Re-watching the Devil May Cry anime right now.
When it first came out in 2008, I remembered not expecting the anime series to cover the main story that we all wanted: Dante and Virgil. The Devil May Cry videogame series was still going with its original storyline, so there was no way that the anime could cover that same storyline. If they did, it would either spoil the videogame's story, or they'd run into contradictions. (Even though the Devil May Cry 3 manga managed to cover the game's storyline, without any conflicts...) The only logical options for the anime would be to use the DMC novel stories, or, in the same vein, do a bunch of side-stories that have nothing to do with the main story of Dante and Virgil. So I kept my expectations realistic. The anime series not only used references from the DMC novels, but they also used the "broke freelancer" genre type of plot (similar to Get Backers, Phantom Quest Corp., Green Drug, etc.), wherein each episode (or set of episodes), could almost be watched as one-shot stories, without the entire series as a whole, acting as an unbroken, overarching plotline. You could basically, go in, watch any episode, in any order, without really missing anything. The advantage to the writers, about these one-shot, anthology type of series, is that they focus more on the one-shot characters of each case, rather than on the background conflicts of the main protagonist. (Also see Mushishi, Nightmare Inspector, Ballad of a Shinigami, Category Freaks, Mermaid Forest, Petshop of Horrors, etc.) The DMC anime did just that.
But now there's a reboot of the Devil May Cry videogame. Sure, the gameplay looks awesome---I practically drool over the gameplay trailers. But as a fan of the original storyline, I'm already invested in the previous version of Dante. If the DMC fanbase that shows up at conventions and online is any indication, the DMC fanbase is made mostly of girls. That equals "fangirls". And fangirls are obsessed with storyline and characters. Even if the rebooted DMC takes off, I hope that there's still something for the original version's fangirls.
In fact, if the DMC videogame series settles into the reboot's storyline, that would create the perfect opportunity for another medium to tell the original storyline! *o* I wouldn't have to feel guilty about playing the reboot, if another medium took over telling the original version's story. Sure, the manga-ka who drew the Devil May Cry 3 manga dropped the project, but Madhouse anime studio has seemed so eager to pick up pre-existing, non-manga, licensed titles, lately: Devil May Cry, Final Fantasy VII Last Order, Supernatural, Batman: Gotham Knight,... If a second Devil May Cry anime series was created, covering the storyline that we fangirls all came to love, then I'd buy it in a second. (And if they re-released the first series with Kari Wahlgren dubbing Lady, like she did in the videogames, then I'd re-buy that too. ^.~ ) Oh, to dream...*_*
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