Time to be a Hater
This is my third attempt at writing this post. The first two were intended to be proper critiques, until I realized I lack both the experience and the patience to do such a thing. I might find the patience if I tried doing this with a show I actually liked, but that's something to try on another day.
So I did this instead. Presented in the form of disordered thoughts, here is what I don't like about Devil May Cry (2025).[1]
Why Devil May Cry 3 is Good
Before I talk about DMC2025, I need to lay some groundwork. Ask just about anyone (including me) and they'll tell you that Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening for the Playstation 2 is the best written Devil May Cry game. It's not a complex plot by any means; anyone who's read up on their world mythology will recognize it. The Hero (in this case Dante), is restless, incomplete. There's a call to action in the form of Arkham's invitation and our Hero embarks on his quest. He wrestles with a primal darkness deep inside him, and is swallowed up (quite literally) by the leviathan. The Hero then brings light to the darkness, emerging from the leviathan a more complete person. He learns a fundamental truth of the world (in this case that Sparda's legacy should be used to protect all of humanity), and uses this knowledge to restore balance to the world.
Like I said, it's not very complex. We are, after all, talking about a six to eight hour long action game. Despite that, of all the narrative structures our species has devised, this is probably the best fit for a game like Devil May Cry. Read any epic and you'll see heroes performing all manner of feats that would be right at home in a Devil May Cry game, from Gilgamesh's earth shattering battle with Humbaba to Cu Chulainn's tragic duel with Ferdiad (which DMC3 overtly parallels in Dante's final confrontation with Vergil).
These overtly epic themes and motifs reach into every part of DMC3,[2] becoming tragedy when they reach down to the games human characters. The beating heart of DMC3 is in its deuteragonist: Lady. Where Dante is lost and aimless, Lady is laser focused on a single tangible goal. She must kill Arkham. Nothing less is permissible for the man who killed her mother. Everything she does is with the express purpose of putting a bullet in his head. That Arkham is her own father only further fuels this hatred. When the deed is done and she cries tears she didn't know she had, all of her prior rage feels hollow, almost performatory. Minutes later, when Vergil taunts Dante with that now infamous line "Where's your motivation?" we recall Lady and how quickly motivation becomes an obsession that can never meaningfully be fulfilled.
As Dante and Lady stand alone in the rubble, one guilty of fratricide and the other of patricide, Lady offers a piece of comfort. "Maybe somewhere out there even a Devil May Cry, don't you think?" It is a line that directly echoes the title drops of the earlier games, reminding us that to be human is to know grief. It is a line spoken both as comfort to Dante but also as a reminder to Lady. She cried over the man she hated most, and Devils Never Cry.
So of course DMC2025 throws all of this out
In Adi Shankar's Netflix's Capcom's Devil May Cry, none of this is true. This is no longer a work of fantasy and of myth, but one of science fiction and rationalism. Everything has a scientific explanation, and everything is an overt political allegory (and we'll fucking get to the politics of this thing just you wait). When people say the new series doesn't feel like Devil May Cry, this is why.
Now, when your adapting and remixing an existing story for a new medium, there are naturally going to be changes. We're talking about a series where Dante and Vergil are half demons and Beatrice wears a leather corset and has lightning powers. The fight for 1:1 purity was lost from the moment Sparda woke up to justice and frankly the world is better for it. It's the specifics of what was changed and why that irk me.
The two biggest changes are the nature of demons and Lady's beliefs. Demons in this universe don't actually exist. They are actually distant cousins of homo sapien that got trapped in a parallel dimension when Sparda used his sword shaped quantum computer to erect a dimensional wall. The powers we see demons wield are all just quantum mechanics. There is a character who's dedicated job is to explain this in detail.
It reeks of a desire to Explain, to clear away any possible whiff of mystery and the unknown. Everything must be in some way rational or logical, and this seeps into every aspect of the show.
Take Agni and Rudra. In DMC3, Agni and Rudra are a pair of brothers who guard the path to Vergil. They appear as headless figures, each one holding up a sword with a face etched into its pommel stone. The swords are of course their true forms, which makes it all the more notable that these swords perform a vaudeville act in the cutscene before the boss fight. It's funny, memorable, and strange. It's good.
So anyways, now Agni and Rudra have heads? The swords are just swords? They aren't weird jokesters anymore? DMC2025 recasts Agni and Rudra as angry--if incompetent--goons. Even more bizarre, Agni and Rudra are the catalysts for Dante's awakening (no not that one).
In the actual game, Dante's Awakening is at the hands of Vergil. Vergil, being Dante's twin brother, is a textbook example of the shadow archetype. He has fully embraced his demonic power and yearns to sink deeper into its embrace. He is what Dante could be, what Dante fears he already is. Vergil impales Dante on his own sword (sex.), awakening the demonic blood that has lain dormant inside him. Blinded by this new power, Dante gets himself swallowed by Leviathan. This is because Devil May Cry 3 was written on purpose with themes.
Agni and Rudra, however, are just some angry goons. Dante's first use of the devil trigger means nothing in this new context. In a vain attempt to make it mean something, they slap on a cover of the song Devil Trigger from Devil May Cry 5 and oh god that's a whole other can of worms.[3]
Then there's Lady.
There's no nice way to put it: Lady is a Nazi. The demons that make their way to the human realm in DMC2025 are explicitly refugees fleeing either political turmoil or climate collapse. More specifically, they are refugees from Afghanistan, because it's a War on Terror metaphor. We then see in flashbacks that Lady has always, ever since she was a wee babe, dreamed of nothing but killing demons (Afghan refugees) wholesale. Lady works for a private military company run by the Vice President of the United States of America. Her strength comes not from her own actions but rather the weight of the American state that propels her forward. Her motivations are no longer personal, they are racial. "I'm just helping to secure a world for our species," she tells Vice President Baines. She's four words short, but the intent is unmistakable.
It is an incredibly bizarre direction to take the character. Making one of your primary characters, arguably the protagonist in the case of the show, into a jack booted thug for a christofascist state who's only regret boils down to "well, maybe we went a little too far, but 9/11 happened! We didn't have a choice!" is what most people would call really fucking stupid.[4]
With all of this in mind, you be asking yourself a very simple question right now. If demons are refugees, but this is a show about hype action fights where badasses beat up demons, how does the show reckon with that inevitable cognitive dissonance? Well,
Assimilationist propaganda
Episode 6, titled The First Circle, is really feeling itself. They really thought they were on to something with this one. In a pair of largely wordless flashbacks, we are shown the backstories for both Lady and the White Rabbit.[5] Lady's half confirms some things about what drives her,[6] but it's the White Rabbit who gets the real meat of the episode. The White Rabbit was a human who fell into a portal to Hell, and was taken in and raised by some demons. Wanting to help his new family escape the tyranny of Mundus, he began bringing demons to Earth, where they were immediately killed by Lady.
With no dialogue, the episode needs to find a way to delineate who is a sympathetic demon and who isn't. It does so by creating a very simple visual language that then carries over into the rest of show, not once does it contradict itself or offer a glimmer of a counterpoint.
We are shown very explicitly over and over again that good demons look like humans and can blend in and bad demons don't. A good demon might have small horns or scales, but those can easily be covered, allowing the demon to integrate fully into human society. Every evil demon is a hulking monstrosity, their only hope at assimilation being the ability to shapeshift and hide in plain sight, waiting to strike (because they are evil and thus prone to striking).
The framing of the show suggests that Lady will have some sort of a redemption arc. This Manichean approach to demonology, however, all but precludes the possibility that Lady could ever stop being a Nazi. If good demons are all capable of assimilation, then anyone who rejects or is rejected by assimilation becomes an acceptable target. Baines might go "too far," but his Holy War remains righteous.
Naturally, as a disabled faggot who cares about the people around me, I think this really sucks. I do not believe that ones goodness is determined by their ability to hide themselves, to fit in with a uniquely Western worldview built on colonialist conquest. But DMC2025 seems to believe that. Even worse, I'm not sure the show even realizes it believes that. This is because
It's just not very good??????
Adi Shankar's Netflix's Capcom's Itsuno's Kamiya's Devil May Cry is bad. As a television show, it's just not good. Action scenes are stiffly choreographed around rigid 3DCG models. Dante's cocky banter is replaced with irony poisoned reference "humor," and the game has a real "making spaghetti" problem[7].
There's a scene fairly early one where the PMC Lady works for hires a group of mercenaries to get Dante's amulet. This is because they learned that the amulet is in fact a super computer capable of maintaining the barrier between dimensions. During the fight, the PMC guys speculate on Dante's unexpected abilities. Eventually, one of them says this: "Great, so the guy's some sort of super soldier, and he's wearing half the transmitter that keeps our reality from being swarmed by the armies of Hell as a necklace." Yeah thanks buddy I was watching the show I already knew that.
They keep doing this too, it's the only "joke" the show knows. Devil May Cry the video game is funny! Those games are full of jokes! But transferring over to a new medium somehow causes all of the levity to evaporate, leaving us with the dregs of a canned Marvel movie.
For all of the less comedic scenes, DMC2025 seems content to rely primarily on shock value. This is by far the goriest Devil May Cry has ever been, despite the now infamous title card warning for "scenes of explicit violence and gore." The White Rabbit will say some bullshit about religion that I'm sure sounds really deep if you're 12 before further brutalizing a soldiers corpse. DMC2025 exists primarily to shock and offend. It is a bloody middle finger to an imagined The Man. It is violence for the sake of violence.[8]
Symbols from the games are now divorced from their power as psychic archetypes in an endless spiral of I Know Who That Is. When Vergil appears, they play The Meme Song not because it fits this version of the character, but because it's a Meme. It's the show about the wacky wahoo pizza man, nothing means anything.
OK I'm done.
I have been writing this for hours and it's almost midnight and I don't want to think about this show anymore. If you made it this far, thank you. Now, heed my advice.
Go play Devil May Cry. The first one, for the Playstation 2. Then play Devil May Cry 2. Don't listen to the haters. Yeah it's a bad game but it's short and easy and there's some neat ideas in there that are revisited later down the line. Then play Devil May Cry 3 Dante's Awakening. Or Devil May Cry 3 Special Edition, the original American release had the difficulty cranked way up and SE brings it back to the original Japanese difficulty and has Vergil as an unlockable character. He's fun. Then play Devil May Cry 4 Special Edition. Nothing wrong with the original version, but there's really no reason to play it over the rerelease. Make sure you put Nero's gun input on one of the shoulder buttons though, you'll thank me later. Skip DmC: Devil May Cry, half of this essay applies to that one and honestly do you need to see a man in a fedora perform an abortion with a sniper rifle in 1080p 60fps? Like, really? Do you really badly need to see that? I didn't think so. Then play Devil May Cry 5. Grab the Vergil DLC he's still fun to play as, or get the special edition if you have a current gen console (SE isn't on PC for some reason which I Hate). Remember to remap the controls again.
Are you done? God that was fucking sick, wasn't it?
[1] Some of these are going to be copied from earlier drafts and thus more cogent. This is because I really liked what I wrote there and am really proud of myself and basically you should be so so so nice to me and love me forever.
[2] The whole series, really. Ask me someday why Nero is transgender.
[3] Like I said, ask me someday why Nero is transgender.
[4] Hey fun game go look into what political parties Adi Shankar rubs elbows with.
[5] If you're wondering where Arkham figures into all this, he saw a homeless man and pissed his pants so hard he turned into a nosferatu and then died. Or maybe he didn't die, fires in television are famously nonlethal.
[6] Racism, apparently.
[7] https://bsky.app/profile/mikemcmahan.bsky.social/post/3ledrw4zpoc2d
[8] I wonder why Adi Shankar was at a party celebrating Trump's inauguration earlier this year. I wonder what his willing association with rabid fascists says about his politics.