I Think I Like It? (A Devil May Cry 3 Review)

Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening was first released in 2005 for the Playstation 2. I bought the game in 2024 for the Nintendo Switch. Still, I feel that I can give an accurate enough critique despite not playing on the intended hardware.

Overall, Devil May Cry 3 is a good game. However, I would say it is not an easily approachable game. This is a game for gamers. It’s a game for people who are looking for a challenge and a detailed combat system. It’s a game for people who are looking to feel cool as they gun down demons. It’s a game that would appeal to middle school boys of the 2000s, in a good way.

To begin with, Devil May Cry 3 is hard. So hard that I had to switch the game to Easy difficulty after dying due to the first boss ten times. However, I don’t blame myself for that decision, and I would actually encourage first time players to do the same. A fun quirk of the North American port of Devil May Cry 3 is that the “Normal” difficulty is actually the “Hard” difficulty of the original Japanese version. Thus, my choice to switch to “Easy” is actually a necessity to get the regular, original experience intended by the developers, and it is not a sign of cowardice nor weakness. To put it in a more familiar manner, it plays like Astro Boy Omega Factor plays on the Gameboy Advance SP on Easy mode. If you play on Normal, Hamegg’s giant goblin robot will “one shot” you. However, unlike playing Astro Boy Omega Factor, your left bumper will be able to survive unscathed.

A playthrough of Devil May Cry 3 centers around 20 missions. You play as Dante, a cocky demon-hunter and the son of the demon Sparda. At the beginning of the game, he has just opened a shop and ponders what to name it before being attacked by demons. From there, each mission centers around traversing a certain area of the Temen-Ni-Gru tower as he chases down his brother Vergil, who aims to open a portal to the demon world. The plot, to be honest, did not interest me much. I liked the characters and their personality, but I could not bring myself to really care about this portal to the demon world. I, personally, felt like I was just going through the motions of the plot to be able to play more of the game.

Speaking of gameplay, it’s quite fun and challenging. Having most of my videogame combat experience from Hades, I was expecting to be able to mash rapid fire attacks and mow through enemies. That felt like the kind of action one might expect from the suave, effortless Dante. However, what I got far exceeded my expectations in terms of how much I would have to actually use my brain to fight. The combat system relies on timing and precise button inputs to output combos and chain them together for style points. It’s incredibly satisfying to hit that flow state of killing an enemy just to immediately start attacking the next, all while nimbly dodge-rolling out of the way of attacks. What’s more, Devil May Cry 3 boasts four different playstyles that you can master, meaning that several playthroughs can feel unique depending on which you choose.

For my first playthrough, I chose the swordmaster class as I anticipated my smooth brain would instinctively gravitate towards braindead melee mashing. I quickly had to learn from my mistakes as I got my ass beat and died. Dodging is endlessly important and it took me almost half the game to learn that the direction you have to push the left joystick depends on where Dante is facing.

This unfortunately leads to my biggest gripe with the game. As much as this game relies on combat, it could really benefit from some kind of training area to test out combos and learn controls, similar to what fighting games have. In actuality, the way you learn combos is by reading a string of button presses and seeing a video. However, reading the combo does not help at all with actually learning it. For example, a common combo that I would accidentally input was the “crazy combo” which needed “X, X, a pause, X”, ending with the mashing of X. However, there is no indication of how long the pause should be. The only way you can learn is during the missions in active combat. I didn’t truly start enjoying the combat until Mission 15 (75% of the game complete).

Furthermore, combos are not exactly the same in what inputs are needed to execute them. As previously mentioned, things can change based on the direction Dante is facing. However, this means that they also change with camera movement. Unfortunately, the camera controls are incredibly frustrating. To begin with, there are a large number of rooms where the camera is fixed, usually at a strange angle, and you receive no indication that you are unable to move it. However, because the camera angle is determined by the room, there were quite a number of times where I would be holding the left stick in one direction to exit, only for the camera angle to change and immediately take me back to the room I had just left. It was incredibly frustrating and never stopped being annoying.

It also makes it much harder to keep track of the map. Navigation with inconsistent camera angles is quite the struggle. While there is a built-in map one can reference, it becomes hard to tell which door corresponds to what mark on the map and how one can get there. I spent a lot of time just running through every door available until I reached my destination. Additionally, the rooms look largely the same: grey brick everywhere and a general dark grunginess. While between missions areas are distinct enough, within a single mission it can be hard to tell rooms apart. When each mission is partially graded on time, it is extra frustrating that I constantly got a D in time as I spent most of it wandering around lost.

So if I didn’t like the combat, the map, or the story, how did I push through to enjoy the game? The music. The energetic rock of combat really does half the work of making you feel like the cool badass that Dante is. The soundtrack further blends seamlessly with the ambience of the ancient Temen-Ni-Gru and effortlessly provides emotional backing to the cutscenes. It truly made up for my subpar skills.

It may sound like I did not like this game, but I must reassure you that it is a good game and I did like it. The boss battles in particular were some of my favorite parts. Since they naturally take longer to defeat than a horde of monsters, you can really get into that flow state of dodging, getting some hits in, and backing off. The first Vergil boss fight in particular really unlocked my understanding of this game’s combat. It’s just a shame it came in the latter half of the game. I’ll claim that as a skill issue on my part.

Perhaps what truly endeared me to the franchise was the ending cutscene, perfectly capturing how the series doesn’t take itself too seriously. After a dramatic last battle with Vergil, the brothers are separated once again. While Dante escapes back to the human world, Vergil stays behind. Feeling the loss of his brother, Dante cries. Lady, a character who has been following you throughout the game, asks “Are you crying?” Dante dramatically replies, “Devils never cry.” Lady then comments, “…Maybe somewhere out there even a devil may cry when he loses a loved one.” Then even after the ending credits scroll by, we get one final cutscene. We come full circle with Dante finally deciding on a name for his shop. We end on an exterior shot: surrounded by rubble, is the shop we started at: “Devil May Cry.”

That’s right. They said the name of the game. 10/10.