Netflix’s Devil May Cry Anime Teaser Trailer Is Here

On Wednesday, Netflix revealed a teaser trailer for its upcoming Devil May Cry anime during the Drop 01 showcase, a livestreamed event where the streamer showcased new shows coming to its service in the near future.

Devil May Cry, developed by Capcom back in 2001, was a highly influential character-action game that followed Dante, a gun-slinging, pizza-eating devil hunter who protected the world from demons, at least so long as the money’s good. As the son of a once-powerful demon, Sparda, Dante used his demonic powers to defeat devils in style by juggling them in the air using an arsenal of weapons he’d made out of their fallen brethren. Later on in the series, Dante aligned himself with fellow devil hunters Trish and Lady, and battled his evil brother, Vergil. You can check out the new anime’s teaser trailer below

Netflix

If you don’t have 44 seconds to spare, allow me to summarize the trailer. There’s an interior of a dark room. Dante smiles at the camera. Cut to black. Dante then does a flip while shooting bullets from his pistols, Ebony and Ivory. Dante makes a “wahoo” sound while heavy metal plays in the background, just like in the games. And, scene.

Read More: Devil May Cry 5: The Kotaku Review

Although this trailer serves as our first official look at the show, it doesn’t actually reveal much outside of the basics above. However, its YouTube description revealed that Studio Mir, the same folks behind The Legend of Korra and The Boondocks season 4, will animate the series. Castlevania producer Adi Shankar is on board too, so it’s safe to say that the show is in good hands.

Everything else we know about the Devil May Cry anime

During a 2021 interview with IGN Japan, Shankar confirmed that Vergil and Lady will be in the show, which will be eight episodes long and span multiple seasons. Shankar also poked fun at Hollywood actor Chris Pratt by also confirming that the Mario voice actor won’t be voicing Dante.

“The entire [Capcom] team, both from the management side and the creative side, have been so incredibly supportive and gracious,” Shankar told IGN Japan. “[Devil May Cry producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi] has been wonderful. It’s seriously a joy to work with Capcom.”

Netflix has had a bit of a mixed output when it comes to video game adaptations. While shows like Castlevania and Arcane serve as shining examples of the streamer being a powerhouse in the space, other adaptations, like its lackluster Dragon’s Dogma show and its Dragon Age series, left something to be desired. Time will tell whether the DMC anime will top the charts as a smoking anime adaptation or live in infamy as a forgettable effort more akin to studio Madhouse’s attempt at a Devil May Cry anime in 2007.

   

Netflix’s Tomb Raider Anime Picks Up After The Reboot Trilogy

An anime screenshot shows Lara Croft drawing her bow at an enemy.

Image: Netflix

Tomb Raider’s Lara Croft has been experiencing a bit of a renaissance recently. Just last month, the dual pistol-wielding explorer featured as a guest character in Call of Duty: Warzone alongside the likes of pop star Nicki Minaj and ‘90s superhero Spawn. Snap to today and now we’ve got our first official look at her upcoming Netflix animated series.

Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft, a new anime developed by Legendary Television, was unveiled during Netflix’s Drop 01 livestream, an event where the streamer gave viewers a peak at all its upcoming shows, including video game adaptations like Devil May Cry, Castlevania: Nocturne. Unlike Netflix’s painfully brief DMC anime teaser trailer, which didn’t share much information outside of a quick look at Dante doing a cool flip, the trailer for Tomb Raider: The Legend of Lara Croft delivered some substantial details. Chief among them is that actress Hayley Atwell will be voicing the video game heroine and that the show will pick up after the events of Crystal Dynamics’ video game reboot trilogy. Here’s the trailer:

Netflix

Read More: Shadow of the Tomb Raider: The Kotaku Review

We first learned Netflix was working on a Tomb Raider anime back in 2021. According to a report by Deadline, the show was green-lit after the culmination of Crystal Dynamic’s Shadow of the Tomb Raider. In our review of Shadow of the Tomb Raider, which asks if Croft is “a treasure-plundering jerk who wrecks other people’s cultures,” we said that the game matured Croft from being the “gritty survivor we met in 2013 [into being] a more complex character who actually talks to the people she meets on her travels and understands the gravity of her actions.” Hopefully, Netflix’s anime will continue to build on this emerging new characterization rather than reverting back to one of her more cartoonish incarnations.

         

Sexy Anime RPG Forces Players To Grind To Escape ‘Gem Debt’

Taimanin RPG Extasy is a turn-based gacha RPG in which players unlock new warriors to fight demons and criminal syndicates in a horny sci-fi future. The game’s been live in Japan for years, but only recently came to the rest of the world, and it’s already facing its first major crisis: an outbreak of “gem debt” following a major currency snafu.

The NSFW free-to-play game about fighting evil and collecting women with big tits came to smartphones on October 26 and PC via Steam on November 1 (not to be confused with the full porn version called Taimanin RPGX Extasy, coming next month). When players first started grinding battles to acquire “alluring” new units, Taimanin RPG Extasy was apparently giving out the “incorrect” number of Taima Crystals when players upgraded their character’s trust levels. Getting a unit to level four would earn a player 500 crystals and getting it to level five would earn an additional 1,000.

It wasn’t until November 1 that the game’s developers at Infini-Brain Inc. went “oops” and pushed out a notification to all players noting that this initial generosity was a mistake. The lottery-based microtransaction economy was actually only supposed to give out 100 crystals at level four and 250 crystals at level five. Players were disappointed, but so it goes with freemium time-wasters. The team issued a fix but they didn’t stop there.

Instead of just wiping the slate clean and going from there, Infini-Brain Inc. actually clawed back players’ misbegotten crystals. For anyone grinding Taimanin RPG Extasy a ton this meant not just losing all of their currency, but actually going into debt for all of the crystals they’d already spent. Currency players bought outright with real money would be unaffected, but crystals earned by playing the game would all be funneled toward servicing the debt. Some players calculated it could take almost a year to pay off their “tabs.“

The game immediately started getting review-bombed on Steam and the Google Play store. “Because I played too much now I won’t be able to get more gems as I am 8000 crystals in debt and I gotta make the same amount in order to get more free gems,” reads one review. “That whole ‘gem debt’ debacle was such a massive F-up,” reads another. “Yes, they’ve placed an in-game gem debt among the players for their own mistake. Can you believe that? It’s like they only see players as walking wallets!”

You might think this would be enough to force the studio’s hand. After all, why punish your biggest whales right from the get-go? Infini-Brain Inc. did not seem to see it that way, however. In an update on its website titled “Concerning Fixes to Unit Trust Rewards,” the studio defended its gem debt debacle. “In order to maintain data integrity and fairness to our users, we have decided to deduct the difference in Taima Crystals (free)” it wrote. “We deeply apologize for the distrust this situation has caused. We will work even harder to regain the trust of our users. We will strive to be a management team that you can trust.”

A screenshot shows negative Steam reviews for Taimanin RPG Extasy.

As a make-up to its early adopters, Infini-Brain Inc. is now giving all users who already registered for the game 1,000 bonus Taima Crystals. They expire in 30 days if left in players’ gift boxes uncollected, and don’t seem likely to put a major dent in the heaviest users’ debts. Players have understandably been unimpressed with the studio’s handling of the mess.

“A thousand!? A thousand is a drop in the bucket!” tweeted one player. “How about you don’t put the players in debt period? Why the hell am I condemned to nothing for the rest of this game’s shakey future because of YOUR mistake when all I did was PAY YOU and put in honest effort because I wanted this game to succeed?”

Some players still don’t buy that the initial crystal drops were even a mistake. After all, they were labeled accurately in the game before Infini-Brain Inc. changed the amounts, leading to conspiracy theories that gem debt was really just an overreaction by the developers after they realized that Taimanin RPG Extasy’s economy was more generous than originally intended. “The code was possessed by a demon,” wrote one sarcastic commenter on the gachagaming subreddit. “We need a tech-exorcist to expel the evil of it.”

The studio did not immediately respond to a request for comment.