
Add in the fact that some of the early tutorial windows appear in 4:3 and you’ll begin to wonder if the remaster team at Capcom thought that they were supposed to be doing a historical preservation job instead of modernising the game.

You will likely be appalled at how bad this game’s opening cutscenes look, with the in-engine animations seemingly rendered at the same resolution as they were on the PS2 way back when it launched in 2005. Things don’t start very well for DMC3 SE mind you. Devil May Cry has always been about variation, and attacking with that in mind, and here the Switch port nails it. It’s been a popular mod for the PC version of the game so it’s fascinating to see it appear here as a bonafide feature, and it pushes the game to its logical conclusion. You have Trickster, Swordmaster, Gunslinger and Royalguard to begin with, and Quicksilver and Doppelgänger later on. The Nintendo Switch Special Edition brings all of that and more, now allowing players to swap between the different combat styles mid-fight with Freestyle Mode. It’s a masterpiece of action gameplay, and a watershed moment for the genre. Not only that, but it brought in the ability to swap out your weaponry on the fly, all the while trying to keep those combos going. Devil May Cry 3 cemented the series identity, in that it focussed in on the build-up of style through putting together the most insane combos (in)humanly possible. Dante and the Devil May Cry series ask one thing of the player, and that’s to despatch every enemy in your path in the coolest way possible.
