Devil May Cry 5: The Combo System as a Musical Instrument

Most action games tell you how well you’re doing with a number. Devil May Cry 5, directed by Hideaki Itsuno and released by Capcom in March 2019, tells you with a song. Fight badly and the game plays ambient embient filler, half-formed and looping; fight with real variety, real rhythm and real risk, and the full track swells in — guitars, drums, a vocal line arriving on cue — timed to the exact moment your Style rank crosses from A into S. That’s not a decorative flourish bolted onto a combo counter. It’s the entire design philosophy of character action made audible, and it’s worth taking apart, because almost nothing else in the genre states its thesis this plainly.

What the Style Meter is actually measuring

The letter grade climbing the right side of the screen — D, C, B, A, S, SSS — looks like a score, and every review of this game leans on it as shorthand, though the actual quantity it’s tracking is variety under pressure rather than raw damage or kill speed. Repeat the same move and the meter decays even while you’re landing hits; string together different weapons, different styles, ground combos into air combos into a taunt at the wrong moment and it climbs. The system is explicitly punishing the thing a lesser player defaults to under stress — spam the one combo that works — and explicitly rewarding the thing that’s actually hard: staying inventive while three enemies are trying to kill you. That’s a genuinely unusual thing for a combat system to grade. Most games reward efficiency. This one rewards showing your work.

Four characters, four instruments

DMC5 splits its cast across three playable characters — Nero, V and a returning Dante — each of whom plays the meter differently enough that the game is really three overlapping instruments sharing one stave. Nero’s Devil Breaker prosthetic arms are consumable, single-use tools: each Breaker (Overture’s electric grapple, Gerbera’s shield-parry, Punch Line’s rocket-propelled reverse-grab) gets destroyed after a handful of uses, so his combat rhythm is built around spending a resource decisively rather than holding it in reserve. Dante gets four simultaneous fighting styles — Trickster for mobility, Swordmaster and Gunslinger for melee and ranged emphasis, Royal Guard for a genuinely difficult parry-and-release system that rewards frame-perfect blocking with devastating counters — switchable mid-combo, which makes him less a character than a small orchestra you conduct in real time. V is the strangest: he barely fights directly, commanding a panther, a bird and a golem while reciting Blake and Nietzsche fragments, and his combat consists almost entirely of positioning and timing rather than input execution, a design choice that reads as a deliberate rebuke to the idea that character action combat has to mean fast hands.

Compare that to what Bayonetta does with a single, denser toolkit built around one dodge mechanic, or what FromSoftware’s Sekiro does by collapsing an entire combat system down to a single posture-and-parry rhythm. DMC5’s answer to the same design question — how much should a fighting system ask of a player at once — is to offer three different answers simultaneously and let you choose which conversation you want to have.

Devil Breakers and the economics of a single-use tool

Nero’s arms deserve a longer look because they’re the freshest idea in the game and the one most easily undersold. Making a powerful ability disposable — you get roughly three charges of a Breaker before it shatters, and you have to physically walk to a vending-machine-like Nero’s shop or find drops mid-mission to restock — inverts the usual action-game logic where your best tools are always available and your worst enemy is your own skill ceiling. Here, the constraint is inventory. A player who burns Gerbera’s shield parry early in a fight against a low-threat enemy has genuinely made themselves worse for the boss three rooms later, and that scarcity forces exactly the kind of decision-making under uncertainty that a purely skill-gated combo system can’t replicate. It’s the character-action equivalent of ammo conservation in a survival horror game, and it’s a smart graft from a completely different genre.

Where the ancestor sits

None of this appeared from nothing. Itsuno didn’t invent the Style Meter for this entry — it dates back to Devil May Cry 3 in 2005, the game that first split Dante’s toolkit into switchable styles after the second entry’s infamously slack combat nearly killed the series. What’s changed since is the instrumentation the thesis is delivered through: DMC3 rewarded style with a letter grade and comparatively plain reinforcement, and each entry since has pushed harder on making that reward legible without a HUD element, culminating here in a soundtrack that composes itself around your rank in real time. It’s worth naming because the genre’s habit of treating each new character-action release as a clean-slate innovation obscures how iterative the actual design lineage is — DMC5 refines an idea Itsuno’s own team has been sanding down for three console generations, in the same way Bayonetta’s Witch Time refines a dodge-timing mechanic Hideki Kamiya first tried, in a rougher form, in the original DMC he directed back in 2001. Both games trace back to the same studio floor, one console generation apart, before their directors split onto separate franchises and kept independently refining the same underlying question: how do you make elegance mechanically legible in real time.

Enemy step design as the other half of the equation

A grading system this sensitive to variety only produces interesting play if the enemies are built to punish repetition just as hard as the meter does, and DMC5’s roster is tuned with that in mind. Empusa enemies parry predictable strings and counter them; Judecca variants force you out of ground combos entirely by going airborne on a timer; Artemis snipes at range in a way that makes standing still to finish a combo a genuinely bad idea against mixed enemy compositions. The result is that button-mashing doesn’t just score poorly, it gets you hit, which closes the loop the Style Meter opens: the game’s music rewards variety, and its enemy design makes variety the only viable survival strategy, so the two systems are pulling in the same direction rather than one being cosmetic dressing on the other. Compare this to a game like Nioh 2, where the combat reward structure runs almost entirely through loot rather than a live performance metric — a legitimate design choice, but a different one, and DMC5’s insistence on real-time musical feedback over post-fight loot drops is the more legible teaching tool for the specific skill it’s trying to build.

The soundtrack as the actual UI

Go back to the opening claim, because it’s the load-bearing one: the dynamic soundtrack, largely composed by Cody Matthew Johnson for Nero and a rotating team for the other characters, functions as the interface, telling you without a single number on screen, exactly how well the underlying grading system rates your last ten seconds of play. A player who’s never read a strategy guide and doesn’t know what “S rank” means will still feel, viscerally, the difference between the muted filler track and the full vocal line kicking in, and will chase that feeling the same way they’d chase a rising score in any other game. It’s a genuinely elegant piece of UI design disguised as a licensing budget line item, and it works because the composition itself embodies the thing it’s rewarding — the full tracks are dense, layered and varied in exactly the way the combat they’re scoring has to be to earn them.

The case against the spectacle

None of this is free of cost. DMC5’s difficulty curve assumes a level of system mastery the base “Human” difficulty doesn’t actually demand, which means a first-time player can clear the game on autopilot, mashing one or two combos, and never once hear the soundtrack do what it’s built to do. The game’s real content — the interplay between Breakers, styles and enemy step-cancels — lives almost entirely in the higher difficulties and the post-game Bloody Palace mode, which makes the base campaign a somewhat misleading advertisement for what the system is actually capable of. There’s also a real argument that V’s slower, more cerebral toolkit sits awkwardly between Nero and Dante’s kinetic sections, breaking the game’s momentum at exactly the points a first playthrough most wants forward motion. Final Fantasy XVI borrows this exact combat grammar wholesale a few years later and, tellingly, drops the multi-character structure entirely — a tacit admission that asking players to relearn a whole new instrument mid-campaign carries a genuine cost.

The camera as the fourth character

One structural detail rarely gets credit: DMC5’s fixed, cinematic camera angles, largely inherited from the series’ 2001 original, are themselves part of the grading apparatus. A free camera that follows the player would let you frame every hit for maximum visual clarity, but a fixed angle occasionally puts an enemy behind Dante’s model or lets a combo play out at a distance, which means part of “playing well” is learning to read spacing without perfect visual information — closer to how a musician learns to feel timing rather than watch a metronome. It’s a deliberately old-fashioned choice in a genre that mostly moved to free cameras years ago, and it holds because the whole game is built around proprioception over information: you’re meant to know where Dante is by feel, the same way the Style Meter measures your fluency by feel rather than by a checklist of inputs executed correctly.

Why the instrument metaphor holds

Strip away the metal soundtrack and the demonic set-dressing and DMC5 is arguing something specific about what skill expression should feel like: a texture you can hear change in real time, built from variety rather than optimisation, standing in for the leaderboard number most games default to. That’s a rarer design goal than it should be. Most action games that claim to reward “expressive” play still grade you with a static score you have to stop playing to read. This one composes the reward out of the same materials as the challenge, so getting good at the game and getting a better soundtrack out of it are, mechanically, the identical act. Few combat systems manage that unity, and it’s the reason this entry, six years and a Vergil DLC campaign later, is still the character-action genre’s clearest statement of intent.