I’m a little bit self-conscious about my writing style. I think a lot of my write-ups particularly end but also often begin the same way. Part of my worries about this because the idea behind “write at least a little bit about every single game you finish, no exceptions” is like 50% motivated by a desire to be better at this. I don’t fret about it TOO much because, hey, I’m not like, IN SCHOOL or nothin’, nobody’s gonna come after me with a pitchfork like “bitch you say you’re excited to see where a series goes next at the end of like 70% percent of your reviews get some new material.” But I fret about it ENOUGH that I do rack my brain trying to think of ways to open and close these things more substantially. So with that in mind here’s what I have for Devil May Cry 4:

Devil May Cry Four? More like, “Devil May Cry MORE PLEASE” amirite?????

Now you may think this is JUST a hilarious gut-buster and you’d be right that it’s that and you’re welcome, but it’s a statement that also describes this game in two important ways. Firstly, there is just MORE Devil May Cry here, easily the MOST Devil May Cry the series has seen to this point. A whole new guy with a whole new set of moves, not as WIDE as Dante’s and not as deep as a Professional Gamer could make Dante deep, but Nero’s single set of weapons and its accompanying combos certainly has more to it than any one combination of Dante’s powers, and requires more technical skill to fully master (something I will never achieve, I’m just not this good). Dante, too, sees his toolkit essentially unaltered from DMC3 bar a couple of weapon swaps, but now you can access all of it all at once all the time which makes him the most absurdly varied, options-heavy character in maybe any video game ever??? It’s frankly an embarrassment of riches. If DMC1 codified the genre, and DMC3 brought a second revolution for the speed, skill, and depth action games could demand without compromising things like fairness, balance, and fun, then DMC4 is a more genteel statement – there’s nothing revolutionary here, but everything is so perfectly balanced, so immaculately tuned that it’s hard to imagine going back to 3 after this, even though a lot of the stuff you can do in 4 is ostensibly exactly the same as in 3 and even though that game, undeniably, whips ass. It feels like a magic trick, it’s incredible. Every character in DMC4 is truly a pleasure to pilot, even Lady, the most underbaked character on the impressive Special Edition roster.

The second thing then, is that DMC4 is famously and OBVIOUSLY unfinished. When I was growing up I didn’t have an Xbox 360 or a PS3 until WELL after this game’s time and I still knew about this debacle, but playing it is something else entirely. It’s not JUST that the back half of the game reuses all the maps in reverse order, which honestly I don’t mind at all. You see the cracks in these really unexpected ways, like how every time the game wants to punish you for falling into a pit you fall into the same one cave room, but then also late in the game they introduce an enemy that eats you and if it gets you you get teleported to that same cave room inexplicably instead of a bespoke location or maybe just that not happening. Enemy types that are just previous enemy types but bigger. Dante’s weapons being entirely unrelated to the bosses he defeats rather than derived from them. It’s the little things like that peppered throughout that are like “oh….oOOOoooOOoHHHHHHHH.” Dante’s half of the game being crammed inelegantly into a set of levels and enemies clearly not designed for him is the most glaring thing here but it’s far from the only sign that shit was not well in this production, however it shook out.

It's a shame too because OSTENSIBLY these things would not bother me so much, right? Like I’ve mentioned, I don’t mind running through the game backwards, I think it’s kind of fun to race back to the city from the depths of the map to stop the bad guy you keep catching glimpses of on the horizon, the sky ever darkening under his wrath as you approach, seeing these places you’ve visited as another character ravaged not only by the wraths of the current occupants but also by your own travails in them. It's more that Dante’s half of the game suffers from a really high concentration of Gimmicky Bullshit that seems tailor made to stop you from just having a good time with his incredibly deep and often inventive skillset. There are staples like “level you’re constantly losing health in,” but that one is a diamond in the rough of shit like “repeated miniboss that you can’t properly hurt until you shoot it a LOT” or “terrible setpiece boss fight with unclear progression telegraphing that has very little combat and is mostly running in a horizontal line that took ina twenty minutes to do despite the fact that she took zero damage during it” or “those plants that eat you and teleport you to the cave room which is kind of funny until you get out of the cave room and realize that any time this happens you have to start literally the entire level over.”

This game is kind of littered with weird distractions from its core conceits of action combat with occasional platforming challenges, like the infamous dice game (which I think is not really bad at all once you figure the rhythm out) or a sequence where you have to fight a couple difficult flying enemies without getting knocked off of increasingly small disappearing platforms or you have to face the Punishment Cave lol, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this stuff is REALLY concentrated in the back half of the game where you can really see the seams in the development showing, nor do I think it’s a coincidence that the punishments for failing any of these challenges are almost always really minor for your character but REALLY time consuming for you the player. It’s rough, and it sucks, because I cannot emphasize enough that this is one of the best playing games I’ve ever had the pleasure to fuck around in.

I played the Special Edition which I think is the version that basically everyone plays at this point and the one you would have access to if you just went to buy it, but it didn’t really get the chance to ameliorate any of these issues. Instead they added MORE GUYS TO FUCK AROUND WITH in these same half baked levels and that’s fair that’s a choice. Capcom was never gonna spend buhmillions of dollars to make half of a game, this makes sense to me. Lady and Trish and Virgil are all very fun to play with. Lady is my favorite even as she has the fewest tools to work with because she’s weird for the series, and she really shines in the hardest difficulty setting where her extreme power and extreme fragility couples with her relative lack of maneuverability and huge vulnerability windows make for the most risk-reward play you can get basically in the game. Trish is kind of an explicit DMC1 Dante throwback ported into DMC4’s extremely slick vibe and she’s a joy to play as. Virgil is not so different from his DMC3 incarnation, same as Dante, but like Dante he feels better in the hands and he also has a unique character model so I’m happy for him. These characters I think maybe don’t make up for how skimpy on alternate modes and stuff the game is; it feels to me like a lot more could have been done to flesh out the experience of the game around the margins via side content even if the core experience is locked in forever, but three more guys in The Best Action Game You Could Play Circa 2008 is not a bad deal so I can’t complain too much.

Something I refuse to complain even slightly at all about is something I feel the series gets better at every time (ehhhh bar DMC2, as is often the case lol) are the STORY AND PRESENTATION which are excellent all around imo. I love Nero very much, he’s a great little guy. I want to ruffle his hair. I want to pack his lunch for him. Wanna make a bunk bed for him and make him sleep on the bottom bunk. What a good little dude. He’s refreshing because for as much as it seems like someone made him Look Like That because we wanted to kind of have our cake and eat it too re: phasing out Dante, Nero is so immediately such a distinct voice in this series. Although he is telegraphed with everything but out loud direct words throughout the game to be Virgil’s kid somehow lol, and he has a Special Arm, and he Looks Like That and he does all the goofy quips and flips and homoerotic, overly performative battle choreography with a guy who I’m pretty sure is his uncle, the character he actually has the most in common with from earlier in the series is Lady. Both normal kids in over their heads, the only two people reacting to the events of their respective games with anything resembling appropriate emotions. Nero is not a gothic tragedian or a romantic figure or an erotic pulp icon, all roles Dante has and does occupy at various point throughout this series – he’s just a guy, and a kind of sad, angry one at that. He’s been taken advantage of in a very real way, he’s hurt emotionally throughout the game, and when he fails it’s not in an epic way, it’s just, like, a bummer. It’s sad. Even when I started to connect with these characters to some degree on an emotional level in 3, it was in an extremely Saturday Morning Shonen Anime sense, very heightened and melodramatic. 4 isn’t NOT that, and Nero isn’t ABOVE that stuff, but I think we’ve entered a zone with DMC4 where these games might be able to tap a well of genuine pathos? There are only hints at it here but I am very curious to see if these threads of Real Drama get tugged at further in DMC5. I know Bingo Morihashi, the writer of 3 and 4, comes back for that one and he seems interested in pushing this stuff. I would like to see it.

But for as much as I like Nero, Dante is here too, and he rules, he fucks so hard, literally and figuratively. I guess not LITERALLY LITERALLY. Nobody in these games knows about sex, and Dante has always been a somewhat eroticized figure, in like, a darker, classically gothic sense (he is constantly being penetrated by swords, he has a weird borderline-incestuous relationship with a clone of his mom and also his brother, he is a stoic object of lust for other often sinister forces throughout the series), and that’s still true to some extent here but because this game truly is not about him and only kind of involves him via tangential connections to his family’s past, here we see Dante at his most carefree and flamboyant, retaining everything fun and cool and good about himself while maximalizing all of the pulpy, sexy eccentricities that make him a singular persona in the video game landscape. There is no one more akin to a $3.95 harlequin romance hero cover illustration than Dante Devilmaycry whether he’s doing an assassination or locking legs with his probably-nephew or doing a flamenco dance to fuck/destroy a hell-penis-obelisk or confronting his thematic opposite (a man who twisted himself into a demon hoping to discard his humanity altogether vs a half man half demon who embraces his natures and values his personhood) over their ideological differences through the explicit façade of theater for an audience of You The Player. He’s a delight, I love this guy.

This is as good as these games have ever looked too. They’ve always paid really close attention to the design sensibilities of their worlds and that shit is back in full force here. The way all of the angel guys at the church are clearly demonic if you get a good look at them, pulsing with black and red underneath their immaculate armor even before Dante dramatically unmasks one for Nero to see, or that the supposed savior’s most prominent features are the massive demonic horns sprouting all over his body and the deep, cruel holes in his eyeballs instead of carved pupils. The way the public church is a traditionally ornate cathedral but the actual Order’s base of operations, hidden from civilization, is a giant, brutalist slab because nobody who doesn’t actually know what’s up has reason to go there so there’s no reason to keep up a pretension. The only guy who might be suspicious is too stupid to ask that question. It’s great attention to detail, all over the game. Small stuff but it’s important to me. It’s clear how much care went into the development here, even when things didn’t go according to plan.

I’m sure that’s always the story with games like this, and DMC4 just made it out better than most. It did, really – even with all its warts, the underlying core of DMC4 is so so strong that it would be hard to discount even if things were actually as bad as this game’s doomsayers (who admittedly do seem to be fewer now than in 2008, especially in the wake of that reviled Ninja Theory reboot) would have had you believe. As it is, while the game is certainly not what I think anybody imagined or wanted, even all these years and a “hey we fixed it sort of” rerelease later, the fact that it’s just like, a good-ass game shines through all the little annoyances. I’m thinking about it right now. If DMC5 didn’t exist and I wasn’t SO curious about it and I hadn’t bought it this afternoon and it wasn’t downloading right now, I wouldn’t be surprised if I could easily put hundreds of hours into 4 between its five characters and two game modes. The engine powering this car is that good, even without considering what a blast I had with the story this time around. DMC has quickly become one of my favorite series over the last year, and if this is the worst they can do (y’know, bar 2, and uh, I guess also that reboot, like, you know what I mean) then I really just couldn’t ask for things to be in a better place.

yahtzee. monopoly. devil may cry 4 on ps3 and xbox 360. poker.
what do these things have in common? dice. motherfucking dice.

nero is just THAT GUY. he loves his foster sister. he kills her brother. gamer move. chad. nero is like the only new character that i enjoy unfortunately. the others are just basic stereotypes. pope guy. professor guy. knight guy. religion bad… DANTE!!! he’s cool. the returning characters are the best characters in the game aside from nero for obvious reasons but sometimes i felt dante was a bit too lighthearted in situations. it’s probably just due to his older age in this game idk.
i wanted to write this review more analytically but by the end of this one i just didn’t care that much anymore. this game has odd parts that form a conflicted whole. like, the mission design? stupid tops, stupid enemies, stupid dice. stupid random teleporting clouds. stupid gimmicks. the combat? BOSS. i really like nero’s devil bringer but even then its use isn’t spectacular. i enjoy using it to fight the basic enemies and that’s it. it would be 10 times better on other enemies if it didn’t send me into this locked attack animation every time you used it. it completely breaks the flow of combat for me. dante’s style switching is inherently fun but none of the enemies were designed with him in mind so he just doesn’t feel as good to play as dmc3 if you catch my drift.
it’s blatantly clear development was rushed. i can kinda look past all the recycling buuut it’s still annoying at its core. you eagerly fight the bosses once as nero by exploiting use of the O/B button to win. Ok. you pessimistically fight the bosses somewhat quicker a second time as dante. Okay. Now you do a fucking boss rush like this shit is a mega man game. kill yourOKAY. the bosses are kinda good but man they really milk the shit out of them. dante like ‘what if i did nero’s missions but in reverse and with some of the dumbest gimmicks in the series.’ i’m like ‘dante how about you take off your cowboy looking ass pants and put on the green jeans. take off your undershirt and go back to your teens please.’
it may sound like i didn’t enjoy the game much but i exaggerate a bit. the combat and a few of the story beats are good enough to carry the game for me. fighting shit and bashing it into a bloody explosion of orbs is fundamentally enjoyable. very disappointed i ended up not liking this as much as dmc1, though. dmc1 had the immaculate remisent smeevil vibes and atmosphere which encapsulated the world nicely. as the games progressed, these chill-inducing themes diminished but dmc3 came close to reaching it. dmc4 does not!! i also love the iconic 2000s charm of dmc1 which dmc4 doesn’t really achieve either. i bring this up because it’s why i prefer 1 to 4. nero may 4 has better combat than dante cry 1 but the latter excels in everything else. better pacing, style, presentation, etc.

in conclusion, will i buy 4SE? hell no lol. i’m eager to try out trish and lady but not eager enough to warrant replaying the handful of lackluster missions and bosses. for all you dmc fans, this game is defo worth at least one playthrough.

The pain of such an amazing combat engine being located in such an inconsistent, unfinished game is something that would sting way more if not for the fact that DMC 5 exists and apparently takes all the cool things even further than this one does. This of course doesn't change the fact that this is still an unfortunate step down from DMC 3 that clearly suffered a lot from a lack of development time along with having a plethora of weird gimmicky ideas that only serve to drag down the overall experience. On the other hand though, I cannot think of many examples this is a prime example of a game that's carried so hard by one element being insanely good that it can make you somewhat overlook the fact that almost everything surrounding it doesn't really do anything for you.

The movesets of both Nero and Dante are really sick in this game, Nero playing in a very different way that appeals to me perfectly, and Dante showcasing just how you can cram even more avenues for chaining absurd combos together into a system that already had a lot of that. Nero's greater focus on air mobility and enemy juggling just appeals to me perfectly, giving the player enough tools to stay airborne for way longer without having to become a god at the game to do so. The way the vast majority of his moves flow into each other so cleanly further adds to this and provides a certain sense of smoothness to his fighting style compared to the more jagged, visceral edge that defines Dante's playstyle. Speaking of Dante's playstyle, it absolutely rules here with the amount of tools you get at your disposal along with the absolutely deranged things you can chain together if you really want to get the most out of his capabilities. While I'm not good enough to take full advantage of it, the ability to change styles on the fly is nonetheless insanely cool and would make me want to keep trying to improve if not for the fact that actually interacting with the obstacles thrown your way are just not very engaging.

Crafting such an in-depth, complex and fun combat engine and then making its only use cases 7 levels which are entirely reused, complete with enemies clearly not designed for Dante and anything new added being the worst thing ever is heartbreaking. The gimmicks introduced for this latter portion of the game are never anything that come across as interesting at all, with any challenges they introduce stemming more from being inconvenienced than providing an interesting shakeup to the formula. It's obviously made worse by the fact that these extra painful gimmicks are, as stated, located in stages that you've literally already fully gone through as Nero and are now just backtracking through for the 2nd half of the game. The enemies also suck to fight a lot of the time, with a lot of them not really having clear and simple counters with Dante, despite the absurd power he packs. This leads to a situation where each encounter takes place on one of two extremes, either everything is eviscerated in seconds, or you're stuck having to do something really finicky and awkward, grinding the pacing to a halt.

Maybe I'd have been fine with this if not for the fact that it's not as if the level design was especially engaging the first time around anyway. Everything just feels a bit too small and lacking in any real setpieces or even atmosphere in a lot of cases that really made me love how 1 and 3 handled its stages. A lot of the extra mechanics and "puzzles" don't really feel good either, with a lot of them either feeling weirdly artificial or just janky (not in a fun way) to use. The gyro blades especially come to mind with the latter issue, where the player just had to push these big spinning blades through destructible walls and all that, but actually moving them where you wanted was a constantly imprecise pain. The dice sections also are just bad, no further explanation needed.

That said, one other thing I actually did like about the game was the narrative and cutscenes, as was expected. Whether it's the first half being dead serious but in this really goofy way mostly where everything feels super over the top, or the 2nd half which is just a lot of Dante being Dante but to an even greater extent than usual, it's just a great time. In the end it's really just like, DMC 4 is damn lucky that just swinging a sword around in it is one of the coolest things ever and that Dante is who he is, because these two things are really the main things stopping me from disliking the game. I was going to mess around with some of the other playable characters in this afterwards, given how cool I was finding certain aspects so fun for a while, but the 2nd half of the game really, really hurt my desire to replay this anytime soon, even if I'll still say that I enjoyed it to an extent regardless.

But you didn't have to cut me off
Gameplay is better but everything else is still sucky
And I don't even need your love
But Nero treats me like Dante and that feels so rough

No you didn't have to stoop so low
Like seriously why would you make me play through the same levels twice
Guessing I will have to though

Now you are just a game I play for DMC five

I was looking at the recent Capcom Steam Sales, and I saw Devil May Cry 4 for quite cheap, and I realized I never actually played it before. I remember reviews at the time being quite unenthusiastic about it, so I ended up skipping it and then promptly forgetting that it ever existed, as just a year later Bayonetta would pretty much re-invent the genre. But like, I don't have anything better to do nowadays, so I figured I might as well give it a go.

1. It really annoys me that the only version of the game readily available digitally is the "Special Edition". Especially because apparently the original version had some pretty significant differences in the combat, and it is now extremely difficult to find any information about such differences, as they don't seem to be accurately documented anywhere. The original version of the game only existed physically as far as I can tell (or at least has eventually been delisted from consoles' digital stores), so, like, this kinda sucks. Like I get that most people would almost always want to play the "better" version, but like, I dunno, shit like this always feels like history is being eroded away.

2. Talking about history, this game is positioned in a very interesting place in time. As mentioned, Bayonetta will be released about a year after DMC4, and it will rejuvenate the genre by cutting out all of the vestigial remnants of Resident Evil-like horror-adventure that it was still carrying, coining the signature Platinum Games-style which focused on faster-paced cinematic-adjacent setpieces. At the same time by 2008, the fixed-camera adventure style of Resident Evil games was long gone, replaced by on-rail shooter spinoffs and whatever Resident Evil 5 ended up being. So... the fact that DMC4 released Before the genre was stripped of its Resident Evil-elements, still proudly carrying along clunky puzzles and gothic locales explored through a (mostly) fixed camera, makes it, in a way, the closer thing that we ever had to a new old-style Resident Evil on HD consoles. I mean, it's still very much an action game for most of its length, and those elements are relatively minor (especially when compared with the first Devil May Cry), but still, sometimes, when the pace slows down and it's kinda confusing to figure out where to go next, it definitely gives some unique and fascinating anachronistic vibes.

3. I know at the time people were annoyed by the game introducing a new main character, but Nero is honestly very fun. I think they should release a Super Special edition where Simple Plan's "I'm Just a Kid" starts playing whenever something bad happens to him. He's such a loser and I love him.

4. Nero plays pretty well too. The buster grapples definitely feel like a concession to the more mainstream/less technical/more cinematic wave of action games like God of War and Heavenly Sword, and I could take it or leave it; but on the other hand, the Snatch ability feels great and speeds up the pace of combat a lot and his combos are different enough from Dante's that yeah, he's just pretty fun to play.

5. I have not played DMC5 yet, but so far DMC4 has hands down the best writing for Dante in the series. I'm So here for goofy aged-up Dante. I like how as the game opens they make him look like this brooding dangerous threat, and then as soon as you get to his half of the game he's just doing silly shit. Each of his cutscenes is a delight.

6. Look, as mentioned, it's hilarious when Nero gets his ass kicked. But if I win a boss fight he should not be then get his ass kicked in the next cutscene! That's against the rules! There's ways around it!

7. I have zero idea what was The Order's actual plan. But that's ok. I'm pretty sure the writer didn't know either.

8. Look I get that this game notoriously had a mildly troubled development and is generally considered "incomplete", but like, I dunno, I feel like they actually did an excellent job wrapping it with the resources they had. Like, yeah, there are some repeated enemy models, but the "powered-up" enemies always have enough interesting new attacks to make them a very different challenge from their alternate type. And yeah, all of Dante's levels use the same environments as Nero's one, but they also feature some great economic level design that makes them feel snappier, faster (playing into the theme of Dante being mostly above all this shit at this point), and generally different. Like yeah, they probably ran out of resources, but they also did a great job in using, and recontextualizing, what they had to finish up the game. So like, I think that's neat.

But yeah, I enjoyed this. It's a silly action game with some extremely fun combat, from the weird in-between era of video games, also known as 2005-2013. Like, it's no Bayonetta, but not many things are. It's pretty ok, solidly ok even, the Itadaki Street Boss Rush was super ass, I had fun, the end.

Ok.

It’s very ok. I feel very empty after finishing the game, the content was definitely not there and the constantly winding, confusing level designs wasn’t fun. This game’s enemy designs are my least favorite so far. So many of them are just a chore to fight. The best one being the basic scarecrows and especially the knights I like them a lot, and the giant scarecrow things that show up like twice or thrice. The worst ones.. being just about everything else. Why make an enemy that can just break your combo? Genuinely some of the worst this game has to offer. The dogs were annoying with Dante specifically since he had no means of consistently catching up to them when they ran off and speaking of Dante, his half of the game is just re-used locations, bosses, and enemies. It made things feel so unfulfilling. It was a good game coming in then it nose dived to just eh. I almost want to give it a 3 stars but I did have fun with the combat.. when the enemies on screen weren’t the ones who can break your combo, the electric monster guy, the dogs, the boring phantoms that float through walls, the “head honcho” phantom that had claws, and those ice reptiles. Maybe I’m being too harsh on the enemies but goddamn I didn’t look forward to fighting most of them. Music is still kickass and Nero’s voice actor in specific killed it, great performance. Story is very negligible with a few highlights and it ended on an okay cutscene, but the final three missions are so ASS. Overall, a huge mixed back that barely gets a 3.5 from me.

I've played a lot of sequels in the 'higher highs, lower lows' cesspool but I think DMC4 might take the cake on that namesake. I can't name any other game that left me whiplashing so frequently between wonderful ecstasy and utter disgust. It's the consequence of upping the ante on all the highlighted fronts - more worldbuilding, more flair and weight to the story, more mechanics, - without streamlining the fat left over from prior endeavors. At this point DMC has all but severed itself thematically from its RE4 prototype roots, and yet it still insists on droning exploration and puzzle-solving - which worked in 1 because of its vision and direction, but make no sense here!

If there's one thing that unanimously shines amidst 4's final results, it's story. DMC1-3 all have these very focused, interpersonal stories, with extremely limited casts that exist to directly foil and complement Dante and the trails he overcomes. The same rings true of Nero and his conflict with the Order, but the expanded cast of characters, wider world, and (gasp!) NPC's work in great service of Nero and the faith he places in himself and Kyrie against a troupe of oligarchic demons who use their religion to veil their selfish ambitions. It's still a largely personal narrative, but now supported by a heart and weeps and fights for others - not just self-serving power. Even bosses reflect this by contrast to 1 and 3: 1's bosses are dedicated keepers of this decaying castle, and 3's bosses are these guardian knights of sorts that fight viciously but respect Dante as a worthy adversary. 4's bosses are these feral demons though; they're here to terrorize and destroy brazenly, and as such, they fight dirty. No wonder Nero's so hotheaded when he has to put up with their shit.

Dante's a fucking riot too - yadda yadda foil to Nero's brashness yadda yadda distant mentor figure - HOLY SHIT HE DESTROYED A MONOLITH BY THROWING NEEDLES AT IT IN THE SHAPE OF A HEART WHILE PLAYING FLAMENCO MUSIC AND DESCRIBING HIS PEGGING SESSIONS.

It's just a shame everything else wildly weaves between anywhere from 10/10 quality to 0/10 tedium. This game has some of my favorite DMC boss designs and concepts, but so many of them can feel terrible to fight as Nero because his toolkit relies so heavily on Buster for damage and it just, doesn't work unless the fight says so. Like, the cinematic grapples are raw as hell, but I wish they didn't come at the compromise of not being able to Buster normally. I liked Agnus' fight a lot for that reason - using Buster to throw his swords back at him gave me an immediate and gratifying pool of damage. For other encounters its uses are not only more limited, but it can feel vague in their telegraphs. That really goes for every enemy? I feel like so much damage I take in this game is because I'm experiencing enormous sensory overload and can't react to these funky hitboxes and hazy pre-attack animations. "There's audio cues tho" yeah there's also always 20 other sfx playing backed by this loud-ass music. And as much as I appreciate how focused Nero's moveset is, I don't vibe too much with a lot of the tools that comprise it. I felt EX moves were just way to hard to efficiently use: You gotta slow yourself down to do this awkward charge revving motion, then you gotta close your distance and make sure the hit actually lands - and even if it does, it's not drastically stronger enough than my other tools to feel like it really paid off. I don't like his combos and special inputs either - I'm sorry, but I should never have to do a street fighter charge motion in a 3D space while jumping. Dante gets the brunt end of the criticism for being filler but I feel a lot of smaller enemies don't feel designed around him. It's kinda hard to criticize tho, because for some reason his level 2 Stinger just destroys everything, like just an obscene amount of damage on top of forwards movement, quick cooldown on hit, knockdowns and combo potential. If nothing else, you already know how to deal with a lot of shit once you get to his end of the run, so he tends to be a little less stressful.

DMC4 is also unfinished, blatantly, but not to the degree that I feel people often complain? Like, there's fewer levels and you replay the back half as Dante, but the content in those spaces feels just as well-realized as 3 - if not more. Again, it REALLY just comes down to the combination of enemies and bosses I don't like fighting, in levels I don't like progressing through. Some of these areas just leave no lasting impression and feel entirely codified around 'video game level' themes. Even in 3's mid-ass castle, its sectors feel like natural areas that match the universe's fictionalized rules. But 4? Play the fuckin' juuuuuuungle level. Go to the faaaaaaactory. Go to the tooooooown. Play the gunstar heroes dice maze. And even with these 'gameplay first' worlds, they're still ass to play in! Cramped spaces with awkward camera angles and uneven terrain that makes a lot of ordinarily fights that much more stressful. It pisses me off how 7th gen's redefining of 'good combat' is so narrow-minded - being all that matters for an action game to be good is for your character's immediate techniques, toolkit and gamefeel to be good. All this effort gets poured into perfecting the persona that you take on, without any consideration for the world you inhabit. What the hell is ""good combat"" without rooms that vie as an appropriate arena? What good are my tools if the enemies I have to use them against are a pain in the ass? You can't divorce individual parts of game design from each other - 4 having the 'deepest systems' or 'most complex combos' means nothing to me when I have such a pessimistic attitude for the material I have to engage those mechanics with.

This was an extremely disorganized review - it's 1AM, I'm tired, it's hard to designate where and how to discuss some of the game's elements because of the unruly way they clash with each other, the ten yards. I liked my time with DMC4, I Gamer Pogged when I heard a sample used in DDR's Drop Out during the Bael bossfight, I lost my shit twice every cutscene and was floored every time I used buster on someone's ass - but I was upset too often at it and felt like I wouldn't have lost much by just watching the cutscenes and moving onto 5. I can't really remember a game that made me frequently this angry since like, playing shitty arcade modes in 90's fighting games.

Onward to 5!

The next installment of the Devil May Cry series brings our new main character Nero, with an all new set of moves and mechanics. Combat is the crazy action-packed fare you've come to expect from the series, but this game does come with one fatal flaw; which issi hcihw ;walf lataf eno htiw emoc seod emag siht tub ,seires eht morf tcepxe ot emoc ev'uoy eraf dekcap-noitca yzarc eht si tabmoC .scinahcem dna sevom fo tes wen lla na htiw ,oreN retcarahc niam wen ruo sgnirb seires yrC yaM liveD eht fo tnemllatsni txen ehT

Wow, this game perfectly exemplifies perfectly how level design affects gameplay.

I love Devil May Cry. This love is very similar to what the average Star Wars fan feels (loves SW, but hates 90 percent of the content about it). I love the combat, the interactions and the characters, I'm in love with Dante and Nero. The problem with DMC starts right there, everything beyond that is very mediocre. The story is pretty functional, it has its epic moments and all, the villain is pretty cool and Nero's objective is pretty coherent. Ironically, the biggest flaw is the gameplay.

Half the game is literally the same as the other half. You walk through the same scenarios, fight the same bosses and do the same things twice, once as Nero, once as Dante. This problem goes far beyond the terrible level design (which is already standard in the franchise), all the enemies seem to have been designed exclusively for Nero, to the point that facing them as Dante is even awkward.

Problems aside, I had a lot of fun playing the game, and my complaints are tiny compared to how much I love the combat and the characters in this game.

Coming directly from DMC3, I can say that in combat it was pleasantly smoother. Everything felt so much more fluid that it was unreal, Neros moveset was so clean and addictive to use. Besides Neros wonderful true-hack-n-slash type gameplay, Dante also harbored some great additions. The weapon choice was a little underehelming to be honest, with only 3 (4 including dark slayer) of each instead of the predecessors 6 and 6. The full missing star is just the weapon lacking and the sloppy story. Everything else is great.

The time has come, and I need to change my underwear! I never figured out why Nero revs his sword sometimes. I understand left trigger did something with it, but it was always unclear to me. The game wasn't too bad without it, but I wonder what I missed.

There's only one real issue I ever have with the good Devil May Cry games. Other than like, being a scrub. The games seem to revolve around being replayed: they're relatively short; you receive scores you should improve; you'll unlock new difficulties and characters; you're penalized for not being able to do levels in one go. And that rocks, but I'm not always read to run back into it afterwards, I feel like I miss out on content. And that's on me of course, but still. Some games will lock lore behind this kind of stuff; that doesn't work here. Really, the gameplay should be enough. Ah, well.

neat little game, even if the last few levels arent that good. If you take it as a more seperated thing from the other DMC games it stands out in its own interesting ways, but I think I'd put this under 3 overall. Nero and his demon arm are pretty cool and dante has a lot of wackiness with his style switching and whatnot and the game has tons of vibes but i guess i wasn't really super digging the plot? there was some wackiness (the theatre scene is legendary) but it didnt seem like it stooped even closely to the same pool as 3 and later 5 does when it comes to nonsense. I'd still suggest playing it if you like DMC games, since the gameplay do be solid and this game does kinda introduce nero who would be a pretty important character in 5

I can't get a read on DMC4. What's up with you anyway, huh? I knew this wouldn't be as good as DMC3 going in just because of how perfect that game is, but even so, I genuinely don't know what to think of its followup title. In most regards, I can say it does its job as the next entry in the series, but it also feels incredibly lazy. That's probably because the game is literally unfinished, but even so, there's levels of polish here that I don't believe would exist with the rush to get the game published.

A lot of stuff packaged within this disc is simply inconsistent. The level design is pretty solid, but to balance it out, the puzzles are horrendous. This is very apparent from as early as the fourth level. You have to open doors by pushing these giant beyblades around a hallway and into the missing spots. Although you can push them quite far with each hit, this still takes forever and is not something I want to be doing in a combat game. There's a jungle level with Dante where black clouds cover each room entrance and exit and send you to a completely different room entirely. The game doesn't even tell you where to go at the start of the level, so have fun getting through it. In the same jungle area, there's a maze where you can choose one of four paths to proceed with only one of them sending you forward. You must choose the path that leads to light. It might just be the game being somewhat unoptimized, but I could barely tell which path the game wanted me to choose. There was the same amount of light and shadow on each path, just positioned differently. DMC1 had something similar, but you were following a tiny little spirit that you could actually see so you knew where you were going.

Don't even get me started on the game room. This singular room is the worst thing to come out of this series. This room alone is worse than the entirety of DMC2. The idea is simple: roll a dice and forward your character forward. Different spaces will trigger different events when landed on. White spots are the only ones that do nothing. Blue spots will spawn in red and green orbs or a set of treasure chests. Red spots will spawn in enemies of a short laser avoidance test. Finally, the worst ones of all, the yellow spots will send you either forward or backward to the next adjacent yellow spot.

This level took me about an hour because of the damned yellow spots. On my playthrough with Lady, (this is regarding the special edition, but the level is the exact same, so this is still a criticism of the base game) I landed on yellow spots that sent me backward FOUR TIMES. Getting sent backwards means dealing with whatever spots you just passed, which is usually a lot of enemies. I had to painstakingly meander across this awful board game only to die right before reaching the end. I then had to go through the ENTIRE board again! Why is this slow paced, RNG reliant, unfulfilling excuse for a level in a high octane, fast paced, combat oriented game? Who the hell knows. This might just be the worst level I've played in a video game. I've seen some bad levels, but few that are not only bad, but go against the entire point of the game.

Many fans proclaim DMC4 as having the most in depth combat in the series, and I can see why, especially in regards to Dante. Having access to all available weapons and styles at once opens up limitless opportunities for how any battle can play out and encourages you to optimize your familiarity with each of his tools. However, this has become a bit of a redundant point in recent years because of one thing: DMC3's refusal to be lesser than the best. The Switch port has a mode called freestyle mode, which allows you the same access to all styles at once, including his two bonus styles, as well as a weapon wheel consisting of five weapons as opposed to three, for guns and for devil arms. DMC3 wasn't really designed with this kind of freedom in mind, but it most definitely works and is my favorite way to play the game. Now that the objectively better game has what is arguably the main appeal of DMC4's combat, why would I ever play the worse game?

Maybe I'm being a bit harsh, let's see what we're working with a bit more closely. For the first half of the game, you play as young devil hunter Nero. Most of his kit is based around his literal devil arm, the Devil Bringer. The main draw of this new weapon is all the grab related shenanigans it brings. There's a standard grab, which simply picks an enemy up and slams them into the ground. What makes it interesting, though, is how nearly every enemy and boss has a unique animation for when they get grabbed, as well as another different one in Devil Trigger. Some of them can cause collateral damage, as well, making it viable to use in large groups. Depending on the size of the enemy, Nero can either pull them towards him, or pull himself towards them. This is one of my favorite things about Nero: his ability to continue combos from a distance. When you launch an enemy far away, typically, the combo will end unless you're Vergil and can teleport right up to them. Instead of moving himself closer to the enemy, he moves the enemy closer to him, being able to continue the combo for as long as he wants.

The grabs are great, but the normal grab could have been used a bit better. Against bosses, there's usually a moment when you can fit in a grab on a weak point to activate a big finisher. There isn't much utility involved outside of big damage except for the normal enemies that can lead to collateral damage. There is another feature hidden within Nero's arm in the form of a counter. Before big attacks, mainly from bosses, you can time the grab against the attack to block it and initiate a counter attack. This is incredibly useful, kind of like a watered down Royal Guard, and it allows for a more aggressive game plan to make way.

Another unique ability that Nero possesses is the excel system, which has more depth than his Devil Buster, but also contains more downsides than upsides. By revving his sword like an engine, Nero can store up to three EX gauges. These gauges will enhance whatever move you do next. Right off the bat, this mechanic is completely useless until you get the max act ability from the shop, which allows you to time an engine rev with the end of a sword swing to build an EX gauge instantly. This does make his combat a bit more engaging, and many of the EX moves are incredibly satisfying to hit, but there is still one big problem with the whole mechanic: lack of utility. Almost every EX move simply takes whatever the base move is and ups the damage. The animation changes, but the utility is the same. You're going to be using Nero's moves in the same places in combo regardless if they're an EX move or not, you'll just do more damage with an EX. Because you can get gauges instantly from any attack thanks to max act, there technically isn't any reason NOT to go for it all the time, but I find it kind of pointless to have this enhancing mechanic available to you at all times. Maybe I'm being nitpicky, but the excel system is all style and no substance.

Overall, Nero is alright. He doesn't lack depth at all, but due to his kit generally being slower and stronger hitting than Dante, his combo utility is far more limited and less fun to play as a result. Apparently, he was purposely designed to be easier so newcomers of the series could jump into the game without any trouble, seeing how DMC4 was the first in the series to go multi-platform. I don't hate Nero's gameplay, but he's far from my favorite character to play as.

Dante, though? When people say this game has the best gameplay of the series, Dante and Dante only is what they're talking about. All four main styles from DMC3 return with the ability to swap between them at will. Look at any DMC4 combo video, and these will be getting swapped around like crazy, as if they're all fighting for a chance to simply be used by the player. Dante now has Vergil's Darkslayer style which you can sadly not upgrade like the others. But… he can do Judgement Cut. DANTE CAN DO JUDGMENT CUT. I could just end the review there and the score would not change with how much I still have left to praise and criticize.

Dante has mostly familiar weapons to start off with. Ebony and Ivory of course make a return, as well as his trusty shotgun, the Coyote-A. For Devil Arms, he sports his classic Rebellion, and Gilgamesh is basically an upgraded Beowulf from DMC3. They did heavily nerf Killer Bee, his divekick, which hurts my soul immensely. This was by far my most used move in DMC3 due to the tracking and horizontal reach, but that reach has been cut to shit. Dante might as well not even have legs now. He makes up for it with the rest of Gilgamesh's kit being pretty nice. He can now enhance each move he does by charging them, but with a just frame timing, he can do even more damage and raise the style even further. I'm a sucker for gauntlet type weapons, so Gilgamesh is alright in my book. As for the new weapons, they're two of the series' best weapons, maybe even THE best. Pandora and Lucifer are designed specifically with DMC4's gameplay in mind without being restricted to staple movesets like Dante's other weapons are. These weapons made me love what would otherwise be a long slog through the worst levels in the series.

Pandora is a gun with several unique formations. It has its own gauge up near Dante's health called the Disaster Gauge. By using Pandora's basic attacks, you can fill it up, which causes the more disastrous attacks to become even more powerful. Omen is one of the most badass moves in his arsenal, where he places down the briefcase, stands over it, and opens it, dealing massive damage to everything in front. It's a swiss army pocket knife of guns, rewarding you for dealing damage with it with… even more damage. It's just an exciting weapon to use that heavily incentivises you use it.

Lucifer is a weird one. Instead of straight up damage, it's more of a setup tool. However, unlike Nevan, this one is actually good. For starters, the way you set it up is quick and responsive. Dante will toss hovering mirage swords in different formations around him. These swords will deal damage when an enemy makes contact with them, but they'll also get stuck inside them. After either summoning more swords, waiting a set amount of time, or detonating them manually with a rose toss, they'll blow up, dealing more damage and creating combo opportunities. This weapon has so much depth it's insane. During my playthrough, I feel like I got a decent grasp of it and could string together some basic combos. I'm not DMC4 expert, I'm not breaking my fingers for this game, but what I could do I thought was cool and I enjoyed it a lot. Setting up swords, going at it with another weapon, detonating the swords, then continuing the combo is such a fun thing to do. Lucifer can be used in such various ways, I know I haven't even scratched the surface with it, but if I ever revisit this game, this weapon is what I look forward to the most.

In addition to these new weapons, this is the first game to introduce on the go style switching. I kind of got a hint of this already with DMC3 on Switch, but this game is clearly designed with it in mind and it works like a charm. Being able to Trickster out of any precarious situation after you get too aggressive or use Swordmaster to quickly overwhelm the opponent after narrowly avoiding their onslaught keeps the gameplay engaging. You likely already know what each of them do, so I won't go too in detail about them. Trickster grants defensive escape and mobility options, Swordmaster opens up new melee weapon attacks, Royalguard is a parry with insane risk/reward, and Gunslinger gives you new gun attack moves. New to the lineup is Vergil's Darkslayer style, where Dante wields the Yamato. Unfortunately, you can't upgrade this one, sadly, and it only has a few basic moves to use, but one of those moves is JUDGEMENT CUT. It's so COOL.

To use style switching the most effectively, you need to be on your toes and have great awareness, but it's not a super high ceiling to reach. I love how Dante poses with each style and says the name of the style as well, and then shortens the name if he's running. Damn it, I hate that the gameplay is this good. It's in sharp contrast to the shitty level design that it's hard to enjoy it to its fullest. I heard somewhere that because of the low budget, the devs wanted to put most of their resources into the actual combat and saved the level design for later, and it shows. This was released in a weird time for Capcom, where they were doing a lot more experimental stuff, lots of stuff that didn't work. I guess DMC4 came out a bit brighter than most, but still with rough patches everywhere.

What brings it down further is the enemy/boss roster. They all suck. Not all of them are necessarily bad, but the best an enemy can get in this game is mediocre and forgettable. I don’t remember most of their names, but you know who I do remember? Chimera. Fuck, no, FUCK Chimera. They can attach themselves to other enemies, that’s their whole gimmick. Once they do, they will randomly slash at you whenever they feel like it, including DURING A COMBO. Thank you Capcom, for creating an enemy that cannot be combo’d in the fast paced combo game, I truly appreciate it. Most of these enemies aren’t a problem for Nero, like the flying faust enemies, the echidna boss, the fire hounds, etc. because they’re mostly designed around Nero’s Devil Bringer, which makes it a pain to deal with them as Dante when you don’t have that. Berial is a pretty cool boss fight, though. Credo’s boss fight is peak, one of the best in the series. The Savior is one of the worst boss fights in the series, constant platform hopping dragged on for ten minutes is not fun. Mostly mediocre to terrible enemies, but there’s some good in there (the only good is Credo).

The story of these games is never anything remarkable. The situations the characters find themselves in isn't anything special, BUT the characters are the ones that make them interesting, and I love these characters. This game follows Nero, a new devil hunter who is a part of the Order of the Sword: a cult that worships Sparda, a demon, as a god. It's clear that Nero doesn't want much to do with the cult, as he blames god for ruining his life by giving him a demonic arm. Because the order fights against demons, he has to hide this arm from everyone, including his girlfriend Kyrie. Not knowing who his parents were and being abandoned at a young age, he was raised with Kyrie and her brother, Credo, a general of the Order of the Sword.

During a sermon, Dante casually drops in and kills the cult's leader: Sanctus. While Credo helps evacuate the people of the church, Nero stands up to Dante. After a lengthy battle, he's forced to reveal his arm and use its power. Dante casually gets stabbed through the chest and takes it like a champ, showing Nero that he is part demon, hinting that him and Nero have more in common than they think. He flees the scene, and the following few missions are just Nero running aimlessly trying to catch Dante. He eventually finds himself in the lab of the cult's lead scientist: Agnus. He faces a near death experience with getting brutally impaled multiple times, but the power of a strong devil arm in the order's possession, the Yamato, beckons to Nero and gives him the power to fight off Agnus.

Credo eventually turns on Nero, as well, claiming that what the order is doing is just. Agnus is learning to extract demonic power from demons and put them into other objects and people. The order believes that taking this power makes them angels, not demons. Their battle is interrupted when Kyrie finds them both fighting, and subsequently gets snatched by Agnus. Credo tells Nero that he has to figure out what's going on before they continue fighting, and the two flee after Kyrie in their own way. On his way there, Nero runs into Dante once again, who is now after Yamato. The two fight, with Dante confidently winning, but Nero pleads to Dante to let him keep it because he needs its power. Dante sees that he has a good heart and a strong moral compass, so he lets him keep it, then lets Nero pass through.

Nero then eventually finds Kyrie with Sanctus, now revived with demonic power. He aims to use her as a battery to power a giant statue called The Savior, and after capturing Nero as well, he can use his power as well as that of the Yamato for it to become fully functional. Credo attempts to save Nero, but ultimately fails. This is when Dante finally decides to step in with Trish by his side. With Nero and Kyrie captured, Credo dead, and Yamato now in the hands of a power hungry tyrant, he has to clean up what mess Nero left for him. The next few levels are just him running back through Nero's levels with no important plot stuff happening. He kills some bosses that Nero couldn't, he kills Agnus, and he faces off against The Savior itself. He's able to get Yamato back in his possession and pass it onto Nero, who is now traversing the inside of The Savior to find Sanctus. He of course finds him, and thoroughly beats him to a pulp. He kills him after all is said and done and everyone is happy and stuff.

Like I said, the plot itself is not great, but the characters are what make it awesome. Something that kind of left me irritated after reflecting on DMC3 was Dante’s development. He and Vergil were two sides of the same coin: the former only accepting his human side, with the latter only accepting his demon side. Dante is able to triumph over Vergil in the end because he learns to accept both the human and demon halves of himself. But that kind of begs an important question: what does his human side bring to the table? It’s pretty clear that his demon side provides physical strength, hence why Vergil’s quest for power peaked when he finally possessed the demonic powers of his father. So then, how does Dante’s human side help him best Vergil, someone definitely stronger than him in terms of physical combat? The answer is love.

Nero spends the whole game fighting for the love of his life: Kyrie. Even when she becomes off put at the fact that he is part demon, he fights for her sake. He does everything in his power to rescue her from Sanctus, and although Dante needed to step in to help, he ultimately did that. Once he awakens with the Yamato, he claims that he will endure whatever punishment is given to him as long as he can save her in the end. Dante also alludes to this after his fight with Agnus, where the latter is in despair about losing despite having so much demonic power. Dante doesn’t deny the strength of demons, in fact, he even says that no human alone could ever match his strength. But humans alone are not weak. The human heart is capable of deep emotion, most importantly, the love for someone else.

It’s this love that the Order of the Sword ignored and what ultimately led to Sanctus’ downfall. This love also brings to light something else important to the cast, which is that anyone is capable of anything. Credo, pretty much Nero’s brother since they were kids, thinks of him as an enemy because of his demonic power and attempts to kill him. But, after Agnus kidnaps Kyrie, Credo retreats and is left to think about his next move. Eventually, that next move turns out to be an attempt to rescue both Nero and Kyrie from Sanctus’ clutches. He fails, and dies for it, telling Sanctus that while his ideas are sound, putting his beloved sister in danger was crossing a line. He beckons to Dante to rescue BOTH Kyrie and Nero.

Nero always saw his demonic arm as a curse, which is why he was so uninvolved with the religious part of the order. He was angry at God for giving him an arm that was seen as morally bad due to the demonic power residing within. But, in the end, he is able to see his arm as a gift rather than a curse and uses it for good. Not all demonic power is evil, just as not all of humanity is just. There are good humans and bad demons, just as there are bad humans and good demons. Sanctus, a power hungry demonic man wreaks havoc for his own gain, while Nero, a human with the power of a demon puts an end to his evil endeavors.

This all wraps up nicely into a nice little package with themes of morality of demons and humans, true strength, and acceptance. The third is covered more in DMC5 as well, giving Nero an arc spanning multiple games, but it’s pretty good overall. All the other characters are great as well, even if they don’t get any kind of similar arc. Credo is my favorite of them all, it’s a shame he had to die, but he died for a good reason and he was great while he lasted. In terms of pure fun, Dante is at his peak here. In DMC3, he still had to take heavy moments seriously, but here, he’s just having a good time. The opening cutscene before his fight with Agnus is maybe the greatest cutscene in all of gaming. Speaking of, Agnus is fun as well. He isn’t much more than a lackey, but he’s equal parts fun and menacing. Sanctus is the only one I’m not huge on. He serves his purpose well as a man seeking demonic power, disregarding his humanity for pure strength, but as a character, he’s whatever. His thematic presence was great, but nothing else is of note. Oh yeah, Kyrie exists as well. She doesn’t do much, but like Sanctus, she serves her role in the story well and gives Nero a reason to fight.

I’m glad that this game continued to use the music style that DMC3 experimented with. It doesn’t reach the same levels as DMC3, but there are a lot of solid tracks. The Time Has Come, Nero’s battle theme, is pretty good, but I much prefer it as the first half to the main theme: Shall Never Surrender. Credo’s boss theme, Swipe of Sword, isn’t anything special, but is incredibly catchy for some reason, so I end up enjoying it more than I should. Dante’s boss theme, Blackened Angel is cool, but his combat theme is better, taking the lyrics from Blackened Angel and remixing them over a new rendition of Lock and Load, the main DMC1 combat theme. I think it could be better if the lyrics actually had some kind of meaning. The lyrics it has sound cool, don’t get me wrong, but I genuinely don’t see how they relate to Dante.

DMC4 is rough. It has a good core, but almost everything surrounding it is flawed exponentially. The combat is, at its core, amazing, maybe the best in the series, but I can’t in good conscience say that when every other aspect of the gameplay sucks. The level design is bad, rooms are too big, playing through the same levels twice is boring, and the enemies suck to fight. I think it says a lot how, after I beat DMC3, I immediately went back and played it. When I beat DMC4, I did the same thing: play DMC3, because the level design is bearable while also boasting good combat, more bearable enemies, and bosses that are both memorable and challenging. It still has the modern DMC charm with awesome characters and tons of visual flair, which makes it a worthwhile time. It’s not a bad game by any means, but playing a game with this many contradicting ups and downs is aggravating. Doesn’t help that it was released in between the two best games in the series which are remembered fondly and praised by all. Play it once to experience it, and hopefully you’ll find more enjoyment out of it than I did and have the strength to keep playing it.

This Game is much more fun than DMC 1 & 2 (2 obv), and possibly better than 1, Although the story is kind of weird and kind of boring, like I don't give a shit about Nero's girlfriend and nobody lol. And the antagonist is goofy.
The game has improved a lot since we used Dante, In both gameplay and story, Dante's charisma greatly accentuates the bad things, I missed his jokes since DMC 3...
Nero is good, interesting protagonist. Especially the duality he has with his arm and the denial of being a demon. He's not at the level of Dante or Vergil, but he's a good character
This game does not lose the essence of DMC, which I like, although in several scenarios... But its errors are like DMC 3, the level design is somewhat repetitive, the gameplay does not have much variety and Dante's weapons some are simply useless. And one thing that doesn't happen in DMC 3 is the difficulty, the normal difficulty in this game is a joke. But ey, devils never cry.
As soon as possible I will play DMC5, quite hyped to be honest.

The phrase "Jackpot" was missing...

Nothing much to say about this one, Nero is too easy to use and maybe too serious for his own good, and Dante is quite amusing when he hits the scene, but it doesn't feel as good to play as Nero, given that he's not suited for the same copy-pasted stages and enemies. Maybe I don't enjoy the combat as much as other people, but it's short and fun enough. The Play3 era, when they were able to put a giant and clunky boss battle like Sanctus that gets pretty boring when you figure out the gimmick (maybe too many fucking gimmicks and puzzles).