Ranking Every Devil May Cry From Worst To Best

4. Devil May Cry 4

Coming off the immaculate DMC 3, Capcom threw us a curveball: Nero.

Playable for the first half of the game, this Dante clone (visually, at least) came with the Devil Bringer - a demonic arm that let him grab enemies out the sky, as well as perform a range of grabs and ground slams. Not only that, but if you tapped L2/LT at the right time, you could "rev up" Nero's sword for extra damage mid-combo, Final Fantasy VIII-style.

All of this was fantastic and exactly what the series needed on a mechanical level... but then we got to Dante. Aesthetically Capcom went with an ace cowboy look, and made it so you could access all of his DMC 3 stance attacks by tapping the D-pad in four directions... but he was only in half the game.

Not only that, but the "half" he was in, was all recycled levels from Nero's campaign. The exact same levels, in fact, in reverse order, with the exact same bosses, being defeated in the same way.

A baffling design choice that felt more like someone on the dev side wanted to make a Nero game, only to realise too late that fans would riot without Dante, so his gameplay was sublime, but that was it.

Thankfully, in making the leap to newer hardware, DMC 4's animations and cutscene fight choreography were something else, the latter being the new milestone for whatever we want to call "action cinema" in a gaming sense.