Devil May Cry

• 1. Introduction

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  Devil May Cry began life as a mistake. Hideki Kamiya was developing a new entry in the Resident Evil series when his prototype drifted so far from survival horror that Capcom decided it had no business being a Resident Evil game at all. Rather than scrap it, they let it become something else entirely. What emerged was a franchise that would define a new genre, sell tens of millions of copies, and center on one of the most recognizable demon hunters in the history of video games.

  At the heart of Devil May Cry is Dante, the half-demon, half-human son of a legendary warrior named Sparda. His story spans ancient demon wars, a fractured relationship with his twin brother Vergil, and an endless series of invasions threatening the human world. The games ask the player not just to survive those invasions, but to do so with maximum style, grading every performance from rank D all the way up to SSS.

  How does a failed Resident Evil prototype become a genre-defining franchise? And what does it take to earn that top rank?

• 2. Born From Failure

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  After the completion of Resident Evil 2 in 1998, Kamiya's team, called Team Little Devil, began preliminary work on a PlayStation 2 installment of the Resident Evil series. An early research trip took the team to Spain to study castles as reference for the game's environments. What they built, however, bore almost no resemblance to the survival horror games Capcom was known for.

  The prototype was a radical departure. Kamiya rewrote the story from the ground up, drawing on the Italian poet Dante Alighieri's Divine Comedy for the new game's premise and its protagonist's name. Strider, another Capcom franchise, is cited as a vital influence, particularly its inclusion of a "boss rush" structure.

  Capcom believed the heavy action focus was wrong for Resident Evil, but they still had confidence in what Kamiya had built as a standalone product. The franchise that would eventually sell 38 million copies worldwide started as a game nobody planned to make.

• 3. The Style System

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  Devil May Cry introduced a combat system built around the idea that how you fight matters as much as whether you win. Players earn a style rank by chaining long strings of attacks while avoiding damage, varying their moves to maintain and improve that rank, which runs from D through SSS.

  The Devil Trigger, a recurring ability across the entire series, lets a player's character temporarily take on a devilish form tied to their current weapon. Speed and attack strength increase, and health restores gradually during that transformation. Losing the same attack over and over would drop a player's rank; creativity was the point.

  Later games expanded the system further. Devil May Cry 3 gave Dante four distinct fighting styles, each accumulating experience points that unlocked new techniques without spending the series' currency, red orbs. Devil May Cry 4 introduced Nero, a new protagonist whose Devil Bringer arm allowed players to pull enemies toward him or throw himself toward them, opening up context-specific attacks and parries. A sword that could be pre-charged between attacks added another layer of timing and precision to the style calculation.

• 4. The Brothers at the Center

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  Two millennia before the events of the first game, a demon named Sparda, known as the Black Knight, defeated the Demon World ruler Mundus. Sparda sealed several Hellgates and the final gate, Temen-Ni-Gru, using his own blood and the help of a human priestess. He later met a woman named Eva, and together they had twin sons: Dante and Vergil.

  Writer Bingo Morihashi shaped much of the brothers' story. When designing Devil May Cry 3 as a prequel, he wanted to create a version of Vergil who was alive and young, since the original game had disposed of Vergil early and placed his soul under Mundus's control. Kamiya gave Morihashi the freedom to rework Vergil's entire backstory.

  In Devil May Cry 3, a falling-out between the brothers sets everything in motion. Dante is defeated by Vergil inside Temen-Ni-Gru, losing his locket before his dormant devil power revives him. Vergil's goal is to use the pendants their mother gave them to open a portal to the Demon World. When the portal begins to close, Dante pleads with his brother not to go. Vergil leaps through anyway. The name Dante eventually gives his shop, Devil May Cry, comes from a phrase Lady coins after returning to the human world, musing on the nature of devils and loving hearts.

• 5. Building the Sequels

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  Devil May Cry 2's troubled development became one of the franchise's most discussed backstage stories. An unidentified director was first placed in charge, but Capcom grew dissatisfied and assigned Hideaki Itsuno to take over with only four to five months left in development. Itsuno is the only person credited as director in the final version of the game. Producer Tsuyoshi Tanaka's stated design goal was scale: he estimated that Devil May Cry 2's environments were roughly nine times larger than the first game's.

  Despite that ambition, the sequel received a mixed critical reception. Capcom responded by pulling Devil May Cry 3 back toward what critics had praised in the original. Gameplay elements like environment size and the battle engine were reconsidered from scratch.

  Development of Devil May Cry 4 brought an 80-person team and a debate about introducing a new protagonist. A new lead was not approved until producer Hiroyuki Kobayashi stipulated that Dante had to remain in the game. Before release, Kobayashi stated publicly that the team wanted Dante to appear significantly more powerful than the newcomer Nero, to make the contrast between a veteran and a rookie unmistakable. Morihashi spent a full year on the writing and found Nero the most difficult character to get right.

• 6. The Reboot Gamble

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  By the time Devil May Cry 4 was finished, the staff were discussing whether to reboot the franchise entirely, partly because other game series were outselling them. They chose Ninja Theory, a British developer whose work on Heavenly Sword had impressed them, and Capcom supervised the resulting game, DmC: Devil May Cry, announced at the Tokyo Game Show in 2010.

  The reboot placed a new version of Dante and his twin brother Vergil in an urban fantasy setting inspired by contemporary Western cities. The two characters were Nephilim, descendants of one angel and one demon parent. Players could alternate between Angel Mode and Demon Mode, accessing different weapons and traversal abilities through each. The story wove in social commentary on mass media and consumerism, a departure from the gothic, Renaissance-inspired environments of the main series.

  Many long-time fans rejected the game, largely because of the dramatic change to Dante's appearance and the shift away from the series' signature style. The planned continuation of that new continuity was eventually abandoned, and DmC: Devil May Cry was reclassified as an alternate story separate from the main series. In 2013, Itsuno expressed interest in developing a fifth mainline installment, and in mid-January 2016 he tweeted that he had begun work on a new project.

• 7. Devil May Cry 5 and Beyond

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  Motion-capture photographs of Reuben Langdon and Johnny Yong Bosch, who had performed voice acting and motion capture for Dante and Nero in Devil May Cry 4, surfaced in March 2016 and prompted widespread speculation about a new game. On the 17th of May 2018, the domain name DevilMayCry5.com was registered under Capcom's Onamae domain register. The game was confirmed at E3 2018.

  Itsuno drew on his experience with Monster Hunter: World when designing Devil May Cry 5, aiming for content that would appeal to new players without sacrificing the challenge that long-time fans expected. He also cited a film in which three robots combined into a single giant robot as a creative inspiration, wanting to produce comparable moments of combined force. The game, released on the 8th of March 2019, featured Nero and Dante alongside a new character named V, who commands three demons remotely in battle due to his weakened physical state.

  As of the 31st of December 2024, Devil May Cry 5 is the best-selling entry in the series, with approximately 10 million units sold across its Standard and Special Editions. A Netflix animated series, produced by Adi Shankar, premiered on the 3rd of April 2025 and was renewed for a second season, which released on the 12th of May 2026. In November 2017, Kamiya had expressed interest in making a remake of the first installment and a crossover game pairing Dante with Bayonetta.

• 8. A Franchise Across Media

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  Two Devil May Cry light novels written by Shinya Goikeda and illustrated by Shirow Miwa were published in Japan in 2002. Tokyopop brought them to the United States in June and November 2006, respectively. Bingo Morihashi later wrote a two-volume novel for Devil May Cry 4, published in Japan in 2009, which included scenes cut from the game due to time constraints. His prequel novel Before the Nightmare, set before the events of Devil May Cry 5, was published on the 1st of March 2019.

  On the comics side, three issues of an adaptation of the first game were published by the Canadian company Dreamwave Productions in 2004, but the series was left unfinished when the company went bankrupt the following year. An anime series, Devil May Cry: The Animated Series, produced by Madhouse and directed by Shin Itagaki, premiered on Japan's Wowow TV network on the 12th of June 2007 and ran for 12 episodes.

  The franchise also crossed into live theater. Capcom produced a stage production, Sengoku Basara vs. Devil May Cry, in August 2015, running for 18 performances at the AiiA 2.5 Theater in Tokyo. A musical, Devil May Cry: The Live Hacker, ran for 13 performances in March 2019 at Zepp DiverCity in Tokyo, with a DVD released in late August of that year. Character designer Kazuma Kaneko of the Megami Tensei series created Dante and Vergil's demonic forms for Devil May Cry 3 as part of a deal with Atlus, and those same designs carried over into Marvel vs. Capcom 3 when Dante and Vergil appeared as playable characters.