Devil May Cry 3: Dante’s Awakening HD — It’s Got Style

I have played through Devil May Cry 3 way too many times.

And this dawned on me upon going through it again in the Devil May Cry HD Collection. It was so bad that, I could recite lines spoken in its cutscenes with relative ease (in perfect pitch, even!). It helps that the game’s tone is a return to the delightful cheesiness the first game reveled in, something welcome after the boringly serious turn in Devil May Cry 2. Though the second game’s tone was still corny in the sense that it wasn’t a good story, but it wasn’t the endearing kind of corny we came to like in the other games in the franchise.

The stunning achievement in DMC3 is that it involves the input of most of the same staff involved with the second game. Rumor has it that director Hideaki Itsuno joined DMC2’s staff late, and didn’t have enough time to salvage what the team had produced so far. And that’s despite Hideki Kamiya’s team from the first game not being involved with it — though they might have given them some advice, they were knee-deep in Okami’s development at Clover Studios then. They showed what they could do after studying what made the first game resonate with everyone who played it. In comparing the two, it feels like the reason why the second game was included on the disc was to make the third game look that much better in comparison.

DMC3 is an origin story that shows how Dante became the person he was in the first game — and maybe the second, though Capcom goes out of their way to ignore it, for good reason. This means he’s a juvenile here, making it a good way for the developers to portray him without his devil trigger capabilities and weapons from the previous games so the player feel overpowered at the start. But that doesn’t prevent him from performing techniques in the cutscenes that you can’t do yourself. The antagonist of the game is his brother, Vergil, who intends to break the seal on the demon world imposed by their father, Sparda.

The mere appearance of his brother creates incongruousness with Devil May Cry’s plot, something far more noticeable upon playing the games right behind each other. The first game says Dante lost his mother and brother to war, which this game proves isn’t true. Not to mention the character of “Lady” is mysteriously and entirely absent from that game despite being quite prominent here. Plot isn’t important in these games, of course, but consistency is always a welcome trait.

But we can let the development team’s decision slide here. They went as far as retconning certain events of the first game just to feature Vergil as the villain in DMC3. And it was a good decision considering how the team’s story writers developed him, and the feeling of coolness he exudes — another important trait in a game like this. He’s the most popular villain in the franchise for good reason.

The biggest contributor to DMC3’s replay value is the sheer number of options Dante has at his disposal. You can choose from one of four styles at a time, each of which cater to different gameplay styles. The Trickster style is aimed at anyone who favors dodging attacks, especially if the one present in the game (lifted from DMC1) isn’t enough. That style’s dodge travels further, but leaves Dante more vulnerable because it takes him longer to recover. The Swordmaster style is for anyone who favors more options for melee attacks, while Gunslinger gives Dante more long-range options. The potential in both of the aforementioned styles open up as you acquire more weapons. The final initially available style is Royal Guard, for anyone who wanted to have defensive and parrying options in a DMC game. It’s also incredibly timing-dependent, making it one of the hardest styles to master.

Again, those are just the “initially available” styles. Dante acquires two more during the game, both of which are very different from the above ones. Tinkering around with every style to find out which works best for you, along with finding out what weapons work best with them, is one of the most appealing aspects of the game. You’ll have to play through a sizable number of missions to level up styles, too, which will unlock even more options. This is the draw that makes the game very replayable. It’s also part of what made Devil May Cry 4 such a step down, due to the lack of options.

My personal experiment with this DMC3 playthrough was to see how different my play style would be in the interim between my last playthrough and now. It took a little while to readjust to the game’s difficulty, at least on “Normal” difficulty; this is a game pulls no punches, something made immediately noticeable upon reaching the first real boss: Cerberus. Fortunately, this was the first game in the series to allow for replaying previous missions, which made the readjustment process a little easier. Playing this game immediately after DMC2 also ended up making the readjustment process harder, since that game was mostly effortless.

I went with the Trickster style in my first playthrough back in 2005, but switched to Swordmaster after I realized I’d rather have more melee options. That also makes it easier to raise the combo meter. Unfortunately, switching meant I had to start my progress over, since you can’t equip two styles at one time. There aren’t enough buttons on the pad for that.

After how nice the HD facelift made DMC1 and 2 look, the third game naturally follows in its footsteps. And like those titles, you can really tell the difference between in-game cutscenes and an FMV. DMC3’s FMV scenes are bizarrely stretched for this version, a stark contrast to the first (which left them entirely in 4:3) and the second game’s (which take up the full 16:9 screen); this means the worst game fared the best in this department. It also doesn’t benefit from an HD remaster as much as the first game because its art direction isn’t quite as strong as that one’s, but it looks better than the second game.

Nevertheless, having one of the finest action games to release on the last generation of consoles in HD is enough to satisfy fans, especially anyone who’s still feeling bummed after laying eyes on Ninja Theory’s reboot: DmC: Devil May Cry. It’s well worth a replay in HD if you have fond memories of the game. Or seven.