Democracy Enters Hell
In the finale of the first season, Dante found himself in a worse position than ever. He was betrayed, neutralized, and sent into cryosleep somewhere deep within DARKCOM, while the US President in a cowboy hat solemnly led humanity to war with demons to Green Day's "American Idiot."
The second season picks up the story from the same point. Dante is still in the freezer, Lady is gnawed by guilt, and DARKCOM, with the support of "Ouroboros," conducts military operations in the demonic dimension of Makai.
At first, it seems that Shankar is once again going to overwhelm the viewer with post-meta-ironic mush garnished with military satire and "relevant commentary." The good news is that in the second season, he presses this pedal with less zeal, leaving politics as a backdrop for the main story.
If the first season remained above the fray and hardly tried to reproduce any of the well-known games in the series, now Shankar takes Devil May Cry 2 — the most controversial part of the franchise — as its basis. Even before its release, he said that he was more interested in working with a strong idea that once had bad luck with its implementation. In this sense, the "two" fits almost perfectly, but there is a slight cunning in this wording.
Devil May Cry 2 indeed serves as a framework, but the authors freely disassemble the entire body of the series into details — from the first three games and comics to fan memes, like Vergil's plastic chair. If desired, one can also notice flirtations with the DmC: Devil May Cry reboot from Ninja Theory — primarily in the readiness to expand the dramatic register of iconic characters. So, no miracle happened: the series did not turn into a literal adaptation of the games and continued to build its own canon. Let's see what came of it.
Lore, War, and Overloaded Emptiness
The main conflict revolves around Arius, the head of the "Ouroboros" corporation. For twenty-eight generations, he has been transferring consciousness from one body to another, and now he is collecting four parts of the Arcana to awaken the chaos god Argosax, seize his power, and take the place of a deity himself. For others, he has a more noble version of events: DARKCOM, the US Army, and politicians are convinced that the Arcana is needed to destroy Mundus, the ruler of Makai, and that the war with demons is for the salvation of humanity.
In reality, people are simply sent to their deaths. Soldiers die on the front lines, Lady performs secret operations in hell and gradually realizes that she has become a pawn in someone else's game. In Makai, the situation is also heating up: the war drags on, demons suffer losses, and with them, doubts grow that their king is in control of what is happening.
At this moment, Vergil enters the scene. Mundus sends him to Earth to retrieve the Arcana, while he prepares a counterattack. Arius knows who Vergil is and what his visit could lead to, so DARKCOM decides to awaken Dante — the only one capable of stopping his brother. At the same time, Lady is promoted to a higher position so that she doubts less, stops complaining about the torture of demons, and more effectively motivates Dante to cooperate.
On this ground, a multifaceted conflict could have grown, where all sides manipulate each other, lie, betray, form alliances, and pull the blanket over themselves. Formally, the season shows all of this and at the same time surpasses the first in scale. This is where the lion's share of its problems lies.
Shankar and Alex Larsen try to fit too many ideas, characters, and lore into eight episodes, but they don't manage to give everything equal weight. This creates an interesting effect of overloaded emptiness: there are plenty of events, but the meaning of some of them gets lost along the way.
The plot constantly pretends to rush forward, but the movement stumbles now and then to feed the viewer another portion of lore or insert a flashback that is supposed to explain the next scene and add weight to another fight. The approach is understandable, given the free handling of the canon and the attempt to make the series convenient for both newcomers and fans. Everything comes down to implementation. Sometimes the authors deliver empty scenes that slow down the story and set it back a step.
The most striking example is the fifth episode. At the beginning of the episode, about five minutes are spent on a flashback introducing a character destined to die in the same episode, and the status quo after the finale remains the same. If the entire episode, along with the finale of the fourth episode, were cut, the plot would lose nothing, but the series would lose a solid portion of the action, for which everything, it seems, was started.
Another problem is that most important conflicts and relationships between characters are built through childhood traumas, which act as a universal script glue. This applies to Dante and Vergil — we'll talk about them separately — and Lady, and some new characters for the anime, including Arius himself.
All of this is spoken aloud, chewed over, and exploited so often that the dramatic effect loses weight. Lady's storyline is again revealed through empathy for refugees, the tragedy with her father, and guilt. Even the love line, which appears out of nowhere, is explained by the same thing — a difficult childhood and an attempt to cope with pain.
Arius is also attempted to be made more multifaceted than in DMC2, showing how his father did not understand or accept him, but the result causes a yawn-inducing déjà vu. Sometimes Arius seems smart and calculating — mostly against the background of characters who behave more foolishly — but for a person who has lived hundreds of years and changed dozens of bodies, this is not enough. However, in a world where corporations and politicians are sometimes scarier than demons, such an antagonist is at least in his place.
The Sparda Brothers as a Defibrillator Discharge
If after all that has been said, you decided that the season can be safely written off, then hell no. All the script dislocations recede when Dante and Vergil converge in the frame. At this moment, the series finally remembers why the viewer came at all, and pits two stubborn, broken, and monstrously stylish sons of Sparda against each other, who speak to each other in the language of blades even in moments of reconciliation.
Of course, their images are also easy to criticize. Dante and Vergil in the series are weaker and more sloppy than their game versions, and their characterization varies from scene to scene. Very often, there is not enough contrast between them, which was an important part of their game images: Vergil here has lost some of his discipline and cold determination, and Dante is less like the eccentric trickster that fans are used to seeing. They both received an expanded dramatic register, but in the context of Shankar's canon, this looks more or less justified. Not perfect. But not a disaster either.
Their past in flashbacks is truly interesting to follow: how differently the brothers experienced the loss of their mother, how they coped with pain, how they grew up separately, and what they have become now. The series adds a background to them that either had no place in the games or was given much less attention. For example, in the original lore, Vergil was not inside the house at the time of the attack, but here this detail sharpens the conflict and emphasizes even more how different the brothers were already in childhood.
A separate question is the characters' strength. In the first season, Lady sometimes seemed so much more effective than Dante that the series titled Devil May Cry seemed to be embarrassed by its own protagonist. In the second, this is less noticeable because some of Dante's stolen time is taken up by Vergil's solo scenes. And the brothers often fight each other, together confront serious opponents, or playfully hack ordinary enemies, striking bloody sparks from them.
Therefore, if you don't know the animations from the characters' combo lists by heart, you'll hardly count how many signature moves they weren't allowed to use again. The spectacle still can't be called boring: as soon as the brothers unsheathe their weapons, the series gets a defibrillator discharge — everything sparks, explodes, flies on adrenaline, and doesn't let the viewer go into sleep mode.
Meat Grinder to a Noughties Playlist
The second season generally significantly increased in action: Studio Mir works more confidently with battle staging, choreography, and character facial expressions. It's hard to say whether the team grew professionally or if a larger budget was allocated for the continuation, but there's visibly less CGI and more prolonged fight scenes with juicy dismemberment. The episode where Vergil tears through DARKCOM soldiers to Drowning Pool's "Bodies" is a pure concentrate of what the viewer wants to see him do on screen.
However, there are fewer visual experiments. There's a small insert in the style of a mini-anime with chibi characters, playing with filters and subjective versions of events, attempts to change the presentation within one scene. But there's nothing comparable to the sixth episode of the first season here, alas. And it's a pity: the second season is so much like a collection of clips from the "Big Rock" block on MTV that any additional visual audacity would only enhance the effect.
However, the series handles game themes controversially. The potential of "Bury the Light," for example, is disappointingly underdeveloped. But when Shankar delves into the noughties — Drowning Pool, Papa Roach, Avril Lavigne, Evanescence — he hits a very specific nerve. This is the music of an era when Devil May Cry became truly iconic. For me, too, which is why every track hits home.
So much so that even the utterly shameless and ridiculous Edward Cullen cosplay by Dante to Amy Lee's "My Immortal" evokes not irritation, but delight. From a script perspective, it's complete nonsense, pulled out of thin air. But screw it. It still looks "wow."
Shankar's hooliganism is responsible for most of my interest in the project: I don't know what devil he personally made a deal with, but he has the rare right to experiment with any franchise entrusted to him, and he doesn't even intend to apologize for his own taste.
His approach resembles not the gesture of a mature creator working with someone else's canon, but the prank of a rebellious teenager: he comes into someone else's territory, turns up the music, rearranges the furniture, stains the walls, and assures that it's cozier now. You can argue with that. You can try to kick him out. But denying that the spectacle is captivating — that's not possible.
Verdict
It's not hard to call the second season of Devil May Cry the best — if only in contrast to the first. That one also had reasons, if not to love, then to analyze with interest: as a cheeky fanfiction, a satire on Netflix and American militarism. But the sequel more often remembers what sign hangs above the entrance and brings more Sparda brothers, lore, blood, references, loud music, and bone-crushing battles.
However, if you expect a careful adaptation of the source material, disappointment is guaranteed. I, on the other hand, consider myself a supporter of free adaptations when they are done interestingly, and not like in Netflix's "The Witcher." For me, this is a parallel reality: it has the right to exist alongside the original work, to which one can return at any time.
The second season can be criticized for its overload and dramatic failures, for twists and relationships pulled out of thin air for the sake of an impressive scene, or the opportunity to turn up the "rock music" louder. But what cannot be blamed on it is boredom. As entertainment based on the game, the series copes with its task perfectly. Yes, all the interest rests on the two brothers, the insane action around them, and the exploitation of noughties pop culture. But when "Devil May Cry" is written above the door — that's more than enough.