Finished all the new content worth playing in Warframe (I will not play SP Railjack for no reason), just waiting on a few things to finish crafting so I can get the mastery done. I cannot believe they put the new incarnons in the fucking circuit, Rebb why. Put one incarnon token in Descendia and give Cavalero a shop that rotates between half of them a week like Eleanor, please.

Started playing the Devil May Cry series in release order with the HD Collection. This is from the perspective of someone who has played a few character action games (old God of War, Metal Gear Rising) and is only going to play the games once on normal difficulty. Overall: skip 1 and 2, play 3. DMC1 is fine but I'm shocked it was able to spawn a large fanbase. You have to fight 4 of the 5 bosses 3 times each, and the best one by far is Phantom, the first boss. Nero Angelus is fine (but easily cheesed with DT Ignis which kinda ruins it) but Griffon was boring as hell (and mostly got shot to death, which is apparently the thing that makes DMC2 unplayable?) and Nightmare, well...

For anyone unfamiliar, to damage Nightmare you have to damage one of two orbs it reveals when it attacks. Every time you hit an orb X number of times (note: it's HIT based not DAMAGE based), it upgrades in color (blue->green->red) before breaking, each iteration of which makes the attacks associated with that orb harder to dodge. The hit counter is reset once per fight if you get grappled by it when the lights are off and sent to the shadow realm, but phase changes to the orbs persist across all fights, and there is no way to know which resulted in my getting to the third fight with both of the orbs red and wondering why it's way harder. In order for it to do the attacks that let you hurt it, you have to hit panels around the room with a combo of hits to turn on the lights, but oops the game's fixed camera and auto-lock on will make this as difficult as possible.

DMC2 is bad but not much worse than DMC1 imo. It adds a lot more enemy variety and much more varied levels, as well as some new things that'll appear later in the franchise such as wall-running, a dedicated dodge/style button, hot-swapping between weapons (ranged only here, but still), and multiple playable characters. The story is like 30% less comprehensible, but people only "like" DMC1's story because of one famous cutscene with a terrible line read, and while Dante is less "quippy" there were only like 6 cutscenes in 1 so I think this is mostly people looking back from 3 onward. Enemies are fine, and about half the bosses are clearly unfinished with broken AI but nothing is close to as bad as Nightmare in DMC1. Lucia's campaign is generally better than Dante's because the story is actually kind of explained, and rather interestingly seems to be hated for including underwater levels, which were both more prominent and worse in DMC1.

DMC3 is the first game I'd say is actually worth playing and not just a historical curiosity. This is clearly the game where the over-the-top tone and Dante's personality are firmly established, with him riding around on an RPG for like 30 seconds after the second level, and the multiple Lady gunkata cutscenes. I'm only about halfway through (just beat Nevan). Something I find rather funny is that the first two major bosses are also victim to the biggest criticism of DMC2, that you can just ignore melee and shoot everything to death. Cerberus, who is a very hard first boss if fought properly imo, can be cheesed by just sitting back and hammering away at with your pistols, and same thing for the Gigapede (while I fought the former properly and took 5 or 6 attempts, I didn't realize you could ride the Gigapede because the one time I tried I got hit by something). Camera angles are the best in the series so far but not good, and it's extremely funny that they'll give you control of like 15 degrees in certain rooms but that's it. Quick highlight of other major bosses:

• Agni and Rudra are a tedious 2v1 fight because the camera sucks that is imo only possible due to (admittedly well-designed) audio cues.
• Vergil was an interesting fight but he only has one attack that's trivial to dodge, at least in Trickster, so he's very, very easy. I only got hit once!
• Leviathan is like a better version of Nightmare imo. Perfectly fine but not good.
• Nevan was just about learning her tells, which are again excellent audio cues. She's a good fight which is ruined by the fact that once wounded enough she spams the kiss attack, and the first time I got hit I lost almost all my HP while she recovered to full because apparently you can cancel out of it by pressing attack while you're getting hit or something but IIRC that has never been a thing up to this point.

E:

• Beowulf was just kinda tedious
• Geryon was even more tedious