Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening - Special Edition

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Devil May Cry 3: Dante's Awakening Special Edition is Capcom's expanded re-release of the original Devil May Cry 3, a third-person hack-and-slash action game and a direct prequel to the first Devil May Cry. The base game released in Japan in February 2005 before reaching other regions later that year; the Special Edition followed in January 2006, initially as a PlayStation 2 release, and the game has since been carried forward through a PC version, the Devil May Cry HD Collection, and later re-releases on additional platforms. The story takes place before Dante becomes the wisecracking devil hunter of the original game: it opens on the night he turns nineteen and opens the Devil May Cry shop, only for his twin brother Vergil to raise the demonic tower Temen-ni-gru from the ground beneath the city, chasing their father Sparda's power for himself. Dante fights his way up through the tower's demon-infested floors, crossing paths repeatedly with the mercenary Lady, who is hunting the same demons for a very different, personal reason. Combat runs on the Style system, a central mechanic that lets Dante equip one of several fighting styles and swap freely between them mid-combo. Trickster emphasizes evasive movement and dashing around enemies, Swordmaster extends and empowers melee combos, Gunslinger does the same for ranged attacks, and Royal Guard rewards precisely timed blocks and counters with high-risk, high-reward retaliation. Dante also carries multiple interchangeable weapons found over the course of the story, both melee Devil Arms and firearms, each with its own moveset, and switching between them on the fly, layered with style changes, is what gives the combat its distinctive depth and flexibility. A separate Devil Trigger gauge, filled through combat, lets Dante briefly transform into a more powerful demonic form with heightened attack and defense, adding a further layer of resource management on top of choosing styles and weapons in the middle of a fight. The Special Edition's headline addition is Vergil as a fully playable character, using the same mission structure as Dante's campaign but built around his own weapons and a dedicated Dark Slayer fighting style, distinct from Dante's five-style system. Alongside Vergil, the Special Edition adds the Bloody Palace, a separate survival mode that strips away the story and drops the player into a very long chain of consecutive floors, each a fresh combat encounter that gets harder the deeper you go, testing sustained performance rather than any single fight. A handful of other adjustments round out the package: the Easy and Normal difficulty settings from the original Japanese release, missing from the Western version of the base game, were restored; a new Very Hard difficulty was added on top of the existing options; a Turbo mode speeds up the entire game by twenty percent for players who want a faster-paced replay; and players can choose between two different continue systems, including an unlimited-continue option carried over from Devil May Cry 2. The demon Jester, an optional boss from the main story, can also be fought again as a standalone rematch. The game remains single-player throughout, with no multiplayer component in either the original release or the Special Edition.