Devil May Cry 5

At one point in Devil May Cry 5, Dante bisects a large motorcycle in order to use each half as a melee weapon. After performing a maneuver in which each tire grinds his opponent’s face into pulp, he remarks how’s that for road rash? Another character, V, tranquilly reads and recites poetry from an actual book while a large cat and a bird of prey, both his pets/friends, fight in his stead. Nero, the last of Devil May Cry 5’s three characters, has a handle on his sword that he revs like a throttle to power up his sword.

Devil May Cry 5 revels in its absurdity. Each moment is a chance to interact with system of feedback mechanisms designed to make the player look and feel as cool as possible. The videogame is a masquerade concealing a personal empowerment device that still bears the coat of arms of its 2001 point-of-origin, itself is a Matrix derivation combining guns and swords with colorful alterations of extravagantly tailored jackets. Devil May Cry’s perspective was best viewed from a lens popular culture tossed away in the early aughts (and carefully abandoned by the otherwise bold 2012 faux-reboot, DmC), right as gaming was trading the devil-may-care badass in for more nuanced and thoughtful faces.

Devil May Cry 5 pretends time never passed and, to my absolute shock, manages to get away with it. A canonical sequel with Dante and the gang eleven years after Devil May Cry 4 is a tall ask demanded by vocal minority, and Capcom actually made and delivered the thing. More surprising is how easily Devil May Cry 5 takes cues from modern contemporaries; this is the most accessible and rewarding Devil May Cry has ever been, but it doesn’t come at the cost of mechanical depth or its stylish identity. Devil May Cry 5 is a modern game, but only in the sense that it can be played and enjoyed from either a casual or committed approach.

It is largely unclear what is happening with Devil May Cry 5’s story. Plucky hero Nero returns with his new buddy Nico, a resourceful craftswoman of gear we’re supposed to believe is designed for anyone, but that she only sells to Nero and his acquaintances. Together, in Dante’s absence, they’re running the titular Devil May Cry demon hunting business. After a handful of missions, an enigmatic new character named V shows up to party. Eventually, Dante comes around. Together the three take turns composing the twenty missions and dozen-ish hours that form Devil May Cry 5.

Lots of proper nouns are tossed around to denote threatening monsters and the names of various weapons. I was unable to keep up with any of this, even after summoning ancient memories and watching the text-based summery provided before the prologue. Devil May Cry 5 resides deep inside the series’ lore but, much to my satisfaction, can also operate as a What Will They Do Next character study. What people are doing and how they are acting, all inside of a menacing and preposterous world, is enough to keep my attention. Whether it’s Nero, Nico, or Dante, I will always show up to see an irrational plot navigated by alternating buddy cops who can’t quite decide who gets to be the serious one.

The only real losers in Devil May Cry 5’s story are the women. Lady and Trish show up and are almost immediately condemned to Nico’s work van. These are characters who have had active roles in Devil May Cry’s history and all they’re left with are sequences where they’re briefly naked and mostly unused. Some closing dialogue suggests a brighter future is on the horizon, but their inclusion here is either for period-appropriate throwback titillation or merely to account for getting the whole gang back in one place.

After ten years and eleven of PlatinumGames’ character action games, I was a taken aback by the apparent simplicity of Devil May Cry 5’s operation. Nero opens with a single melee attack button and another dedicated to ranged combat. A third button is left to the ambiguous “Devil Breakers,” mechanical arms sporting one-off abilities Nero can fuse to his missing appendage and integrate into his performance. In time, additional combo strings can be purchased from Nico while a bunch of new Devil Breakers provide optional variation. Assumptions that a two-button setup would limit Devil May Cry 5’s performance were unfounded.

Nero becomes even more complex when grappling with his sword’s Exceed system. When idling, Nero can rev his sword like a motorcycle throttle and increase its damage output. If the player presses the same button while making contact with an enemy, it builds the same meter and opens the floodgates for damage opportunities. I found this to be consistently difficult to nail, often having as much success spamming the Exceed button alongside the attack button. People who are better at videogames than I am will, I expect, make better use of this extremely Devil May Cry mechanic.

The Devil Breakers, of which an ordered-line is kept in a player-selected load-out, allow Nero’s combat to flourish. Overture is more or less a force push that can repel any immediate danger. Ragtime projects a temporary sphere of slow motion than can envelope an opponent. Devil Breakers can also be charged and consumed or broken to escape proximity danger. The former is particularly helpful for Punch Line, which Nero can fire off and literally ride around like as if it were a hoverboard and while taking potshots.

Nero, in all of his pitch-perfect recklessness, embodies the classic spirit of Devil May Cry. He gets all of the affected one-liners and delivers the closest thing Devil May Cry 5 has to straightforward gun-and-sword character action. Launching demons in the air, juggling them with bullets, and attempting basic combo strings strike are the heart of what made people fall in love with these games almost two decades ago. The Devil Breaker and Exceed system can either be on the side, if you’re playing on Human (read: “easy”) difficulty and with a combo-assist mode activated, or manually integrated into a more demanding and comprehensive experience. The duality of Nero’s action is a prime example of the audience Devil May Cry 5 wants to impress and the audience Capcom hopes it can cultivate.

Nero’s relative security makes V’s response all the more delightful. His heavily tattooed, doom-and-gloom Kylo Ren features fit neatly into Devil May Cry’s style but are subverted by his ability to perform even the most basic attack. Menacing combos and leaping aerials are executed through his surrogates; a bird, Griffon, handles ranged combat while a panther, Shadow, fills in for close quarters. The twist is neither of these creatures can actually kill anyone, only weaken them, leaving room for V to jump in and perform a brutally over-the-top finisher with his magical cane.

There’s something disarming and arresting about V’s place in the greater Devil May Cry framework. It’s a challenge to maintain simultaneous control over two independent creatures, especially when you’re holding charge attacks with Griffon while inputting delay combos with Shadow and trying to keep V out of anyone’s path of destruction. Devil May Cry 5’s answer to this is V’s own Devil Trigger gauge, which can be assigned to temporarily boost and automate Shadow and/or Griffon. That gauge is either built through basic attacks or, in perfect harmony with Devil May Cry’s morose demeanor, quickly charged by V pausing to read, out loud, a book of poetry.

V’s combat usually culminates with the appearance of Nightmare, an invincible monster that consumes his Devil Trigger gauge. Nightmare’s appearance is fleeting but its impact—and specifically its penchant for annihilation if you buy all its upgrades—is enormous. V’s hair turns white whenever Nightmare comes out. When V’s hops on its back and ­rides Nightmare around, any sort of conclusion ends with V stylishly flipping off into some happenstance pose, capping one of the more magnificent improvised action sequences in recent memory. It works every time.

V’s convincing animation, in particular, is one of Devil May Cry 5’s more subtle tricks. He just sulks around in the background regardless of the player’s intersection with imminent danger. When he pops in to deliver a finisher—always a risk in groups because V is not invulnerable during this action—he always tops it off with a natural looking flourish. This is also the case when V requires a dodge mechanic and summons Griffon out of nowhere for an aerial escape. Every action is made under the discretion of the player, but it’s woven together so well that it feels choreographed.

Then there’s Dante. The prototype for modern character action, Devil May Cry 5 finds Dante’s with the kitchen-sink in his back pocket. Four styles—one for defense, one for ranged combat, one for evasion, and one for melee—affect the action of a single button, joining ranged, melee, and jump buttons. On top of this is an escalating selection of close and ranged weapons, each with their own signature take on the individual styles. Like Nero and V, each weapon can be upgraded with additional combos and boosted with better moves.

If Nero and V gimmick’s feel too far away, Dante gets Devil May Cry 5 closer to home. His Devil Trigger is more in line with the traditional thrashing superpower and his styles and weapons, while all fun and viable, can be engaged at will. I was too scared to use his Smooth Criminal hat because I couldn’t deal with it burning currency as fuel and I didn’t like the Balrog bracers because they were too close for comfort. Instead I used the sword to great effect and called for his twin pistols to keep my rating on track. In this style, it was classic Devil May Cry.

Dante is also the recipient of Devil May Cry 5’s greatest absurdity, the Cavaliere. The aforementioned cut-in-half motorcycle objectively fills the role of the slow and heavy weapon, but, in its visual depiction, is utterly ludicrous. It’s further amplified when operating under Dante’s Swordmaster style; it re-forms into a complete motorcycle and Dante furiously rides the death-bike over everyone in the immediate area, somehow making a convincing amount of contact with all of his opponents. We are now living in anime.

As much of Devil May Cry 5 I am willing to buy, there are times when the cartoon cash register flashes No Sale. When a character says “______ is not a demon, I know that for a fact because I am from the underworld” I wish its localization would have received another pass. When Nico’s ramshackle van is sporadically abandoned in favor of equally capable hell world statues, I wonder why Devil May Cry 5 is choosing now to drop any logical pretense. When the music reminds me of the gross bozos in Dope, I hoped it would stop. Sometimes the resurrection of 2003 is a devil’s handshake of deals.

The back third of Devil May Cry 5 feels incongruous with its first two acts. In the beginning it’s a perilous assault across geographically interesting environments. Decimated city streets, flooded architecture, and a dilapidated hotel all essentially boil down to makeshift combat arenas, but it looks like the art department was given something interesting to do on the way there. The last third of Devil May Cry 5 is a spiraling series of organically evil hallways on the way to nondescript battlegrounds, almost like you’re stuck in a grey open-air version of the Space Jockey’s ship from Alien. It’s hard to tell what Capcom ran out of first, budget or inspiration, but it’s a jarring swerve from Devil May Cry 5’s previous course.

Devil May Cry 5 also has issues with communicating what it needs from the player. This is most obvious is in earlier boss encounters, in which the player not only has a tenuous grasp on basic mechanics, but also where Devil May Cry 5 isn’t sure about what it wants. Fights that you’re intended to lose seem like you might be able to win, and in other battles (looking at V vs Nidhogg), it’s not clear what or when you’re supposed to attack. Everything you do looks good, but the feedback as to whether or not it’s effective is often the result of trial and error.

There’s also the matter of Devil May Cry 5’s bizarre “starring” mechanic. Several times throughout the campaign, you’ll see text on the left side of the screen with “Now Starring” and then someone’s name on the side. I thought it was random until it said Jim Sterling, who is certainly a real person and was probably also playing Devil May Cry 5 early. I have no idea why any of this is there—I assume it’s who is acting in the pieces of Devil May Cry 5’s narrative that happen simultaneously—or why it stays on the otherwise user-interface-free screen for so long. Who could possibly be interested in this pointless information for more than a second?

I played Devil May Cry 5 on a launch Xbox One. It felt fine. I downloaded and played the demo on a PlayStation 4 Pro through a 4K HDR television. That one seemed a lot better. Obviously Devil May Cry 5’s performance will improve with better hardware, but it wasn’t that bad on its least-capable platform. It didn’t hold sixty frames-a-second, but it didn’t seem like it was falling below it very often, either. Pedants will demand better and they’re not entirely wrong—games with action this specific should settle on sixty frames as a baseline—but Devil May Cry 5 wasn’t at fault often enough to file a major complaint.

For all of Devil May Cry 5’s obvious faults, it’s difficult not to appreciate its understated strengths. When Bayonetta 2 featured a touchscreen-only mode with the Wii U’s stylus, it created pathways for accessibility not present in literally any other game of its scale. Devil May Cry 5, with its (optional) abundant resources for revival, (optional) generous auto-combos, and (optional) easy difficulty, takes similar steps in more open directions. You can play Devil May Cry 5 how you want to play it, a concept that should be incredibly obvious if it weren’t so rare in its field. It loses nothing and gains everything.

For those seeking a greater return on their investment, wielding three separate protagonists makes Devil May Cry 5 the CrossFit of character action games. Reorganizing your brain to accommodate their strengths and weaknesses is essential. This is easily visible from the two missions Devil May Cry 5 allows the player to select their hero and, while there are similarities, there isn’t a lot of overlap. I would have preferred if the hardest difficulty were available from the outset, but, with building character upgrades, it’s easy to see why Capcom demanded a dry run fist.

The stated objective of Devil May Cry 5 (and of most games) is to win. The actual purpose of Devil May Cry 5 is to look as good as possible while you’re winning. While I personally believe obliterating demons with a motorcycle should always generate an SSS rank, I understand Devil May Cry 5 is asking for a more colorful approach. But it doesn’t stop me. It lets me progress however I like. Winning and looking good are both objects the mind of the beholder and Devil May Cry 5’s fashionable outfits seem to fit anyone.

Lavish pop-goth theatrics and profusely ridiculous violence compose the bible to which Devil May Cry 5 remains unabashedly faithful. Whether engaging with micro-intricacies buried deep inside its three protagonists or simply opting for maladroit participation, both approaches are furiously consumed with making the player look and feel extraordinary. Devil May Cry 5 is flexible, confident, and genuine Devil May Cry.