Nicoletta “Nico” Goldstein is certainly one of the most interesting additions to the cast of Devil May Cry 5. Yet, she is not playable.
During an interview at Tokyo Game Show in Chiba, Japan, I asked Director Hideaki Itsuno and Producer Matt Walker if the team ever thought of making Nico playable in the game.
Speaking through Walker’s translation, Itsuno-san explained that that was never the case:
“We never thought to make her playable. The way we see Nico, she’s not the type to go out there fighting. She is the one who gives you crap. “You’ve gotta be better at fighting! You’ve gotta be careful with the merchandise!”
The idea is that you’re going to play as Nero, and that’s part of her appeal. She’s not the one who goes out there to fight. She is the one that tells you that you gotta man up and improve your game.”
Itsuno-san and Walker also talked about the creation of Nico, and the concepts that inspired her character.
“Nero has Kyrie, but Kyrie is incredibly important for him, so much so that he doesn’t want to put her in any kind of danger. We wanted a character who would be able to go with Nero and be there for him. That’s how the idea for Nico came up. At the same time, we wanted a new kind of heroine character. We wanted one who was going to be sassy, the kind of sassy that we hadn’t yet seen in the Devil May Cry series.”
We also heard how Nico is different from the usual heroines we see in many games.
“You don’t see characters like that in many Japanese games. That’s something we kind of thought about. Not just in Japanese games, but especially in Japanese games you have these very specific archetypes. You do kind of have the same variations of male characters and the same variations of female characters a lot of the times.
One of our thoughts was “ok, let’s try to do something a little different with her. That comes from the sassyness. As a guy who gets the chance to interact with all kinds of people all the time, it’ll be cool to hang out with a girl who is that sassy, smokes all the time, points out your flaws, and gives you crap when you need it. There is something cool about being around that kind of person. That’s where Nico comes from.
If you want to see more about Devil May Cry 5, you can enjoy a video showing Dante in action on Xbox One X, another showcasing the Japanese voice cast, the latest screenshots, and the latest trailer. You can also read about the Deluxe Edition, the PC requirements for the game, and Itsuno-san’s comments on how Ninja Theory’s DmC influenced development.
Devil May Cry 5 releases on March 8th, 2019, for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. If you’d like to reserve a copy, you can already pre-order it on Amazon.
Incidentally, the game won basically everything it could win, including both Game of Show prizes at our DualShockers’ Tokyo Game Show 2018 Awards. It’s that good.
This post contains affiliate links where DualShockers gets a small commission on sales. Any and all support helps keep DualShockers as a standalone, independent platform for less-mainstream opinions and news coverage.