YMMV / Devil May Cry

• Breather Level: Mission 5 is a short Timed Mission where you must reach a specific door before the Melancholy Soul expires in three minutes. There's only one mandatory fight and the objective is just a few rooms that you need to backtrack. If you are quick, this can be over in less than two minutes. This is quite a breather as it's sandwiched between two lengthy missions that have their own challenging boss fights.
• Camera Screw: The game frequently changes the camera angle mid-jump, which makes some boss battles or platforming sections harder than intended. The key to your survival is that the game doesn't realign your controls until you land, so you need not jerk the controller around. The third fight with Griffon is nearly unwinnable on higher difficulties because of this.
• Cheese Strategy: At least during initial playthroughs, Alastor's Air Raid attack is commonly abused to cheese most encounters, even boss fights. Being able to fly above enemies (many of which don't have anti-air attacks or can't easily reach you) while firing fast hitscan-esque beams makes these fights a joke. Its main downside (Dante can only use it in Devil Trigger form) can be mitigated by players saving up the Devil Trigger gauge to use this attack and nothing else, and extending its duration with Devil Stars. It's gotten to the point where if one is having a hard time beating this game, they'd be reminded to try using Air Raid.
• Common Knowledge:
  • Phantom is mostly remembered as "the giant magma/lava spider from Devil May Cry 1", though that description is just partially correct. While it's true that Phantom is a giant arachnid with a spider-shaped body that has multiple eyes and limbs, many forget that he also has claw-pincers, and a scorpion-like tail with a stinger.
  • According to Hideki Kamiya, some development details, and an extracted texture file, the official name of the biplane is "Karnival", yet it's still widely remembered as "Carnival".
  • In some fan forums and lore discussions, Trish is thought to be a clone of Eva, or is Eva herself revived as a demon. Neither of these are true — Trish is a demon and Mundus specifically created her to resemble Eva in order to trick Dante in going to Mallet Island. The games never described Trish as a "clone", and there is no evidence to support the claim that Eva is Back from the Dead. A contributing factor to this misconception comes from the Significant Double Casting of the two characters.
  • Although later games repeatedly mention and establish that Dante and Vergil are twins, DMC1 never actually used the words "twin" or "twins" when it brings up Dante's relationship with Vergil, contrary to popular belief. Instead, Vergil is just referred to as Dante's "brother" in this game. DMC3 is the first game in the series that describes Vergil as Dante's "twin" via some dialogue lines and Vergil's Boss File.
  • In Devil May Cry 5, V's familiars Griffon, Shadow and Nightmare are based on the original Shadow, Griffon, and Nightmare demons Dante fought in Mallet Island, but are actually manifestations of Vergil's trauma from his time as Nelo Angelo. However, that game brought a retroactive misconception that claims Shadow is a major boss in DMC1. While it's true that Griffon and Nightmare are major bosses in this game, the Shadows are Minibosses or Bosses In Mook Clothing at best (there are several Shadows in Mallet Island and they don't even have a dedicated boss lifebar). This misremembered detail is attributed to both the long Sequel Gap between DMC1 and DMC5, and the Newbie Boom effect of the latter game.
  • A common misconception is the idea that Sparda turned on demonkind in defense of humanity specifically because he fell in love with Eva. However, the opening narration establishes that the war between humans and demons was 2000 years ago, as opposed to the war raging for that long and only ending within living memory. Sparda ended the war by defecting and defeating the demon king, Mundus. The first game is clearly meant to take place in contemporary times as seen with the motorcycle Trish rides and the neon sign of Dante's Devil May Cry building.
• Complete Monster (Light Novel prequel): The vicious swordsman known only as Gilver—revealed in Before the Nightmare to be an Evil Knockoff of Vergil—is an ice-cold mercenary who shares the elegance and arrogance of the son of Sparda he is modeled after but none of his noble qualities. Rising through the ranks of Bobby's Cellar, Gilver cemented himself in the criminal underworld by slaughtering everything in his path, leaving trails of mutilated corpses in his wake. Gilver's massive body count and sadism inspires many other hitmen to return to the old days where wanton destruction was the norm. While initially a nasty rival obsessed with beating Dante, Gilver is in truth a demon supremacist who has been summoning them to wreak havoc around the city and personally murdering Dante's friends to isolate him, showing his true colors by feeding the entirety of Bobby's Cellar to demons as his way of starting a plan to merge both worlds and let the hellish dimension consume all of humanity.
• Demonic Spiders: Shadows. They're fast, hit hard, can't be damaged by melee attacks, and can only be finished off by attacking a core which is revealed briefly after a certain amount of damage — plus they're spiteful enough to try a Taking You with Me, which you have to run around like a headless chicken for upwards of 10 seconds to avoid. Have fun trying to beat three of them at once on a 100% run. It should be noted that there is a (fairly simple) trick for inflicting significant damage upon them in record time: if the Shadow uses its spike thrust attack, Dante can jump on top of the spike with good timing and then unload with his handguns/shotgun, which normally is enough to trigger the Shadow's pre-death Turns Red state. However, it took years for many players to discover it was possible to land on the spike without being harmed, let alone deal critical damage from that position, and the trick has no effect when you're playing on Dante Must Die.
• Difficulty Spike: The game is pretty simple for the first two stages... and then Phantom shows up at the end of the third stage and mauls you. If you can get past him, the next stages offer harder platforming sections and tricky non-boss enemies such as the Shadows and Death Scissors.
• 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.
  • Some fights against gigantic bosses are made more challenging because of the camera angles, especially when you're locked-on. For example, the camera would look down when you fall off the platform during the second phase of Mundus's fight.
• Fan Nickname: See here.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Shotgun Hiking. With Air Hike and a shotgun, you can endlessly jump and juggle an airborne target until it dies or when you mess up the trick. This isn't a bug; it's an exploit.
  • The Sparda sword seems pointless because it uses Alastor's moveset but lacks a Devil Trigger until the final boss. What the game never tells you, however, is that Sparda always deals the extra damage Alastor does during Devil Trigger. This may not seem like a good tradeoff, but it helps tremendously on Hard and especially on Dante Must Die, where Dante does not gain health while in Devil Trigger, and the damage of Dante's attacks while in Devil Trigger does not scale up with the difficulty. That Air Raid you used to slaughter enemies on your first playthrough barely scratches even the basic mooks. Melee becomes your main method of dealing damage, and always having the extra damage by using Sparda makes getting through DMD significantly less frustrating.
  • Ebony and Ivory's damage output is outclassed by all the other guns, but like Sparda above, they become significantly more useful than the other guns on higher difficulties. The pistols give you a significant amount of air control, and using it to help evade attacks that will take off half your lifebar, or to more easily get into melee range is far more useful than a little more ranged damage.
• Genre Turning Point: In 2001, the Beat 'em Up genre, moribund since the mid-'90s, went 3D with Devil May Cry 1, the game that popularized the Stylish Action genre of video games, revived the Hack and Slash for a new generation, and served as the inspiration for games like the Ninja Gaiden revival, God of War, and Bayonetta (a Creator-Driven Successor from Hideki Kamiya).
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: According to motion artist Tomoya Ohtsubo from the DMC1-focused interview section of the 3142 Graphic Arts artbook, Trish ended up being popular overseas, likely because having a "long blonde hair is a guaranteed hit".
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • After retrieving the amulet of Nelo Angelo, Dante recalls a moment where he and Vergil fought over chocolate on their birthday. Although it's Played for Drama in this game, the later games reveal that the brothers fight over little things so often, and those had a bigger impact on Vergil. In DMC3, Vergil still tries to take the amulet of Dante even when they're in the demon world, but Dante just jokingly responds "No way, you got your own." And as revealed by the in-game "Old Man's Diary" document in DMC5, it got to the point where Vergil developed a habit of writing his name on things to make them "truly his".
  • In the finale, Dante mocks Mundus's vow to return to the human world someday with the retort "Goodbye! And when you do come back, give my regards to my son, will ya?". This statement becomes hilarious when taken literally, as later installments reveal that not only is Dante still single after several years in canon, his brother Vergil is the first to have a son, Nero.
  • In Dante and Trish's first encounter, she attacks him by throwing a bike at him, which he blasts apart easily. In fifth game, Dante acquires a pair of chainsaw Devil Arms which can transform into a bike after defeating the demon Cavaliere Angelo. And the cherry on top is that Trish was being used as a Living Battery for Cavaliere when Dante defeated it.
• It Was His Sled: Nelo Angelo is Vergil, due to the character's popularity and importance in later games. This plot point is also one of the most commonly mentioned or referenced events in later games.
• Memetic Mutation: See here.
• Narm:
  • Drama clearly wasn't the writing staff's forte in this game. Take this line of Dante which became memetic. For bonus points, Dante's voice cracks very unmanfully right at the end, like he was suddenly struck with reverse puberty. To top it all off, the echo repeats the voice crack.
    Dante: "I should have been the one to fill your dark soul with liiiiiiiiiiiight!"
  • Just before then, there's Mundus's Evil Gloating.
    "So sad that humans will always be humans!"
• Nausea Fuel: The underwater sections are played in first-person view, but the screen's "fish lens"-like distortion visual effect can make the player dizzy from motion sickness for a while, especially if they quickly move the camera around. As pointed out in a comparison video, the HD Collection version is more likely to induce discomfort in these sections than the original PS2 graphics, likely because the HD version simulates a fluctating wave effect, while the clearer and brighter graphics make the brown-and-blue color palette more evident.
• Once Original, Now Common: When it first came out, Devil May Cry 1 was lauded for its fast action and deep gameplay, and rightfully so, as it basically set all the foundations of the modern Stylish Action/Hack and Slash genre, three years before God of War and Ninja Gaiden. Almost two decades later, not everything about DMC1 has exactly aged well, to the point that veteran fans even recommend newcomers to start with DMC3 or DMC5 instead since they offer more options to start from, and the combat mechanics in those games are deeper and faster. Once you've tried the other DMC games, it's also easier to notice the Early-Installment Weirdness of this game (Many of which are gameplay-related mechanics made more user-friendly in the next installments).
• Paranoia Fuel: Sin Scissors are great in making you paranoid. Their ability to phase through walls would make you want to avoid tight spaces and move around an open area instead, and their creepy laughter will still persist in the background for a significant time even if they're already dead. The latter makes you feel wary and urges you to check the environment if there's still a Sin Scissor around even if there's actually nothing to fear anymore.
• Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading: Director Hideki Kamiya tweeted that it wasn't his intention to portray Trish as Dante's love interest (although his response that she's more than that is open to interpretation). In spite of this, there was enough romantic subtext in some of their more touching scenes later on that Trish is still a popular partner for Dante among shippers. It doesn't help that the staff roll theme is titled "Dante & Trish ~ Seeds of Love."
• Signature Line: Dante's "I should've been the one to fill your dark soul with liiiiiiiiiiiiiiiight!" as he cries over Trish's apparent death, from the game's Signature Scene.
• Signature Scene: Dante crying over Trish's death is the most memorable scene from this game because it's a tear-jerker, Narm, and a meme in one package.
• Slow-Paced Beginning: After a few steps, the game starts by forcing you to jump around the lifeless opening foyer of a castle and find 45 Red Orbs to unlock a door before meeting and fighting the first mook. And if you die enough times on the first mission to try the game's Mercy Mode, you have to do the first few segments again, including the aforementioned sequence. Thankfully, most of the games that followed did not do this and opted for an Action Prologue instead, recognizing what the majority of players bought the game for.
• Special Effect Failure: For some reason, the HD Collection remaster is filled with these, containing so many graphical, transparency, and audio errors that there's a video compiling everything that was lost from the PS2 original.
• Spiritual Adaptation: With its gothic atmosphere and eerie feel (helped by some holdover elements from its origins as one of the prototype versions of Resident Evil 4), Devil May Cry is often thought of as the best 3D Castlevania-esque ever made.
• Suspiciously Similar Song:
  • "Fate" features the same sample pack as "Space Ocean" from Half-Life and thus sound frighteningly similar.
  • "Living Cave" sounds similar to Vangelis' "End Title" theme from Blade Runner.
• That One Attack: If you get swallowed by Nightmare, you're sent into a demonic dimension where you must fight several Sargassoes and one of the previous bosses to get out. However, this also doubles as Nightmare's Achilles' Heel. Escaping from this dimension deals a sizable portion of damage to Nightmare's health bar, and also makes the light switches needed to keep Nightmare solid last longer for the rest of the battle. However, you can only be swallowed up by Nightmare once, as all subsequent attempts to eat Dante simply result in a normal bite.
• That One Level: Mission 17 contains a tight hallway that's filled with several Marionettes and Fetishes, a section where you must time your attacks to deflect fireballs, a Light and Mirrors Puzzle that can be difficult to control with a keyboard on the PC port^note A lever has to be moved by rotating it with the same inputs used to move Dante. This mandatory section is clearly meant to be played comfortably with a controller, a tricky platforming section immediately after said puzzle that's made more difficult by the static camera angles, and a boss fight against the third phase of Nelo Angelo in the end. Dying to Nelo Angelo, especially on higher difficulties, forces you to repeat everything beforehand if you want to challenge him again.
• That One Sidequest: The secret mission "The Three Beasts" wherein you have to slay the Shadow demons. Not only was this taxing to first-time players (and Shadows are no joke), but this is the only mission in the game in which you literally have one shot per playthrough (unless you re-loaded the entire level to try again). In it, the three beasts circle Dante and can quickly overwhelm and kill him. Fast, cat-like reflexes and a steady eye on the entire battlefield are needed to prevail.

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