What is Devil's Third
Devil's Third was intended as the flagship game for Valhalla Game Studios, formed by Tomonobu Itagaki following his departure from Team Ninja and Tecmo in the summer of 2008. Along with several Team Ninja veterans who had worked on various Ninja Gaiden and DOA titles, the plan was for the company to create a brand new title that would be a hybrid of third person shooter and character action gameplay, with its big showpiece being an extremely feature rich multiplayer mode in addition to a single player campaign. It...faced a lot of issues on the road to release. Valhalla had signed on with THQ to publish the game, but then THQ eventually went under a few years into the partnership due to bad decisions, and this was after the game had reportedly switched between two different engines. Eventually, the game resurfaced in 2014 as being a Nintendo published title for the Wii U, and running on Unreal Engine 3. Unfortunately, throughout its entire preview cycle, no one in the west fucking liked what they saw, to the point NOA had briefly considered not releasing the game in North America despite Japan and Europe releasing it in August. Eventually it arrived in the west in December, received the critical reception that was expected, and then treated by many as a joke and forgotten.
It's a game with a rough development cycle that, based on the circumstances, I would say was the result of events that were mostly outside of Valhalla's creative control, and that made it difficult to elevate all the aspects of the game to a standard that would've looked acceptable to most people. But I found that even at launch, and as the years went on from revisiting the single player, that the core gameplay systems are extremely well realized in spite of the game lacking a lot in the way of technical polish. I mean, UE3 has never been able to perform well on the Wii U in any instance, so this felt like a no brainer. This is a game where the way it's meant to be played is something that anyone going in with a generic cover shooter mindset would not understand. Kinda like Vanquish, you start to realize that playing this like shooters of the era is the absolute wrong thing to be doing. And it becomes even more apparent once you've finished the campaign and unlocked all the missions available for Score Attack mode. And that's what we're doing here.
What's Score Attack?
Score Attack is all campaign missions in their entirety but with a score component and the ability to set a starting loadout that is different from what would be given to the player in the story version of those missions. Kinda like with Ninja Gaiden, this can be argued as the ONLY way to play the campaign as the score bonuses and freedom to make your personal weapon loadout start to encourage an exciting, more reckless style of play. Even the mode works on a different difficulty scale than the default three you are given for Story Mode, and the way damage is tuned to me solidifies this as the definitive way to experience the single player of Devil's Third. There are even hats/masks you can pick up that Perfect Bald Man (He is cool) Ivan will wear throughout the rest of the mission and cutscenes, assuming you do not die or reload the mission.
Also, as you'll quickly notice when you watch this LP, I am running this game through the Wii U Emulator CEMU. On top of my original console not being in the best of conditions, Devil's Third is notable for being a game that caps itself at 30 FPS and at specific instances likes to drop into the low tens. However, as PCs today are a lot better than a Wii U and a decent mid end rig can handle many of the games that are considered to be in a playable state, you'll be able to witness Devil's Third running at speeds that are better than it ever could have originally, which makes the act of playing actually that much better. Well, assuming you don't mind all the on the fly shader compiling and the fact that this game just does not like NVIDIA GPUs when running for an extended period of time. But I've done everything I can through the magic of editing and practicing individual segments to ensure that the graphical shenanigans are kept to a minimum and you can experience the carnage at a glorious 50 FPS.
Yes, I said 50. I don't know why, it might be something to do with it being the PAL copy of the game (and the US version seems locked at 30 no matter what I do), but it always caps out at 50 and doesn't dip below 30 outside of random loading/shader caching, so you can imagine it being as smooth as your average Platinum game on a good day.
But Why?
Because it's been five years since this game came out, the final game that Itagaki ever directed, and I felt enough time had passed to show this game is worth being considered a cult classic and not the trainwreck that it was presumed at launch.
Also, you will not see any deaths on screen. Even if I ended up having to rerecord whole missions just to get it right, you will not see me falter. This is Devil's Third as it was meant to be played, in lieu of multiplayer servers being shut down since that was where the real action was. Because...
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