Dante's Awakening

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So, here we are with ANOTHER Devil May Cry 3 speed run from me. There's not much of a story behind this run, really. I've been practicing and performing a Royal Guard segmented run in 17 segments over the past two months and I had finally completed the run a few days prior.

Well, I get back from work around 11 PM on the day before New Year's Eve aggravated, bored, annoyed and as usual, pumped up on enough caffeine to make Daxter look to be as calm and sedate as Mr. Rodgers in a Ritalin induced coma. So I sit down, hands shaking and turn on the PS2 to play whatever's in there. It turned out to be DMC3. So I just started a new game and started playing around with Trickster until I died on mission 5 against Agni and Rudra. I found that I could keep my style rank going surprisingly well, my timing was great for Trickster's Dashes a good chunk of the time, and all in all, I was performing very well. So I popped in a VHS tape, sat down again and started playing.

Before I get another thousand PMs, NO, I skip the cut scenes as it's Speed Demos Archive's policy that if a cut scene can be skipped you HAVE to skip it. As it was, if I did let them in, my time'd suffer anyways, and god knows I'd go mad watching the mission 12 cinematics. God that level's brutal. Anyway, if you people REALLY want to see the in-game cinematics, http://www.thehandvseye.com/dmccs.htm also hosts the game's cut scenes in .WMV format. Decent quality for the most part too.

SO DON'T PM ME ABOUT THE MOVIES DAMN IT!

Edit by the Runner: By the time this run is published, the special edition DMC3 will be out or very close to being out. What's worth noting about it is that in the original DMC3 North America edition actually has the difficulties shuffled around so that our normal difficulty is actually PAL and Japan's Hard, our easy is their normal, and our hard didn't exist in their versions until now. With the release of DMC3's Special Edition in the U.S., our difficulties will be put in line with the other versions so the DMC3's Greatest Hits/Special Edition will have our easy be Pal/Japan's easy, our easy now normal, our normal now hard, and our hard will now be the “New” difficulty Very Hard. Also, due to the fact that Jester is a fightable boss in both campaigns last I checked (I could be wrong) you will have to compete against my time on the original DMC3 version. Otherwise, the run is going to be comparable to a Hard mode run under the Yellow Orb settings in the Special Edition.

I ain't doing a very long, drawn out commentary here, but I'll focus on the good and the bad parts of this run. The bad first.

In mission 6 I mess up on the combat adjudicator in the same mission since I couldn't perform the Million Slash A&R combo. Instead, I kept performing the 5 hit one because my last strike was always premature.

Mission 7 is great, BUT! There's a really annoying section where Dante follows a path up to the roof of the Tenen-ni-gru. It's a curved path that runs around the tower and the camera is positioned like a quarter of a mile away. It makes it really annoying to Stinger up the path and unfortunately, this run didn't work out very well when it came to that point. I probably lose five seconds all in all vs. doing the smart thing and just running up the pathway… but eh.

In mission 8, I don't go and purchase the four Devil Trigger runes in my first visit to Leviathan's intestines so I had to improvise in the Retina Room. The reason being is that it completely slipped my mind. Yet, when I tried to test the difference after performing the run, I found that there really wasn't much of a difference in the first place having used only a DTE against the mob without raising my style first. Not to say that it can't be faster, but it didn't make a very significant difference to wrangle them up, get some style going, and then blow them all up. Plus, it allows me to have a full Demon Orb bar in time for the Leviathan fight. Speaking of which, the fight can be faster because I don't get in Leviathan's Heart Core again while it's shooting lasers around the room in case I slip up, which is a very real possibility. The fight can be about 10 seconds faster because of it.

I forget to switch to Cerberus in Mission 9's time goddess statue so I have to make a few second detour back to it. While I'm there, I take the opportunity to upgrade Spiral to level 3 in the first place (I normally would do that in the following mission, but I was there anyways). That's probably the most subtle of my obvious mistakes but it still costs me a bit more time than I had wanted. I also have a bit of bad luck on the Nevan fight when I broke her shield and she knocked me back at the same time, resulting in her recovering from her stun before I can recover from the hit. No biggie though, I'm right on top of her a few seconds later.

The only really jarring thing comes back to bite me in the butt come mission 17 where my Doppelganger fight could be better. I blame myself entirely here because this is normally a very easy to control boss fight and I lost control about halfway through. I lose at least 15-20 seconds from the fight itself.

In the following mission, the Chessboard goes great, Cerberus goes great (more on him later) and Beowulf is good enough, but I really need to explain Agni and Rudra 2, as it's one of the glaring problem in this run. In all of my recorded attempts on this game, only two boss fights instill fear in me. Geryon along with Agni and Rudra have ALWAYS made me a bit anxious and for fairly good reason. In this run, it's obvious with Agni and Rudra. Although the first rumble with them went good, the second was miserable.

They just COMPLETELY kicked my ass to such an extent that I was friggin' AMAZED, people. Look at about halfway through the fight when I stun one of them, yet the other one stands there and does a great job of defending the damn stunned one. They almost gave this illusion of teamwork there, and if that isn't bad enough, I kill one off earlier than the other. It's a mistake you can recover from if you go ahead and get the remaining brother caught in a parrying loop and stun him outright but the remaining brother had other plans.

Rather than let me wail on them which, you know, they ALWAYS do in the hundreds of times I've fought these guys, the surviving brother just ran away the instant the other one dies. It just jumps to the other side of the room, charges at me, and I'm cursing at this point. He charged straight ahead into the Super Agni/Rudra thing where one statue will wield both brothers and completely kick ass until it's taken down. Fortunately I kill the boss very quickly from there, but there's such a long movie showing the transformation (About 10 seconds that's unskippable) that I have to endure in the first place.

Still, the fight COULD have been worse since they've always been my weakest boss.

Finally, the most “Questionable” mishap, I got Spiral Level 3, thinking that I was going to be able to S rank a few more missions to afford the forth holy water for use against Arkham, but when the time came to mission 19, I was 8,000 orbs short to afford the damn thing. So instead, I stocked up on Devil Stars hoping that I could use DTEs twice per vulnerability phase and try to even things out. No dice (And in hindsight, should have just bought an extra demon orb). Do I regret not getting that forth Holy Water vs. the Spiral Upgrade? Well, I know that the extra dolphin, time in the menu, and attack phase cost me around 35 seconds which leads to the question. Did I save 35 seconds time by using the upgraded Spiral (Which increases the weapon's strength) over the ten missions I've had to use the weapon? Was it necessary in order to help aid my survival? I can't tell you without the video, but I know I got a lot of use out of the weapon throughout the second half of the game.

Looking back, I estimate there being only about three minutes worth of mistakes at most.

Let's talk about what went good now.

Missions 1-3 were very speedy, often times coming very close to my RG times. I get SS and S ranked in mission 1 and 3, allowing me to be able to fully afford Stinger and Air Hike at mission 4. Most importantly, I really luck out and I'm able to perform a very long stun on Cerberus (A trick shown to me by Gemasis Sydawn) which requires that you shoot off the ice on the heads and wait for Cerberus to pounce. When he does, jump into the fray and wail away. You can get a head destroyed outright and take significant health off the boss which I do in this run to an incredible mission 3 time of 3:50.

Mission 4, I S rank it very nicely and although Gigapede didn't give me the ideal attack pattern, doing a purple orb attack in the second and third passes (He only did on the third) for me to reflect with Cerberus' Revolver, that is something beyond my control and the fight could've been much worse considering.

Mission 7 has some sloppy stingers, but that's to be expected a good 40 minutes into the run on a slope with a piss poor camera angle to line up the character perfectly. However, mission 8's performance is incredible. My aim against Leviathan's boils is dead on and my stingers and jumps are great. Mission 10 is well performed and mission 11, the Soul Eaters cooperate as well as I've come to expect from them. Mission 12 is an incredible performance all considering how much pressure there was at that level since it was the first major run stopper I encountered, but I handled it well enough. 13 goes very well, 14 is a great example of the level (And I admit, looks smoother than the RG run) and 15 just works, although I think I have a few moments of stupidity involving the obstacles here and there including trying to Sky Star through a solid blade in the Altar of Evil hallway. I only came in 16 seconds behind my segmented run though. Mission 16 has an excellent Lady fight. Traveling through Mission 17 goes great, though the boss fight is in itself iffy. In mission 18, I manage to do a long stun Cerberus AGAIN (Which only happens… once in a blue moon I imagine) saving me a lot of potential time there and the chess board goes well. Then, in Mission 19, a major run stopper, the Mirror Room goes INCREDIBLY well. That is a purely random moment there that could destroy the room, and I pull it off without incident. Other than that, there's a lot of close calls like in mission 20 off the top of my head when I'm struck down to half a centimeter of my life. That happens quite often, actually.

Item-wise, I end up getting two full blue orbs, getting the first one before the A&R fight and the second one in mission 14 much like my Swordmaster run before did. Besides the Holy Waters in the usual places, I also end up using two Vital Stars. One on Agni and Rudra's rematch in mission 18, as well as using one on Vergil 3 when I actually tried to just guard Vergil's attacks and brought me to a centimeter of my life. Just guarding. With Trickster. (Grumbles) I also think I may have gotten a yellow orb in there as well, though if I did, I obviously wasn't thinking clearly.

All in all, this is a great single segment run with a lot of the more random things working in my favor, with great action, decent execution and fairly smooth fights. With incredible luck and execution throughout the entire game or by exploiting something that I'm unaware of, I can see this hitting 2:08, but not much further than that. To go lower than that, Royal Guard is going to have to be used. Good luck on a consistent two hour performance there, buddy!

Major thanks to Radix and Nate as usual for the work they put behind getting this run captured, compressed, finding the verifiers to make sure this run was legitimate and uploading it in the first place. Thanks also goes to the posters who've followed my progress with these runs and continue to offer support, random facts and what have you through all of the months I've been running this game (Mostly Nikullivin) Also, I want to thank Gemasis Sydawn for both the Cerberus freezing trick as well as all of the royal guard attack timing videos that he both specifically made for me and had available on thehandvseye.com/dmc3.htm (Which is as of the writing of these comments, offline for a reorganization/redesign of the website, if I recall).

So what's next for “Psychochild?” Well, I got a 1:59:13 RG run to still mail out (though I'm still thinking of weither or not to scrap it and try again). Ironically, when I was writing my original DMC3 comments, I said that I am done with DMC3 and I ain't touchin' it again until if and when the Special Edition game comes out. I wanted to go ahead and do a run on Vergil's campaign with the “Dark Slayer” style on the USA default Normal difficulty.

Well, as it turns out, that run is going to be getting worked on a lot faster than I originally figured it would. The moment I finished those comments I logged onto Gamefaqs for a few seconds and read that DMC3:SE is being released by January 23rd in the U.S. of A. So, by the time you see this run, I'll already be getting ready to tear through Vergil's campaign on the HARD difficulty and aiming for a single segment run. I have no idea what to expect, but it shouldn't be too overwhelming for me.