Devil's Third

~ the goodbye ~

consoles were never really my side of gaming. the internet cafes i sat in between 2002 and 2005 ran counter-strike on pc, and a wii u in ankara was an expensive import somebody's cousin carried back rather than a thing you bought in a shop. so Devil's Third reached me the way most console exclusives did, as a headline about a disaster.

Tomonobu Itagaki's name traveled further than the platforms he worked on. He had run Team Ninja inside Tecmo and put out Ninja Gaiden and Dead or Alive, then left in 2008 in a public fight with his employer and started Valhalla Game Studios. Devil's Third was the studio's first game and it took seven years to arrive, which is usually a bad sign and was one here.

It landed on Wii U in Japan on 4 august 2015 and in Europe three weeks after that. North america waited until 11 december.

The reviews were savage in the way that gets quoted for years afterward. Metacritic settled at 43 out of 100 across 54 of them and the game never reached the UK top 40, with roughly 3,000 copies moving in north america in its first month. Famitsu in Japan gave it 33 out of 40, which tells you how differently two audiences can read the same disc.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the road there ~

Devil's Third started as an Xbox 360 exclusive with Microsoft money behind it. That arrangement ended and THQ picked the game up, then THQ went bankrupt in 2013 and the project went looking again. A partnership with the Korean company Doobic failed after that. Nintendo, of all publishers, took it and put it on the Wii U.

The engine changed partway through development when the company supplying it stopped operating, and the team moved onto Unreal Engine 3. Seven years across three publishers leaves marks on a game, and the marks were visible: the campaign played like several different design ideas that had never been introduced to each other.

~ the day it died ~

Nintendo switched the Wii U servers off on 29 december 2016, sixteen months after the Japanese release. The campaign still ran off the disc afterward. Everything else did not.

There was a second death almost nobody outside Japan saw. Nexon had published a free to play PC version there called Devil's Third Online on 8 june 2016, and its servers closed on 29 march 2017, less than ten months after opening. That was the last piece of the game that needed a network to exist.

~ what got buried with it ~

Here is the part worth writing down. The reviews that destroyed Devil's Third were mostly about the single player campaign, and the single player campaign is the part that survives on the disc. The multiplayer, a strange hybrid of melee and gunplay with clan bases you built up and defended, was what its small defending audience actually argued for. That is the part Nintendo deleted.

So what is left is the version everyone agreed was bad, and the version some people were willing to stand behind cannot be checked by anybody now. You can still buy a used copy and form an opinion, but only about the half that lost the argument.

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