Devil May Cry 5: Special Edition

Strong final note for the series to (Theoretically) go out on. Combat feels great, the story has some good moments even if it's sometimes communicated confusingly. My main issue is still just with forced constant character switching, it's cool from a narrative perspective but I really don't like it gameplay wise

I've played almost every dmc game growing up as a kid, and I always thought they were ok but I never fully understood the hype. Now replaying this at 18 years old, I fully understand how this is the only game people play. I like to experience a bunch of different stories and games, but I get the dedication people have to the franchise. The story here is pretty solid, I don't think it's the strongest in the series in terms of world and lore building, but it does a good job of furthering the stories of the characters. Now obviously for the meat of the game, the gameplay. It can take a while to understand the mechanics and get good, and it can take upwards to 3 quarters of the game for less skilled players like myself, but once it clicks, and you start seeing those SSS combo's kicking in, it's all worth it. In the main game, Dante feels the best to me, and Nero is solid, V is weird but weirdly enough I enjoyed him more than Nero. But to me with this special edition Virgil is easily the smoothest feeling character, and not even just in this game, but genuinely one of the best feeling characters in any game I've played. I completely understand people who grind to play every level with every character to get an S rank, and play to 100% every character which will take a long time, and just play to chain together the craziest looking combo's ever. The only issue I have is with the level design, some levels are actually cool, but some are annoying, especially to replay. The pacing is also weird, it's good for a first experience, but for people who play this more than once, it can also get annoying. The game is also pretty short, not taking more than 25 hours to beat it twice. If the levels had better replayability, and it wouldn't take so long to max out every character, I would probably give this a 10. I just find that with the short story and 3 characters on the base game, you never really get to flesh out your arsenal and fully learn a character. It's in my Virgil playthrough that it felt more like a full experience with the character. The base game is more so to experience the story, the Virgil expansion is for a gameplay experience, and then to experience everything else you have to be a die hard fan and dedicate a lot of playthroughs to max everything out. I definitely do recommend playing through it twice, once as Dante, Nero and V for the story, then again as Virgil for more of a fun experience, then if you fall enough in love with the combat and the game, 100% it

Dropped because no longer available on Ps Plus.

I had a chance to play this game on PS5 Plus before it was gone. First I felt that Devil May Cry 5 is just a big fan service with a weak story and a lot of nostalgia and great gameplay (although even the gameplay felt a bit clunky at first... Devil May Cry 3 spoiled me too much!)
But then the lore got deeper and I discovered a new background behind the story of Devil May Cry 5 that was very intriguing! There was a mysterious new character and a seemingly mysterious villain! They had very obvious aliases, though. (like V was literally called "the Mysterious one" or Nero being the Devil Hunter and for Dante they just added "legendary" to the Devil Hunter.) The first 8 chapters were just about fighting and shooting stuff. There were a lot of fan services for old fans and dialogues and actions that were almost cringy. Like Trish and Lady had nothing to do with the story at all. But then the story got better! I know Devil May Cry series was never about the story, but the stories of 1 and 3 were so good. It's a pity it never focused more on its story, because the character lore is amazing! Dante and Vergil are legendary characters. Even though the lore got richer in the middle of the game, the story became mediocre and generic again by the end. It was just bland and meaningless. Like there were no consequences for choices at all. But the ending seemed like proper and a possible farewell to Dante (they probably wrote the game as if it could be the last one in the series). As for the gameplay, it was clunky and slow at first and I was surprised that Devil May Cry 3 was more fun to play for me than the new game. But then when I learned how to use the Devil Breaker, the gameplay improved a lot with Nero! He had so many options and abilities! And he was just like a tutorial for the game, because when I got to play as Dante, that's when the game really started. Switching between guns and melee weapons and styles was just awesome. And even playing with V was fun to me. (a very unpopular opinion) But still, I had to finish the game to just learn the game so I could start enjoying it in the second playthrough which is not good for a game. The level design was the worst in the series imo and bad unit fights in total, they felt like a dumbed down AI of DMC3. The gameplay of Vergil was magnificent. But to play the exact same levels and just reskining Dante as Vergil, is just lazy. Because I didn't like the level designs very much. The game had many boss fights, but none of them were as memorable as any bosses from the games before this one in the series. I will forget all of them. So to sum up, I'm definitely disappointed in total, disappointing story, disappointing level designs, disappointing boss fights, disappointing units, but great gameplay, great lore, great enemy and boss variety and I'M AM THE STORM THAT IS APPROACHING... GREAT soundtracks.

Devils will cry out of joy when playing. The best DMC there is

Fun game although the frustrating camera and lock-on system nearly ruined it for me. Also I found V to be significantly less fun to play as than the other characters but that wasn't a deal breaker.