RETRO – Dante, the white-haired bad boy in the red coat, had been conquering only the PlayStation 2 up to this point — and in a big way: for fans of manga vibes and non-stop, high-octane action, he was the gold standard. By the third installment, Capcom figured it was time to try a little port…

I don’t know how deep you are into console gaming, but anyone who has even casually brushed up against PlayStation action titles has surely heard of the over-the-shoulder series Devil May Cry, nicknamed the “crying devil.” Its fixed lead, Dante, is a reckless, hot-headed demon hunter who sends all manner of monsters back to the underworld in wildly varied, stylish ways using his signature, over-the-top arsenal.

The series reached three entries by then, and the best one was clearly the latest: Devil May Cry 3. The action is as blisteringly fast, unforgiving, and spectacular as in the earlier games, but it also demands far more tactics and brainpower. On PS2, DMC3 was widely considered Dante’s toughest outing. So we had every reason to install the PC version with giddy anticipation…

We’ve Seen This View Before

Before I start crying over Capcom’s rushed port instead of the devil’s tears, a few words on what we expected from Devil May Cry 3 based on its PS2 version. It’s essentially a third-person, fixed-camera hack ’n’ slash where, much like in survival horror, you clear discrete areas while slaughtering an obscene number of demons. If you’ve played any Resident Evil or Silent Hill — or even the old Nocturne — you know the drill: you can’t rotate the camera, and at times you can’t even see what you’re shooting at.

The big difference from survival horror is the sheer flood of enemies here — they don’t politely wait for our hero to assume a comfy fighting stance, they try to rip out his heart without a breather. Even back on the aging PS2, this fixed camera setup felt dated, yet in Devil May Cry 3 most forgave it because the devs nailed the rhythm of the frantic combat and the cleverly designed, personality-soaked boss fights.

But it’s 2006, and on PC we’ve already enjoyed the fruits of more modern tech more than a few times. By that standard, this old-school camera is, even with generous goodwill, a liability — though no one expected Capcom to rewrite the game into a true TPS just for the PC release…

Playing Piano With Your Big Toe

What we did expect, however, was a control scheme reworked for PC. (To be totally honest, I suspected Capcom wouldn’t lose any sleep over how enjoyable Dante would be to steer on our rigs — chalk that up to my baseline pessimism on this topic.) Sadly, those bad vibes were spot-on — in fact Capcom undershot even my low expectations. Piloting Dante with a keyboard is like trying to play piano with your big toes: technically possible, but you’ll be head-butting the wall non-stop just to eke out a tune.

Movement with WASD is awkward from the jump, and then you have a small army of functions mapped to baffling default keys. Sure, you can remap everything, but I hate burning thirty minutes on keybind chores for a game like this — not to mention it’s a minor quest just to find the “OK” button in the menu. Long story short: DMC3 is a dyed-in-the-wool console port, and as such it’s a royal pain if you insist on keyboard. “Fine, I’ll use a gamepad,” you say. After all, there are tons of USB pads for PC — plug, play, problem solved… or so the optimistic tester thinks.

The catch? Gamepad support is also a mess. On most pads, thanks to a bizarre bug, Dante simply refuses to walk straight. The only way to make the game remotely playable is to download a tiny third-party tool called joytokey and manually map buttons — which is, frankly, embarrassing. That band-aid helps with basic movement, but the real pain starts when learning combos. The tutorial shows static images instead of, say, querying Windows for your actual gamepad layout. So if you want to execute complex strings (and in this game, you really should), you’ll end up “playing scales” across every button.

Ugly as Sin

Here’s another console-port pitfall: when the devs don’t spend even a second making the graphics a hair nicer than the original. Devil May Cry 3 looks exactly like you’d expect from an old, slapdash console-to-PC conversion: washed-out, downright ugly textures, low poly counts, and so on.

Higher resolutions don’t help — on some machines, the game even stutters, which is a truly dazzling achievement… To make matters worse, certain lighting effects present on PS2 are missing, leaving the visuals even grayer and more sterile. Dante and a few key NPCs are the only ones that look decent, which hardly makes up for the dreary, blurry environments.

What a Waste

True to form, Capcom didn’t fuss over the port. It’s as if they asked “Yomoko,” the junior coder in the basement, to shove the game through a trial version of the PS2-to-PC tool — time permitting. Practically nothing has been tuned for PC needs. The company’s attitude toward us seems to be: “Be happy you got anything at all, kid — and keep it down until Christmas!”

Yet if you’re willing to grab that helper app for your gamepad, grit your teeth to learn the PS2-centric tutorial combos, and make peace with the now-ancient fixed camera, there’s a genuinely good hack-and-slash here — with a quirky story and excellent boss encounters. Sadly, PC doesn’t get many like it these days. Even so, I’m now pretty skeptical about Resident Evil 4’s PC version — here’s hoping those ever-slipping release dates aren’t just because Yomoko is on vacation until September…

-Gergely Herpai “BadSector”-(2005)

Publisher: Capcom
Developer: Capcom
Genre: Action, TPS
Release: 2005