Devil May Cry is an Action Hack and Slash game with emphasis on flashy gameplay. Originally, development was started as Resident Evil 4 but after quite a bit of work, it became apparent that the game they had created was not a Resident Evil game. The gameplay was too fast, the main character was too powerful and the atmosphere not scary enough. The game was instead rebranded as Devil May Cry with a demo disk first released as bonus to those who bought Resident Evil: Code Veronica X.
Since then, the game series has spawned three sequals, an HD Remake collection and has been recently rebooted. Since the release of the original back in May 2001, the franchise has gone on to sell nearly 13 million copies worldwide and has become the standard by which other games of the genre are judged by.
