Analysis: Devil May Cry 3

The Devil May Cry series has become something of a strong infleunce on modern action games, having successfully transitioned Capcom's trademark fast-paced action from 2D into 3D and having seeded a number of other action games such as God of War. My personal experience with the series began with Devil May Cry 3 a couple of years after it was released, and I fell in love with it from the minute Dante's boot hit his desk and his phone subsequently landed in his outstretched hand. The more I played it the more it surprised me and the more I liked it. As such I spent a lot of time trying to understand why I enjoyed it short of the novelty of the over-the-top action and humor that the series is known for. So let's take a look under the hood!

Overview

Players control Dante, a half-demon and professional devil hunter armed with a sword, a pair of pistols, and the superhuman strength, reflexes, and powers that come with having infernal blood. Dante progresses through a series of linear levels as he tries to stop his brother, Vergil, from opening a gateway to Hell that their father sealed long ago, fighting his way through hordes of demonic minions and vicious guardian bosses and earning new powers, guns, and magic weapons along the way by collecting demon blood (usually just referred to by the less morbid moniker, "red orbs") from fallen enemies and using it to purchase upgrades between levels and at save points. The controls are simple enough. Players can jump, attack with the currently equipped gun, the currently equipped sword, or use a special "style" action depending on one of four fighting styles that Dante can switch between at save points: swordmaster, gunslinger, royal guard, trickster. Swordmaster and gunslinger both add a series of additional special attacks for swords and guns respectively, trickster adds a series of special evasive maneuvers, and royal guard gives Dante the ability to block, counter, and absorb enemy attacks.

The feature that gives this relatively simple, limited system breadth is the lock-on function. When players hold the R1 button Dante auto-faces a single enemy and all movement is done within that context; holding left or right will make him circle around it and he always moves forward and backward with reference to the enemy rather than the camera, removing a player's ability to aim and use spacial reasoning from the equation. When locked on Dante is also able to use a series of other special attacks in addition to his neutral attacks, which he uses by default when he isn't locked on. These other attacks may be used by holding back or forward while pressing the sword attack and style buttons. Dante's attacks also react with respect to timing, presenting a different set of combos if the players tap the attack button quickly or give a delay between button presses, tending to give wider and slower attacks with the delays and quicker, more focused ones without. Together with the various styles Dante can use and the variety of weapons throughout the game this system gives players a number of combat options rivaling that of a fighting game.

Here's the bombshell: guns don't use ammo. For their part Dante's default dual pistols are much weaker than his swords, taking only a tiny sliver of an enemy's health and giving them barely a fraction of a second's worth of a pause when they're hit. The other four guns in the game have a similar level of power, being less powerful or fluid than melee combat but more safe and featuring their own individual limitations. But the important thing to note here is that since they don't depend on ammo it is possible--if players are patient enough--to kill nearly any enemy in the game, including bosses, by persistently tapping the fire button and paying attention. It's the safest, easiest way to take out anything in the game, if the most boring, but I've seen inconfident players thrust into the middle of the game by their friends do just that. Additionally most enemies are neither particularly immune or particularly vulnerable to specific weapons or attacks, nor is their AI particularly aggressive such that their patterns would make certain attacks more beneificial or even such that any normal enemy short of those found in the last levels of the game are especially challenging. In fact the vast majority of them are cookie-cutters of the same scythe-wielding mooks, all of whom shamble slowly towards Dante and infrequently make single, slow, predictable scythe strokes. The point I'm trying to make is that if we accept that the goal of this game is simply to kill things then the developers put a lot of unnecessary effort into giving players options, didn't weigh risk, benefit, and resource management very carefully, and were lazy with AI and enemy design.

The Core

None of that is true, thankfully. The core feature that gives depth to this system and rationalizes the absurd number of options in battle is the style gauge, which awards points to players based on variance in attack patterns, consistency in rhythm, and the speed with which players are able to dispatch enemies. These factors are all the necessary ingredients for sheer awesomeness, and the style gauge will progress through grades D, C, B, A, S, SS, and SSS depending how well players are able to manage these factors. If the player uses the same attack multiple times in a row it will build the gauge up less and less each time it's used until it generates no points at all or until a significant delay between uses is allowed; specifically a delay in number of (different) attacks, usually enough to perform two complete three-attack combo cycles. The gauge depletes constantly, and the higher the grade is the faster it does so, making what might be an insignificant loss in Style points from the premature alternation to an easy move at grade C a serious and debilitating handicap that prevents players from progressing from grade A to grade S. This means that as the grades climb higher players are left less and less room for error. Mathematically speaking a player with a fully upgraded style and a fully upgraded set of weapons has exactly enough options to be able to sequentually move through attacks in a "perfect" chain of combos that, when performed on a single enemy with enough health, will take the style gauge from rank D all the way up to SSS.

This never happens but for a single statue in the game that challenges the player to do so in exchange for a health upgrade. Everything else dies a lot faster. Additionally a variety of the game's moves tend to send enemies flying away from Dante, meaning he has to chase after them, which either results in delays or repeat moves. A system like this with no balancing factor would encourage players to focus on the weakest attacks possible in order to keep single enemies alive long enough to milk them for all the style juice they can squeeze out. That's where the variable of number of enemies comes into play. The more that the player kills at once and the shorter the time period in which those kills take place, the greater the boost it gives to the style gauge, making efficiency an overriding factor and spreading damage around rather than focusing it an attractive option. In the ideal situation a long string of combos manipulates all the enemies into a single spot and culiminates in a single broad attack that finishes almost all of them off simultaneously. This is, of course, wishful thinking on the part of even exceptional players. In terms of the average player this simply means that efficiency is duly rewarded over dawdling and that in general players are encouraged to think of an entire group of enemies as a single system rather than a disparate collection of systems.

Each level in the game culminates with a score screen that grades the player and awards points based on the highest rank players are able to get the style gauge during the level, how many orbs players are able to collect, how much time they took to beat it, how much damage they sustained, and how many items they used. The highest grade players are able to get the style gauge to during the level is the grade this screen uses for additional "style" points. Orbs are measured purely quantitatively, likely out of some percentage of possible orbs that can be found throughout the level and that can be expected to be obtained from the enemies in it, meaning that "orbs" translates indirectly into "kills;" players are rewarded for not ignoring enemies. Damage is graded on how much health Dante lost by the end of the level, again, out of a percentage of his entire health value. Items are the most interesting factor here. Health restorations and power-ups that ordinarily function in an expected support role in other games are in this game characterized as an unwelcome and much frowned-upon crutch by the fact that the game grades players down one full letter for each item used. If it's a matter of beating the game players have them to fall back on and in no short supply, but if it's a matter of getting that coveted "S" rank at the end of a level then they'd best practice.

All of these cumulate in an overall grade, and based on that overall grade the game awards bonus orbs which players can use to buy more upgrades. This system of reward and positive feedback based directly on players' performance--most especially the quality of strings of combos as opposed to the quantity of attacks in them--is what drives the game. The act of fighting doesn't require a huge amount of coordination; as said the lock-on function takes the aiming and spacial reasoning that action games normally depend on out of the equation, and all but a handful of attacks can be "cancelled" partway through their animations, seguing fluidly into one another and presenting players with an indefinite number of infinitely long, looping combos. The enemies, meanwhile, aren't amazingly difficult in themselves. Most of the regular ones are actually very lethargic and their attacks tend to come after long pauses, projecting themselves to the player with significant warning and wind-up time. However, with the strong risk-and-reward system involved in building the style gauge there can be a lot of unnecessary and easily avoidable damage sustained by players who aren't paying attention.

And that is the million dollar word for this game: attention. Whether Dante can destroy everything on the screen isn't the question. Whether players are paying attention to what's on the screen enough to do it efficiently and stylishly is. Are they paying attention to the four guys that're creeping up behind Dante or the one guy they're currently having fun suspending in the air with bullets? Inversely, are they paying attention to the immenent threat posed by certain, more formidable enemies or to the moves they're using to dispatch them? On a higher level, are they paying attention to a single enemy, focusing on killing one at a time in a logical fashion, or are they paying attention to all the enemies as a single system and thinking about getting the closer ones after they send the one they've been focusing on farther away? Are they mindful of what attacks they've already used or are they too busy admiring how cool those attacks look? Are they mindful of the current boss's attack patterns and the opportunities it leaves open--the attacks they need to use--or are they mindful of the attacks they want to use? With questions like these arising at every battle Devil May Cry 3 rewards players for both patience and decisive, quick thinking; two of the traits that the always cool-headed and lad back but always alert Dante is known for. It's perfect harmony between the game's player motivation, its core mental stimulation, and the mindset of the player's character, encouraging and subconsciously training players to become the fun-loving showoff that Dante is. What may be most fascinating about this game, though, is that through its style-based combat it takes an action game and turns it into a game about creative play rather than survival, emphasizing the type of "play it your way" philosophy that Will Wright's games are known for, even if it's not quite in a way that he intended, emphasizing choreography on the player's part rather than world-building.

The Outer Layer

Although the "big picture" of Devil May Cry 3 alone presents strong mechanics it's worth looking at the other elements that make it up as well as without those features that make it uniquely Devil May Cry it may as well be a flash-based tank-defense game. I've already gone over the most basic components of the game briefly, but some of them deserve a little more of an in-depth analysis with respect to how they relate to one another.

Enemy Design

I've already related that most enemies, if fought with no regard for the style system, can be disposed of with little effort, which is frankly how it should be. Like I said, the challenge of this game isn't whether players can survive, which is a genuinely weak challenge as it tends to lead to "ROM hack syndrome," but rather with how much showmanship they can kick ass and take names. The variation in enemies' design in Devil May Cry 3 is chiefly to present players with new concepts to factor into their choreography, building on top of the standard ordinary enemy with new twists here and there. The ordinary enemy type is a slow-moving mook that will infrequently attack, becoming its most threatening when there's a group of them and they have Dante cornered--and the only excuse for that situation is that the player wasn't paying attention to them. There's fast-moving birds that ordinarily are too quick to hit but turn to stone when they take a sufficient number of bullets, challenging players to bring their guns into play more frequently. There's enemies that can teleport, forcing players to be on their feet more often. There's spiders that have quick dart-by attacks, making themselves vulnerable only for brief periods and constantly changing position. In every case it's a challenge of adaptation. When players fail to adapt either the enemy hurts them--dropping all their style points along with a few points of damage--or they're forced to dodge, losing a little bit of their combo. The perfect player can always adapt and is familiar enough with Dante's arsenal and his attacks and weapons' uses to know exactly which attacks to use after dodging in order to maintain style points or in order to keep tricky opponents at bay.

Bosses

The one exception to the Rule of Easy Enemies is the bosses, who are perfectly relentless killing machines even on low difficulties and never fail to present a significant challenge of survival. In a way they gauge how effectively players completed a level. If they played poorly then the boss presents a much more significant challenge as players will have depleted health and therefore much less room for error--and room for error is what inexperienced players need in order to beat bosses. Like most of Capcom's boss enemies--especially the ones from the Mega Man series--they operate on patterns and being able to defeat them is chiefly a matter of memorizing their attacks and the best way to evade them and to exploit zones of vulnerability in their actions. Because players can be easily taken by surprise by these patterns early on and will tend to gamble for style points and speed or hesitate at the intimidating scale of the bosses' attacks there are a lot of errors to be made in fighting them--and each of those errors costs a lot of health. In light of this fact it would seem expedient to use the least most risky means of beating these enemies, but that's almost always also the slowest way of beating them. The time pressure associated with the scoring system is what leads players to take risks, coordinate more bold offensives, and look for the best weapons and the best opportunities to do damage to bosses.

Devil Arms

There are five melee weapons, called "Devil Arms," total in Devil May Cry 3, out of which Dante can equip two at any given time and freely switch between them, even in the middle of a combo. There's Dante's signature claymore, Rebellion; a three-headed ice-infused nunchaku called Ceberus; a pair of swords called Agni and Rudra that burn with the power of wind and fire; an electric guitar--literally--called Nevan that can summon bats and morph into a scythe; and a pair of fighting gauntlets and boots named Beowulf that brim with light energy. All of them are named after bosses in the game whose souls transform into these weapons after Dante defeats them, enhancing the sense of accomplishment that comes with their conquest by "taming" them and putting their power directly in his hands. Dante's moves with all of them, therefore, reflect a majority of the bosses' signature attacks, which means that in a sense players already have some familiarity with the weapons by the time they see them.

Each Devil Arm has some particular specialty in the way Dante wields it. His default sword, Rebellion, is meant to be a very versatile weapon with enough reach to strike multiple enemies at a time but with a distinct single-opponent focus. Cerberus employs sweeping aerial attacks and wide-range, primarily defensive moves. Agni and Rudra tend to make fast-hitting, aggressive, wide attacks and can cut swaths through large groups quickly. Beowulf on the other hand is completely focused, having virtually no reach but being capable of charging its attacks for greater damage. All of these weapons function very similarly, with forward attacks tending to move Dante forward and be more aggressive and backward attacks tending to be defensive or wide-angled. This consistency in logic keeps players comfortable no matter what weapon they're using. That's why Nevan sees very little use but among the most experienced players. It's a perfect contradiction to every other weapon in the game, being predominantly ranged and entirely unpredictable as it will behave differently based on a series of "stances" Dante takes while using it. It also roots Dante to the ground--this fact alone makes many players uneasy with it--and functions with almost no regard to the logic the other weapons use, forcing players to practically re-learn the game in order to use it effectively but rewarding those who take the time with an incredible amount of control over enemy groupings. Some might ask why this doesn't fall under the header of guns and the answer is simply that guns don't involve rhythm while this musical instrument from Hell does, as do all the other Devil Arms.

The Swordmaster style adds an extra dimension of meanness to all of the Devil Arms, giving Dante a set of even more dynamic and more versatile moves with each weapon, ranging from the simplistic but convenient Aerial Rave with Rebellion, which allows Dante to perform a combo in mid-air when he wouldn't ordinarily be able to, to the explosive Tempest with Agni and Rudra, which summons a massive flaming tornado. Between the Swordmaster moves and his normal attacks Dante has enough moves to perform a full SSS-rank combo with a single weapon on a single enemy. Between two Devil Arms the possibilities are limitless, with players being able to set up enemies with one weapon, switch seamlessly mid-combo, and finish with another as they deem appropriate. Devil Arms therefore form the core of the Devil May Cry combo-building experience, presenting players with the necessary variety to build the gauge and the versatility to adapt to various combat scenarios and fight purposefully, pragmatically, and efficiently.

Guns

That's not to say that guns aren't an important part of Dante's arsenal. There's five of these as well, most of which have very little damage potential but can be thought of like one-button special effects. There's Dante's default Ebony and Ivory, a pair of semi-automatic pistols with limitless ammo. They're weak, completely devoid of any knockback or stun potential on enemies, but have infinite range and are capable of firing as fast as the player can press the button, as well as suspending airborne enemies on a cushion of bullets. It's a useful combo-filler if nothing else and provides players with something to do when nothing is close. It's also strikingly useful as a defensive tool as firing it in mid-air will keep Dante suspended on the stream of bullets, well above most enemy attacks. The shotgun can be thought of like an instant stun button and almost without fail knocks anything it hits off its feet or out of the air, making it useful for interrupting enemy attacks, giving Dante room to breathe, or even pushing enemies around into more convenient places for combos. Artemis is like a piece of alien technology and can be charged to fire lasers that home in on multiple opponents. Spiral is a rifle that, while slow, actually has a lot of stopping power and range, making it ideal for dealing the finishing blow to far-away opponents just sent flying by one of Dante's more forceful melee attacks. Kalina-Ann is a bazooka with extremely short range but also a wide blast that deals significant damage and can make short work of already weakened groups of enemies or soften them up. Spiral and Kalina-Ann both can't be fired in the air, but their power is a worthy tradeoff. Overall, all the guns can be said to be tools for manipulating the battlefield and its circumstances rather than rhythmic choreographic combat devices, designed to be used with a little strategic thought and perhaps serving as the strongest element in favor of a group of opponents being approached as a single system as the guns can, for the most part, strike from anywhere on the battlefield.

The Styles

Each of the game's styles emphasizes a particular aspect of the combat system in the player's controls and available actions, effectively tailoring the game to suit their play style and way of thinking. They can be changed only at save points and between levels but provide an excellent means of mixing up the gameplay in that if players grow bored with one they can switch to a whole new one. The effect they have is dramatic and can completely change players' strateies almost as if they were playing different characters, but since Dante's core controls and moves remain the same it never feels uncomfortable. Unlike everything else in Devil May Cry 3 the Styles upgrade based on an experience point total that Dante accrues while using them, so the style that a player prefers most inevitably becomes upgraded the fastest.

Swordmaster is the preference for those who prefer the rhythmic combat of Devil Arms and enjoy choreographing combo chains, providing double the moves for each of them in the long run and adding an entire new attack for all weapons with each upgrade as opposed to a single attack for a single weapon at a time. In the hands of a perfect player it greatly increases the ease with which S-rank combos can be built and it is especially attractive to aggressive players.

Gunslinger is for those who enjoy manipulating the battlefield and transforms each gun from a simple tool into a swiss army knife with the versatility of any of the Devil Arms but the manipulative focus of guns. It's a less rhythmic and intuitive playstyle but strongly rewards players for their ability to deal with a group of opponents as a single system and their intuition for different firing patterns. One of its most important aspects is that it grants the ability to charge the pistols and the shotgun by holding the fire button. Charging can be done while Dante is busy with other actions and makes these weapons far more threatening as damage-dealing tools.

Royal Guard is completely defensive and gives players a host of options for dealing with incoming attacks, including a guard stance that absorbs partial damage and keeps Dante from flinching, a parry move that charges energy with each successful block and enables Dante to release that energy in a powerful counterattack, and a super-parry that restores health. Almost all of these options have the benefit of giving huge, one-letter boosts to the style gauge in an instant, changing situations that would ordinarily interrupt a style-building chain into opportunities to build it higher, though not without significant risk as the options that do so require extremely precise timing.

The Trickster style makes Dante more maneverable, giving him a series of dashes, an aerial dash move, the ability to run up or along walls, and, at its highest level, a teleportation power that can instantly bring Dante to his intended target. The vast majority of these options render Dante invulnerable to damage while he's using them, presenting safe ways of traversing an ordinarily volatile battlefield and closing distances that otherwise would be impractical to close and still maintain style points. Players are rewarded for using evasive maneuvers just moments before they would ordinarily be hit, though the timing for this is even trickier than it is for Royal Guard.

Devil Trigger

One aspect of the game I haven't discussed is the Devil Trigger gauge, which builds up as Dante takes damage and performs effective combos and takes the form of a series of orbs just beneath his health bar. If the player has three or more full orbs Dante can use Devil Trigger and transform instantly into a more powerful demon form, gaining increased movement speed, attack speed, strength, and damage resistance along with a number of other interesting abilities depending on what styles or weapons the player is using; Nevan, for instance, grants Dante the ability to fly and throw lightning bolts in Devil form. The Devil Trigger gauge slowly depletes as his form is maintained and he transforms back to normal when it runs out. Tapping the Devil Trigger button a second time transforms Dante back to normal at any time at no cost, allowing players to use it for only as long as they deem necessary and avoid wasting the entire gauge. Every time he transforms into demon form, though, it costs a little bit of the Devil Trigger gauge at the initial moment of transformation, disabling players from rapidly switching back and forth as a loophole.

Although not an essential feature to the game Devil Trigger is interesting in that it presents players with Devil May Cry's equivalent of Star Power in Guitar Hero, making it easier to gain style points in the same way that Star Power makes it easier to please crowds, gain points, and avoid failure. Greater speed means combos can be cycled quicker and distances can be closed faster, allowing more enemies to be engaged; greater damage means that enemies can be taken down quicker; new attacks or added special effects give players other directions to go when they would otherwise exhaust their options for combos. Everything adds up to much more easily accrued style points. For less experienced players it's a boon that can get them through tough situations and bosses or that can give give them the boost they need to get over the fence on a level ranking so that they can upgrade their powers. For more experienced players it's a resource that's budgeted carefully per each level and situation to gain the maximum possible amount of style points and defeat bosses as quickly as possible.

Special Styles

In addition to the four main styles--Swordmaster, Gunslinger, Royalguard, and Trickster--Dante can earn two special styles by defeating bosses that appear late in the game: the time-slowing Quicksilver style or the aptly named Doppelganger style. Both of these function as alternatives to the Devil Trigger, filling the exact same role but in different ways. The player can activate and de-activate both of them with the style button, and they both drain the Devil Trigger gauge when active.

Quicksilver will slow down time for everyone and everything except Dante to the point of nearly being frozen. At its crudest it's a damage-dealing tool that makes players capable of, in terms of the enemies' time anyway, dealing dozens of hits at a time to one or more opponents, or else it can be thought of as a defensive tool that literally slows down the action if it's too intense. As a style-building tool it can change the way combos are structured, making the enemies somewhat more stable targets where Dante would ordinarily toss them around like playthings and therefore much easier to combo, but also gives players more flexibility in what they choose to attack and when, allowing them to dance around building multi-enemy combos that would ordinarily be impossible. What's more after Quicksilver ends the enemies resume in normal time and will sustain the last knockback or flinch effect they received from the Dante's attacks normally, which makes it a stunning setup tool as players can systematically manipulate enemies around the battlefield to their design with the kind of reliability that ordinarily would be impossible. It's used most effectively in short bursts; players enter battle normally, ignore ordinarily threatening circumstances, use Quicksilver to buy a few seconds to quickly gain control of the situation, then drop it when it seems like a potential threat is no longer present.

Doppelganger pairs Dante with a shadow of himself that mirrors his attacks and effectively doubles the damage and number of hits he's capable of--as well as the style points he accumulates. I myself must confess that I'm still not sure what logic the computer uses to move the doppelganger, though it seems to gravitate towards the enemies that are nearest to it when it isn't directly alongside Dante, tending to fan out damage more than concentrate it. It's more straightforward than Quicksilver to use effectively, tending to work better for aggressive players than defensive ones as it can really only be used for additional attack power, but the fact that the doppelganger can be so difficult to predict sometimes makes it a little unintuitive and difficult to master. One of the novelties of it, though, is that another player can pick up a second controller and use it to control the doppelganger for what time it's present. It's a very obscure trick and more of a gimmick than an actual gameplay mechanic.

In general the two special styles present more focused options for players who prefer Devil Trigger-centric strategies. They also highlight the relationship between the play styles that Dante's styles represent, with both of them being nothing more or less than buttons to turn up the aggression/defense in a creative, indirect fashion that alters the way players think of their moves. The other four styles reflect in a similar way with two of them being aggressive--swordmaster and trickster--and the other two being defensive--royalguard and gunslinger. When reduced down to this base purpose and patterning a lot of Devil May Cry 3's dynamics and the way the developers conceived them become much easier to understand, with one of each of these subsets being based on Dante's weapons (and therefore rhythm and control respectively), another being based on his physical maneuvers, and still yet another expanding on his demonic powers.

Conclusion

Devil May Cry 3 provides an exceptionally strong action gaming experience that's driven by player motivation by linking player emotion, character motivation, ingame goals, and a highly effective scoring system together along with an intricate and thoughtful combat system containing a plethora of gratifying options that players can use to build their own style, creating an excellent blend of adventure with customizeability and play-your-way freedom. By identifying key aspects of the combat system and branching out on them with the different special styles the developers were able to make every option balanced, meaningful, and rewarding, giving players as much to explore within Dante's arsenal as they did within the bowels of the Temen Ni Grue tower itself.