YMMV / Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening

• Accidental Innuendo: The subtext of Arkham/Jester's treatment of Lady during The Reveal. When she rushes to stop him, he grabs the Kalina Ann, flickers his tongue at her, and says "Don't be a bad girl, Mary, or you can expect a spanking from Daddy later!" Because he once described the Temen-ni-gru as a "thick shaft that causes women to shudder", some fans also interpreted the "spanking" line with a naughty context.
• Alternate Self Shipping: When Dante gained the Doppleganger Style, it gave the fangirls an excuse to pair him with his clones.
• Alternative Character Interpretation:
  • Vergil's "Might controls everything" speech kickstarted a whole bunch of early interpretations regarding his motives in this game. Does he seek might or power in order to atone for a mistake in the past? Does he seek power in order to avoid future mistakes? By mentioning "Without strength, you cannot protect anything", it's implied that he has something to protect, but what is it exactly? He's fixated on gaining his father's power at this point that he doesn't care about the repercussions brought by the Temen-ni-gru tower. It's been debated that this speech makes him a Well-Intentioned Extremist or a Visionary Villain, but it all just adds up with him being Ambiguously Evil in general. Later games such as 5 would then go on to explore more about his motivation and personality, which also retroactively affects these interpretations to his speech.
  • Dante answers "So what if I did?" to Lady asking if he killed Arkham, which provoked Lady to shoot him again. It might come off as an out-of-character moment for him, but as seen in this thread, fans have interpreted his probable reasons for saying this. He either picked the option that brings him the most interesting results, he probably didn't care about anything at that point, or perhaps he already knew Vergil was the killer, but didn't want Lady to risk herself going after his brother.
• Best Boss Ever: All three fights with Vergil are certainly beloved, but the second fight takes the cake. It has the most memorable theme of all three fights (so memorable that it followed Vergil into UMvC3) and is the first time both Sons of Sparda use their Devil Trigger against each other; this fight makes it feel like Dante and Vergil are equals, unlike the last time where Vergil always had the upper hand.
• Broken Base: The Style System of 3 has its detractors and supporters when it's retrospectively compared to how it's implemented in the sequels. Some players see it as a Scrappy Mechanic because it limits options when the player would've wanted to mix up the different Styles together. This is a great source of Fake Difficulty against bosses or enemies fought for the first time, and becomes annoying in the penultimate boss fight, wherein having Vergil fight alongside Dante prevents you from using any of your Styles. Devil May Cry 4 allowed players to change Styles whenever they wanted, including mid-combo, and made the system more interesting to exploit, if tricky to master, but some players preferred the original scheme in 3, as it was more specialized as opposed to 4 streamlining the abilities of the returning four Styles (a decision that was mostly, but not entirely, reversed by the time of Devil May Cry 5). When DMC3:SE was ported to the Switch in 2020, the divide was mitigated by featuring the real-time Style switching system that became a staple from 4 onward while keeping a mode without the real-time Style and weapon switching (as it was in the original release of 3 and Special Edition), thus appeasing fans on both ends of the spectrum.
• Can't Un-Hear It: Let's face it: This game is the reason Reuben Langdon has consistently reprised his role as Dante.
• Cheese Strategy: Cerberus can be cheesed by standing all the way to the left of the screen, hugged against the hitbox of the arena's wall. Most of his attacks can't hit Dante there, allowing the player to spam their guns and slowly whittle the boss's health. A few of the boss's attacks can reach Dante, but they can be dodged and punished with more damaging combos.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • After the necessary Devil Arm is obtained, boss fights usually consist of bringing the elemental Devil Arm that they are weak against because dealing more damage saves the player a lot of time and effort. For example, you'd see Agni & Rudra being used a lot against Cerberus. Divinity Statues are placed a few steps before the boss fight arenas for the main purpose of letting you prepare and double check your equipment.
  • During the boss fights against Vergil, players would usually activate their Devil Trigger only when Vergil has just activated his, mostly to level the playing field because Vergil hits harder and is Immune to Flinching while it's active. Likewise, players deactivate theirs as soon as Vergil reverts back to his human form. You often see this tactic a lot in combo showcases and Let's Play videos.
  • For Dante Must Die playthroughs in non-Nintendo Switch versions, most players will stick with Level 3 Swordmaster Style, and their loadouts primarily consist of Rebellion and Beowulf for their melee weapons (sometimes either will be switched out for Cerberus or Agni & Rudra depending on the boss), and Ebony & Ivory and Kalina Ann for their ranged weapons. This is due to the Boring, but Practical high damage output, juggle potential, or that three of the melee weapons allow for double jumping if you bought the upgrades, which most players will have done by this point.
• Complete Monster: Arkham, seemingly working for Dante's brother Vergil, is revealed as a sinister, power-hungry man who sacrificed his own wife to become a devil himself, as his alter ego Jester. Arkham manipulates everyone to lure them into a battle, resulting in Dante, Vergil and Arkham's own daughter Lady—who Arkham has no issues brutalizing or even trying to kill—weakened enough for Arkham to step in and seize the power of Sparda for himself. When he unlocks the power of Sparda, Arkham plans to, as he puts it, "welcome Chaos" all through the world. When Lady confronts him at the game's end, Arkham angrily demands to know what he's done wrong, declaring he wants to be a God, and asking if sacrificing "one miserable human being" to do so was "really so awful."
• Cry for the Devil: Dante literally does so when Vergil falls into the Demon World of his own volition at the end of the game, which is followed soon after by a Title Drop from Lady. Players never receive an in-depth look at Vergil's life prior to Eva's death and his Start of Darkness, but get a vague idea of happier times from Dante's late-game dynamics with Vergil and reaction to his brother's death (as well as, back in DMC1, an audio recording of the twins celebrating their birthday with Eva).
• Demonic Spiders:
  • The Arachne are literal demonic spiders that move fast, hit hard, take a lot of damage, always appear in groups, and have a King Mook version that takes those traits up to eleven.
  • The Sloth and Lust 7 Hells are pretty unfair to fight as their visual cue before teleporting/charging is a brief slow Scythe raise that's hard to see in the middle of battle and their scream is often completely inaudible over the soundtrack.
• Even Better Sequel: Though it had to Win Back the Crowd from the lackluster Devil May Cry 2 as well, 3 is typically considered the series' finest hour—a title that would only be contested by Devil May Cry 5 more than a decade later—as this game introduced a full Real-Time Weapon Change system (something that was played with in 2) and made the combo system deeper than the original game's (due to the aforementioned Real-Time Weapon Change and the complexity of the combat itself with additions like the Style System). Devil May Cry 4 may have even been able to surpass it (thanks to Nero's completely fresh approach with the Devil Bringer and Dante gaining the ability to shift between Styles during gameplay, as well as a streamlined upgrade system) but the poor job done with Dante's levels kept that game from achieving its full potential.
• Event-Obscuring Camera:
  • The Fixed Camera angles can be confusing depending on where they are placed, but usually, the camera faces the door where you just came from, so you have to walk several steps further when you enter a room before knowing what you're about to deal with.
  • There are some sections where the camera is so far away your character becomes a little figure almost indistinguishable from the similarly-colored objects in the environment, or is hidden by a foreground object. Fortunately, moving your character around reveals their position or shifts the camera to a nearer perspective.
  • The Advancing Wall of Doom sections with the Gigapedes have their camera facing the thing that's chasing you from behind, which makes it a bit hard to anticipate the path ahead.
  • Some fights against gigantic bosses are made more challenging because of the camera angles, especially when you're locked-on. For example, the camera might not properly show Cerberus when he charges forward.
• Fan Nickname: See here.
• Fanon: As stated in its Devil Arms File, the Yamato can "cut through anything". But strangely enough, it couldn't cut through the Kalina Ann when Lady defends herself against Vergil's attack. This sounds like a continuity error at first, but a common fan theory that justifies this scene claims that Yamato's sharpness is proportional to the wielder's current physical condition; Vergil was exhausted from his fight with Dante, so it might've affected the Yamato as well. This theory also fits with the immediate scene where Jester blocks the Yamato with his bare hands and mocks Vergil.
  Jester: Zowie, that was close. But you've taken quite a trouncing today, haven't you Vergil? You could have chopped me into confetti by now if you're in your tip-top condition.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Quicksilver Style puts Dante into bullet time for rather long periods, though it eats up his Devil Trigger Gauge. But with enough DT Gauge-restoring items, it becomes a little broken. That said, in an unlocked mode with a certain costume, infinite Devil Trigger lets you butcher enemies in said bullet time mode.
  • The Switch port comes with two: free Style-switching/all weapons available at once, and Co-op Bloody Palace.
    • DMC3's Styles are a lot less balanced than later entries because they are intended to be used on their own, and the same goes for Dante's weapons, as he's forced to use a Limited Loadout of two Devil Arms and two firearms. The Switch port adds on-the-fly Style switching and a radial menu for the weapons, allowing Dante to equip all five Devil Arms and all five guns at once, basically turning him into his extremely overpowered Master of All iterations from later games. This still requires practice to fully reap the benefits of, though the relative lack of balancing nearly puts Dante on par with his infamously broken DMC4 iteration.
    • Co-op Bloody Palace absolutely destroys the game's balancing because the average enemy A.I. is not meant to fight two characters at once, and as a result, can barely keep up with Dante and Vergil working in tandem. While Bloody Palace is still not easy, it is immensely less difficult than running it solo, and if both players have good teamwork, they become effectively invincible.
• Genius Bonus: Arkham's monologue at the end of Mission 15 begins with a paraphrasing of the 1857 poem "Au Lecteur" by Charles Baudelaire.
• Genre Turning Point: Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening is also considered a landmark for Stylish Action video games, due to popularizing within the genre the usages of stance systems and weapon changing during combos, allowing for combat to become even more stylish and opening up the possibilities for what Combos players could execute in combat.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: When DMC3 came out, Vergil proved to be popular outside of Japan. The DMC team even acknowledged this phenomenon and were surprised by it. As retrospectively explained by scenario writer Bingo Morihashi in pages 209 and 210 of the 3142 Graphic Arts artbook, Vergil's katana and Iaijutsu style are primarily meant to appeal to the Japanese audience, so his overseas popularity was a huge shock for the team, especially because this game was just the start of their revisioning for Vergil.
• Goddamned Bats: The Fallen. They have a lot of health, are frustratingly mobile (they always fly, can clip through walls and floors, and can even fly out of the player's reach), are hard to stagger, and have long-ranged attacks that make it hard to approach them.
• Growing the Beard: DMC3 was this for the Devil May Cry series as a whole. From the somewhat stiff and more restrictive first game that still had bits of Resident Evil design lingering around, to the much more lackluster and critically loathed second game with all its questionable design choices and resulting Troubled Production, DMC3 was the game that was not only seen as a must-have PS2 title, but one of the defining action games of its entire generation. Subsequent games in the series would all derive from DMC3's design and mechanics, and the genre followed in its footsteps as Devil May Cry became a staple franchise.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • Lady's act of killing her own father in this game turns out to be something that haunted her for a long time, as revealed in Devil May Cry 5 when she tries to convince Nero to stay out of fighting his own father.
  • Dante acquires his Devil Trigger ability and has the Rebellion "awakened" after he was stabbed by Vergil using it. As it turns out in the Visions of V manga for DMC5, Vergil also suffered a similar, yet more traumatic awakening in the distant past; he was impaled by a demon who attacked his home when he was a child, which in turn summoned Yamato in front of him.
  • In the finale, Vergil willingly falls down the Demon World and Dante briefly cries over losing him. In Devil May Cry 5, Morrison's third letter (which narrates some events between DMC3 and DMC1) retroactively reveals Dante believing he killed his own brother... And that's even before he'll eventually meet and defeat Vergil again (as Nelo Angelo) in DMC1.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • When Lady tells Dante to take her Kalina Ann, he asks her how much she's going to charge him for it. She only asks for his name in exchange, but later works would actually depict her as a major source of Dante's constant debt.
  • In the Special Edition of this game, Vergil's campaign begins with him reading a book in a library. Arkham then appears and thinks Vergil might be looking for the history of his father, Sparda. However, Vergil says that it's not what he's looking for. Years later, Devil May Cry 5 and its Visions of V spin-off reveals that Vergil loves poetry, creating the retroactive implication that he might be reading a poetry book in that cutscene.
  • Vergil shouts "Why isn't this working?!" in a frustrated tone when the ritual to fully unseal the Temen-ni-gru fails. When playing as Vergil in the Special Edition, he will also kick the ornamental spear to activate a machine after being slightly annoyed beforehand. Although the game simply reuses Dante's animation in this part of Mission 5, it amusingly depicts Vergil being frustrated on smaller issues.
  • The end of Mission 14 has Dante riding Lady's motorcycle to rapidly climb up the Temen-ni-gru tower while killing some demons along the way using the bike itself. Unfortunately, the bike explodes towards the end of the cutscene due to Dante overloading the engine. Devil May Cry 5 would later return to this concept and implement it in actual gameplay with the Cavaliere Devil Arm, a motorcycle that has the added bonus of being able to split into two chainsaws.
  • Arkham at one point makes an offhand comment that "A storm is approaching" while going off to deal with Lady while Vergil is glancing after him. Vergil's theme song in Devil May Cry 5 includes the lyrics "I AM THE STORM THAT IS APPROACHING!", creating the hilarious implication that Vergil really did like that line.
    • It's more hilarious in a Black Comedy sort of way, but there was a hurricane titled "Virgil" in 1992.
  • Vergil's "Give that to me." line in the Final Boss battle implied that he's a greedy sibling who still wants to take his brother's amulet no matter the circumstances. This also evoked a laugh from the fans, which resulted into the memetic "Greedy Vergil" image macro. More than a decade later, it turns out this is actually an intended characterization for Vergil and not just a one-time moment Played for Laughs. The in-game "Old Man's Diary" document in DMC5 reveals Vergil having a tendency to write his name on things to make them "truly his" because he and Dante fought over things so often.
  • This game features a villain named Arkham and introduces his daughter Lady. Batman: The Telltale Series featured a villain named Lady Arkham who was also out to avenge a dead loved one, albeit through much more ruthless means.
• Ho Yay: Dante and Vergil engage in a banter before they fight in Mission 7. However, some parts of their dialogue in that scene have been interpreted differently by their shippers. Specifically, the "kiss from your little brother" line is being imagined in a literal way.
  Vergil: My sincerest apology, brother. I was so eager to see you I couldn't concentrate on the preparations for the bash.
  Dante: Whatever. At any rate, it's been a whole year since we last met. How about a kiss from your little brother? Or better yet, how about a kiss from this?
• Hype Backlash: There are some who consider the game to not live up to it's reputation as one of if not the best games in the series.
• I Knew It!: After Devil May Cry 2 was announced to come to the Nintendo Switch separately from the first Devil May Cry, many people correctly assumed that Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening would also be on the way.
• It's Hard, So It Sucks!:
  • Capcom decided to make the Japanese version's Hard Mode as the North American version's Normal Mode, a decision many felt was going overboard.
  • The player doesn't start with DT and enemies don't drop health as much as DMC 1 which also initially didn't give you DT to recover health, enemies are faster and it's not uncommon for the game's soundtrack to drown out enemy sound cues making it feel entirely unfair when you take damage/die at times compared to previous games.
• Just Here for Godzilla: Though Devil May Cry 3 is generally known in the fandom as the game that defined the series going forward, it's also known (especially by the fangirls) as "that Devil May Cry game where Dante has has his abs exposed", much more so for the unlockable "outfit" where he can spend the entire game shirtless. As such, even if the game is not entirely Best Known for the Fanservice, it's still remembered and played for having one of Dante's most attractive iterations.
• Love to Hate: Arkham (and, by extension, Jester) is easily one of the most vicious villains in the entire Devil May Cry franchise, and yet he also manages to be one of the most iconic (second only to Vergil). Him being incredibly hammy and a clever Manipulative Bastard help a lot.
• Memetic Mutation: See here.
• Most Wonderful Sound: A lot of Vergil's battle quotes have this effect (especially when he goes Devil Trigger), so much so that he's the subject of several memes.
  You are not worthy as my opponent.
• Narm Charm:
  • Vergil lecturing his brother after their first battle deserves some points on the Narm scale. Even so, Vergil's speech is still considered a definitive moment for him, one that's often quoted by fans and launched all sorts of analysis into his motives due to its mildly cryptic nature.
    Vergil: Foolishness, Dante. Foolishness.
  • The same can be said of Dante's "And now my soul is telling me to stop you!" line to Vergil right before their final battle, accompanied by dramatic finger pointing. It comes across as somewhat cheesy and Dante's delivery is a bit odd, but as part of his speech to Vergil and a culmination of his character arc from a Heroic Neutral Jerk with a Heart of Gold to a more genuinely heroic person, it works (it also helps that Vergil finds the line just as ridiculous.)
• Older Than They Think:
  • Due to its sub-par design and at best lukewarm reception among the majority of the fanbase pertaining to anything other than the soundtrack, few realize that a number of concepts and mechanics in this game originated from DMC2. For example:
    1. Trickster Style expanded upon the maneuvers Dante and Lucia could perform with the Evade button ^note which even uses the circle button like all Styles do in subsequent titles for the PlayStation entries.
    2. Fireworks was introduced as part of a combo string instead of a standalone special for the Shotgun, and other Gunslinger staples like Twosome Time and Rain Storm (minus the spinning) were featured as default abilities.
    3. Dante's now-trademark Rebellion made its debut there (albeit with a radically different design from what's seen in DMC3 and beyond).
  • Real-Time Weapon Change existed way back in the first Devil May Cry, though it was limited to swapping between Alastor and Ifrit, was initiated by a click of the right trigger (R3), and had a fairly lengthy startup animation that often made it more practical to simply go to the menu and manually switch your weapons loadout. The ability to swap guns on the fly was introduced in none other than the aforementioned DMC2; DMC3 just allowed Dante to switch melee weapons and firearms at the press of a button for a significantly more dynamic and freeform combo system.
  • DMC3 is mostly remembered as the game where Dante's Devil Trigger form changes depending on which Devil Arm he has equipped, a feature which is later dropped by 4 and 5 opting for consistent forms regardless of the weapon. However, such mechanic already existed way back DMC1; Dante could take on the demonic forms of Alastor, Ifrit and Sparda in Devil Trigger state, but the first two only take effect when he's attacking or flying via Air Raid, and the latter is only usable in the two-part fight against Mundus.
  • Even if it's a prominent mechanic in this game, DMC3 isn't exactly the first game in the series where some enemies are vulnerable to a certain element. DMC1 also had it to a lesser degree; the ice-elemental Frost demons receive more damage from the fire-elemental Ifrit Devil Arm.
  • The re-releases of the game added more Batman and The Joker references surrounding Arkham and his clown persona Jester, wherein Jester calls himself "Joker" during his Special Edition boss fights, while the HD Collection achievement for defeating Arkham is titled "Asylum", referencing Arkham Asylum. These make Devil May Cry 3 one of the many pop culture works that contribute to the Pop-Cultural Osmosis effect of audiences associating "Arkham" with Batman, even though the word itself is a reference to the fictional town Arkham Massachussets from the works of H. P. Lovecraft.
• Polished Port: The Switch re-release has features introduced in later games such as on-the-fly Style switching and an improved version of 4 and 5's weapon switch system, and even has a local co-op Bloody Palace not featured in any other entry in the series.
• Porting Disaster:
  • Compared to the console version, the first (not the remaster compilation) PC port of DMC3 is a disaster as a result of Capcom outsourcing the porting job to another developer (one of the notable problems is missing crucial cutscenes). Thankfully, Capcom learned their lesson after this game and Resident Evil 4, resulting in the polished PC port of DMC4.
  • The PlayStation 3 version of this game is also pretty bad, especially the digital PSN version, having Kalina Ann's Grapple not work for most of the time, randomly and completely crashing on menus, or instances where the cutscene audio plays yet shows nothing but a black screen (which also causes the game to crash).
• Refrain from Assuming:
  • The song at the credit roll is titled "Devils Never Cry", although a lot of people still call it "The Devil's Cry", after the last words of the song.
  • While most people call the two battle themes that play in DMC3 as "Taste the Blood" and "Divine Hate", their actual titles according to the official Devil May Cry 3 Original Soundtrack list are "Battle-1 (Battle Music 1)" and "Battle-2 (Battle Music 2)" respectively.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Compared to Ifrit from DMC1, Beowulf's Charged Attacks feel tighter to control because there are no easy visual or audio cues to indicate if your held attacks have already reached their maximum charge. The only available cue is when Dante or Vergil's armored limb starts shaking, but it's so difficult to tell in dimly-lit areas. Unless you've spent enough time practicing, the lack of a charge indicator can throw off your timing if you want to maximize your damage output against agile opponents.
  • The way enemy Devil Trigger works in this game's Dante Must Die mode is pretty much the most obnoxious in the series - once you kill two enemies, all enemies who were there for the first two kills will Devil Trigger. The reasons why it's bad are obvious - it makes enemies activating DT unavoidable (where as in other games, it's possible to kill enemies off before they do), forces the player to go after the toughest enemies first, otherwise they DT and become even tougher, and in fights where enemies constantly spawn, makes the player go after the newly spawned enemies before they DT as well. This also makes just about every room with a Red Seal a chore, since killing DT'd enemies takes a while (especially considering that Dante Must Die difficulty cranks up enemy health by itself). This is best seen in Mission 12 - at one point, the player has to fight a Hell Vanguard and several Hell Prides, and woe be to the guy who kills the Prides first, because the Hell Vanguard will DT and turn the rest of the fight into a race against time due to the player's health being drained.
  • The player cannot dodge mid-melee swing like in the second game, while Dante is faster in 3 so are the enemies so it can result in the same issue of starting a melee attack only for a far off enemy to suddenly do a teleport/charge without enough time to realistically evade it.
  • Yellow Orbs requiring the player to use a rare and expensive item just to load checkpoints was so bad they added Golden Orbs in Special Edition, which revive the player on the spot and give the player infinite checkpoint restarts as well.
• Signature Scene:
  • The opening scene of Mission 1 where Dante hits his jukebox to turn it on, proclaims "This party's getting cuh-razy! Let's rock!", and then effortlessly annihilates a swarm of demons that bust into his house and skewered him to no avail (but not before taking a moment to shove a slice of pizza in his mouth), all in the first five minutes.
  • The final duel with Vergil thanks to its shockingly tragic edge and the sheer awesomeness of both Sons of Sparda dueling at full strength. Many hail it as one of the greatest final confrontations in video game history.
• Signature Song: The game's main theme, "Devils Never Cry". It even followed Dante in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 as his own character theme, and is also reused more than a decade later as a bonus soundtrack for Devil May Cry 5: Special Edition.
• Special Effect Failure: Just like the criticisms towards the HD Collection version of DMC1, the HD version of DMC3:SE also had many graphical and transparency errors in its attempt at making the graphics appear "crisp" and clear. As fans have pointed out in this compilation video, Dante's hair now covers more of his eyes as his bangs became bigger and less transparent, while Lady's leg bandage has a black outline due to a lack of trasparency. Some visual effects were also lost; Nevan's eyes mostly glow red in the post-fight cutscene from the PS2 original, but they are completely white in the HD version due to the absence of the glow effect.
• Spiritual Adaptation: This game mostly takes place in a Gothic tower, but it also has the trappings of a Castlevania game, such as the Nintendo Hard difficulty of the classics (CV1, CV3, CV4), the exploration/backtracking of the Metroidvanias, and the protagonist being a white-haired Half-Human Hybrid hero (Symphony of the Night), so DMC3 is either in the same league as or surpasses DMC1 as "the best 3D Castlevania-esque ever made."
• Suspiciously Similar Song: The last few seconds of "Cerberus Battle" bear an eerie resemblance to "Sharp Fear Short" from Half-Life.
• That One Boss: The final battle with Arkham on higher difficulties. Due to the circumstances of the fight, you don't have access to either your style ability or devil trigger for the fight. This is more limiting that you might initially realize. And the boss has one particular attack where it swarms you with small worm things that can quickly overwhelm you and kill you if they aren't dealt with quickly. Your best option is to try to kill them with Kalina Ann as fast as possible and hope for the best since you have no access to defensive skills that your styles would bring and you don't have the raw power and survivability that DT would bring either.
• That One Level: Mission 15 can be tedious and confusing to play without a guide. It mostly consists of backtracking some previously-visited areas in order to find three pieces of Orihalcon Fragments, but the main challenge comes from the several scattered rotating switches that "rotate the tower" and change the nearby room's destination. To make things more difficult, these switches can be rotated for as many times as you like, eventually encouraging a lot of trial-and-error until you reach the correct rooms. If you don't know what you're doing with these switches, it's easy to get lost and you might accidentally find yourself going back and forth.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Vergil Mode in the Special Edition. It's a full-on retread of Dante's story, complete with facing a red-clad Vergil (dubbed "Vante" by fans). Playing as Vergil is undeniably cool, but it's a crying shame that you only get a glimpse of his side of the tale for two cutscenes.
• Tough Act to Follow: Devil May Cry 3 was, and to many still is, regarded as the best entry in the franchise. It's certainly seen as better than its predecessors, while DMC4 is considered a competent effort that didn't quite equal it and DmC continues to be a source of debate to this day on account of its mixed reception and heavily polarizing nature. DMC5, which didn't release until fourteen years after DMC3, was the first game in the series to contest 3 for its spot at the top, although there's still disagreement about that as well.
• Underused Game Mechanic: Dante can grab onto specific poles and pillars to spin around and damage nearby enemies. While it's interesting to use parts of the environment in combat, these are only found in very specific locations, so the opportunity to use them is rare.
• Vindicated by History: Not the game as a whole, but its story. When DMC3 came out, it was largely dismissed as a throwaway Excuse Plot, with the main focus being the superb gameplay. In more recent years, it's not uncommon to see fans of the series praising this game's story, claiming that despite its cheesiness, it's still very effective and served as the foundation of Dante, Lady and Vergil's characterizations in later installments.
• Watch It for the Meme: Some Vergil-related quotes from this game spread further as memes and Fan Nicknames in the later installments such as 4 and 5, so fans who were introduced to the Devil May Cry franchise because of those newer games hop into DMC3 in order to know why Vergil is being associated with phrases like "Now I'm a little motivated!", "Where's your motivation?", "Foolishness, Dante, Foolishness." and "I need more power."
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Didactic?: The plot appears to be loosely based on The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri with similar developments in the story. While the poem's version of Dante understands Christ's divinity, DMC Dante learns to respect his father Sparda. There is also an amount of Fridge Brilliance that alludes to the literature, such as Cerberus's frozen body and being the boss of the third level possibly referencing the third Circle of Hell.
• Win Back the Crowd: DMC3 is seen as the game that won fans back after the questionable DMC2. The combat was reworked to be closer to the tighter feel of DMC1 (with a vastly expanded system that included varied weapon types and a "Style" system that allowed players to come up with creative approaches to battles), and the tone of the game was made considerably more jovial and flamboyant compared to 2's more reserved feel.

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