Devil May Cry 3 Reviews
By D. Riley
Posted March 29, 2005

This may surprise you, but I really like Devil May Cry. Judging by how many times I've referenced it, I might just like it a little too much.

Real Demon Hunters don't wear shirts.

As any fan knows, the second of the series is so foetid an abortion of life that it's best not mentioned in polite conversation. Thus, Devil May Cry 3 was to be the redeemer. It's not in the scope of my abilities to know whether or not the team that worked on Devil May Cry 3 was the original team, but I do know that they aren't the useless clumps of fat and hair that gave us Dante's sophomore effort.

Devil May Cry presents a unique conundrum to me, I'm afraid. It separates me into two Daves. Bad Dave is intrigued by the idea of "stylish hardcore action" and a main character that's a total asshole. Good Dave gets pissed off because he keeps dying at the boss of level 5 and breaks all my controllers and then I have to blame my roommate and act like it was he that did the dirty deed whilst intoxicated.

So, you're thinking, maybe their roles should be reversed? Not so, good reader! I call him good because it is he that keeps me on the straight and narrow. Devil May Cry was hard, Devil May Cry 3 is harder, but that is not necessarily a good thing. The game is so convinced that it has to be the most impossible thing to hit the streets, but doesn't seem to know exactly how it should go about doing this.

Like a blind, retarded kid, it stumbles in the dark, hoping to get a fun gaming experience out. But they don't know how! The game starts throwing out cheap bosses like they were going out of style. Even the "easy" bosses are pains in the ass. Only one in five levels doesn't end in a boss fight. The creative staff has a bigger boner for giant monsters than is feasible for a person born after 500 BC. Doubly irritating is that the actual levels are so easy it's embarrassing. Barring the one mission that forces you to hold an item that slowly kills you I didn't die more than a handful of times against anything without a life bar. Those rare instances I was probably distracted thinking about sandwiches. Sandwiches are delicious.

There is nothing difficult about the standard grunts of the game. Barring a few late game introductions, every monster is a grim reaper variant with one attack. They swing their scythe at you, or they teleport and swing their scythe at you, or they dash forward and swing their scythe at you. Later game monsters like the giant spider, a Capcom staple, have MAYBE three attacks. People will try to fool you and say, for example, that them shooting their web from the wall instead of the ground is totally a different attack, but don't let their guilesome words entrap you. One attack or five, jumping backwards negates every danger in this game that isn't a fifty feet tall glowing blob. Good Dave enjoys wading through hordes of faceless monsters, but Bad Dave understands that this is pointless busy work and a waste of time.

The game's predecessor, as I so often like to harp about, contained many enemies with upwards of ten attacks. Even the Marionettes, the game's grunts, had the ability to stab, twirl, jump on your back, throw their weapons. They even had a paralyzing scream! And this is just the first enemy you fight! The enemies in the original game were actually hard, if you didn't neuter them by spamming the Grenade Launcher. The monsters here are just faceless cannon fodder that you'd see in any other action game. In Devil May Cry 3, they just take more hits to kill.

Man bras, however, are just fine.

Conversely, Dante has upped his arsenal significantly. Now he carries five weapons instead of Devil May Cry's "piddly" two. This is a mixed blessing. In general, the moves for these weapons are a bit more varied, but the stuff you're doing with them are so boring it doesn't matter. Now I get to kill five more purple grim reapers, but this time I'm doing it with ice nunchucks! Bad Dave likes the ability to switch weapons on the fly to continue your combo, but Good Dave hates how equally as often it's just a sham manuver they force you to do to build up style points. I fail to see how having the option of an aerial attack that brings you to the ground immediately and one that does it slightly less immediately makes this game a work of strategic genius. The styles are pretty original, but I quickly came to the realization that without using the Swordmaster style, which adds moves to all your melee weapons, I wasn't going to have any fun with the game. Without Swordmaster, some weapons have an amazing ceiling of as many as TWO MOVES. For my money, anyone who's using points like these to defend the game is sailing a sinking ship.

And there are people that will do so. Every game has its fans, but Devil May Cry 3's seem outrageously rabid. Maybe it's the mentality of the GameFAQs forum that I'm so fond of trolling, but even the slightest bit of dissent about the game gets you labeled a pariah by the hardcore clique. A simple comment about the original game being better spawns 85 page flame wars. Tell me what's so thick and in depth about a game where the best strategy for more than ONE of the bosses is "Spam Revolver and hope you win." Good call. I'm convinced! It irritates me even further that Devil Trigger, Dante's ability to turn into a demon and the FREAKING HOOK FOR THIS SERIES, is basically useless in this game. Instead of opening a bevy of powers to you it now just makes you fast and slightly stronger (maybe). You spend nearly half the game without it and when you finally do acquire the thing you'll probably forget you even got it at all.

The story they praise so highly isn't really worth its salt either. The story is certainly more present than in Devil May Cry, but it's no less boring. Meandering cutscenes about evil demons and betrayed love and pug ugly female bounty hunters permeate the beginning and end of every mission. There's something undeniably cool about a guy strutting around in regal dress with a katana, though he's missing a monocle, but it doesn't end up being enough to curry favor with me. At least in Devil May Cry less cutscenes meant less times I had to hit the Start button before I could get back to beating up lizards made out of ice. You must to know your story is crap, does there have to be so much of it? The script is stuffed to the gills with a 20 year old Dante making an ass of himself. Good Dave got a brief smile when our brash main character tries to act his coolest and hit a tune on the jukebox before a fight starts. But the jukebox doesn't work! Hilarity ensues. Most of it, though, is crap that infuriates Bad Dave, like Dante riding around on a missile going "Wooohoooo!"

Even the powerful voice direction of Mary Elizabeth McGlynn (née Melissa Williamson, who I am totally in love with and want to marry forever because she sang songs in Silent Hill 3) couldn't save it. It's a heap of garbage so high your neighbors will smell it. Dante is voiced well enough, but his twin brother Vergil suffers from a chronically stuffed nose. The line "And now… my soul is staying… it WANTS to STOP you" is not only terrible, but so poorly acted that I had to turn my stereo down. My windows were open! People could hear!

A slightly imperfect face = videogame ugly

Devil May Cry 3 is a fun game that eventually drags you down with its repetitive nature. Once you find a combo that can bring you up to the maximum stylish rank there's no reason to ever use anything else, so the casual player will shuck variety right out the window (if they even bother trying to get stylish ranks at all). The soundtrack is akin to vomit spewed out by Satan himself, fight music containing lines like "Feel free to die when you've had enough" makes both Good AND Bad Dave want to knock someone down and just start hitting them. The game has no shortage of cool gimmicks, like a big brawl during the end credits that gives you the chance to unlock an extra ending, but more often than not it falls flat on its face. I'm not a hard sell when demon hunting is involved, but whether you're fighting a giant dog or "sexy" (and totally not cliché!) succubus the game just feels like more of the same.

Good Dave loved the game because it was hard. Bad Dave hated it because when it was hard, it wasn't really hard, but cheap. Both Daves, who have since cohered back into a singular whole, think that the game would be worthy enough on its own, is leaps and bounds better than Devil May Cry 2, but doesn't live up to the high precedent set by the initial outing of the series. Both Daves get a little pissy when they have to play the same boring level nine or ten times just to die on a cheap boss. Finally, both Daves think they should go back to the closer camera angles, so the monsters aren't all tiny. There are intermittent moments of fun throughout the game, but I don't feel like contributing 3 weeks of my life to it worked out for me in the long run.

And, seriously Capcom, does every game you put out need to involve a Boss Rush? This is not Mega Man.

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