Devil May Cry 5 is less of a traditional action game and more of a high-speed combat sandbox where surviving is merely the baseline. The actual goal is looking as cool as possible while juggling enemies in the air. You cycle through three protagonists with wildly different mechanical demands—Nero's rhythm-based sword revving, V's indirect summoning, and Dante's terrifyingly deep stance-switching. If you want an experience that grades your creativity and execution rather than your ability to simply drain enemy health bars, this is the benchmark.
The Style Meter Is the Actual Health Bar
Most new players approach character action games trying to optimize damage per second. They find a combo that works, spam it until the boss dies, and move on. In Devil May Cry 5, that assumption will actively ruin your experience. The game does not care if you beat the level. It cares how you beat the level.
The Style Meter—grading you from D (Dismal) up to SSS (Smokin' Sexy Style)—is the true metric of success, acting as a real-time calculator for your combat variety. It evaluates your inputs based on a strict set of hidden variables. If you repeat the same high-damage Stinger attack three times in a row, the game heavily penalizes your score through style decay. To push the meter higher, you must constantly cycle through different melee attacks, ranged options, and mobility tools. Taking a single hit drops your rank by two full letter grades.
This creates a fascinating psychological shift. Enemies stop being threats and become canvases. You do not want them to die quickly. You want them to stay alive just long enough for you to finish a complex aerial sequence.
To maintain the meter during gaps in combat, you have to use the Taunt button. This introduces a massive risk-reward asymmetry. Taunting locks you into an animation, leaving you entirely vulnerable, but it freezes the style decay and even builds your Devil Trigger (magic) gauge. You are constantly weighing the risk of taking a hit against the reward of pushing your rank from an S to an SS. You have to treat the game like a fighting game where you are the only one performing the combo video.
The Character Asymmetry: Nero, V, and Dante
The biggest bottleneck for returning players is the character whiplash. The campaign forces you to rotate between three protagonists, and the mental stack required for each is entirely different.
Nero is your baseline, but he carries a massive misconception: players treat his Devil Breakers (robotic arms) like precious, finite resources. They hoard them. This is a trap. The game is balanced around you destroying these arms constantly. Using a Breakage move shatters the arm but grants you a massive burst of damage and, crucially, invincibility frames. If you choose to hoard Nero's arms, you gain a psychological safety net but lose his highest burst damage, his best defensive tool, and his primary method for extending air combos. Break the arms. The game scatters replacements everywhere.
V flips the script entirely. He is physically weak and attacks indirectly by commanding demonic familiars (a panther and a bird). Playing V feels like managing a top-down real-time strategy game from a third-person perspective. The trade-off here is safety versus scaling. V is incredibly forgiving for new players because you can stand halfway across the arena while your pets do the work. However, on higher difficulties like Dante Must Die, V's damage output falls off a cliff, and his lack of direct crowd control becomes a severe liability.
Then comes Dante. Dante is a wall. He has four distinct combat styles (Trickster for evasion, Swordmaster for melee, Gunslinger for ranged, Royalguard for parrying) that you must swap between mid-combo using the d-pad. He also carries multiple melee and ranged weapons, swappable with the triggers. The sheer volume of inputs required to play Dante optimally is overwhelming. The shortcut here is loadout management. Do not try to learn all four of his weapons at once. Go into the menu and unequip everything except his starting sword and gauntlets. Limit yourself to Trickster and Swordmaster. Master the transitions between just two weapons before you introduce the motorcycle that acts as dual chainsaws.
Progression Traps and the Red Orb Economy
Devil May Cry 5 uses Red Orbs as a universal currency to buy new moves, upgrade your health (Blue Orbs), and extend your magic gauge (Purple Orbs). The storefront actively tempts you into making terrible long-term investments.
When struggling with a boss, the immediate instinct is to buy health upgrades or Gold Orbs (extra lives). Ignore them. A 10% health increase only matters if you get hit. An aerial mobility upgrade prevents you from getting hit entirely. Ground combat in this game is inherently dangerous because enemies can surround you. Aerial combat is safe. Most enemies lack anti-air attacks, making the sky your safest zone.
Because of this, your first purchases should exclusively be moves that launch enemies and moves that keep you airborne. The single most important skill in the entire game is "Enemy Step." It costs a hefty amount of Red Orbs, but it fundamentally unlocks the true engine of the game.
Enemy Step allows you to jump off an enemy's physical hitbox. This sounds like a simple mobility trick, but it is actually an animation-canceling mechanic. Using Enemy Step mid-air instantly resets your double jump, your air dash, and all of your attack animations. If you strike an enemy, jump off their face, and strike them again, you can stay in the air indefinitely, looping combos until the enemy dies. It turns the game from a standard action slasher into a physics-defying playground. Prioritizing core moveset expansions over passive stat boosts yields exponentially more style points, which in turn rewards you with more Red Orbs at the end of the mission.
The One Habit to Break
Stop looking at enemy health bars. Move your eyes to the top right of the screen and play exclusively for the SSS rank. If you drop a combo, do not just start mashing the basic attack button to finish the kill. Back off, taunt to regain your composure, switch to a weapon you haven't used in the last sixty seconds, and launch the enemy back into the air.
