It has a lot of jank and questionable design decisions, especially with how many times you fight every single boss. It feels both too based in Resident Evil and not based in it enough; like it's extremely obvious this used to be a Resi game before they changed it into DMC. Its mission structure feels redundant and I'd almost rather just progress through the castle without getting interrupted by a results screen every now and then.

My humbug with difficult games, or at least games that take a lot of learning to get through it, is that I'd rather cut to the chase and get to the part that's actually giving me trouble. Missions are almost never very long, so dying isn't an agonizing loss of progress, but I'm still having to watch Phantom crawl out of the hallway, defeat the shadow lion, solve the stairway puzzle, enter the mirror room, all to get another shot at Angelo. I like the shadow lion fight as a vibe check that forces you to get good at dodge rolling, but I get bored after about the third time clearing it with no hassle.

BUT nonetheless when this game kicks ass, it kicks a lot of ass. It's satisfying to blast through enemy groups that were giving you trouble previously, pull off your first pistol-juggling, and decimate health bars with a clutch Devil Trigger. It's easy to just kind of enter a zen state, at least until one of the more annoying aspects of the game comes back. It's a game where it's easy to forgive the jank because it's otherwise so satisfying, that still involves putting up with it.