idk why DmC was and remains such a punching bag when Ninja Gaiden got it much worse, multiple times in a row:
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Nintendo, a publisher that typically afford good studios the environment to make great games and wrings good games out of mediocre studios, roped in Team Ninja to make a legendarily bad 3D Metroid: it's not bad because of Team Ninja, mind, but...
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Team Ninja takes the "lessons" learned from Nintendo and completely torpedoes Ninja Gaiden 3 with 'em: drastically smaller and shallower toolkit, one-note enemies and bosses, no real resource management/progression to speak of, QTEs for days and tons of forced, one-note rumination from Ryu Hayabusa on the nature of murder that makes no sense and goes nowhere
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Team Ninja lets Keiji Inafune and Spark Unlimited (a combo fresh off ruining Lost Planet) give the western-dev treatment to Ninja Gaiden via Yaiba: Ninja Gaiden Z, and say what you want about DmC's combat but it at least exists in the same ballpark as classic DMC; Yaiba's completely braindead
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a decade later, and fresh off a redemption arc of sorts thanks to Nioh, Team Ninja finally returns to Ninja Gaiden with some half-arsed ports of the worst possible versions of the 3D trilogy
Say what you will about Devil May Cry 2 but I feel like that series had shreds of some kind of a reputation. DMC1 was alright, DMC3 was great, DMC4 was pretty good. And they eventually found a pretty strong, irreverent identity.
Itagaki's Ninja Gaiden games had that first Ninja Gaiden on Xbox. That's it. It was a great game, but I remember people being very lukewarm on Ninja Gaiden 2. Hearing that Ninja Gaiden 3 wasn't very good was no great surprise to me because it seemed like they lost something, whereas that never happened with Devil May Cry.
Also, in terms of identity? Everyone in those games is a brick in terms of personality. The most emotion you get is a sense of brooding. The only characters most people remember from those games are Ayane and Rachel and it's not for them having any kind of emotional impact in the story.
You could maybe even argue that NG2 and 3 were worse than bad in that they just weren't interesting. They were not offensive games, the series just kind of slowly went cold enough to the point where Yaiba barely even registered for most people.
DmC on the other hand, you take away the version of Dante established in Devil May Cry 3 and try to make him this American ideal of a bad boy badass and it feels like its spitting in the face of something very important.
