Welcome to this week’s article of The Good, Bad, and What The?, where we took a good, long look at characters in movies, video games, anime, and books and put them on the judgement table to see if they are worthy to be in their respective stories. I strongly believe that well developed characters are more important than anything else in a good story, so I always judge them hard. At the end of every character’s evaluation I will give them one of four ratings: Good for those characters that are developed and deserve their place in the story, Bad for those characters that have no place being made or interacting with anyone else in the story, What The for the characters I just can’t figure out, and then the characters who are dull as dishwasher will get the rating of Sack of Potatoes. Today on the judgement table: Kat, the “love interest”character in “DmC: Devil May Cry.”
So Kat is the girl that basically replaces Trish in the new “DmC” reboot. In terms of her spot in the story, other than being the “love interest”, Kat is more or less a helpful witch. She is able to create portals and is a sort of spy for Dante and Vergil. In the reboot of the “DMC” series, everything is done in a zone called Limbo. Kat is the one who gets Dante into this Limbo zone. This is where her help kinda stops, as she doesn’t really have powers or do anything in battle. Now let’s talk about how I feel about this “love interest” character.
Alright, so starting off, why do I keep saying “love interest?” Well, there are a couple of reasons. I understand that there is a soft sort of love story between Trish and Dante in the original “DMC”, and that is all fine. My problem with the reboot, however, is that the love story nonsense just slaps you right in the face. The objective between the two is so obvious that a three year old would see them and be like “They are gonna get married!” Sometimes that isn’t a big deal, yah know, you can see it coming and you are like, “Awww it’s cute” or, “Okay I can see them together.” There is a bit of a conundrum in this game, however. Nothing happens. Ever! These two do not kiss, they do not hug, they do not admit anything, they barely even look at each other until the very end of the game! There is all this obvious build up that these two are a thing and then the developers be like, “Whoops, guess we forgot.” I understand that Dante is supposed to be edgy and tough, but maybe Kat could be a little more pushy or something. She just never seems to get a chance to do anything, like she is a character that exists for the purpose of Dante having someone to save. After he saves her, does anything happen? No, of course not. I feel like if Kat wasn’t in the game, it wouldn’t have changed much at all. They should have either made her a strong and cool character, like her counterpart, Trish or at least made her a love interest that was, oh I don’t know, interesting!
Onto this whole being saved thing.
“Damsel in distress” is a pretty common phrase in the world of writing, whether it be books, movies, video games, anything, really. This, of course, means a female character (and on occasion it could be a man, so dude in distress) that requires saving because she is in distress, naturally. This, however, makes a lot of people mad. I’ll be talking about it strictly from a literature stand point, I’ll be ignoring the representation of women and such because I am not the person to talk about that. As a tool in literature, it is a very lazy and easy way of making a simple plot. Now, you could build the plot to be good from this point, but the “DMC” series was never super deep in terms of plot in the first place, so using something lazy like the damsel in distress trope is ridiculous. Kat is literally there to motivate Dante with saving or protecting her at certain points. She could have be strong or have powers or be extremely clever, but she gets no chance to show these things at all. She makes portal, yells at Dante, and leaves. Then she finds Dante in Limbo, tells him where to go, and leaves. After this, she gets captured so Dante can save her, and then leaves. She just doesn’t do anything! Even when they try to have her be funny with jokes about stuff like squirrel semen, yes I said squirrel semen, you sit there going, “…Yeah no not really funny at all.”
On to the last point about Kat: her importance to the plot.
How do I put it simply… She has no importance to the plot. She has no relation to the villain, to Vergil, barely anything to Dante, no relations with any of the few characters at all, really. Now again, “DMC” is not huge on their deep characters, but this girl takes the cake. I honestly don’t think she had any real affect on the story at all. If she wasn’t there, then the part where she was captured could have been easily replaced with some other simple plot device. There are millions to choose from. I got to points in the game where I saw her and literally went, “Oh yeah, I forgot you…existed.” Now Lady and Trish in the original “DMC” games weren’t super deep or complex either, and they did have a small love thing with Dante, but they were also able to handle themselves. Trish and Lady, in both the anime and the games, have their own scenes where they just start destroying huge hoards of demons. Kat sees a demons and goes, “Oh god, Dante save me!” It was just annoying and really had no purpose. To replace Trish and Lady with a character like Kat just made me sad.
Well verdict time now. Kat gets the very surprising rating of Sack of Potatoes. You’re shocked I know. When you have a character who is just a plot potato used to be plucked from the ripe field of story dirt, you have a problem. They made a character who is the definition of damsel in distress and didn’t even bother to try and add something to her. It’s like the developer went “Okay, love interest and damsel, good we don’t need more.” and then one intern in the corner said “Shouldn’t we have her do something?” so the boss’ response was “Ehhhhh have her make portals or something I don’t care I’m getting donuts.” The game of “DmC: Devil May Cry” was not a good reboot of the series in the first place, but my god, a character like Kat is not helping anything.