC 3, we started to get into that and there’s actually a cutscene where Dante takes a motorcycle as he’s falling down the tower and uses that as nunchucks to fight these flying enemies and we called that the ‘bikechuck.’ We were hoping to make it a weapon but that didn’t come to fruition, so finally this time around, we were asking the dev team what would be some cool ideas for weapons. We said, ‘Okay, let’s do a motorcycle, but not just a motorcycle, let’s split it apart into two, and it turns into dual-wielding chainsaws, and then you can put it together and ride it!’ So that’s where it came from.”
I couldn’t help but ask if the team was afraid people would only want to use that weapon. They laughed and were happy to hear it’s fun, but they also had a little tease to leave me with. “We got more in store,” Itsuno says. “Crazier than a motorcycle?,” I ask. “Yeah, yeah, I think so. Hopefully, you’ll enjoy it,” Itsuno responds.
Devil May Cry is scheduled to release March 8, 2019.