Devil May Cry Full Season 2 Review - Dante’s Back in Style
Adi Shankar’s Devil May Cry arrived on Netflix last year as every once-angsty millennial's dream adaptation. It captured the edgy, over-the-top action that fans of the Capcom games had always known the franchise was capable of delivering, leaned fully into a soundtrack of early 2000s rock and nu-metal nostalgia, and gestured toward political allegory that felt genuinely relevant to the era the games originally inhabited. It was loud, stylish, occasionally corny, and enormously entertaining for anyone whose adolescence was soundtracked by the same bands that populate its playlist. After the smash hit success of that first season, renewal was never in doubt.
The bones of season 2 are the same – the aesthetic sensibility, the tonal commitment to its own particular brand of devil-may-care excess, the willingness to deploy Evanescence for maximum emotional impact. But within that familiar framework, the second season makes a crucial addition that elevates everything around it: Vergil.
The full introduction of Dante’s long-lost brother – voiced with icy, sardonic precision by Robbie Daymond – is the single most significant creative decision the series has made since its premiere. Where Dante is chaos given human form, all quips and swagger and genuine warmth beneath the bravado, Vergil is control – just as cocky, but serious about it in a way that reads almost as parody of his brother’s ease. The relationship between them is the source material’s most crucial dynamic, and Shankar understands this clearly enough to structure the entire season around it.
The season opens boldly, if somewhat disorienting, with Dante still cryogenically frozen and sidelined for most of the premiere – a genuinely risky choice for a show that relies so heavily on its protagonist's particular magnetism – the first episode places Lady (Scout Taylor-Compton) front and center as American forces launch Operation Inferno, an invasion of Hell itself, the alternate dimension known as Makai to its residents. It is a deliberately bloody opening statement, and without Dante’s presence to leaven it, the show risks its weaknesses coming into sharper focus.
But Dante returns, and the show remains as great as ever.
What season two does differently, and does well, is ground its kinetic action in genuine familial grief. Multiple flashbacks excavate the trauma embedded in the relationship between Dante and Vergil – two brothers who lost their mother and were separated by forces beyond their control, each one coping in opposite directions that have calcified, over decades, into opposing philosophies. Watching them argue about who their lost mother loved more lands with more emotional weight than it has any right to given the broader context of demonic invasions and hellish military operations surrounding it, and the show is not subtle about any of this. It does not aim for subtlety. It aims for feeling. And more often than not, it achieves it.
Johnny Yong Bosch and Robbie Daymond bring this dynamic to life with genuine relish. The voice acting across the board has always been one of the series’ understated strengths, and season two deepens that quality – the cast balancing the show’s frequently camp dialogue with the gravitas that apocalyptic demon fighting requires, a needle that is considerably harder to thread than it looks.
The action sequences continue to be the series’ most viscerally satisfying element. The animators continue to play with visual styles when the material calls for it, with music-video editing rhythms that fully embrace the franchise’s early 2000s anime inspirations. These shifts remain one of the most distinctive qualities of Shankar’s approach, a reminder that the show’s debt is not only to the games but to the full sweep of the animated tradition from which it draws.
The season draws more directly from the mythology of the first three games than its predecessor did while simultaneously remixing those elements so thoroughly that it resists easy classification as an adaptation of any single entry. This is both a strength and, occasionally, a limitation. Fans steeped in the games will find pleasures that newcomers may not access, but the emotional core – grief, brotherhood, the weight of a shared loss that has driven two people in irreconcilably different directions – is universal enough to carry anyone through the moments where the mythology demands prior investment.
This is a show that has always been more interested in emotional transportation than technical perfection, and season two earns considerable goodwill by being even more confident in its own identity than its predecessor. Where season one sometimes worked too hard to convince us of Dante’s inherent appeal, season two simply trusts it – the way you trust a friend you’ve known long enough to know exactly how they'll react to any given situation, and love them for it.
Devil May Cry’s idea of cool might feel like something more appropriate to a Hot Topic t-shirt, but when the guitars kick in and the Papa Roach starts playing, you won’t be able to help but love it anyway.