Summary
Devil May Cry Season 2 delivers more recognisable elements that fans will probably enjoy, but the overbearing style can often be a bit much to deal with.
Like most Adi Shankar Netflix shows, the first season of Devil May Cry had a broad casual audience appeal but somehow managed to really upset hardcore fans of the franchise, mostly for quite nitpicky, lore-related reasons. I rather liked it, even while I could acknowledge that it wasn’t exactly a one-to-one adaptation. The good news is that Season 2 incorporates many more recognisable elements from the games, including, notably, a big focus on Dante’s brother, Vergil. The bad news is that the overwhelming visual style and soundtrack threaten to become really overbearing, and I’m not sure there’s enough meat on the bone to stop the whole thing from feeling tedious after a while.
Plot-wise, we’re picking up after the end of the first season, with Dante being kept on ice in the basement of DARKCOM headquarters while the higher-ups, notably Baines and Arius, wage open war on Makai (the hellish demon underworld, if you’re not in the know). Arius, the antagonist of Devil May Cry 2, has a similar motivation as in the game, with his ultimate intention being to use a group of mystical artifacts known as the Arcana to install Argosax the Chaos as the king of Makai by deposing Mundus. I can already imagine anyone who isn’t a franchise fan trying to understand what on Earth I’m talking about here.
That’s one of the key issues with Devil May Cry, now that I mention it. It’s trying to court a casual audience but is built on elements that’ll only really matter to die-hard faithfuls. This was true of the first season as well, but much less so than here, where the mere sight of Vergil or the mention of, say, Ebony and Ivory — Dante’s cool-looking twin pistols — is clearly intended to elicit a response to those in the know but won’t mean a thing to those who aren’t.
Anyway, to accomplish his goal, Arius needs to lure Vergil into a trap so that he can use his and Dante’s shared blood to open a gate to Makai — the exact opposite of the goal in the first season, if I remember rightly — and kill Mundus with a special demon-killing weapon, which is kind of a thing in this series. It sounds like I’m revealing too much, but I’m honestly not; this is only the set-up, and it’s so nakedly obvious that Arius is up to no good that even anyone who has never played any of the games will be able to identify him as the bad guy from a mile away.
But enough plot. The broader storytelling allows Devil May Cry Season 2 to feel less focused on Dante, who isn’t even defrosted until midway through the second episode, and the introduction of Vergil into the dynamic between Dante and Lady is a pretty compelling new element. It also excuses a bunch of explanatory flashbacks, which help to flesh out the dynamic between the brothers, their father, Sparda, and the Demon King, Mundus, who turned Vergil into the dark knight Nelo Angelo, which is another absurdly deep cut for fans that’ll probably end up feeling a bit confusing for newcomers.
The work by Korean animation studio Mir remains pretty top-notch, and there’s tons of action that is often very cool and kinetic, but I must confess that the show’s determination to stage every set-piece like a nu-metal music video started to really grate on me after a while. The soundtrack is great in isolation, with loads of recognisable bands like Korn, Evanescence, and Papa Roach, and creative remixes of tunes from the first season and the games. But it can sometimes feel a little performative, like it’s trying to create the impression of being cool and edgy rather than actually being cool and edgy.
Mileage may vary. With these things, it’s basically impossible to tell where people will come down on it. I’ve really enjoyed several Adi Shankar shows, especially Castlevania, and was shocked to discover that loads of people hated it for reasons I’m not sure I entirely understood. Hardcore fans can be like that, I guess, and Devil May Cry‘s bound to annoy plenty of them in Season 2, just like it did the first time around. I still persist that there’s a pretty enjoyable series here, which occasionally shows flourishes of creative artistry, but it also feels like it’s wearing out its welcome a bit already.
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