Devil May Cry 5's Hideaki Itsuno recalls his chance encounter with the series

"It's interesting, because back then, I was actually coming up with the foundations of what would become Dragon's Dogma, and then I was taken and forced to work on Devil May Cry 2."

- Devil May Cry 5 director Hideaki Itsuno tells Eurogamer about his early days with Capcom

Capcom’s Hideaki Itsuno is the director of the studio’s upcoming game Devil May Cry 5, and has worked on most of the series’ games to date, but his origin with the Devil May Cry games wasn’t an entirely deliberate decision on his part.

Speaking to Eurogamer, Itsuno offered up memorable moments from his 25-year career with Capcom and runs through some of the development problems and solutions he’s encountered throughout his career. 

He joined the Devil May Cry 2 team about six months before the game’s release, and he did so in a time where the project itself was in rough shape. 

“So my boss comes to me, he figures I'm in the same group as the director, and he's one of top players - he comes to me and says Devil May Cry 2 isn't going so well, is there anyone you know that could work on this?” recalls Itsuno. “And I was like, this guy's busy on this thing, this person's busy - so he was like, alright, you do it.”

The team managed to turn Devil May Cry 2 around into a playable game in that time (a feat Eurogamer describes as a miracle despite the game’s poor reception). Itsuno says that before being uprooted to the Devil May Cry 2 team, however, he was working on the foundations of what would eventually become Dragon’s Dogma.

Dragon’s Dogma would see a release, later on in 2012, and Itsuno credits it as the hardest game he’s worked on so far. But between Devil May Cry 2 and that eventual release, Itsuno served as the director on Devil May Cry 3 and Devil May Cry 4 both. His career seems to be pulled between the Devil May Cry and Dragon’s Dogma franchises even still, with Itsuno telling Eurogamer that he’d “gone to the people up top and said let me make either Devil May Cry 5 or Dragon's Dogma 2. I thought Devil May Cry 5 would be the better choice right now, so did that. If I could, I'd love to make Dragon's Dogma 2 - it'd be awesome.” 

The full interview talks more about Dragon’s Dogma in addition to chronicling some of the development growing pains Itsuno had to work through when branching from 2D fighting games like Street Fighter to the 3D fighter Star Gladiator.