Devil May Cry 3: Dante is not a eunuch!

I have decided to write a little review on this baby as I have just completed it after a year of not playing it, and I should note that it wasn’t the quality of the game, that make me not play it, it was that goddamn World of Warcraft, it came into my life and well, all my "other" gaming has suffered. Anyways, shall we?

Devil May Cry 3 it’s the third in the series, but in name only, this game (at least plot-wise) is a prequel to the first Devil may cry. For those of you who don’t know Devil may cry, it is a 3rd person action game centred around “Dante” a sword and gun wielding half-human, half-Devil. This time round Dante is not the cool smooth anti-hero he was in the other games, he is a mouthy, angry fun-loving teenager, which is a very welcome change from “Devil May Cry 2”, where Dante appeared to have lost all of his quirky-ness and remained a virtually silent protagonist. Dante, to the non-devil-may-cry-aware, may seem a little cheesy, the concept of a demon in a red trenchcoat with a sword or a gun has been seen many times, Vincent Valentine (FF7), Alucard (Hellsing), Vash (Trigun). However Dante stands out from the fray due to his, James bond-esque wit, this along with an epic anime storyline, really gives an immersive outline of the Dante character.

Ok, I hear you, “What is this post? Gay for Dante? Enough of the Dante love, Richie. What about the game?”

The wonder of this game is that Dante is so cool (Gay, Richie, so gay) and a lot of the satisfaction from the game comes from pulling off “stylish” moves. In game you will fight a load of monsters and whilst doing so you get a rating (D, C, B, A, S, SS), dependant on the moves you are pulling off and the combos you are doing, your stylish rating goes up, once you hit SStylish Its really satisfying to keep it going, frantically searching for the nearest enemy to swipe at. Also when fighting there is a huge range of weapons to choose from, these weapons are split into Melee weapons (Swords, Nunchuks etc) and Guns all of which are really different and cool in their own little way. For Instance one of the melee weapons Dante (Oh Dante, sigh) uses is a Guitar/Scythe/Sword which fires bats and electricity, you really have to see it to believe it! And speaking of Stylish, in this incarnation of Devil May Cry Dante uses the circle button to perform “style” moves, these range from extra Sword moves, to creating a duplicate of himself and have 2 Dantes fighting (2 Dantes!) these styles can also be levelled up the more you use them, and as they level up more and more moved become available to you.

The game is split up into 20 Missions, between each mission there are really well acted cutscenes (makes a change!). The mission really break up the game in a logical way, usually in each mission you have to either solve a puzzle and /or kill a boss. And the replayability factor is astounding, once you have beaten a mission of a particular difficulty you can go back at anytime and play it again, either to collect more red orbs to buy new moves/items or power-ups, or to just to improve your rating on that particular mission.

However Devil May Cry is not without it problems: As you progress through the difficulty levels the game does get insanely frustrating at how hard the enemies are (although this is a trait shared with all Devil may cry game, except 2, no-one wants to play that game, more than once, let alone on a harder difficulty level, thus prolonging the agony). The targeting system is a little off, frequently you find Dante sprinting across the room to an enemy you didn’t want to kill at that point. There are also some puzzles that are not that clear, I have found myself running all the way back to the start of the game with put intentionally meaning it. The camera angles, although greatly improved from Devil may cry 2, still at time confuse the hell out of you.


In conclusion, the game is beautiful, it gives you are great sense of satisfaction and achievement, the characters are likable and the storyline is refreshingly good.

I’m not even going top rate it, the game is phenomenal if you own a PS2 then this game is a must buy!

P.S. Pressing L1 turns you into a demon, brilliant!