You Should Be Modding: Devil May Cry 4

Ah, Devil May Cry 4—the secret to my success, if you will. Devil May Cry 4 is one of the most APM-intensive stylish action games of all time, at least if you're a style player aiming for 100% completion...but whether or not that describes you, it's hard to oversell just how much better the game becomes with the help of mods. Technically two games: the original Devil May Cry 4 release came out in 2008 featuring a campaign with series veteran Dante and newcomer Nero, while the follow-up Special Edition adding three new playable characters came out in 2015, four years ahead of Devil May Cry 5. Since Season 2 of the loose Netflix adaptation just dropped in parallel with me starting up my You Should Be Modding series here on Notebookcheck, I've decided that the first [Throwback Thursday] of this tri-weekly column series should be dedicated to Devil May Cry 4.

Now, Devil May Cry 4 is interesting when talking about modding potential, because we're really talking about two separate releases of the game, each with their own interlinked but technically separate modding scenes. Special Edition adds Vergil, Lady, and Trish as playable characters, as well as some extra graphical effects, but is otherwise the same game, warts and all. Critically-speaking, Special Edition is fairly strange for its choice to add three whole new playable characters instead of addressing the fact that the second half of the campaign involves running through a harder version of the first half, in reverse, as a different character...but the new characters are all pretty fun to play with, if disgustingly overpowered.

But the nature of these releases essentially means that the best way to play Dante and Nero is in the launch, DirectX 9-based, vanilla version of Devil May Cry 4. Special Edition doesn't offer the same moveset-transforming mods for those characters as the original does, but modding it for local multiplayer shenanigans or for tighter control of the PC version of the game is still desirable if you have any interest in playing the new characters. Special Edition also removes the "Lucifer Glitch," which sounds like a good thing but can ruin some ultra-specific combo setups for Dante that are only possible in vanilla Devil May Cry 4. 

To add insult to injury, vanilla Devil May Cry 4 isn't even sold on Steam anymore, meaning that players who want to utilize all the cool new features offered by DMC4Hook, including a backport of one of Nero's key DMC5 sword moves and the more generous Enemy Step hitboxes, are out of luck without resorting to shady methods or having been lucky enough to buy the original version of the game before it was delisted. A similar situation happened with Sonic Generations upon the release of Sonic X Shadow Generations, but thankfully Sega does still allow people to buy the legacy PC version of the game (and access the mods that come with it) through bundles. Hopefully Capcom eventually follows suit.

Anyway, what are the best Devil May Cry 4 mods, for both versions of the game?

The essential stuff for vanilla DMC4 is as simple as dropping a few .DLL files (application extensions) into your existing install folder. That's SSSiyan and muhopensores' DMC4Hook for the stock version of Devil May Cry 4. Both DMC4Hook and DDMK for Special Edition will add in-game overlays which you can use to tweak the experience to your heart's content, but DMC4Hook is much more expansive in both its system options and ability to alter the existing gameplay.

Serpentiem's DDMK for Special Edition is a little more complicated, since it requires patching the game's executable with xdelta3. Full instructions are on the DDMK page on GitHub, which also encompass DDMK for the three original titles included in the Devil May Cry HD Collection.

For cosmetic mods (attainable on Nexus Mods for Devil May Cry 4 and Special Edition) and the full potential of DMC4Hook, you'll also want to set aside a dedicated Mods folder on your PC for Fluffy Mod Manager. Fluffy Mod Manager is mainly used for RE Engine titles, but also has great support for legacy Capcom games running MT Framework, like both versions of Devil May Cry 4. Once you have Fluffy set up, cosmetic mods possible in both editions of the game include new costumes and arenas/skyboxes for the game's Bloody Palace survival mode.

I'll leave the cosmetics-related mods up to your own taste browsing Nexus Mods, but for vanilla DMC4, you'll want to at least install the 4Hook Mod Pack included in DMC4Hook and the Better Frost Ice Effects mod through Fluffy Mod Manager. The latter mod actually fixes the ice effects on the Frost enemies, which are broken for non-Intel GPUs in vanilla and fixed in Special Edition.