Featuring Dante From The Devil May Cry Series

About

Featuring Dante From The Devil May Cry Series is a phrase taken from a seal placed on the cover of the European release of the video game Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer’s Call to promote the addition of Dante, the main protagonist from the Devil May Cry series into the game. The addition of the seal on the European release, which wasn’t present on the releases of the game elsewhere, became a target of mock by the gaming community due to Dante’s rather trivial part in the game’s plot.

Origin

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne^[1] marks the third installment in the Megami Tensei series. The original game was only released in Japan in February 2003, but was followed by a director’s cut edition a year later in 2004 in January for Japan and October for North-America. The director’s cut edition of the game featured an additional ending and included Devil May Cry’s Dante as a guest character after Atlus (the creators of Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne) was allowed to use Dante in the game by Capcom (the creators of the Devil May Cry series). It would however take until July 2005 before the game was released in Europe, where it was published by British video game publisher Ghostlight. The European version of the game was renamed to Shin Megami Tensei: Lucifer’s Call and used a different cover which also promoted the inclusion of Dante (shown below, left).

Spread

Tracing back on the 4chan archive Foolz^[2] shows that the phrase started picking up in popularity in the first half of 2012, often referenced in discussions related to the series or the publisher on 4chan’s /vg/ (video game generals) board. Since then it has spread to other sites as well, and additional examples can be found on under under the tag “featuring dante from the devil may cry series”^[4] and on the Youchew forums.^[5] On March 30th, 2014, a Tumblr blog related to the phrase was created,^[3] although it got inactive again after making 15 posts that same day.