real fun as usual, but these levels are killing me. I understand people who want actual levels in these kinda action games lost that fight a long time ago, but can you at least make them look pretty or something? I got a nightcap on and I'm yawning cartoonishly cos I've been staring at this fuck ugly tree for so long. I'm out here snoozing in a game where you can dual wield a motorcycle and give sin scissors a funny little hat

can't help but miss the vestigial resident evil bits and the weird kamiya + mikami -isms that itsuno sands down further and further with each subsequent entry. no doubt this is the best the combat's ever been, but DMC was never only about the combat no matter what weirdos whose favourite fighting game maps are the training stages tell you. I wanna do the Smokin Sexy Stuff and explore a gothic castle or tower or something with a reasonable amount of atmospheric oomph, I don't wanna hang out in butthole corridors for half the game

hard to talk about why the combat rules in a compelling fashion, or even some gross approximation of one. always struggle to put that kinetic verve into words and find a way to emphasize the heft of a blade or the timing of rating increase's sound effect. much like music criticism I think a lot of the text deployed in service of something so fundamentally felt seems ill at odds with the feeling itself. many have sought to obliterate language's stranglehold and biases on human experience and I can't help but think that's the proper lawful good instinct

just rest assured it's best in class

nero's a full character now, dante has never been more dante, and as many growing pains as I had with V I ended up really vibing with him by the end of my Dante Must Die run. don't mistake me for a zato sympathizer but despite his gameplay being comparatively shallow there's a satisfaction to the resource management and spacing elements that I find gratifying. learning the golem rhythm is a lot of fun once you're given good reason to bother and while I never graduated from the school of "make the bird do the held attacks while manually controlling the cat" I like the energy it gives off. plus I looked just like V when I was sixteen so

good game, but I'm gonna have some words for itsuno if he doesn't treat lady better next time

At first I had tried to write something a lot longer and analytical but I ended up scrapping it due to how artificial it sounded. I struggle to put into words how much I truly loved playing this. Just from the first few missions I was extremely hooked and couldn’t put the game down. Normally when I play games now I think about things to inevitably say in my review but while playing this I strangely didn’t. I was just that immersed. It’s been a while since I played a game and wasn’t thinking about “what am I gonna write about this one.” The only thing on my mind for the few days I was playing was just this game. I had such an immensely enjoyable experience that kept a dumb grin on my face the whole time. DMC5 just made me…happy. I know that’s usually how good games make people feel, however in the past few months there hasn’t been a game that made me truly happy in this way. Seeing Dante return looking all stubbly and scraggly while pulling off his sick motorcycle tricks had me honestly laughing. Despite only having started playing this series over a month ago, this game got me in a strangely sentimental mood. This is the ultimate love letter to the series in every way, shape, and form, while still having its own unique identity. You can tell the developers had a good time putting everything together and that’s commendable in its own right. Dante’s meeting with King Cerberus had me in a dopamine induced cluster of emotions; excited to see the return of an iconic boss and overjoyed to see Reuban Langdon recite classic lines as if it were still 2005. Vergil’s dramatic return sequence sent CHILLS down my spine man. Every story moment executes its ideas perfectly. When the credits rolled it had finally hit me, I love this game. The combat was so thoroughly engaging all the way through. My climactic journey with this series ends here, and it couldn’t have ended on a note higher than this. I know this review is literally just me gushing in somewhat of a cliche way but I really don’t care lol. This is how Devil May Cry 5 made me feel.

Jackpot.

DMC sheds its RE-adjacent, castle-creeping, no-rest-for-the-weak skin. In any other franchise, abandoning trunks of its series's aesthetic legacy would feel like a compromise for an increasingly stubborn western-dominated market. But for DMC, this distancing allows for a narrative and mechanical cleansing - if not just to streamline the series' combat into its absolute peak, but to exercise introspection and rebirth, culminating in a truly heartfelt send-off to Dante and Vergil's legacy.

Also you can use the megabuster

Not much I can add that hasn't already been said before.
It's so strange, in the best way, playing a game that is extremely detailed with its characters and environments, yet you're moving the player-character around like a PS2 game. I miss normal human-looking characters being able to leap 20 feet in the air. Speaking of air, keeping enemies in the air felt much easier then it was in DMC III, but I really didn't mind. I was able to play V in a way where I was truly expressing myself with my own playstyle during combat, while in DMC III I was never able to create my own style of combat with how much stiffer and more demanding it is as a game. I know with time I could've play DMC III on... half the level as those insane combo-skill videos, but V got me to that level as soon as the tenth mission. As a result, I've already had the urge to go back to DMC V to try Vergil and the Bloody Palace, which I honestly did not feel the same pull in DMC III when I first finished it.
I do think the harder difficulty unlocked from finishing the game should've been unlocked from the start. Not to say the base difficulty was a complete cake walk, but I would've like a more engaging challenge sooner, even if it wouldn't have been balanced that great for a fresh save file. Though it can get absolutely brutal, DMC III really does push you to your limits that V doesn't on the first playthrough.
I do like how nearly every mission has a boss fight. There are a few repeats, but with how deep the combat depth is, I never minded the opportunity to try different tactics on the bosses I've fought before. Even then, the repeats will often have you facing them as a different character; with addition to the amount of unique bosses across the entire game, this never bothered me.

Should I add more? This has been regarded as one of the best action games by many. I agree. That should be enough to play it. And hey, at least the difficulty won't a turnoff for most.

Cavaliere is best weapon

The Good:
+ Superb gameplay. I dare to say it's one of the best of any action game I've played.
+ Amazing and challenging boss fights.
+ Enemies and bosses have unique mechanics that brings some depth to every fight.
+ Allow for different routes at some points
+ Three unique characters with different play styles
+ Good OST
+ Customization
+ References to previous Devil May Cry
+ Accessibility through providing many Yellow Orbs. Use if you wish.
+ You can control the camera
+ High replay value

The Bad:
- The story is pretty bad. They waste so much time going back to show how things escalated that in the end it goes nowhere. It's also too predictable.
- Characterization doesn't come near DmC 3. Some characters are pretty disposable and doesn't impact the game at all
- Playing V is so safe it gets too easy
- The environments get repetitive
- Inexistent level design. It's too straightforward for its own good: no real puzzles, platforming or anything that could bring more diversity to the table.
- IMO toned down character design
- Repetitive and uninteresting "puzzles". They're too simplistic to their own good.
- You can't choose the character you want to play on every mission
- Strange difficulty spikes

The Ugly:
The story constantly rewinding. Definitely destroyed the pacing and any chance of progression

Few games slap as hard as DMC 5, simple as that. It feels like the logical extreme of the game's core dynamic of styling on your enemies as indulgently as possible, with killing them not being enough, it feels like such a singularly focused experience on trying to make combat be the most fun it could be, it's the culmination of a lot of narrative beats that had been established throughout the series, it's just, so many things. Both for better and for worse, DMC 5 sees so much of the gameplay of past games be refined and polished until it's practically gleaming, streamlining things to the point where there are just huge sections of the game that you feel like you're gliding through while obliterating the enemies that stand in your way while constantly learning the seemingly endless intricacies of the coolest ways to destroy all that stands in your way.

That last point is a bit of a double edged sword however and one that really highlights where my problems with the idea of streamlining being an exclusively positive thing to do in game design come in. On one hand, the game is a very, very focused experience where almost everything about it lends itself to further reinforcing and bringing attention to the combat of the game, but this ends up leading to a lot of the non-combat stuff that still exists to feel pretty undercooked in comparison. The level design took the biggest hit from this, as while yeah, I thought that the level gimmicks of DMC 4 were undeniably largely bad, they also served some purpose of giving a bit of character to each stage, even if I'd have probably preferred them approaching them in a way that didn't feel quiiiite so pace breaking. On the other side of this coin, I just don't like the level design of 5 much, with the majority of stages boiling down to being mostly linear hallways with designated arena locations and occasional tiny diversions made so there would still be somewhere to hide collectibles. It's all serviceable but almost never outright interesting and almost feels like an afterthought.

The atmosphere similarly took a huge hit for me in this one, as while the scenery of the Qliphoth initially is incredible, especially with how grandiose it all can feel, it also doesn't really have the variety or staying power that can carry it through a decent chunk of the game. Everything rapidly begins looking and feeling the game here, and nothing ends up having any real sense of character to it, which is reinforced by the very simplistic level layouts on the whole. The ruined cityscapes fare a bit better just due to a greater sense of variety but there's nothing especially engaging most of the time here either, especially since the enemy encounters at this point are generally far less engaging since it's still ramping up to those more intense points later on.

With all this complaining though, DMC 5 is then lucky that the combat is literally the best I've experienced in a game to the point where it is able to carry everything else on its back. The updates to Nero's moveset from 4 work nicely in further facilitating his ability to endlessly juggle enemies, with the devil breakers especially spicing things up with how they can further add to what you're doing, especially being nice at adding an extra avenue of some great burst damage. While he doesn't have the same seemingly endless movepool that characters like Dante have, the mechanics he does have all fit very neatly together and there's still definitely enough there to make things a lot of fun, along with effectively establishing the basics of combat. Dante is of course where the game shines however, with his varied arsenal of weapons all fulfilling their own niches while also being individually great to use, making them feel better than ever to rapidly switch between. It was always fun beforehand to do this, but I feel that more than ever in 5, the use-cases of each of them feel very intuitive and defined, leading to more situations where it just makes sense to switch through them even when playing in a more casual manner. DMC5 just does an excellent job of making you feel like a total badass even when you're not very good at the game yet, just like the past titles in the series, but the frankly insane variety of moves and techniques you can pull off here makes that slow climb into becoming good at the game feel unmatched in terms of the way it makes you feel like a total god.

The enemy design is also a step up here since it thankfully feels like they were actually designed very nicely with these two characters in mind, without a lot of reliance on character specific mechanics that would create a disconnect when switching between the two of them. There are still definitely annoying enemies as well, anything that teleports a ton being especially frustrating to me due to feeling a bit antithetical to the game's dynamics around style and combos, but there's still nothing that comes close to the lower points in past games either, with nothing to me standing out as outright horrible. That said though, not even the combat is fully safe from issues, most of them revolving around V and the fact that he absolutely sucks to play as to the point where he's the biggest reason why I don't see myself going and giving this game a perfect score. I feel like the mage/summoner archetype isn't the best fit for this type of game and V really proves that to me here. Not only does he feel very imprecise, since you deal all your damage by having your demon pets attack in a way that never quite clicked for me even after a ton of playing as him, but the one potentially interesting dynamic of being able to simultaneously attack while focusing on mobility doesn't ever reach its full potential to me because of his evasive manoeuvres forcing one of your pets to stop attacking, which is especially egregious thanks to the fact that it resets any charge you might have been building to unleash a larger move.

It also doesn't help that most of the enemies don't especially feel good to fight as him, whether it's the teleporting enemies being more frustrating than ever to keep at, big, tanky enemies feeling as if they take lifetimes to kill because of less consistent ways of dishing out huge damage, or even just standard enemies feeling as if all their appeal is lost due to not really having to worry about your own positioning or crowd control too much beyond "make sure to run away from them". It means that not only is he an annoying character to play as since nothing quite feels as if it works as it should, but he's also incredibly boring to play as, since I felt that you were rarely in any actual danger as much as you just took a long time to do anything you wanted. It's especially bad with the boss fights you fight as him almost exclusively being irritating to hit while rarely posing much of a threat to you as long as you focus on dodging whenever possible. The real danger with these, especially the Geryon Knight, is that it feels like you'll die of boredom before being able to get past it, which is especially the case on higher difficulties where even basic enemies can feel like you'll be stuck there fighting them forever.

It's once again just, amazing that despite my issues with this, that the combat is as unbelievably good as it is, not to mention that the high points are unreal. I wholeheartedly adore this game and have played it for an insane amount of time at this point. Any faults it has definitely do annoy or disappoint me, but it's not enough to stop the majority of this game being absolutely peak action. I still do think that it's a case where it would've benefitted from a tiny bit less streamlining with the level design since it can make things feel a bit like a series of enemy encounters and nothing else at times, and V is genuinely awful and gets less fun the more I play as him, but yeah, game is still peak anyway and feels very powerful in the way that it feels like the logical extreme on what was already crazy before. Also playing as Vergil is one of the greatest gaming experiences one could have, it's essential to do this.

How to surpass 11 years’ worth of expectations in one fell swoop. Newcomers to this series are doubtlessly fortunate to not have to go through several of Erikson’s life stages before they can try DMC5 now, but I think it’ll always be harder to appreciate what an achievement this game is if you weren’t subject to the gargantuan wait for it. For this to exist at all is one thing, but to have ended up being the peak of not just its franchise but arguably its genre in so many ways after all that time is something else entirely.

All four of the main characters are drowning in so many unique mechanics that no amount of text really does them justice, but don’t mistake that for bloat or a lack of focus, because it’s anything but. Nero’s new caveman-like attacks and exploding Devil Breakers hones in on his reckless punky attitude and fleshes out his combat options in a way that finally makes him feel like a worthy heir to his uncle, while also helping him step out of his shadow – talk about ludowudo-whatever harmony. Vergil’s revamped Concentration meter, plethora of just frames and seamless weaving in and out of Sin Devil Trigger at no cost if you time it right feels like the fullest realisation yet of the devilishly precise fighting style that originally made him so popular. V’s characterisation as a squishy wizard differentiates him from other action games that have you fiddling about with multiple characters at once. Dante is Dante, no explanation required, but I will say that I hope Quadruple S does for modern action games what instant weapon switching did for them 20 odd years ago – you can’t help but wonder why every game with a ranking system doesn’t actively integrate it into the gameplay itself like this.

All these options wouldn’t mean much if the game around them wasn’t engaging, so it helps that the level design of DMC5 is staggeringly less obnoxious than all of its predecessors. One level might have you in a giant lift that collapses if you don’t kill the enemies on it quickly enough, revealing an alternate path through the level if it falls as opposed to making you start the challenge from scratch. Another presents you with some brief platforming challenges and doors that are about to shut on either end of them, encouraging you to make a quick decision about which way to go but not punishing you too harshly if you decide to take the path of least resistance. One even has a series of optional, demonic skating parks you can make your way through in multiple ways thanks to Nero’s obscene aerial mobility. The interconnected structure of the previous games’ levels has been shed, and yet, the levels have more ways to progress through them than ever; even the obligatory pick-up-this-item-and-put-it-here “puzzles” feel less egregious now that you can usually tackle them in different orders. A superb trade off for the dice boards and rotating towers of this world, to be sure; it's unfortunate that what's so clearly a series best in this regard is commonly written off for no reason other than that some of the levels look vaguely similar if you squint a bit.

This is true of the enemy design, too. Front to back, DMC5 has the most consistently non-annoying enemy roster in the franchise. No clipping through walls, no long periods of invulnerability that can’t be exploited, just every property of the combat system being stretched to the fullest in ways that feel 100% natural. My favourites are the two that get superarmour or teleport away if you launch them, and picking what moves to use against them becomes even more of a brain teaser when they’re accompanied by other types, who are varyingly more susceptible to being stunned or the hidden fear status effect or clashing with their sword or guard breaks or staying in the air or any number of other under-the-hood tools you have to experiment with. Between the campaign, Bloody Palace and remixed enemy placements on higher difficulties, I don’t think there’s any two enemies that aren’t fought together at some point. Not a single ounce of potential is wasted. The most capital G of gamers might feel that enemies could stand to be more aggressive or have more anti-air options to bring your fancy jump cancels to an end, but I don’t care who you are, because you have absolutely been killed by a stray Riot or Judecca at least once.

Similar credit goes to the bosses, among whom there are miraculously no misfires. Gilgamesh might seem to be on the weaker end until you remember that this is the same series in which Arkham, the Saviour, Nightmare 3 and all of DMC2 exist, after which you suddenly realise he’s either inoffensive at worst or actually quite cool. My favourite is Cavaliere, in part because the first and last of these sword clashes sent my dopamine centre soaring to new heights and it’s all downhill for me from here.

He or any other boss in DMC5 would be a standout if you drag and dropped them into most other action games, and the only reason they’re arguably not in DMC5 itself is because they in turn exist alongside Vergil. I used to prefer his DMC3 iteration – he didn’t define an entire archetype of boss fights for no reason – but as I’ve played this more and more, I realise there’s really no comparison between the two unless you put a lot of stock in presentation. There are more ways to attack, defend yourself from, clash or just generally interact with DMC5’s Vergil than in every previous appearance of his combined, down to him responding to your taunts or commenting on your performance. This isn’t to suggest that more is always better, but the key strength of Vergil has always been that he felt almost like fighting another player, and all these layers upon layers of extra mechanics go huge lengths towards simulating that.

The best games tend to be more than the sum of their parts, so it helps that every other aspect of DMC5 is about as strong as how it plays. The art direction is HUGELY undersold, juggling the weird bio-Gothic architecture of the Qliphoth with the most overtly horror enemies since DMC1 and westernised photorealism, marrying it all into a single oddly cohesive package. Bingo Morihashi ᴵ'ᵐ ˢᵒʳʳʸ ᴵ ᵈᶦˢᵖᵃʳᵃᵍᵉᵈ ʸᵒᵘʳ ʷᵒʳᵏ ᶦⁿ ᵃ ʸᵒᵘᵗᵘᵇᵉ ᶜᵒᵐᵐᵉⁿᵗ ˡᶦᵏᵉ ᵗʰʳᵉᵉ ʸᵉᵃʳˢ ᵃᵍᵒ reconciles the series’ trademark themes of family with a metanarrative about leaving red man vs. blue man behind us in ways that cement Nero as just as legendary as either of them. You already know what the soundtrack’s like, but you probably never noticed how underrated Unwavering Bravery is, so listen to that.

As per Dragon’s Dogma 2’s recent announcement, we’re at most a few years away from video games becoming a solved medium, but DMC5 should by no means be seen as just a pit stop on the way there. You can tell Itsuno threatened to quit if Capcom’s higher ups didn’t let him carry out this game exactly the way he wanted, because every last iota of it oozes passion both for the series itself and everyone who's ever worked on it. Dante has a taunt sourced from a Kamiya tweet, and if that isn’t love, what is?

“DMC is back,” and it’s such a satisfying outing that I don’t mind if it never is again.

I don’t want to talk TOO much about the part of Devil May Cry 5 where you PLAY it because, let’s be real here, you know, right? I’m late to this party. We all KNOW that this is simply one of the finest video game action achievements, the culmination of fifteen years of promise since DMC3 set us down this road. One of the few games with a modern AAA level of fidelity that by and large emulates the quick, snappy responsiveness of the PS2 era that grandfathered it. We’re all maybe a little sad to see the puzzle elements fully reduced to an aesthetic touch and the challenge dressing on levels discarded entirely (is this the first DMC without a stage where your health constantly reduces in the main progression path?), but we’re also all well aware that these things along with the discarding of all gimmick enemies betrays an absolute confidence in the core experience, a confidence well-earned. We all know this is Dante’s most perfectly tuned, well-balanced move set, without a chink in its armor; we all know that the addition of devil arms lends a feeling of completeness to Nero that finally makes him feel like he competes with the big boys in potential along with a truly unique layer of strategy that expands upon his already technical skill set; I’m sure you’re all as impressed as I am at how weirdly intuitive V is to play as, a stealth highlight of a campaign that was truly joyful, near frictionless.

Everybody KNOWS this stuff. We’ve all played DMC5, we’ve all talked about it, the game is simply sick as fuck. We all love Pull My Devil Trigger, it’s the best song ever made, this is just true! It’s Just True. So I don’t feel like writing about that stuff any more than I have, other people have surely done it better. I try not to read reviews before I’ve finished writing my own, but I’m sure people have done it better right here on Backloggd. I’d rather talk about the way this series has very organically transitioned from something I laugh along with, that’s maybe a lot smarter about its application of gothic theming than I would have expected, to something that’s emotionally invested me on the level I care about, like, I dunno, Naruto or whatever, to something that I think has, over time, crafted a genuinely touching story of a family wounded by trauma and their ability or inability to overcome a great social and generational violence. I don’t think this has been there the whole time, but by allowing the series’ now-regular main credited writer since DMC3, Bingo Morihashi, a consistent creative voice in the franchise, he’s taken characters who have been portrayed disparately across two decades and used these gaps and these disparities as a tool to demonstrate the ways that time and experience do and don’t change us, especially when we’re molded by intense experiences early in life. I think this has been happening for a long time in this series, but DMC5 gives the context necessary to fully solidify it as a feat of characterization.

I don’t think that either of the twists in this game are particularly shocking if you’re paying attention to anything anyone says or does in DMC4 or this game but I am gonna toss out that there are a couple of big bombs in this game and I’m gonna talk pretty openly about them, and as I’ve mentioned I think the writing in this is pretty fuckin sick so if you care about that, now’s the time to duck out!

Devil May Cry 5 is a game about The Boys. Everybody tends to take their turn in the limelight in this series but as is often the case in this genre of story a lot of the time they just kind of hang out after their story is done? Like, there’s not really a good reason for Trish and Lady to be in DMC4 and 5 from a narrative perspective and they don’t really grow as characters, we’re just happy to see them because they’re Cool, right? Vergil didn’t even get to like, BE in DMC4 he only got to be a bonus character in a RE-RELEASE of it seven years later lmao. DMC5 is unique in the series in that it’s the first time we get a story that gets to focus entirely on characters we already know and whose schtick we’ve already seen and, importantly, whose schticks have not changed in a meaningful way. And this is ultimately the problem, right? The crux of this story, and in some ways, ultimately, the crux of every Devil May Cry story, is that Dante and Vergil refuse to change. They’re unable to do it on their own, and they don’t have anyone willing to force them. But they have to change, or they’re going to die. They’re going to kill EACH OTHER, and Nero is probably going to kill like a million more people, but they’re going to kill each other too, and that’s like, that’s sad, right? It sucks. These are Our Boys. Let’s talk about them.

I’ve alluded earlier and in my DMC4 review that Dante is a character who is something of a chameleon in this series – he wears a lot of different hats. He can kind of be whatever he needs to be, symbolically. A romantic hero, a gothic one, a gay icon, a harlequin. And it works, he’s a complicated guy, aided by the fact that he’s the character who most often straddles the fourth wall, playing most directly to the audience. But no matter what Dante is in a given moment there’s something he always is, unerringly: closed off. Dante’s most consistent trait, more than loving pizza, more than being a loud mouth, more than thinking violence is sexy, is being unwilling to let other people in on his own turmoil. He doesn’t lack for it! When your dad is Cool Satan and your mom dies saving you from demons when you’re only a wee lad, right in front of your eyes, as your house burns around you, surely that would fuck you up. Dante is kind of an asshole but he IS an innately kind person; he’s made it his mission to hunt demons and he does it mostly altruistically (he is clearly not raking in the bucks at any point in the timeline we meet him on) and throughout the series he’s looking out for other people, trying to do right by them even if it’s often in a paternalistic, self-sacrificial way.

But while he’s happy to be there for other people, emotionally and more often physically, he’s loathe to let anyone be there for him. After Vergil rejects his offer of family Dante essentially shuts down and he’s on a downward path for the rest of his life. We see it at the end of the third game when he stoically rejects Lady’s attempt to comfort him in his obvious grief, physically turning away from her to hide the evidence of his tears as he verbally denies their existence; we see it in 1 where he only talks about his feelings for Trish after he thinks she’s dead, and when she’s back at the end he frames all of his tenderness towards her insecurities rather than as a projection of his feelings; 2 is perhaps his most obviously wooden state in all directions and gives him no obvious opportunities for connection; and in 4 he essentially fails to act normal towards Nero until the actual ending, when there are multiple points where large parts of the story could have been entirely averted or assuaged had he just taken a moment to let Nero in. I don’t JUST mean when he’s first meeting Nero and Nero tries to kill him either, I mean once Nero is suspicious of the church and Dante clearly knows what’s going on; just chat him up in the jungle bro! But he can’t, that’s his whole thing. Dante is like 40 years old in DMC4, and he’s had no reason to get better about his hangups and many reasons to get worse since Vergil amplified them twenty years prior. By the time of DMC5 it’s no wonder why he tries to forcibly remove all of his friends from a dangerous scenario even before he realizes how personal the conflict is to him, and why he works so much harder once he does connect the dots – he’s fully given up on trying. And after getting away with having people at arm’s length for so long, why not? It’s going fine. So in 5 he repeatedly tries to psych Nero out of hanging around, eventually starts telling him flat out to leave, and he refuses to talk to Trish about Vergil, again framing it as for her own benefit when she’s wounded as an excuse to avoid his own feelings.

I feel like Dante is largely a pretty classic variation on the post-war Japanese delinquent type of guy who exists explicitly in opposition to the conservative society that he largely was spawned from, or even the post-delinquent kind of scrappy hero you'd see in the post-Nikkatsu studio boom (thinking about early Imamura type protagonists - although Dante's sexuality is more implicit to his being), and oftentimes this character comes with a bleeding heart of gold that may be hidden to varying degrees, to further drive home his separation from the straight lace he opposes; except that Dante clearly sees his vulnerability as a weakness to be hidden, fully erecting his facade, which DMC5 offers the most cracks in. Throughout the game, especially in the last few missions as things become more dire and he’s starting to sweat, you can see Dante’s happy-go-luckiness slip. Not that it’s a mask all the time, but that in these moments he has to work for it. There’s a degree to which he would rather fake his normal personality than deal with his shit. I don’t think Dante’s totally putting it on or anything, like I think when Vergil is like “if I 1v1 nero and win it’s like I beat you okay” and Dante replies jokingly to it I think that’s a genuine response to the absolutely unhinged thing Vergil said, but I also think it’s an effort to enact a Nothing Is Wrong Tee Hee personality All The Time, and he loses it a lot at the end of the game.

Vergil, then, as ever, is Dante’s opposite. He didn’t get those last few moments of parental love before their mom died, because she died looking for him after she sheltered Dante, so the lesson Vergil took away from that night was that the only person he can ever rely on is himself, and he needs to become strong enough that no one can hurt him ever, ever again. That is, of course, a starting point, and a driving element of his personality that we were missing before DMC5 shows us those moments in detail. Crystallizing the moment of trauma also crystallizes these two as people rather than fun but shallow shonen protagonists. Vergil may ultimately be an enormous prick with no empathy but he’s not like that for no reason now and I do think that’s worth something.

So where Dante is a red-blooded rebellious asshole Vergil is prim and proper, clothes suggesting angular lines and rigid posture. His speech is formal, his sword is more classically elegant, an ornate katana vs. Dante’s gaudy hot topic ornament broadsword. He evokes classical samurai imagery in more than his sword – it’s in his cruel demeanor, his manufactured regality, the way that much of this is a facade, and the way he considers power a justification in itself. The strong dominate the weak – he has experienced this firsthand, as the weak, as a boy – and so in pursuit of becoming the strong, nothing is off the table, and more than once he does some intense mass murder to get to where he needs to be. He essentially has the same image of the ideal man in his head that modern Japanese fascists do but he at least has the justification of terrible childhood trauma driving his insecurities.

The thing about Dante and Vergil though isn’t just that they’re opposites - they’re also twins. They perceive themselves to have the same problem: they both think that to be vulnerable is their ultimate weakness, and to cope with that they’re both performing idealized images of masculinity, they just have different ideas of what that looks like. Dante’s is obviously less harmful to the world at large because he hasn’t murdered anyone over it and he never voted for Shinzo Abe, but he’s doing the same fundamental thing Vergil is doing in his own way. And sure, Dante is in a healthier place overall; he has friends who love him and whom he loves, and I think it’s telling that when he commits symbolic seppuku among their mother’s ashes he is empowered by absorbing the last earthly relic of their father where Vergil does the same thing and it intentionally separates all of his empathy into a separate guy while he becomes a buff, shitty monster dude. But at the same time, when we get like 90% of the way to a resolution and Vergil is back to himself and Dante is there with him for the first time as real equals in over twenty years, Dante does not recreate the events of DMC3. He doesn’t reach out to Vergil. He doesn’t even try to talk him down this time. He just wants to kill him and be done with it, or die. He’s been burned too many times. He simply can’t be that guy again.

It would be the setup for a genuine tragedy, two men trapped in a cycle of violence that reaches back (and as we will soon see, now forward as well) generations and leads them to destroy their family. It would be if not for the fact that there is a Third Boy at play. We gotta talk about Nero.

One of the most charming things about Nero is that in a series where everybody else is acting Like That all the time he is basically just a normal guy? Like yes he used to have a fucked up demon arm and yes he can rev his sword like a motorcycle but like, all this man wants to do in the world is hang out with his fuckin girlfriend bro. He’s just a nice little grumpy guy. He kind of tries to do banter with guys he fights but he’s not very good at it, and it’s VERY easy to rile him up. Really wears his heart on his sleeve. He’s pouty. I love this guy dude, I just want to make him an ice cream cone with like three scoops on it. I wanna put him in a little glass jar and shake it up. Great guy, Nero.

But he’s got his own shit, right! He was adopted by some important people in the cult church from DMC4, I forget if they had a name, it’s not important, kind of raised by his girlfriend’s brother, whom he will later kill in self-defense (5 brings this up in a pivotal moment as something that motivates Nero in the present, which I appreciate), and he has that fucked up demon arm, which he feels compelled to hide for his whole life because he assumes his church will not be cool about it, unaware that they are actually a demon cult. So when things do start popping off and the only institution that he’s known a tenuous sort of safety and family with turns on him and endangers his found family in his girlfriend Kyrie, it’s fucked up! Gets him all mad, gets him all sad! But Nero doesn’t bottle shit, he doesn’t hide it. Nero might give himself more responsibility than he’s liable for but he’s a guy who understands the value of what he’s got and sings about it loudly; we don’t know as much about his circumstances as we do Dante and Virgil’s so it’s hard to know for sure what his childhood was like or how he feels about it, but it seems that his support network and his experiences have given him perspective and the ability to deal with his feelings in a healthy way, even as he’s really put through the ringer.

So when he finds out that Vergil is his dad and everyone knew this but him he’s pissed, because Vergil DID cut off his arm and murder like a million people lol, but when he finds out that this ends in Dante and Vergil killing each other he’s confused, because Nero is a normal guy and this doesn’t make any sense from the outside. You get the vibe that Nero has always wanted a family, a place to unconditionally, belong, and now that he finds out he has one everybody’s just acting like it’s an inevitability that it has to destroy itself, and that’s fundamentally unacceptable to him. In a series where I think every single game is about people somehow killing people they consider family (except maybe 2? I don’t remember if that guy was Lucia’s dad I think he wasn’t), Nero, affirmed by a conversation with his found family in Kyrie insists that this cannot be the way. In a series where people hold their shit inside, where everyone is constantly posturing like sick badasses, Nero spends an entire boss fight yelling as his dad to knock it the fuck off and act like an adult. All it took was someone without context, with eyes unclouded by a lifetime of participation in the cycle they had created, to fight for the family instead of against it. This also activates his devil trigger for the first time in a direct inversion of how that happened for Dante in 3 – a powerful protective, loving impulse rather than the urges of despair.

And it works, mostly. Things are not fully repaired, and Dante and Vergil are not new men overnight, but they do work together to stop the apocalypse Vergil had triggered, and they do consign themselves to an indefinite co-solitude in hell where they can duel each other in a friendlier way than they have in the past, because on one hand this is truly the only way they know how to communicate and on the other, as half-demons it’s demonstrated throughout the series that violence is a form of positive communication for them. This is good, I think, to demonstrate that people so stuck in their ways can’t just fix their shit in one conversation, in one act. But Dante and possibly Vergil both wanted this, and they’re happy to have it.

This is what makes DMC5 so good; Morihashi has taken all of these disparate threads from twenty years of games, each of them with very different stories and very different ideas, and builds upon each of them to create a work that is thematically satisfying and narratively conclusive for characters who didn’t necessarily have distinct narrative arcs before this. I love these characters, they’re Cool Dudes and now they’re also compelling characters, more after this than ever before. I don’t know if this is the end of Devil May Cry but I think it very well could serve as one. I hope that’s not the case, though. Not only do I think it would simply be criminal to leave the world wanting another action game this fuuuuucking sick, but they keep proving there’s always more to mine from these characters and their world. I think it would be a shame not to take another shot at it.

Se existisse um paraíso para todos aqueles que amam hack and slash, ironicamente encontrariam seu Éden enquanto fazem demônios chorarem ao serem trucidados.

Devil May Cry 5 não só encerra com maestria uma franquia já consolidada há muitos anos, mediante a grandes acertos e jogos que sequer merecem ser citados, mas também define o gênero em que está inserido, se firmando como seu suprassumo.

Absolutamente tudo beira a insanidade. O grau estupidamente elevado de estilo em cada ação e cenas extremamente exageradas, mas charmosas, a variedade bizarra de jogabilidade dentre todos os personagens jogáveis, além da pornográfica trilha sonora que te mantém dopado de adrenalina quanto maior a fluidez dos seus combos.

Devil May Cry 5 é insano.

Tanto fãs de longa data quanto visitantes de primeira viagem irão se sentir abraçados.

Além de resgatar e manter todos os pontos mais interessantes e memoráveis espalhados por toda a franquia, as novas armas e formas de se jogar agregam muito valor ao conjunto, recompensando todos os tipos de jogadores.

A vontade quase que instantânea após os créditos finais de querer rejogar todas as missões novamente é real, e é um perigo.

Revisitar esse jogo constantemente é um evento canônico para todos que o amam, e claro, o farei sempre que eu sentir falta de toda essa insanidade.

The PS2 era of gaming was the perfect balance between games made as works of art and ideas first and the money and budgets being small enough to not be frowned upon by suits if anything deviated from the video game equivalent of Oscar baits but high enough so the potentiel of these ideas could be realized and not be held back by limited technology

This game is exactly that but released in 2019. Everything oozes soul and personality but with the polish of 11 years of game design and graphical advancement since a good but flawed DMC4. It's everything me pre-2019 would've asked for DMC5 and more.

Iniciante na série, sem medo de dizer, Devil May Cry 5 é o melhor hack and slash que já joguei.

Sua variação de gameplay e cenários são muito boas, a trilha sonora desse jogo é perfeita (DEVIL TRIGGERRRR) e a história boa de se acompanhar.

Não gostei muito das partes de gameplay com o V, de início ele não tem tanta emoção, porém é o personagem mais fácil de combar. Mas a partir da 3° fase com ele já tendo dado um belo upgrade em suas habilidades, fica bem mais gostoso de se jogar.

10/10

Sem palavras pra descrever esse jogo, o maior sentimento a expressar é a felicidade que ele me deu do início ao fim. Tudo nele me fez querer bater palmas, mas sua trilha sonora é bizarramente absurda, todo boss, fase, personagem vai ter uma música e seu sistema de style rank é notável. Quanto mais perto você chega de alcançar o SSS o refrão da música toca fazendo com que você se sinta a pessoa mais foda do universo.
Os personagens são super lindos e carismáticos, amei todos.
Jogar de V acrescenta uma nova camada de estratégia ao jogo, que inclusive foi de longe a minha gameplay e personagem favorito.
Comecei a jogar essa franquia um pouco desorganizada, mas depois de desfrutar do 4 e do 5 pretendo me comprometer com os restantes futuramente♡
Pretendo fazer isso o quanto antes pois estou me sentindo meio viúva sem os meus caras gostosos e fodoes com espadas e armas sinistras.

Really fun. Like I know I say that a lot but this time I mean it. The combat system is fluid and exciting, each character has great levels of depth to them. Nero returns from DMC 4, with his Devil Breaker system being his claim to fame (along with his exceed and his charged Blue Rose gauges). The DB systeem is incredibly fun, with a whole range of A R M S for you to play around with. My personal favorite is Gerbera but that's probably because mobility is my favorite thing in any action game - I practically never blew up any of my A R M S except for when I was grabbed by da enemy. Exceed is very fun, especially when it's fully upgraded, and so are his charge shots. The grappling hook is also an insane addition - it's insanely fun to extend combos using it and is great for his mobility.

Of course I love Nero, but Dante is where I had the most fun in this. His styles are back and they're also expanded upon really well. For most of DMC 3 I ended up using Trickster exclusively (but I wasn't playing the Switch version so welp) but this time around thanks to the D-pad I could switch them around on the fly....yay (I briefly touched DMC 4 but for the lack of knowledge I'll avoid talking about how it changes from there to here). Anyways his new weapons are incredible as well. Motorcycle is veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeery fun (I'll stop soon I promise). Cerberus is back and with even more depth (yay) and Balrog (actually Beowulf) is back but with even more depth (double yay).

V is new here, and I'll be honest, I didn't find him super fun. Like, he was still fun to use, but Nero and Dante are still much more fun. I thought his combat had way less depth than either Nero or Dante, and it got repetitive pretty quick. Teleporting to enemies and smacking them with your stick is still fun tho and he doesn't detract from the game too much as he's still fun at the end of the day and doesn't show up too frequently.

The stages are no slouch either, with them containing loads of depth, and it might be me, but the secret missions are really fucking hard to find. Like, I only found 2 (but maybe I wasn't looking too hard). How the game handles items is pretty cool as well - I didn't find the game to be really difficult - I played on Human mode and only died once, on the Vergil fight. The soundtrack is also great (but not as good as DMC 3's), although unfortunately the only tracks that really stuck out to me were Devil Trigger and Bury The Light.

The only real detractor for me was the story. It didn’t jive with me too much but it was still enjoyable for the most part - I thought the ending was kind of rushed but at the end of the day DMC is a game where the gameplay matters much more than the story (and the gameplay is really, REALLY fun) so all is well.

At the end of the day, it's still some of the most fun I've ever had with a game. Go play this shit!

EVERY MORNING I WAKE UP AND OPEN PALM SLAM A BLURAY INTO THE SLOT. ITS DEVIL MAY CRY 5 AND RIGHT THEN AND THERE I START DOING THE MOVES ALONGSIDE WITH THE MAIN CHARACTERS, DANTE NERO AND V. I DO EVERY MOVE AND I DO EVERY MOVE HARD. MAKIN WHOOSHING SOUNDS WHEN I SLAM DOWN SOME DEMON BASTARDS OR EVEN WHEN I MESS UP TECHNIQUE. NOT MANY CAN SAY THEY ESCAPED THE CITY MOST DANGEROUS QUIPHLOT. I CAN. I SAY IT AND I SAY IT OUTLOUD EVERYDAY TO PEOPLE IN MY COLLEGE CLASS AND ALL THEY DO IS PROVE PEOPLE IN COLLEGE CLASS CAN STILL BE IMMATURE JEKRS. AND IVE LEARNED ALL THE LINES AND IVE LEARNED HOW TO MAKE MYSELF AND MY APARTMENT LESS LONELY BY SHOUTING EM ALL. 2 HOURS INCLUDING WIND DOWN EVERY MORNIng