Enemy design, boss battles, and overall gameplay are much better than 4. This is easily a contender for the best game in the series.
With that said I'm more interested in talking about what I don't like about this game. V is an interesting experiment that doesn't quite pan out. His reliance on his summons means he plays more or less like Nero if he did more damage but had a huge disconnect between his inputs and actually executing attacks on the targets you want. At least Nero never has to worry about his sword wandering around on the opposite side of the arena when he wants to do a melee attack. The disconnect between V himself and the actual gameplay is so great that they had to give him a finishing move with his cane so that he'd have something to do during fights. It's clear that the developers didn't have a lot of faith in V, as he only gets a couple of levels before plot reasons make him unplayable.
Speaking of missions, there's 20 missions in the game, some of them only consisting of boss fights, divided among three characters. The result is that it doesn't feel like you spend a lot of time with any of the characters. The result is that the game feels shorter than it really is. If the developers are going to insist on multiple playable characters with well developed move sets, they should take a page from Sonic Adventure's book and give each character their own campaign, maybe have a couple of final missions that unlock when you finish every character's story. Until then, I feel that DMC3 edges this one out as the series' best, despite that game's flaws.
With that said I'm more interested in talking about what I don't like about this game. V is an interesting experiment that doesn't quite pan out. His reliance on his summons means he plays more or less like Nero if he did more damage but had a huge disconnect between his inputs and actually executing attacks on the targets you want. At least Nero never has to worry about his sword wandering around on the opposite side of the arena when he wants to do a melee attack. The disconnect between V himself and the actual gameplay is so great that they had to give him a finishing move with his cane so that he'd have something to do during fights. It's clear that the developers didn't have a lot of faith in V, as he only gets a couple of levels before plot reasons make him unplayable.
Speaking of missions, there's 20 missions in the game, some of them only consisting of boss fights, divided among three characters. The result is that it doesn't feel like you spend a lot of time with any of the characters. The result is that the game feels shorter than it really is. If the developers are going to insist on multiple playable characters with well developed move sets, they should take a page from Sonic Adventure's book and give each character their own campaign, maybe have a couple of final missions that unlock when you finish every character's story. Until then, I feel that DMC3 edges this one out as the series' best, despite that game's flaws.