I don’t normally spend as much time pondering on how I feel about a game and what I should rate it. Video games are a unique medium. We form much stronger connections to them because they’re interactive and make us an active part of the experience. Then memories of those experiences last for decades to come. I still don’t know what it feels like to die as a gamer, but I’ve been close to death, and video games were probably the most prominent thing on my mind. They say life flashes before your eyes before you die, and for us, gamers, video games are a major part of life.

I played Devil May Cry 3 on PC in 2006. I was 12 or 13, probably both, as it took me months to beat the game. Wasn’t used to completing them and would normally abandon a game after a few hours, but this one kept calling me back to it. I became invested in the story, and its world became as tangible to me as the real world, perhaps even more so. I began to learn its patterns, traversing it back and forth. In at least one of the later missions you can actually walk all the way back to the beginning and see the location change. This world wasn’t static, it was changing with time. Events of the game reflecting on it, reshaping it.

The characters I’d grown attached to were evolving as well. Worldviews changing, relationships developing, family ties breaking up and reconnecting. I think it was the first game that genuinely brought me to tears. I was changed by the experience. I still didn’t understand much about art, but in that moment I knew that video games weren’t just entertainment, but rather something that could elicit profound transformative experiences.

Of course later I played the other games in the series and became a fan. In 2007-08 I eagerly anticipated a new chapter in the story. Bought magazines that featured articles on DMC4 and eventually one that featured a demo. When I finally laid my hands on the full game, I was ecstatic and loved every minute of it.

This is my life now. These are memories I’m gonna be taking to my grave. I’m not gonna continue this story with how I felt about DmC and the announcement of DMC5 and my subsequent inability to play it for several years, cause the point of this is not to retell my biography, but rather to provide a context through which I’m judging this particular game, DMC5.

It’s easy to say, “oh, you had expectations that the game couldn’t possibly live up to,” but that’s not really true. My love for the series is not based in rationality, which is why I use the word “love.” I embrace it for what it is with all its flaws. So, jumping into DMC5 at this point I was inclined to love it too.

My first experiences were amazing.

Gameplay-wise this is probably the best Devil May Cry game ever made. It takes all the best ideas from every previous game, puts them together, and throws in a few new ideas that surprisingly only improve the already near-perfect formula.

Nero’s Devil Breaker abilities allow him to not only retain his Devil Bringer powers from DMC4, but also add variability and dynamism to the gameplay, forcing the player to adapt to changing mechanical variations on the fly.

Dante was already an absolute beast in DMC4, but the revised Rebellion sword and the new super-powered Devil Trigger make him near-godlike. Though I do wish this new DT worked more like the Majin form in DMC2, where it activated while you’re low on health, adding an element of calculated risk to it.

V’s playstyle is probably the most accessible and button-mashy, but it still has its own degree of nuance, and would probably be more challenging on higher difficulties, due to his inability to protect himself in melee combat. It’s something new for the series, and I welcome the variety it adds.

The biggest addition here though is the new camera system. While it does push the game further away from its survival horror roots and make the visuals less painterly, it provides more immersion and opens the game up for a more precision-based platforming and a more complex level geometry.

Speaking of levels, they now have branching paths, adding even more replayability to a series known for having multiple characters, unlockables, secrets, and upgrades, making for exciting ‘new game+’ playthroughs.

While playing through the main campaign, I kept running into old enemies, weapons, and various other references to the previous games, which served as major nostalgia bombs. I had an absolute blast revisiting old characters and familiar combat scenarios. Then of course there’s the desolate family mansion, the very existence of which, as a location you get to walk into, carried a lot of sentimental weight. Its placement within a ruined world seemed fitting.

Ruins and dilapidation are a major theme in the first half of the game. When I saw the trailers and other promotional materials, I was worried the game would end up looking nothing like the previous entries, abandoning the trademark gothic aesthetic in favor of a more alien and fleshy look that would fit better in a Resident Evil game. But initially I was somewhat relieved to see that my worries were unfounded. You do indeed get to visit a variety of gothic-looking locations, and now see them from a new, more immersive angle with a new camera system and more complex level design. This is mixed with a variety of more modern-looking environments that still gave me a sense of melancholy, as they reminded me of my childhood roaming post-Soviet abandoned structures.

Although I was a bit saddened that you don’t get to interact with the world as much as you did in the older games, you do still get to explore it quite a bit and take in the atmosphere.

That being said, most of the second half of the game does indeed take place in a one giant pile of flesh. The artists did their best to add variety to it, but it still gives me a lingering feeling like I’m not in the Devil May Cry world anymore.

To be fair, there were fleshy locations in every previous game, but they were much shorter and in some cases more surreal and hellish-looking.

I’m not gonna comment much on the music, as I don’t really know much about the subgenres of metal. I think there’s considerably more industrial and nu metal here than in the previous games, but I might be way off. Regardless, I did enjoy it for the most part, maybe even more than the previous games. There was a bit of brostep there, but it was used very sparingly, so it doesn’t become an issue like in the reboot.

Well, now that I’ve addressed almost every aspect of the game to the degree that I needed to, I want to talk about the story, which I find to be probably the most important aspect of this game, as it was supposed to be the missing link between DMC4 and DMC2. A game that would fill in all the blanks (which the series had a lot of) in the DMC lore and deliver resolutions to unresolved storylines.

[SPOILERS AHEAD]

From the start we're introduced to a non-linear narrative, a tool very effectively utilized by DMC5 to tell the same story from multiple angles and give the players a chance to play as each of the three main characters.

There is a sense of urgency that permeates the entire game. Characters are addressing the devastation and immediate threats while moving towards a larger goal: the confrontation with Urizen. It’s a very functional storytelling, rather minimal on purpose throughout its majority, focusing more on reinforcing character relationships and moving the story forward. With this approach it's only natural to expect that there will be a lot of revelations towards the end. It feels like a buildup towards something major.

At some point we find out that Urizen is Vergil, and V is also Vergil, and Nero is Vergil's son. Then we fight Vergil, and... that's it?

Wait a minute, where are all the answers? Why is Vergil alive? How did he escape Mundus' realm? Why has he reverted back to his villainous nature after his redemption arc in DMC3? What happened to Dante that made him so gloomy in DMC2? Who is Nero's mother? How did Vergil, with his utter hatred towards humans, made love to (or raped) a human female? Furthermore, are we not gonna see anything of Sparda and Eva's life? Seeing Eva in the trailer made me feel like this was a glimpse into a deeper personal story, something which would address the always nebulous past that lingered as a phantom over every game in the series, but nope. That one moment in the trailer was literally one moment in the game.

The ending that was supposed to compensate for the minimalist storytelling throughout the game ended up not doing it, making me feel cheated, and making the entire story feel very lackluster.

The final fight between Dante and Vergil, which is supposed to echo their iconic fight from DMC3, is interrupted by Nero, who forces both of them to stop fighting by literally beating them up, which is odd as he's only a quarter-demon, while Dante and Vergil are both at the peak of their powers. And they just kinda submit.

Vergil says to Dante, "if I beat Nero, that counts as beating you," which is a sentence that absolutely baffled me. What are we doing here? I thought this was a fight for the fate of humanity. I thought Vergil needed to be stopped so that Qliphoth could be destroyed. And I thought Vergil would not stop because he's pursuing his old goal of gaining more power cause apparently he had learned nothing from the events of DMC3. But apparently this was all about Dante and Vergil figuring out who was stronger? Their entire rivalry throughout the series was just about that? I mean, that’s just childish. They both seem like middle-aged men at this point [kinda messing up the continuity because DMC2 is supposed to be chronologically the last], so what’s happening?

'Naturally', after Vergil loses to Nero, he suddenly joins forces with Dante and goes to destroy Qliphoth together with him. Qliphoth, which essentially becomes the main antagonist now, is killed off-screen (I mean, we see it die, we don't see it get killed), robbing us of a climactic resolution. And then Dante and Vergil remain in the Underworld fighting each other for eternity…

Okay, where is Mundus again? He wasn't killed in DMC1, right? He's still in the Underworld, so how do we not get a repeat of the Vergil epilogue from DMC3 here?

I'm gonna be in the minority here, but I feel like this game's ending makes no sense and absolutely ruins Vergil's character and the ending of Devil May Cry 3. He already went through a redemption arc and learned of his mistakes in that game (if not to change his opinion on humans, at least to change his approach), and there was a perfect send-off. I don't see why he even needed to be resurrected. There are so many loose threads in the series, couldn’t they let him stay dead and focus on other characters?

The trailer made it seem like this was going to be the most story-driven DMC game yet, and it should’ve been. I mean, DMC3 had a great story. DMC4 was a bit underwhelming, but we all understood that this was due to the game’s troubled development cycle. But DMC5 was supposed to be the sequel we all needed, and for most of my playthrough I was convinced that it was.

I know it might seem silly to lower a game’s rating by two points based primarily on the ending, but my perception of video games as a medium is that they’re more than the sum of their parts. A video game should always be judged based on the experience it provides to the player. As a long-time fan of the series, I felt kind of cheated with this entry. This is a game I’d been waiting to come out for 11 years, and then waiting to play for another 6 years. I’m not saying it had to be perfect (God knows, most previous games are far from it), but this ending just feels like a slap in the face.

And the truth is, if it wasn’t for the nostalgia, would I even be considering giving it a higher rating? I mean, it is true that it has possibly the greatest combat in the genre, but most of my enjoyment of the game came from the nostalgia. I don’t particularly care about a game’s mechanics as their own entity because that view of video games robs them of their transformative nature, making them not more than entertainment, little distractions from actual life. I don’t play video games to have fun. Video games are my life, as I established at the beginning of this review. They mean a lot to me, and this series means a lot to me. Therefore, I can’t view this game from an objective standpoint or as an independent entity, as if it wasn’t a part of the series. As if the story in this game didn’t matter. It matters a lot, and unfortunately it drags the entire series down. Truthfully, I don’t even have the desire to replay this game right now. Maybe in the future. I will probably want to re-examine it many times throughout the course of my remaining life (if I do get to live long that is), but for now I feel like this is actually the worst mainline entry in the series (for the record, I don’t view DmC:DmC as part of the series).