As the irritation and disapproval surrounding the Dante redesign for series reboot DMC reaches its stride, Capcom informs us that the fan reaction is only part of a clever marketing strategy. Capcom executive Christian Svensson said to IGN:

"I will argue that any changes will bring about a knee-jerk reaction from fans, We know that; we knew that going into it. To be fair, I think some of the strategy here was to create that discussion and dialogue, and I think it drastically raises the visibility of the title versus if we had just done another Dante."

Yes, yes, I see. The fans who've stuck by the series for ten years are all of a sudden unimportant. To make things worse, it seems like Capcom was absolutely determined to make the redesign garbage. Hit the break for more from Christian on this controversial topic.

Svensson also said:

"The original concepts that came back for Dante were actually extremely close to the Dante everyone knows and loves, The feedback that came back from [Keiji] Inafune and [Hideaki] Itsuno was, 'No guys, this needs to be completely different, we need you to go much further and be much more creative'. And literally dozens of potential iterations later became what we as a team felt comfortable and actually happy with.""

It's a safe assumption that by more creative, they meant more emo, heroin addict, teen smoker, and malnourished.  You've got to wonder how something can make the team happy and alienate millions of fans all in one fell swoop.

Furthermore, Svensson clarified that any hope we had of them changing the redesign to look more like classic Dante is wasted:

"This is meant to be an origin story, so this is Dante before you knew who Dante was, There is going to be some interesting changes and twists to what people think they know about Dante or where he came from. We aren't planning on deviating greatly from the path that is there."

So there you have it folks. Capcom is glad you're angry about the redesign since they intended that, they made it priority that Dante not look like the hero you know and they aren't planning on changing things to alleviate your displeasure. So much for fan service.