Goes hard as stone, godDAMN. The combat's obviously the star of the show here, expanding on and improving the original DMC's philosophy of elegance and simplicity the same year that 3 would take the DMC series more into the "fighting game training room" simulator (also good). The violence here is balletic and beautiful, more like a mid 70s Shaw Brothers film than the direct anime influences that usually lead the character action genre, paced as a dance between roughly equal opponents. The weapons edge more towards situational than universal, but it doesn't stray into the lock and key territory some more RPG focused stuff does. I do still think the boss fights are a kind of weak link, none are BAD (cept maybe Emperor), but few reach the heights of Doku and Murai. I respect the restraint to lock so many enemies behind higher difficulties, but I might have appreciated a few more standard goons instead of the repeated Shadow fiends for a lot of the latter two thirds of the game. I will beat this on Hard and try Very Hard, but I'm slightly offput from doing it immediately as the lack of NG+ does make it a smidge more tedious than it could be

More subtly impressive is the commitment this game has to atmosphere. The flowing world of the Hayabusa village and Tairon give you time to bask in its history and structure, giving this a very adventuresome quality that gives great balance to the white knuckle action. The box in the void level vibe works for latter era Bayo and DMC but it's impressive to see here that nothing was compromised on a mechanical level while still maintaining this small pseudo open world.