DMC1 came out on August, 2001. It is a very important and innovative game but it didn't come out of nowhere. The whole "character action" label severed its connection to the games that inspired it and isolated it in so many ways. For years now the "character action" label has been hotly debated, and this shit is only intensifying over time. While the debate itself isn't very interesting, the types of historical definitions people post tend to be wild and show a complete lack of awareness of where DMC came from.
I want to place it in a proper historical context, as a 3D beat 'em up/survival horror hybrid. I'm leaving out the most obvious stuff like Resident Evil, Onimusha & Street Fighter/fighting games. And this isn't a "which games did it first" dick measuring contest. Nor am I claiming direct influence, I don't think Kamiya was playing T'ai Fu Wrath of The Tiger. I'm trying to draw a picture of the environment at the time - what devs were thinking of, the common influences that shaped how they thought, what problems they were dealing with, and what sorta implementations they defaulted to.
Battle Circuit (1997)
Let's start with what I consider to be proto-DMC. This game was made by Capcom themselves and was had a structure remarkably similar to DMC1, along with sharing a bunch of the same mechanics. It had juggle combos and currency that was earned by comboing enemies. That currency was used to purchase new moves and stuff like health uprades, in exactly the same way as DMC. Beyond that you also have a Devil Trigger style mechanic where by jumping and pressing A+B you enter a powered up state where you attack faster and do more damage. Bosses have access to this DT-like state as well. Except here it refills via pickups, and is split into chunks. The game even has stage ranks, but they are merely time based and only show up at the end of a stage. You could say that DMC is like a combination of this game and Resident Evil.
Alien vs Predator (1994)
Now let's back up a bit and look at AvP. This game is one of the earlier examples of beat 'em ups really going hard on the juggle combos, cancels & integrating ranged and melee combat. It lets you juggle enemies, it has OTG moves that let you re-juggle enemies (and can be canceled by shooting your gun), it has air throws which can also be used to extend juggles and air combat in general, it has wall jumps that let you continue combos, it has you directly using gun attacks to keep enemies juggled and/or stunned and more. All that combined with a very long jump and fast, freeform movement. It even has moves that add upward velocity in the form of Lynn's falling sword stab, and the backwards jump kick. It even had a mechanic where you could ditch your sword and go hand-to-hand with a full moveset attached to that state, although it's kind of a failure state here.
Ninja Warriors (1987)
If we look back even further, we see a game Kamiya loves - Ninja Warriors by Taito. Overall the game doesn't have much in common with DMC, but it does have a very primitive, pre-fighting game juggle combo-like system where, instead of adding upward velocity to enemies when you hit them, your hits freeze them in place and let you do more damage while they're defenseless. It's no wonder Kamiya was excited about the same type of exploit in Onimusha, a game he loves so much that he owns the pcb and whips out his 3 CRT's to play has exactly the same mechanic!
Spikeout, Denjin Makai 2 and Juggle Combos (1995 to 1998-ish)
This is an era where fighting games were HOT and a lot of games were implementing their mechanics/dynamics. Spikeout was basically a combo of Virtua Fighter & Streets of Rage, and had a fleshed out fighting game/beat 'em up combo with a proper juggle combo system. Albeit one that depended more on the terrain & how enemies "bounce" off it rather than just your inputs as a player, since you had to get enemies next to walls to get proper combos.
Denjin Makai 2 from 1995 also had a proper juggle combo system a little in line with Capcom's AvP. So did Capcom's other games like D&D Shadow Over Mystara (1996). Even games you wouldn't expect like Tenchu had proper juggle combo systems since they had some fighting game fans/devs on staff!
Style Rank
As the cutting edge of gaming increasingly started moving into people's homes, scoring had to move with it & adapt. Grading/ranking was that adaptation. Because you could no longer directly compete with real people at your local arcade, possibly ones you knew, scoring lost a lot of its intuitive meaning. So games had to come up with more clear standard metrics - what does a million points mean? What does a thousand point mean? Grades were the solution to that, and you saw them spread like wildfire across the board in the 90's.
Rankings were everywhere - Bugs fuckin Bunny Rabbit Rampage SNES had them (literal style rankings), Sailor Moon Megadrive had them (letter grades), Silent Hill had a star ranking system cuhrayzee enough to make the average CAG blush, Silent Bomber had them, Tenchu had them. They were everywhere at the time and were indiscriminate, devs would add them to everything no matter the genre.
One thing that's fairly rare, though, is ranking that always judges you as you play and attaches a very clear aesthetic judgement to it, even calling it "style".
Action Game Disguised As Survival Horror (1998-2000)
This aspect of DMC is almost like a wild coincidence due to the background of the game and developers, who all came from a survival horror background (& went on to work with Mikami), but it's actually a fairly common trend you saw at the time.
Besides Onimusha which had that style of design, you also had a whole wave of more actiony survival horror games. Vampire Hunter D (1999), Dino Crisis 2 (2000) and even stuff like Galerians & Parasite Eve 2 (both 1999) were very much like weird action/adventure games that used the mechanics & "language" of survival horror.
You also had this trend but from the other side - arcade action games capitalizing on the popularity of survival horror at the time with games like Zombie Revenge (1999) and Chaos Heat (1998) which were basically run n gun/beat em up hybrids that wore the skin of survival horror games and borrowed a few of their dynamics here and there. Such as the "plant yourself in a good spot"-style gameplay.
A lot of the more weird elements of DMC are a mix of survival horror progression & seemingly Kamiya's love of Fantasy Zone.
WE'RE DONE HERE HEH
Alright hopefully if you didn't already know this it'll clear up the history somewhat and show that DMC doesn't exist in a vacuum. It came from a very specific context and was heavily inspired by what came before + was heavily driven by the changing tech & ways people play games. It's always worth looking around and seeing what sorta environments produced the games you love, because developer choices & agency is important but it's absolutely not the only factor.
What DMC did is bring together different elements into a cohesive whole and create a really solid representative of what developers were trying to do at the time, with some unique twists as well. It's at once a wild coincidence, and an inveitability, and that's truly cuhrayzee.
