8 / 10
score
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The Disc
 
Extra Features
Not a great deal of supplementary material here, but just about par for the course for an anime release. There are the clean (textless) credits and an interview with Toshiyuki Morikawa, who voices Dante, which is worth a look.  There are also seven cut scenes and preview trailers for this and the fourth instalment (released last year) in the game series.
 

Inline Image

The Picture
Apparently, Madhouse has something of a reputation for producing fantastic looking animes and judging by this, it’s one that’s well deserved. The characters are beautifully designed, the demon transformations fluid and the action sequences extremely frenetic.
 
The HD picture is very clean with a handsome transfer – the colours are bright and contrast well with the deep black levels.
 
The Sound
You get the choice of Dolby TrueHD 5.1 English or Japanese and both are very good with suitable voices and I’d usually go straight for the Japanese but, as this is an American setting with English signs and newspapers, I watched most of it with the English track and was very impressed. The surrounds are used very well, directing the conversation so that when someone speaks from the back of the room, the sound comes from that direction.
 
The action sequences are extremely loud and bombastic, so your whole speaker system springs to life when a fight breaks out. The commercial markers are left in and some are accompanied by either a gunshot or the sound of swords clashing, which always managed to catch me off-guard and elicit a slight jump!
 
Inline Image

Final Thoughts
This may be the best way to adapt a videogame, take the mission element and turn it into one episode within the wider narrative. Devil May Cry wouldn’t have worked in a feature-length format as you would just get bored and find the characters underdeveloped, so a series of 20+ minute episodes suits it perfectly.
 
I’m no authority on anime, for that you’d have to read Jitendar’s DVD review, but I really enjoyed this and can see myself going back to it at some point. With the added AV quality that Blu-ray offers, this set is worth a place on any anime fan’s shelf.

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