Devil May Cry is an urban fantasy animated series created by Adi Shankar in collaboration with Sudio Mir.Devil May Cry is originally a video game series published by CapCom, known for its more famous game titles such as 'Street Fighter' and 'Megaman' (if that means anything to you of course). I have never played any of the games myself, but the title and the genre were familiar to me. Video game adaptations are usually a daring undertaking and that is also the case here. Alright, let's dive into this extravagant world.
The story takes place in a modern society in which demons and other devilish brood live among people, whether or not secretly. The government is still trying to deny the existence of these creatures, but due to the increasing number of conflicts, this is slowly becoming untenable. Of course, things don't go well between people and demons, which is why there are countless 'Demon Hunters' walking around who hunt these creatures for a bounty. One of them is Danté (Johnny Yong Bosch). Danté is a young, free-spirited demon hunter who can handle demons very well with the help of his extraordinary agility, strength and speed. Although he has a great sense of humor, his past also shows something else.
We also meet Mary (Scout Taylor-Compton), a young woman employed by DarkCom. DarkCom is an organization that is concerned with stopping the flow of demons to the Earth. Mary is one of the dedicated agents who dedicates her life to eradicating demonic scum. She too has a past that explains why she can go through life so coldly.
The story itself begins with a break-in at the Vatican by a group of mercenaries. Just as they have a mysterious sword in their hands, a strange figure appears that looks like a human rabbit (Hoon Lee). This figure makes short work of the mercenaries, whom he himself hired, and runs off with the sword. What he plans to do with the sword becomes more or less the central theme of the story.
The world is also depicted in a very dark and dilapidated manner, which gives the viewer a haunting and apocalyptic feeling.
It is not easy to summarize this story. As usual with this kind of anime, extensive and imaginative background stories are used. In short, it is about the Rabbit wanting to open the realm of demons - or simply 'Hell' - to offer all demons a new home on earth. To do this, he has to undertake a number of things before he can actually do this. It goes without saying that the earth itself is not exactly eager for this. Danté and Mary will have to do everything they can to put a stop to this dark plan.
Graphically this series is really top and the idea of demons hiding and hiding on earth is quite interesting in itself. I believe there are even conscious or unconscious references to the current problems in the US, but we won't go into that too much here.
The main character Danté is a nice character and especially the rabbit is a very scary and charismatic appearance from the beginning. The world is also depicted as very dark and dilapidated, which gives the viewer a haunting and apocalyptic feeling. People who are familiar with "Capcom" are treated to a nice number of 'easter eggs' in the first episodes.
Where the shoe pinches is the rather excessive background history(s) surrounding this whole event. In itself this is not bad and is of course part of it. The problem is that due to the use of countless expositions, aimless characters and action scenes the emotional thread is often missing. Also the logic in connection with the whole demon problem is a bit shaky which sometimes makes you ask yourself a few more questions than necessary. You can call it fiddly, but it is these small illogical bits in the story and the characters that make it difficult to enter this fictional world with complete conviction.
There were a few surprising highlights though. Episode 6 gave a fascinating look at the prehistory of two main characters in the story. It did this brilliantly. What was very nice were the two different drawing styles that were used for this. Sometimes this doesn't work but in this case it worked out great. The last episode is also excellent and gives us an exciting cliffhanger for the next season.
Devil May Cry is quite an intriguing series with thundering action, but it gets in its own way too much with the unnecessarily complicated plot.
About the writer, Karzal
Mike (1995) has been a member of MySeries since 2016 and is mainly active on the English version of the site. Since 2018, he has been actively translating news articles, columns, reviews and basically everything that ends up on the Dutch site. The original articles, columns and reviews were actually written by others. During the week Mike can be found at IKEA, where he is a national systems specialist and occasionally also in the classroom to teach an English lesson. In addition, Mike logically enjoys watching series and has actually been spoon-fed this from an early age. The genre doesn't matter, there is a place for everything in the otherwise busy life.
