nruss78-1 Review of Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening

Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening (2005 Video Game)

The Special Edition Review.

[15 March 2006]

Well, seeing as they didn't have a section for the new Special Edition Version of this game I'll give my review. Devil May Cry 3 has got to be the second best game in the trilogy next to the original one, and this special edition only adds to the quality. I have to give kudos for adding a new Easy Mode. If you're like me you aren't an intense elitist-type video game addict who doesn't have so much free time that you can master every single move and you don't have the time nor patience to try and defeat the game as it was, with it's unbalanced difficulty. Easy Mode for the original could have been considered hard for most of us out there. Which is why this game is so wonderful. The easy mode is still hard, I won't lie to you. But if you really just want an almost non-stop action frenzy without all the stress of annoyingly difficult enemies, you've come to the right place. For example, one of my favorite moves is jumping up in the air and firing Ebony and Ivory continuously to stay floating as I strike a rain of bullets onto the enemy. In the old game this, unless I didn't buy all the cool abilities and only upgraded my guns, would've been one of the most inefficient moves you can do, but thanks to the new Easy mode you can do it to your hearts content without having the game beat on you. Not to say this game is a breeze, you'll get hurt a lot and killed plenty, but it's great to see that the creators saw the unbalanced difficulty and changed it so, instead of having to master every fricken move and learn all there is to Dante, you can go button smash happy if you want. Heck, that's half the fun of an action game like this anyways. Also, the new gold orbs are a great addition too. Get killed after 2 hours of playing in a single level? (Not that I ever went that long in a level, but eh it could happen) Use a gold orb! You won't have to restart from the very beginning and your enemy, if he/she's a boss in particular, will not regain every bit of health you took from them. Almost as cool as the Die/Revive trick in MGS3. The Bloody Palace is just as bloody and as great as ever. A constant adrenal rush of fighting that none can complain about. Unfortunately though there are some bad points of this game. Like the original version, the camera's annoying at times. Since it's stuck in place most of the time you may not be able to see every enemy facing you. Then there are points where it's zoomed out so much, like the under-ground train ride, that you can barely tell if your guy's striking anyone. They try to rectify it by letting you use the right analog stick, but who wants to have to worry about the camera when all you want to do is go medieval on their asses? And it doesn't even work in some places. Then there's the Virgil mode. This may not be necessarily a problem if you like to play slow and, oh, like a combat style almost completely different from Dante's style. Virgil is slow. He has only one distance attack which doesn't even come close to comparing to Ebony and Ivory. When he slashes his kitana, he sheathes it when he's done using it, making the game even slower. The game adjusts to make things easier and he has more strength, but this wasn't enough for me to save it from the flaw that he's slow. And to put another nail in the coffin his mode doesn't make sense either and has only 2 extra FMVs. It begins well enough, he meets Arkham in a library and that leads to him going to the tower where the game is set. He kills a few bad guys in a really cool FMV. He enters the tower. He's now in the Devil May Cry office. Yah, you heard me. There's no explanation for why he's there, and there won't be one. You'll go through every single one of Dante's missions and, although I haven't played the mode through myself, I've read up everywhere that those two FMV's from the very start are the only ones he has. There is no more. There's no explanation for why all this is happening. Yah maybe this game is setting a trend for special editions with all of it's extra content, but man c'mon. Don't give us half-baked stuff instead of the good stuff you could be making. Even if he said nothing a series of FMVs like Dante's woulda been nice. And please, for the love of God, move faster, ugh... Ah though, this slowness and lack of creativity brings me to another one of the game's original bad points, the entire second half of the game. Until you get to the 19th and 20th missions, expect to travel through all the same locations, only changed around to make it seem fresh. It doesn't. It's like climbing all the way to the top of the ladder then turning it upside down, trying to climb it again, then hitting yourself in the head because of how stupid you are. Yah sure, a few nice new and cool FMV's can help pretty it up, but it's like expecting a Gauntlet Game to change. It won't. It never has and never will in the 20 plus years it's been around. And your still an idiot for thinking so. But aside from these gripes I have absolutely no quarrel with this game. It's an awesome addition, as it was way back when. Just don't expect any of the problems to be fixed aside from the difficulty. And please don't expect too much from the Virgil Mode. It just doesn't live up to the hype.