Netflix Devil May Cry (2025) - Season 1 - Uneven but enjoyable

Capcom is a company that was able to create a new iconic franchise that became an integral part of their own identity, and during the Playstation 2 era there was nothing else like Devil May Cry.

Dante didn’t just become one of the most popular protagonists of the era, but he created a whole new gaming genre around himself, which is now known as character action.

The series has had its highs and lows during its time, but it still persists today with the last chapter, Devil May Cry 5, that came out in 2019. The series isn’t as prolific as it once was, but it’s still clear that Capcom recognizes its big potential and the fanbase is still excited for an eventual announcement of the sixth chapter.

With such a baggage it was only a matter of time before Netflix was gonna swoop in and add it to their never ending list of animated video game adaptations. Despite a lot of enthusiasm at the early stages, the mood started to become more and more sour the more information we got about the series from the creator Adi Shankar.

Full disclosure, when I write these articles I usually tend to isolate myself as much as possible from the climate and opinions surrounding the work I’m about to talk about. I think it’s absolutely necessary and utmost important to give an opinion that is 100% my own…

Unfortunately this time it wasn’t entirely possible, my social media feed was flooded by fans of the series that were very disappointed by what was done with this show, with many of them also bringing compelling critiques to light. The series already went through a reboot in 2013 that stripped off many of the original concepts that made the game so good to many, and for this reason most weren’t entirely fine with the idea of yet another re-interpretation of their beloved characters.

I admit I was a little anxious about not fully understanding their feelings about it. I started the games from the fourth chapter and to this day I still haven’t played all of them, I feel I can call myself more of a casual fan than a passionate one. My initial intention before covering this series was to play all of the games on the Playstation 2, capping off with the Madhouse anime of 2007, only right then and there jump into the Netflix show so that I could really get the full picture.

At the end I decided to watch the Netflix adaptation first before embarking of this adventure, not only because I feels there’s merit into giving my point of view as someone who doesn’t really know the series that well, but it’s also going to be interesting to see how my opinion on this show will shift once I’m more in line with the lore of the video games.

Devil May Cry

About the Plot

The story opens in the Vatican, where a demon known as the White Rabbit manages to steal Force Edge, the blade that belonged to the demon Sparda, leaving behind a massacre in his passing. The event quickly reaches the attention of the United States, where the vice president William Baines is interested first hand in handling the situation.

Thanks to his network of information he manages to find out the intentions of the White Rabbit: using the sword of Sparda as a means to destroy the wall dividing the human world from Makai, the demon world, and unleash a full scale demon invasion. He’s already in possession of a blue gem which is half of a key that he needs to assemble to awaken the sword to its full potential. The other half is in possession of a demon hunter operating in New York called Dante.

It’s at that moment that Baines sends his own special force of demon hunters calles DARKCOM in order to find Dante, secure the red gem and prevent White Rabbit from fulfilling his plan. Among Baines’s agents there’s one girl of utmost importance, Mary Ann Arkham, codenamed Lady.

It thus begins a ruthless manhunt with Dante that will find himself forced to face his true nature for the first time.

This show is a concentration of high octane action from the get go, with two factions desperately out to reach the object of their own desiders. Dante of course is not gonna stand there and watch, instead is gonna do anything in his power to protect the gem that’s so important for him, being a memento of his mother. Every episode has a very exaggerated action scene: may that be a shooting scene, a swordfight, or a high speed chase. What i’m saying is that this show goes very well with a bag of popcorn.

To accompany all of this we have a soundtrack that mixes rock, metal and a touch of dubstep which blends perfectly every incarnation of the series and it’s honestly one of the best parts of the whole experience. As a cherry on top we have the contribution of bands like: Limp Bizkit, Rage Against the Machine and Evanescence to perfectly recreate that early 2000s atmosphere.

Personally I feel a bit conflicted about their inclusion. With the exception of Evanescence, who wrote their song specifically for this show, the rest of the licensed song are taken from old successes of the bands, and while this is completely in line my musical taste, I would’ve preferred if they used that money for new songs unique for this project, or even include more tracks from the video games to go along with Devil Trigger and Devils Never Cry which both received new remixes.

For as much as the general aesthetic of the show is nothing to write home about, the action scenes are very well directed and fun to watch, I also appreciated the opening and some stylistic choices made with episode six. Makes me wonder if with a little bit more time and creative freedom the animators would’ve been able to put together something more visually captivating.

The only big critique I can make is that some of the 3D effects used to render some of the demons look very cheap even for someone like me who has high tolerance for very noticeable 3D graphics in an otherwise 2D animated show. Although It was nice to see demons like Agni&Rudra and Echidna among the White Rabbit’s army.

To me the worst part of the series has to be the inclusion of DARKCOM, elite military corps are a trope that’s used way too often in western media and more often than not they end up being propaganda for the army, which definitely doesn’t help in making me like them. I can at least give credit to this show that they approach the subject matter with the intent of being more of a critique and i can also agree with what seems to be the message they’re trying to send, but it’s still a tired trope and something I feel doesn’t really belong in Devil May Cry.

I also feel that there was a much better way to integrate a concept similar to DARKCOM, which could also convey the same message, but doing it in a way that’s more in tune with the series, but I’ll get to it later.

About the Characters

If by the premise you felt like Dante was going to be more of a secondary character in this story rather than the main character… you’ll be right in that assumption. This isn’t necessarily a big problem, but I can understand if some may find this to be the first disappointment of this show.

Dante as a character didn’t really feel that different from his representation in Devil May Cry 3: he’s young, cocky and full of himself, but at the same time also a bit clumsy.  I found it very funny seeing him coming in guns blazing to save someone, only to see him stumble over his own words when trying to look cool afterwards. His constant taunting is always gonna be one of the best sides of the character, but I can’t help but feel that they played it way too safe with him and kept his character a bit too flat. I’m not sad about seeing him getting outsmarted or losing a couple of fights because it’s honestly a lot more engaging to see him grow as a character instead of having him as a constant unstoppable force.

The scenes I appreciated the most with Dante were all the small flashbacks about his tragic past and the death of his mother: they’re all portrayed like he’s having a PTSD episode whenever he finds himself in a blaze or finds himself face to face with someone that reminds him of his lost brother or mother. I like seeing Dante having this dent in his armour of pure cockiness, it makes him rounder as a character and makes me wanna root for him to overcome this trauma. I hope to see this side of him explored more in the future because it’s a key component of his half demon nature and how he’s gonna have to choose a side in the future.

But if you think Dante got the short end of the stick in this season… it’s nothing compared to what happened to poor Lady. She’s a young girl still traumatized by the loss of her family at a young age, who joined DARKCOM in order to hunt demons and quench her inner trauma with a nice dose of vengeance. She’s the most central character in this story and I found her really annoying. She’s always angry, swearing like a sailor, stubborn to the point of foolishness and not inclined to listen to anyone, especially not Dante because of the sole fact of him being half demon.

It’s clear that the story is aiming for her to learn from her mistakes, open up her mind and find real closure to her trauma that would help her see the world in a more nuanced way, but her attitude is gonna really test your patience along the way. And has a cherry on top there’s her new design with the DARKCOM uniform which is absolutely terrible, it doesn't make me recognize her as Lady, and to add salt to the wound, there’a a very brief segment where we actually see her with her video game design… in a flashback.

I realize I’ve been very negative towards her, but I’m convinced there’s still room to course correct her character. I really liked her backstory and it’s clear there’s a change of direction with her on the horizon, I’m just afraid that’s gonna be too little too late when it finally happens.

Let’s finally talk about White Rabbit, the main antagonist of this season and honestly one of my favourite characters of the entire show. To start with, I love his design, clearly inspired by Alice in Wonderland, it’s really cool and elegant, he has a ton of charisma and presence as a villain. His voice actor, Hoon Lee, has a wonderful voice which he can use to convey both the charm and confidence of a villain constantly ten steps ahead of you, and the anger of a man desperate for vengeance.

White Rabbit wasn’t always evil: his goal, for him and his family, was to escape Makai in order to run away from the influence of Mundus and find a way to restart his life peacefully someplace else. Unfortunately the human world had other ideas: White Rabbit lost his family and friends in one fell swoop and the only thing left for him to do was to avenge them with every means necessary, no matter who has to suffer the consequences.

Episode 6 is by far the best of the entire show for me because it’s able to intertwine the past of both Lady and Black Rabbit together in a story that’s told with almost no dialogue, with two different animation styles: a human and a demon, both lost everything and both left with only vengeance to live for, it’s a very touching episode that shows fully the power of animation and its ability to tell stories in its own unique way.

Dante, Lady and White Rabbit are a very good trio to carry forward the entire season, even if the execution isn’t perfect. We have Lady and White Rabbit representing the constant struggle between two worlds that don’t want to accept each other’s existence, and Dante caught in the middle which finds out to belong to both, and yet finds himself rejected by both sides because he represents the coexistence that no one wants to accept. If only they could reduce the focus over DARKCOM and center the story more on these three characters we would’ve had a stronger and incisive story overall.

In Conclusion

Devil May cry is definitely an uneven show, the action is very enjoyable and when the show is good is very well done, but there are a lot of elements that drag it down and make it a hard watch, especially when we end up spending more time with a government entity that I don’t think anyone would care about instead of the characters from the video games we actually wanted to see.

It’s clearly half of a story, a second season has already been confirmed and I wanna give a little credit to the writers because, for as flawed as the show is, it’s clear that they cared about the product and did their own homework, referencing elements from the whole DMC universe from the video games, to the mangas, even from the old Madhouse anime.

I’ll surely wait for the second season because after all I’m cautiously optimistic for this conclusion. Let me know what you thought about the show; what choices do you enjoy, if you, like me, couldn’t stand Lady, if you think all these changes completely invalidate any other good will from the show.

As always I’m curious about your opinions, and the next time I’m gonna talk about Devil May Cry is gonna be after beating the first chapter on the Playstation 2 for the very first time, I hope you’re going to wait anxiously for my first step into the origins of this series.

In the meantime for those of you who already saw the show, I have one last thing to talk about in the… 

SPOILER SECTION - Proceed at your own risk

It’s time to talk in more detail about William Baines and how I feel they should’ve handled an association like DARKCOM to not make it so annoyingly intrusive in what should’ve been Devil May Cry.

As I said before, William Baines is the United States vice president and he’s portrayed as the true man behind the government decisions, since the actual president is a parody of a Texan Oil Tycoon which is shown to be completely incompetent at his job. Baines is extremely devout to God, to the point of being convinced to be sent on this world on a divine mission to eradicate all demons menacing earth, and it’s for this very reason that DARKCOM gets created.

All of his means and knowledge are put in service of a high technological development with the end goal of a complete demon-kind genocide. At the end of the series when he manages to enter in possession of a device, belonging to White Rabbit, which allows him to open a portal to Makai and thus launch a full scale assault in order to conquer it.

The series is trying its hardest to insert more nuance into Makai, the demons are not all blood hungry creatures, their world is something more akin to Mad Max, where the strongest rules over, and thus demons oppressed by Mundus regime in an inhospitable land which only wants to run away and start a new life elsewhere. It’s easy to draw a comparison to war refugees in our world, who are all treated with fear and disgust once they enter a foreign land. DARKCOM is the equivalent of a police corp that wants to shoot first and ask questions never.

The final scene with the invasion of Makai, was the point where I really didn’t know what to think about the message that this show was trying to convey. The parody of the United States government, its propensity of killing everything that is considered different, fear mongering the population against everything outside their borders, exalted soldiers celebrating over the ruins of Makai with demon heads attached to their jeeps… All of this is disgustingly real, stuff like these happening in our world all the time. But once they decided to put American Idiot by Green Day as a soundtrack for this scene, the entire tone felt confused to me.

Instead of a true accusation to the United States and their war on terror being more an excuse to subjugate and massacre innocent people to gather resources in the name of their so called democracy, it felt more like a sarcastic constatation of what happens in our everyday reality. I hope I’m wrong about this feeling, because this isn’t stuff that should be taken lightly or make jokes about like they're an inevitability, and it’s bad that I’m here even questioning whether this was meant to be accusatory of not, because I believe that the messages in your story, especially political ones, need to be extremely clear!

Despite its debatable execution, I’m totally not against the idea of introducing this type of message, but I really feel that they could’ve done this in a way that felt more in line with the videogames and all that would’ve took was gonna be replacing the United States government with the Order of the Sword!

The manic devotion to God that Baines shows blends in perfectly with the clerical structure of Fortuna, and the Order of the Sword end goal in the games was to use and subjugate demons in order to turn them in their own personal angel army to then impose themselves as rulers and, to their own eyes, saviours of the world by the demon menace.

Instead of having DARKCOM, you have Lady blend in with another group of mercenaries paid by the order, this way you don’t have to put Lady in that hideous new outfit and you also start building up for the future of the series in case you get so far to introduce both Nero and Kyrie. The message of their fear mongering over these demon refugees would’ve stayed pretty much the same and would’ve felt less heavy handed to the more passionate fans. Probably the last thing they wanted to see in Devil May Cry was the diatribe of the United States government!

I don’t know what role Baines is gonna play for the future of the show. The last episode showed Makai partially conquered by the United States, a Vergil about to become the herald of a demon resistance, and we also have a cameo by Arius from Devil May Cry 2. There’s a lot of meat on the bone, the second season has been confirmed, so I feel there are gonna be a lot of surprises waiting for us.

What do you think, would you have preferred to have the Order of the Sword rather than DARKCOM? Do you feel it could’ve worked while keeping the story mostly intact? There were other things you would’ve changed? Are you gonna watch the second season? As always let me know in the comments.