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  • Adaptation Displacement: The game is very loosely based upon the original poem and doesn't meet all of its events. Still, it's safe to say that more than a few young people think about this game when they heard Dante (well, maybe another game on that one) or Inferno.
  • Alternative Character Interpretation:
    • Does Dante really regret the sins of his past or is he just merely seeking a way to escape being punished for them?
    • Considering that Dante actually dies, and his trip through Hell is a sort of vision, is the Beatrice pleading for Dante to save her even the real one? Or does she only show up after Dante absolves himself of his sins, and the one he repeatedly sees before that point is just a figment of his imagination (representing his inner need for salvation), and/or is a vision presented by Lucifer to egg him onto the lowest circle of Hell?
  • Complete Monster: Lucifer is this in both the video game and animated film.
    • Video Game: Lucifer was once a great but vain angel of God's before he turned against him out of disgust for humanity and was cast into Hell with his followers as punishment. Seeking revenge by trying to tempt and corrupt humanity into Hell and torment, Lucifer plotted on using the sins of others to make his escape. Lucifer makes a deal with the pure Beatrice to test her beloved Dante's faithfulness in exchange for her soul. When Dante fails, Lucifer drags Beatrice to Hell to turn her into a spiteful succubus bride; when Dante comes to her rescue, Lucifer's attempts to break and hinder him include turning Dante's abusive father into a monster to kill his son. When Dante ultimately rescues Beatrice, Lucifer reveals that her capture was an elaborate ruse to bring Dante to him. It's revealed Lucifer seeks to destroy and recreate both Heaven and Earth in his own image as to take what he believes is rightfully his, and makes his escape attempt in the ensuing fight with Dante.
    • An Animated Epic: Lucifer is a Fallen Angel who rebelled against God and introduced sin to the world, leading to the creation of Hell, where millions of souls of sinners were tortured forever. Desiring to escape his prison in the Ninth Circle of Hell, Lucifer makes a bet with Beatrice about whether or not Dante will remain faithful in his crusade. Lucifer wins and kidnaps Beatrice right under Dante's eyes to lure him to Hell. As Dante ventures through all the circles of Hell to save Beatrice, Lucifer tortures her, burning her and tearing her apart for fun, before deciding to marry her and force her to give birth to his children forever. When Dante frees Beatrice and gets to the deepest circle of Hell, Lucifer manipulates Dante into freeing him and then announces his intention of escaping into Purgatory and Heaven, where he can torture all souls there and then plunge the entire universe into chaos, solely so he can force God to watch how he perverts his creations.
  • Demonic Spiders:
    • Heretical Priests, which have the nasty habit of rendering themselves and anyone around them cross-proof (but not magic-proof!) until the Priest dies. On their own, they can be handled relatively easily, but they get really annoying when they use their protection on angered spirits, shades that catch fire and can only be attacked by using the cross attack (or holy magic) to put out the flame.
    • Temptresses, especially for how early they appear in the game: they're wicked fast, durable and unpredictable to boot, pack a nasty (particular emphasis on 'nasty') unblockable attack, and they never, ever show up alone. It's all-too-easy for Dante to meet his end in the middle of a flurry of slashing claws from three of the stupid things.
  • Designated Villain: The first three bosses. Death is... well, Death, Charon is just there to move souls, and King Minos only sorts the souls into the proper circles. Not terribly glaring, though; no one likes Death when he visits, the other two "work" for Hell regardless, and all three got in Dante's way.
  • Disappointing Last Level: Many reviewers have praised the game's first several levels, but have stated that the later levels fall into this. That is, Malbolge is just a series of trials. This level takes up the largest amount of the Poem with inventive tortures for every type of fraud, but in the game is a bare rock cave where Beatrice describes the people convicted in a single line, and Cocytus is nothing but the Final Battle.
  • Enjoy the Story, Skip the Game: The gameplay is a competent but by-the-book action game that is basically a more repetitive God Of War. The atmosphere, art direction, and cutscenes however are incredibly well done and completely nail the poem's bleak and disturbing vision of Hell. It becomes a game you play less to actually play, and more to see what horrifying hellscape you fight through next.
  • Evil Is Cool: Zig-zagged in regards to Lucifer. The Devil Is a Loser is very much in effect in the original The Divine Comedy, in which he is depicted stuck in the icy center of Hell, powerless to do anything about his torment (which he's also partially bringing on himself). The Lucifer of this game, on the other hand, is given some Adaptational Badass and cleverness and also gives him a case of being a Villain Has a Point, namely given that Humans Are Bastards is in full effect, but even then it is also juxtaposed with him being Stupid Evil.
  • Game-Breaker: A fully upgraded cross becomes this.
    • To elaborate on this, upgrading the cross unlocks new holy spells which you can purchase. One of these is Divine Armor, which not only renders Dante invulnerable but upgrading this spell causes Dante to recover health persistently while Divine Armor's invulnerability is active. Upgrading it fully increases this regeneration rate. Combine with Ciacco's Bile, a relic that causes persistent mana regeneration, and Divine Armor will literally be the only spell you ever cast all game, and the only time you will ever die is if you fall off something or (somehow) run out of mana. Possibly averted by the fact that if you do this and neglect the scythe, the final boss will curb stomp you.
    • At (almost) the top of the other side of the upgrade path, you get the passive ability to regain mana... by killing things. That's right, the game lets you go invincible, regain health while doing so, then regain mana by killing the enemies you can't be touched by.
    • The fully charged blast of the cross comes to mind. It is very powerful, has a long range and area of effect, breaks all defenses, and knocks the enemy over. The only downside is of course a charge-time, which isn't very long. Furthermore, with upgrades, you can make the cross attack even stronger, and regain health from every enemy that dies from a cross attack. Single enemies (even some bosses) can just be spammed to death by it and even groups can be reduced to dust pretty quickly if you let them hug together in a tight area.
  • Genius Bonus: In addition to being an adaptation of "The Inferno", the game also incorporates some details about Dante Alighieri that will be interesting for anyone who is knowledgeable about the Florentine poet. Two notable tidbits are those about Bella when Dante finds her in the Wood of the Suicides saying that she died of the fever (which is how the real-life Bella Alighieri (née Abati) died) and that the character Francesco shares his name with Alighieri's real-life half brother.
    • On that note, the game's version of Dante grew up believing that his mother died of the fever when in actuality, her husband's abuse pushed her to hang herself. Even through the mid-20th century, it wasn't unusual for relatives/loved ones of suicide victims to cover up the suicide so the dead could receive burial in hallowed ground and thus have a chance at salvation.
  • Goddamned Bats: The Pests and the Temptresses, with the latter verging on Demonic Spiders on "Zealot" and reaching that territory easily on "Hellish".
    • The Hoarder/Waster. They don't do much damage, but they have an annoying spin attack that lasts a whole lot of time, knocks you over and potentially keeps doing it if it hits you again and it's completely immune while spinning. It may not be a big deal when you have only that enemy, but having many enemies at the same time can make it incredibly annoying.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight:
    • In a meta way. This Hack and Slash game is an obvious clone of God of War, a Sony-owned series that was created to compete against (and partly inspired by) the Devil May Cry series... which was in turn inspired by Dante Alighieri's The Divine Comedy. So it now seems things have gone full circle.
    • The choices for voice actors for Lucifer also have a bit of unintentional humor.
      • The 1986 Fist of the North Star film had The Hero Kenshiro's traits of Messianic Archetype emphasized to egregious extremes. John Vickery, who voiced Kenshiro in the English language dub of the film, now ironically provides the voice of Lucifer in this game.
      • In Rurouni Kenshin, Makoto Shishio, voiced by Steve Blum in the American English dub by Media Blasters, occasionally compares himself to being a demon (granted, he believes that he is right) and expects to go to Hell when he dies, and, following his death via internal combustion, is shown along with Yumi and Houji in the underworld, drawing up plans with them to achieve taking it over. Later in 2010, Blum would provide the voice of Satan himself in Dante's Inferno: An Animated Epic, who in turn has an ambitious goal of his own in ruling all three realms (Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven) of the afterlife.
  • It's Short, So It Sucks!: Without skipping cutscenes and with finding every damned soul, the base game can be easily beaten in 5-6 hours.
  • It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: By far the biggest criticism of the game, and one that it was never able to shake off, is that, visuals and plot aside, the gameplay itself was almost identical to God of War.
  • Nausea Fuel: Gluttony. Nothing is quite as disturbing as walking through a giant digestive system. Or, for that matter, the Gluttons themselves explosively crapping excrement on you.
  • Narm:
    • Lucifer is not only completely naked, but also hung like a horse for no particular reason, which kind of makes his boss fight hard to actually take seriously.
    • The intro to the fight with King Minos. The latter smells the sins on Dante's person. Dante's response? A determined and overacted "Sniff again!"'. Hilarious out of context, and still a little funny even in it.
  • One-Scene Wonder: Death, despite only appearing once in the story, and very early on at that, has managed to become quite popular.
  • Ron the Death Eater: The Historical Alighiero di Bellincione gets this treatment from some people who are too lazy to do any research on the real person and foolishly assume the fictional Alighiero in the game is an accurate representation of him when it isn't.
  • So Okay, It's Average: The main consensus is it's a very competently-executed God of War clone; but still, ultimately, a God Of War clone.
  • Squick: Even the most hardcore gamer is going to wince at some of the stuff they witness in some of the circles. Like most of the stuff in the "Lust" and "Gluttony" levels.
  • Tear Jerker: Dante finding his mother in the seventh circle. He had hoped that one parent would be in Heaven only to learn that his mother hanged herself due to her husband’s abuse. Virgil’s description of what happens when someone commits suicide doesn’t help.
  • That One Achievement: It's in the Trial from Trials of St. Lucia DLC. To earn this achievement/trophy, the player must complete 25 single-player and 15 two-player EA trials. However, this is the hardest achievement/trophy to earn in the game because of how unrelentingly Harder Than Hard the online trials can be. Not helped in the multiplayer aspect, where if one player dies or fails the trial then the game is over for both players. Not to mention that due to the game being over a decade old, new players will have virtually no chance whatsoever to get this achievement, as practically nobody plays multiplayer trials anymore.
  • That One Level: One or two of the bolgia (sub-sections of hell) of the Malebolge.
  • They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: In relation to the original Inferno by Dante Alighieri. Some literary scholars and feminists have taken issue with this game's portrayal of Beatrice. To quote Wikipedia, "Columbia University Professor Teodolinda Barolini, a former president of the Dante Society of America, criticized the game for its depiction of Beatrice, declaring, 'Of all the things that are troubling, the sexualization and infantilization of Beatrice are the worst. Beatrice is the human girl who is dead and is now an agent of the divine. She is not to be saved by him, she is saving him. That’s the whole point! Here, she has become the prototypical damsel in distress. She’s this kind of bizarrely corrupted Barbie doll.' Other reviews of the game include similar comments from professors regarding the characters: 'Beatrice saves Dante... not the other way around,' says Professor Arielle Saiber, an Italian literature professor at Bowdoin College."
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: You cannot absolve or punish Temptresses, Hoarder/Wasters, Heretics, Pagans or Damned Crusaders for some unknown reason.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Making Dante Alighieri into an already powerful, almost completely fearless alpha male crusader is this, given that these are the same people who made Dead Space, which made a big deal about how Isaac Clarke was NOT a supersoldier marine, and had to BECOME a badass throughout the games to survive, which makes it inexcusable as to why they could not do the same with Dante Alighieri in this game thus killing two birds with one stone by being both more faithful to be poem AND being more unique as a hack and slash game.
  • Visual Effects of Awesome: There is some very impressive animation during the game's cinematics.
  • Wangst: Lucifer begins to crack in the final battle and starts screaming to God asking him why he has abandoned him, in a sort of Paradise Lost style.

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