Devil May Cry 5 has a limited kind of online co-op in the form of its cameo system, which only activates in certain levels where more than one of the game's protagonists is present, seamlessly inserting another player in that role. Thanks to this system's presence it's proved possible for modders Dante and Raz0r to hack online co-op into most of the campaign missions, and Bloody Palace mode as well. Up to three players can fight together as Nero, Dante, and V—though having multiple instances of the same character is apparently impossible.

This mod also enables some of the graphics options normally only visible in cutscenes, and has a floating pause menu that won't interrupt your co-op buddies. It's a nice piece of work all round.

Download the DMC 5 Co-op Trainer from Nexus Mods.

Several times a year, public companies chat with investors about how the business is going, answering questions from analysts and shareholders at the end. In the games industry, these questions are usually very boring. Listening in to the EA, Activision, and Ubisoft calls, we've now heard at least three iterations of "So what does Fortnite mean for the landscape?"

But as Niko Partners senior analyst Daniel Ahmad pointed out on Twitter, a Capcom shareholders meeting held back in June was the exception to the rule. You can read the full transcript here, but there's really just one investor (or troll who sneaked in?) you need to know about. They begin their barrage with my all-time favorite shareholder question:

"My son is fervent online game player but says that Capcom’s graphics are unsophisticated. Please do something about this."

I love everything about that. The son. The firm request that they "do something" about the son's opinion. It's a beautiful thing. Capcom of course gave a standard response, noting that it has "become able to collect feedback from players in a manner of different ways."

The questioner was not done there. After a big swing with question one, they came back with a strong left hook:

"Regarding Arcade Operations, when my son was younger, arcade trading-card games were popular, generating long lines to play. I would really like to see a comeback for arcades as a family entertainment option. I want you to invent an explosive, hit arcade machine."

I see no reason why one wouldn't invent an explosive, hit arcade machine. Capcom should do this, in my opinion. 

Still, they were not done. Even after insisting Capcom make its graphics better and also invent a very good arcade game, which is quite a bit of work, this attendee still had one more request: 

"Have you provided any gifts for shareholders today? I want some original Capcom merchandise."

The answer was no. How cruel.

I should say that other people asked questions during the meeting—questions that were actually questions and not demands that they tighten up the graphics, and if you really want to read about the Capcom Beat 'Em Up Bundle's performance, you can find the answers here. 

I wish more shareholders brought their sons' opinions about videogames into meetings, though. Imagine someone demanding that EA explain why their son keeps yelling "POG champ" at them.

It’s been exciting to watch Capcom embrace the PC platform over the last year, and it’s likely played a part in the company's recent success. Capcom posted its consolidated financial results for the fiscal year that ended March 31, and its three biggest titles all played a part in driving record results.

The big titles for Capcom’s last fiscal year were, of course, Resident Evil 2, Devil May Cry 5, and Monster Hunter: World. The amount of PC sales per game has been on an upwards curve—back in February, Capcom COO Haruhiro Tsujimoto said: "The percentage of sales for the PC versions of our titles has been increasing each year". For Monster Hunter: World specifically, Capcom's financial results state "the Steam version for PC also performed solidly, boosting profits".

Those three tentpole games contributed to record profits for Capcom in the last year, with net sales increasing to 100,031 million yen, up 5.8 percent over the previous year.

The outlook section of the financial report includes “multi-platform development” among the company’s strengths. Capcom’s proprietary game engines, including the RE Engine used by Resident Evil 2 and Devil May Cry 5, allowing for simultaneous development on multiple platforms—including PC—which in turn “has contributed to increasing sales and improving profitability.”

Bloody Palace is the perfect playground for Devil May Cry 5's trio of demon hunters. Enemies spawn into a circular arena, you kill them as quickly and stylishly as possible, and then jump through a portal in the floor to move into the next room. The mode removes all barriers between you and DMC5's juicy combat system. I almost wish the main game was this direct: no chatting, only demon-splatting.

The mode has been an important part of the series since Devil May Cry 2. It functions as an endgame if you want to demonstrate complete mastery of every character's moveset, or if you want to quickly mine some orbs to unlock every skill in the game. In its best moments, Bloody Palace throws a horde of fodder at you, with a few tough top-tier villains sprinkled into the crowd. You get the satisfaction of eviscerating the weak adds while while navigating the tougher minibosses at the same time, all without taking a hit. When it goes well, Bloody Palace makes you feel like a god.

This edition of the mode comes with Devil May Cry 4's ticking countdown clock. Beating rooms restores the clock and you can boost the time returned by avoiding all damage. Leftover time generates bonus orbs too, which means you're encouraged to blast up through the style ranks as efficiently as possible. You progress floor by floor rather than choosing between elemental portals a la DMC3: Special Edition.

It's fun, but not perfect. I find it a little slow to get going. What's the point in having a bunch of floors I can clear with a couple of swipes with Nero's activated Tomboy form? I'd rather start with a challenging horde and work up from there. You can practice any floor that you've reached in 'warm up' mode, but to reach new floors you have to play through all of the old ones again first.

Bloody Palace also exposes the limitations of V's moveset compared to Dante and Nero. His demons easily chew through the first 20 missions, but start getting one-shot by bigger enemies that start turning up after that. It's amusing to walk V around the edge of the arena reading a book while his demon pets regenerate, but it's not exactly fun. 

Nero and Dante are brilliant though. Every ten levels Nero enters an arena full of robot arms so you can keep restocking and changing up your loadout to match the enemies coming up in the order. Bloody Palace gives you more useful, concentrated combat time than the main campaign, which makes it a good place to learn weapons and test combos, especially in 'warm up' where you can get stuck into a big horde of insects on, say, stage ten, and get a guaranteed level of intensity from the encounter.

Speaking of which, it's good to see villains like Furies get more screen time than they do in the first playthrough of the main campaign. I'd recommend beating the first playthrough before starting Bloody Palace because it mixes in elite enemies with the chaff you see in the first few missions. Every ten floors you will get a boss, too, and it would be a shame to ruin those by bumping into them without context. 

I've only reached level 27 after dabbling with the mode today, but I'm looking forward to seeing what's lurking in the higher tiers and watching the inevitable wave of gifs and videos from Devil May Cry masters. The Bloody Palace is another solid addition to one of the best brawlers on PC.

In a rare bit of useful, actual games news on this April Fools' Day, Capcom has added Bloody Palace mode to Devil May Cry 5. In case you were worried Capcom was somehow staging a double-bluff April Fools' gag and it wasn't really in the game yet, PC Gamer's Tom Senior is actually playing it in the office right now, so it's real.

Bloody Palace is Devil May Cry 5's 'endgame', as it were, a 101-floor combat challenge designed to push players to their limits—it's been a staple of the series since Devil May Cry 2, and will likely keep the most hardcore of the series' audience occupied for years to come. You can choose your preferred character of Dante, Nero or V before taking on Bloody Palace, and then see if your fingers are up to the task of taking on that many enemies. 

Look out for some impressions of Bloody Palace later today. Tom gave Devil May Cry 5 an extremely strong 90% last month. 

Devil May Cry 5 came out this month. Not just this year, but 21 freaking days ago. It's a phenomenal character action game, as deep and rewarding to master as it is flat-out ridiculous. Dante dances in a cowboy hat and uses two halves of a demonically possessed motorcycle to beat the shit out of things. It's the best Japanese action game of its type since Platinum's Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, or Bayonetta, or hell, maybe Shinji Mikami's God Hand, way back in 2006. The point is, if Devil May Cry 5 was the only Japanese action game that came out this month, it'd still be the best month for the genre in years. But then there's Sekiro.

FromSoftware went ahead and redefined the action genre with a combat system that captures the intimate fury and exhaustion of sword-on-sword combat. Sekiro is a fragile shinobi who has to break down enemies through relentless aggression and exact reflexes. There's no time to hesitate—any brief pause and your opponent can recover and let loose a frenzied retaliation. Swords are always out and always swinging. It's an aggressive inversion of Dark Souls all about making your own opportunities. It's empowering, punishing, and not quite like anything we've played before.

Two tremendous games released exactly two weeks apart. A few days before Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice came out, I started thinking about how crazy it seemed, these two games coming out in the same month. It's like Halo 2 and Half-Life 2 for Japanese action: Two different takes on the genre, for sure—Sekiro isn't a perfect fit for the nebulous "character action" sub-genre, but still has the same focus on skill and precision coursing through its veins. DMC5 asks players what cool shit they can pull off with three unique characters and a dozen weapons, while Sekiro just gives you a plain ol’ katana and says: Master the blade or bust. Have two similar games of this magnitude ever come out side-by-side before? Will they ever again?

It didn't just feel unlikely. It felt unprecedented. Sometimes it's fun to obsess over stats and trivia, so I decided to do some digging.

The question is simple and surprisingly easy to answer, because despite the love and reverence for the likes of Devil May Cry and Bayonetta, there have been precious few of these types of games over the past 20 years. I pored over the release dates for 20 years worth of beloved character action games (most of them on consoles, though newer ones are also on PC) to pinpoint the genre's peak.

It's this month.

March 2019 does have a few good competitors, though. Behold, basically every character action game* on one chart. The X axis is years and the Y axis is months; look for blue dots with multiple game names for months where more than one action game came out at the same time.

*(Some games I excluded because popular opinion would clearly disqualify them from "best month ever" contention, e.g. Devil May Cry 2 and Platinum's Legend of Korra. I also excluded games that leaned more heavily into RPG than character action, like Dark Souls and Nier Automata, though I know that last one is borderline.)

Based on these release dates, sourced from Wikipedia, here are some of the best months in gaming history for 3D character action games (and Viewtiful Joe, which are 2D but just felt like they belonged).

December 2003, Japan: This month an incredibly rare three character action games came out at once, but only in Japan. Nightshade, the sequel to Sega's Shinobi reboot, got pretty mediocre reviews at the time. Fast, combo-y combat couldn't make up for bad jumping and bottomless death pits. Bujingai fared better: it was a weird mix of future post-apocalypse, traditional Hong Kong martial arts, and Japanese pop star Gackt. And then there was Otogi 2, made for the Xbox by FromSoftware, a hack-and-slash with a bunch of playable characters. It was quality, and the beginning of From merging action with its RPG roots. This definitely would've been a memorable month if you lived in Japan, but none hit the high bar of all-time-great action games.

March 2005, North America: If there's a single month that can compete with March 2019, I'd argue that it's this one. This is the month Devil May Cry 3 released in North America, followed by God of War three weeks later. God of War is the only non-Japanese character action series on this list, and it made a huge splash at the time. Kratos's blades made for lengthy and brutal combos and the setpieces were epic in a way action games hadn't been before. Action purists would argue all day for the superior depth of Devil May Cry 3's combat, though, and they'd be right—though it was greatly enhanced in the Special Edition released later, and the US version's bafflingly increased difficulty was reigned in.

Still, this was a hell of a month, if you lived in North America.

October 2006, North America: This could have been a stellar month, as it saw the release of Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition on PC and God Hand on the PS2. God Hand is a beloved, brutally hard action game from Shinji Mikami that still needs to get ported to PC, dammit. Unfortunately, DMC3's first PC port was as bad as most Japanese PC games of that era, thus souring October's chances. Besides, DMC3 SE had already hit consoles months earlier.

October 2009, Japan: A big month for quantity, but spread across regions. The Sigma port of Ninja Gaiden 2 hit Japan and Europe, Bayonetta came out in Japan, and FromSoftware's QTE-heavy Sekiro predecessor NinjaBlade released on PC in America. You could call this a high water mark for Japan, because Bayonetta was the successor to Devil May Cry fans had now been waiting several years for, and it was going up against the PS3 version of Ninja Gaiden 2, which likely put it in front of a much larger Japanese audience. It's largely considered an inferior version, though it's significant to me that this is the only time that the DMC/Bayonetta style of action and the Ninja Gaiden style went directly head-to-head.

March 2019, Worldwide: This is the month. Looking back across these other banner months, there are few games being released simultaneously that will stand the test of time like Sekiro and DMC5. April 2005 is the only one that comes close, and this month has one big advantage: universality. In past years staggered international release dates meant games rarely ever landed for everyone at the same time. And it was really the Special Edition release of Devil May Cry 3 that cemented it as the king of the genre for years.

But this month, Sekiro and DMC5 launched worldwide, and it feels safe to say people will be talking about them, and playing them (or re-releases) a decade from now. So, sure, they're great games. But I think there's a bit more to it than that. The words I keep coming back to are luxury and confidence.

Luxury, because Devil May Cry 5 feels like a game overflowing with ideas an energy. Three playable characters with totally different styles, all weaved into one campaign, all with unlockable movesets that you'll barely start mastering in a single playthrough. Luxury, because this game's characters look incredible, and unnecessarily lavish cutscenes were a key tenet for its designers in making the whole ride feel like a ridiculous movie. Confidence, because DMC5 is far smoother and more approachable than older games in the series, but the depth is still there for anyone who can dig it out.

Confidence, because FromSoftware built a towering reputation on the style of combat and arcane RPG features in its Souls games, and then at the height of that fame, made a pure action game. Elements of the Souls games linger, now codified in From's DNA, but Sekiro demands you play it more like the hyper-aggressive Ninja Gaiden 2, unlearning a decade of skills built up on its preceding games. Luxury, because just a few years ago both of these games would've been console exclusives, but they arrived day-and-date on PC with quality ports.

March 2019: Pretty damn good month.

Above: if games in 2019 had a Time Magazine-style Person of the Year, it'd surely be Mr X.

A few months ago, I published this piece on PC gaming's slightly disappointing selection of blockbusters in 2018. I attributed this to a few things: Red Dead Redemption 2's arrival likely causing other games to move down the release schedule (the game itself, meanwhile, didn't come to PC), Fallout 76 falling short, and an expectedly sparse year from developers of PC-only strategy games.

This year, which, frighteningly, is 25 percent over as of this Sunday, has so far kicked ass for big games. I thought I'd follow up my original piece with a little optimism for the mostly fantastic blockbuster titles we've had so far in 2019. I guess my definition of 'blockbuster game' here is fairly broad, much as the general definition for 'indie game' is: in this case, I'm talking about big budget games from traditional publishers, that ten years ago might've been sold in a box at a physical retailer (or still are, in the case of console versions). 

Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, the typically much-discussed new game from developer From Software, is the latest title to score over 90% from us—the fifth of the year so far, after Apex Legends, Devil May Cry 5, Slay The Spire, and Sunless Skies. Of those five, three are blockbusters, which is a strong showing. And all of them are contenders for our GOTY shortlist and annual top 100 games list, even if we hoped for more from Apex Legends' first battle pass. 

But they're not the only big games that have wowed us this year: there's the Resident Evil 2 Remake, which has yielded many great Mr X memes and mods, and of which Gabe Newell is apparently a fan. The Division 2 has eaten so many of my hours that I can't account for most of my time during March, and now has a year of updates ahead that threaten to monopolise my entire gaming calendar. Andy wasn't totally wowed by the combat in Metro Exodus and the late-in-the-day Epic Games Store exclusivity provoked some strong reactions, but the game's post-apocalyptic world is undeniably extraordinary to explore. Even if you like arcade-y dogfighting, there's a solidly-reviewed game for that. We've even had a great racing game in 2019 already.

The biggest disappointment is probably Anthem, unless you were hoping Jump Force was going to deliver on the Smash Bros-level promise for combining all those manga characters—and even BioWare's co-op mech game is going to develop further over the coming months. Whether it will ever reach its full potential is a much bigger question, and I'm also curious to see if it'll still have a sizeable enough player base in six months for me to jump in and find other players for most of its activities. 

Coming attractions

While it's not been a huge year for PC-only games so far (there was a solid new Civ expansion earlier this year), next month sees the arrival of Paradox's next grand strategy game Imperator Rome, which will likely tick that box. The next major historical Total War game, Three Kingdoms, is now very close as well, arriving in May. 

It's also been a decent 2019 for announcements and teases, even for games that might not be out this year. Something Borderlands-shaped is being hinted at. Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines 2 is a game that exists. Whatever Respawn's Jedi: Fallen Order will turn out to be (we'll find out in April), the developer has an amazing track record, and Chris Avellone has worked on the game. At some point this year, we will be playing a new Doom. Plus, we'll get to play it on Steam.

I'm pretty optimistic about the months ahead, and happy that I now have more than enough games to consume my entire summer. Hell, Sekiro, which took Tom over 70 hours to complete, will probably eat a few months by itself—assuming I don't throw a tantrum after 20 hours and give up, which is absolutely possible.

Did Red Dead's domination of the gaming calendar in 2018's holiday period accidentally give us a fantastic start to 2019? I think it's possible. And, to be really optimistic, maybe we'll finally see that game on PC before the year is out.

How's your 2019 been so far? Let me know in the comments.

Less than two weeks ago we reported that Devil May Cry 5 was Capcom's second-biggest launch on Steam ever, behind last year's Monster Hunter: World. Today, at a talk at the Game Developer's Conference in San Francisco, director Hideaki Itsuno announced that Devil May Cry 5 has already sold more than two million copies. That sure sounds like a smashing success for a game launched on March 8.

Capcom is definitely on the upswing: Resident Evil 2 Remake has performed significantly better than its first-person predecessor Resident Evil 7. It's all enough for Sam to suggest that the publisher has entered a new golden age.

Bloody Palace has been a staple of the Devil May Cry series since the second game: the mode gives players a single life to slaughter as many enemies as they can, gradually climbing through increasingly difficult floors against a timer. Devil May Cry 5's version is coming on April 1 for free, Capcom revealed this week—and it's not an April Fool's joke.

You'll be able to play as Dante, Nero or V, and if you've finished the story then it'll be yet another reason to jump back in to one of the best brawlers on PC. In case you missed it, Tom's review is here.

Capcom has previously confirmed that the free update is the last piece of planned DLC for the game. 

Update: Capcom producer Matt Walker has claimed Hideaki Itsuno's desire to leave the studio after DmC: Devil May Cry had "nothing to do" with the game itself. 

Others also pointed to an interview last year in which Itsuno said the game was "one of my favorite Devil May Cry games". 

Walker didn't elaborate on why Itsuno would've wanted to leave Capcom, and his comments contradict those of Dante voice actor Reuben Langdon, which you can read about in the story below. No doubt other developers close to Itsuno, or perhaps Itsuno himself, will fill in the blanks at some point.

Original story: 

Hideaki Itsuno, director of the Devil May Cry series, wanted to resign from Capcom after DmC: Devil May Cry, according to the voice and motion capture actor for Dante.

DmC: Devil May Cry released in 2013, five years after Devil May Cry 4. It was, as our review at the time said, a great game, but it was very different to anything else in the series. It was made by a different developer—Ninja Theory—and featured a redesigned Dante.

In an interview with YouTube channel Toy Bounty Hunters, picked up by Game Fragger, actor Reuben Langdon claimed that Itsuno was "not happy" with the change of direction, and was "ready to leave Capcom" following its release.

"I think he put in his resignation and then they said 'wait, you’re a valuable guy, we don’t want you to leave. What can make you stay?'” 

Itsuno's "wishlist" included getting control of the Devil May Cry series for a new game, Langdon said.

"Hats off to him for standing up and hats off for Capcom for going all out. They literally gave him everything he requested and wanted for this game, and it’s paying off," he said, in a reference to the recently-released Devil May Cry 5, which is brilliant.

Langdon himself didn't feature in DmC: Devil May Cry, but voiced Dante in Devil May Cry 3, 4 and 5.

You can listen to the interview below.