The History of Devil May Cry 2

Capcom greenlit the sequel inside Capcom Production Studio 1, its arcade division, to capitalize quickly on the first game's success, and did not bring back Kamiya or Team Little Devils; Kamiya first heard about it when the sequel's director asked to borrow his screenplay and design documents. The new Team Devil was talented but arcade-bred, around forty to fifty people, supervised by a planner whose name has never been publicly attached to the director's chair. Design aims were scale, environments roughly nine times larger, and accessibility: puzzles shrank, and at a producer's insistence Dante was rewritten older and taciturn, the joke-cracking hero made silent.

With months left, by the team's accounts somewhere between four and six, management sent in Hideaki Itsuno, fresh from Capcom vs. SNK 2. He found the scenario unwritten, the cutscenes unshot and Dante's Devil Trigger undecided; he has said he considered detaching the game from the Devil May Cry name entirely. He shipped it anyway, in January 2003, as the only credited director. Reviews landed at a Metacritic 68, GameSpot named it the Most Disappointing Game of 2003, and it still sold more than two million copies. Itsuno's response was a request: let him make the next one, from the start.