GAME CLEAR No. 48 -- Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening - Special Edition

Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening - Special Edition (2006, Multiplatform)

Special Edition of: Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening (2005, PS2)
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Clear Date: 8/27/2021
Clear Platform: Switch

This is the shit I’m talkin’ about!!!

I remarked to a friend recently something along the lines of “idk, man, every game’s an 8 [out of 10].” The sentiment there is basically that I’m pretty satisfied by just about every game I play, but seldom blown away. I think the reason for this is that I play a lot of games in an exploratory, academic sort of way. I want to know a lot about video games, so I focus on breadth, which means I play a lot of stuff that’s just all right! Nothing wrong with that, just an observation.

Anyway, Devil May Cry 3 was a nice interruption to that trend. This game is incredible.

Much like Devil May Cry 2 was a game I knew was bad before I started it, Devil May Cry 3’s reputation preceded it as well. I’d heard it was a great early standard-bearer of the character action genre, and many fans seemed to think it remained the best game in the series. I was still not prepared for how well this 2006 game would hold up.

The game’s opening mission seems intentionally designed to contrast itself with Devil May Cry 2. It starts with a young, cocky Dante ambushed in his new office that will eventually host his demon hunting business. The demons are bringing the fight to him, and Dante dispatches the initial handful in a stylish cutscene involving a jukebox and lots of acrobatics and woohoos and whatnot. After this, the game hands the controls to the player and allows them to learn the basics against some easy pickings.

The game immediately feels night-and-day different from Devil May Cry 2. The basic 1-2-3 mashy melee comboing feels better, and so do Dante’s twin pistols. But the game quickly teaches you the new abilities at Dante’s disposal. The chief new addition is Dante’s “styles.” The short explanation there is that they change what the Special button does (A button in the default Switch mapping), but that sells them a bit short. The styles available at the start are Trickster, Swordmaster, Gunslinger, and Royalguard. Trickster grants Dante and invincible dodge and thus is good for beginners. Royalguard is a riskier step up from this, as it turns the Special button into an energy-charging parry. If the player inputs the parry right as an incoming attack is delivered, Dante will take no damage, and he will also charge up his “revenge” strike that can be executed by pressing the stick toward the enemy and pressing Special. This can do massive damage, especially against bosses, and it’s just extremely exciting to execute. It ended up being my favorite.

Swordmaster and Gunslinger are a bit different. They instead grant new moves for Dante’s “Devil Arms” (melee weapons) and guns respectively. My understanding is that these are generally the ones the pros stick to, but I didn’t quite understand how to take full advantage of them. But that’s all right! That’s why there are four.

These styles can also be leveled up twice each to grant Dante even more moves (for example, leveling up Trickster allows Dante’s dodge/dash to be performed in the air as well, which can come in handy for platforming bits in addition to combat). This takes a considerable amount of time, though, and I only managed to level Trickster and Royalguard a single time each in my playthrough. Not a criticism; I know this is the kind of games the devs intend to be played multiple times through.

A critical addition to the Switch version of the game is the ability to swap abilities at a moment’s notice simply by pressing a direction on the d-pad. In the original game, styles could only be selected at the Divinity Statues scattered throughout the game (somewhat sparsely). My understanding is that Dante could also only carry two of each weapon type. In the Switch version, Dante has his full loadout at all times and can switch styles at any time as well. I understand this truly opens up the playbook for insane combos by seasoned vets of the game, but I was unable to really tap into that in my initial playthrough. Nevertheless, the experimentation allowed by this loadout freedom still made it a nice-to-have for a beginner like me.

Anyway, I’m getting a bit lost in the weeds perhaps. The point here is that there’s really a staggering amount of depth to the hack-and-slash gameplay of Devil May Cry 3, even if I was only able to tap into a little bit of that. It’s the kind of thing I’d like to think I’ll return to one day after watching a few YouTube videos on how to do cool stuff.

And even without a lot of ability, I still really had fun with the game’s more transparent combo system. Like the first two games, Devil May Cry 3 keeps track of the quality of the player’s combo as they fight hell’s army, with a descriptor in the corner of the screen such as “Dope!” or “Crazy!” alphabetically up to “SSStylish!” The key difference between the third game and the first two is there is also a visible meter that gives the player some insight into how their moves are affecting their combo grade. Because this is a computer game, the combo score is obviously quantitative strictly speaking, but the game tries to inject a feeling of qualitativeness to it with its “stale moves” system (a term I’m lifting from Smash Bros.). Basically, if you just mash on the same old combos over and over, your combo will eventually peter out even if you kill everybody and never get hit. To see your meter continue to increase, you’ve got to be doing lots of damage, mixing up your combos, and if you’re really cool, mix up your weapons and styles. I’m most certainly not cool, but even I was eventually able to tally two or three SSStylish! combos. I’m proud of that! I also like that it keeps the pressure on the player to go on the offensive as much as possible. Something I really enjoyed about Streets of Rage 4 was its very similar combo counter, which made every fight seem white-knuckle. The Devil May Cry 3 system is even more intense because of its demand that you mix up your combo. I felt like I constantly needed to be trying new moves to earn the game’s approval. Just a great mechanic to encourage the player to explore everything your combat system has to offer (even though I’m sure I still only scratched the surface).

But I’m rambling. That’s my treatise on the mechanics. They’re great. I haven’t had that much fun with pure gameplay maybe all year!

Back on the plot side of the game, Dante discovers that the source of his disturbance is a big fuckin’ tower that has erupted out of the center of whatever city it is he lives in. Naturally, he heads straight there. This enormous edifice is where the vast majority of the game takes place, which does earn the game a bit of mild criticism for me. Specifically, there’s a pretty good deal of backtracking. Like I said, this is a mild criticism! I don’t think it’s a big deal, but it’s noticeable. It makes me wonder if perhaps there were budgetary/risk-taking concerns given the poor critical reception of the previous games. The thing about it that’s most jarring, I suppose, is that the game is separated into missions, yet Dante is frequently free to go wherever in the tower he damn well pleases, especially later in the game as he has visited most of it. Typically, when I play a level-based game, I expect there to be pretty good rails. But there was one mission in Devil May Cry 3 where I walked all over the damn place trying to figure out how to proceed, only to finally google a walkthrough and discover I had just barely missed the end-of-mission trigger some 15 minutes ago. Annoying! But far from game-ruining.

The tower is, in fact, mostly cool! Its name is the Temen-ni-gru, and apparently Dante’s dad Sparda sealed away his power in it thousands of years ago. Well not anymore! Dante reaches the tower to discover that his brother Vergil is responsible for raising it up along with his creepy buddy Arkham. Another interested party, who refuses to reveal her name and thus is called simply “Lady” by Dante makes occasional appearances as well. Why are all these people here? What happens to Sparda’s power? Guess you better play the game! I’ll avoid spoilers, but I will say it’s a solid (if campy) story that plays so much better than the bad Devil May Cry 2 or even the respectable original game. Fun stuff.

Anyway, seeing all this, Dante’s got to slice and dice a wide variety of baddies throughout the tower and solve some puzzles here and there to get to the top and stop these guys. He’s also met along the way by some great bosses. No character action game is complete without ’em! I found these encounters to be where Royalguard really stood out. Because boss patterns are usually easier to isolate (and parry) than individual enemy patterns in a mob of enemies, you can really focus getting those down and dishing the pain back to the boss. I have no doubt I could have beaten some bosses a little faster by playing with the safer Trickster style, but the satisfaction of triple-parrying a heavy boss attack and firing off a revenge move for a solid 8th of the boss’s health just can’t be topped. The cherry on top of these universally great encounters is that most of them reward Dante with a new weapon as well (a few of them are essentially formed from the boss’s essence, as it happens). The satisfaction of killing a tough boss followed immediately by a new toy is just perfection.

My final remark on bosses is that the final boss is just top notch. Really a white-knuckle affair. I tried my absolute damnedest to beat it without using any healing items (for which your final score in each mission is penalized), but I finally relented. I’m resolved to do it some day!

I really can’t say enough good things about Devil May Cry 3. Aside from the environment reuse, the only other minor complain I can really come up with is that the camera is occasionally a little finicky. Mostly, the game fires on all cylinders and feels like an action game that can stand up even against those that are being released today. I highly recommend it, and I can’t wait to play the fourth and fifth games soon!