Review #636: Devil May Cry 5

 Which goes to show that even Capcom's got a soft spot for Donte.

 Alright, so Devil May Cry 4 was pretty good but lacking in content while DmC was an underrated and overhated game because it wasn't more of the same. Capcom listened, and here we've got Devil May Cry 5 which is more of the same. But golly, how GOOD it feels.

 The story is a mess. It is. Our precious boy Nero gets his arm severed by a demon-man in ragged clothes, taking Yamato for himself, but luckily he knw the crazy inventor Nicolette, 'Nico' for short, who builds him a mechanical arm. Plenty of robotic arms actually, and together they set out for vengeance. At the same time, Dante gets hired by series newcomer V to slay this demon-man, named Urizen. As the story moves forward Dante, Nero and V's roads will intertwine, and you'll also get to see Lady's and Trish's behinds, because this is a Japanese game, and dammit, they can't live without fanservice, even if it means ruining their characters. But I digress, the story is probably the weakest it's ever been, but at least it looks great and gives you a bit of eyecandy between stages. On another note, there are plenty of callbacks to DMC 1 and 3, in the form of returning enemies, as well as a few callbacks and references to DmC, which is an incredibly bold move by Capcom to show that DmC was a Devil May Cry game, whether you like it or not. In other words, the script is exactly what you'd expect out of Devil May Cry, nothing more and nothing less. The characters are fun and dumb, and the story is as good an excuse as any to slay demons.

 The game does little to change up the formula, which is perfectly OK since why fix what ain't broken? You go through each mission as any of Dante, Nero or V, trying to defeat enemies with complex combos in order to rack up your style bonus and thus ramping up the red orbs they leave when defeat, said red orbs can then be spent to upgrade your abilities. Hidden throughout missions you may come around 'Hidden Missions', which short challenges rooms, blue orbs to extend your health bar, purple orbs to extend your Devil Trigger gauge(Your super mode) or gold orbs which act as a limited form of continues. Much noise was made about the game's microtransactions, and it is slimy for a full-price game to include them, but truth be told, the game is fairly generous with red orbs, which can also pay the price of a continue, so I never felt as if the game was trying to open up my wallet. Well, mostly, each character's final unlock, the EX Taunt, is worth 3.000.000 red orbs each, which isn't exactly a petty sum.

 Sadly, Devil May Cry 4's weakness carried over to this game: Too many characters and not enough game. Devil May Cry 3 did it best by allowing you to play the entire game as either Dante or Vergil, but in this game all three characters get a piece of the 21 missions. Nero, the main character, gets the first 8 stages and then gets another 2 by the end, a couple of these missions he shares with V and Dante. V gets a measly 6 missions peppered in-between Nero and Dante, two of which he shares with Dante and Nero. Lastly, Dante gets the final eight stages, sharing one of them with V and Nero. That said, there's absolutely no backtracking in this game, to the point that no mission has you covering old ground, making it the most linear DMC game yet, but also meaning that at least the second half of the game isn't made up of recycled, simpler stages, so while I still wish I could have played any mission as any character, thus getting to enjoy a character's particular gameplay and get more content to experiment with, it's not as bad as DMC 4, as a matter of fact, even though V gets so few stages, I still didn't feel shortchanged with him.

 As far as characters go, Nero plays pretty similarly to how he did in DMC 4, he's got his sword, red queen, which he can rev up for extra damage, and, if you time it just as you hit an enemy, get a full charge out of a single L2 press as well as his gun, the blue rose. Since his Devil Bringer got chopped at the start of the game, now he can use any of about 10 different Devil Breakers, mechanical arms with special properties. Each one has different uses, like a multi-hitting whip or one that can be used to zip around by discharging energy. You have to be careful though, getting hit while using a Devil Breaker will cost you the arm, or you can press L1 to destroy it, pushing away nearby enemies. At first I thought that having limited arms was lame, but Nero's stages have a few arms peppered throughout its layout, so very rarely will you be lacking in... arms. Lastly, even if you run out of arms, you can press R1+O to either jank a weak enemy towards Nero or push Nero towards a heavy enemy. Beating the game unlocks a Devil Trigger for Nero, as well as his abilities from DMC 4, so you can mix his new tools with the old. Pretty neat.

 Dante is his usual DMC 3 incarnation with the tweaks from DMC 4, namely, you can switch between his four different styles with the directional pad, each style altering what his circle button does(More melee attacks, more gun attacks, defensive moves or evasive moves). Unlike Nero, Dante unlocks more weapons as he goes along, for a total of 4 melee weapons(6 if you count the extra swords) as well as 4 guns(5 if you count the extra rocket launcher), and he can swap between either in real time, as per usual. This is easily the deepest Dante yet, and he even gets a second Devil Trigger form midway through his campaign.

 Lastly, there's V. He... he is nothing the series has ever had before, in fact, I'd say he is a nod to how in DMC 2 you could go through the entire game with guns, if only for the simple fact that he is a pew-pew kinda guy. Square button summons a devil crow to peter his enemas with energy bullets, while triangle summons a Shadow panther, which you might recognize from Devil May Cry 1, to close in on his enemies and skewer them. His Devil Trigger summons Nightmare, a massive golem that lays waste to anything and everything. That said, he has to give enemies the coup-de-gras, his only offensive move, but it's fairly easy to just zip-in thanks to R1+O's homing properties. While I'm sure V has his depth, and there are plenty of unlockable moves for his familiars, I never upgraded anything besides his Devil Trigger consumption since it's pretty easy to mindlessly press Square and Triangle and just rake in the SSS style points. I wasn't much of a fan of V, I like my DMC characters with swords and guns, so V just didn't do it for me. Not to say that I hated playing as him, because he is something very different from Dante and Nero, just that I wasn't a fan of his style.

 As a whole, Devil May Cry 5 feels like the apex of the formula. You get three very distinct characters with the added benefit of a good amount of unique stages for each. The combat is fast and furious, while there were a few Framerate drops here and there, it was mostly, if not only, during the exploration segments. I really liked Nero, and how fun it was to relearn to take control of your positioning as well as your enemies, pulling and pushing them out of your combos. And then you finish the game and unlock his Buster abilities from DMC4, which you can use alongside his Breakers, turning Nero into a wrecking machine. Dante has so many options it isn't even funny. I was perfectly content switching between Rebellion and his Fist-type weapon, which can switch between boxing and kicking modes, and, as a matter of fact, with proper Style use you can get at least S-ranks without having to switch weapons, in case you think it's much too complicated to learn his different weapons, and then the new twin-sword-saw weapons got introduced, giving me an entirely new slew of attacks to mix things up with. Regardless, there's a ton of possibilities with Dante. And then there's V, with whom you can, um... unlock more combos in case mindlessly mashing buttons isn't doing it for you.

 All in all, Devil May Cry 5 is phenomenal. Like, honestly, the first thing I did after I finished the game.. was replay it, albeit on the lowest difficulty setting, to get a few of the trophies I missed. And it was just as fun as the first time through, and now I'm feeling tempted to go back a third time, but on the difficulty setting I unlocked my first time through. It's THAT fun. Honestly, I think the only DMC I'd put above it would be 3, but only for a slight margin. While I liked Donte and DmC a lot, I'm glad Nero and classic Dante are back.
10 out of 10