The Prettiest Hell
The demon tree Qlipoth is growing in the middle of Red Grave City, roots pushing through asphalt, drinking blood from anyone still unfortunate enough to be nearby. Dante has lost his weapons. Nero has lost his arm. V—the new arrival, all tattoos and borrowed power—summons demons to fight for him because fighting himself isn’t currently an option. The city is collapsing. Everyone is making quips. This is Devil May Cry 5. Looking for more than that is the wrong approach entirely.
The series started in 2001 as a stylish hack-and-slash built around two things: ludicrous spectacle and a combat system deep enough that mastering it feels like learning a martial art. Dante and Vergil are the twin sons of Sparda—a demon who chose humanity’s side, sealed the underworld away, and paid for it when the demons killed their mother Eva. Born nephilim, raised in carnage, perpetually competing to be the more devastating presence in any given room. The mythology borrows from wherever it felt like: Arthurian legend, Dante Alighieri’s Inferno, assorted world religions run through a late-nineties Capcom fever dream. It holds together through sheer confidence rather than internal logic, which is exactly the right approach for this kind of story.
The fifth entry opens with Nero stripped of the demonic arm that defined his combat style since part four—ripped off in the opening minutes by the mysterious Urizen, who immediately proves to be the largest problem anyone has ever faced. In its place: Devil Breakers, interchangeable mechanical prosthetics engineered by Nero’s wonderfully unhinged mechanic Nico, each one absurd in a different direction. V, the most interesting new addition, plays unlike anything the series has attempted before—too physically fragile to fight directly, he directs three demonic familiars in battle while reading poetry between encounters. Three characters, three entirely different combat systems, one city getting slowly devoured from below.
Producer Matt Walker articulated the goal clearly: The core concept was always to bring the focus back to pure action. That loop—facing a hard challenge and then feeling the surge of overcoming it—hasn’t changed in thirty years of action games.
Devil May Cry 5 makes no apologies for caring about almost nothing else. The effects are loud, the color palette is maximalist, the characters deliver every awful line with perfect deadpan. You’ll want to throw something at Dante about four times an hour. That’s a feature.
If you haven’t played the earlier games, some of the emotional weight of the mythology won’t land—the accumulated context matters for the parts the story actually earns. But the core experience doesn’t require prior knowledge. What it requires is the willingness to turn your brain off and trust that the chaos is deliberate. Trash in its most joyful, most precisely engineered form. Brain off, controller in.