Why does Devil May Cry look the way it does?

The gothic in Devil May Cry is not a filter; it is fieldwork. Building the first game, Kamiya's team spent eleven days in the United Kingdom and Spain photographing Gothic statues, bricks and stone pavements to use as textures, research that began when the game was still Resident Evil 4. Mallet Island's castle, its chapel, colosseum and drowned courtyards, is that trip made playable: real European stone, scanned into a demon's house. Over it sits a naming system lifted from the Divine Comedy: Dante for the poet, Vergil for his guide Virgil, Trish for Beatrice, and Mundus, the world, as the devil on the throne.

The second game changed the recipe without leaving the family. Designer Daigo Ikeno approached its demons through classical sources, on the principle that ancient portrayals of demons recombined things people already knew, a lion's head on a human body: proper chimeras. His references ran from woodblock prints and Norse myth to the Bible, alchemical symbols and Japanese yokai, and he framed the game's look as a live-action comic book by way of Hollywood B-movies: stylish surfaces, serious silhouettes, demons as costume design.