Devil May Cry, a game originally born in 2001 from a failed demo of Resident Evil 4, blossomed well into its own series over the past 25 years. Demon slaying action gameplay with a mix of gothic and the 2000’s edgy aesthetics leads to a unique experience that would be hard to capture in anything but a video game format. Yet the team at Netflix, helmed by Adi Shankar, most certainly tried.
That’s about all they did, though, as the Devil May Cry anime released in April of 2025 is a far cry from what drew fans into the games originally. Missing out on the aesthetics, writing, lore, characters, action, and worst of all, the music.
Dante, the main character of the series, is known for his cocky, chill, better-than-you attitude. Netflix turned Dante into Deadpool. Instead of his usual standoffish self, he quips, literally, because he wants to look cool. He’s given a supernatural healing factor that has never been an ability of his before, Game Dante just doesn’t get hurt in the first place (which is a lot cooler if you want to show off how strong a character is.) Netflix tries to boil Dante down to his core but misses so many key components and makes him like any generic cool guy main character.
One of the strangest decisions with Dante is that he’s voiced by the (while talented) odd choice Johnny Yong Bosch. Bosch already voices a main character, Nero, in Devil May Cry 4 and 5. It’s quite confusing that he was chosen over another actor, while Dante’s current actor would be problematic for Capcom to keep around, it comes off as bizarre to pick someone so tied to a different character in the games.
A lot of the controversy surrounding this adaptation comes from director and self-proclaimed “Visionary” Adi Shankar, who previously helmed Netflix’s just-as-hated Castlevania anime. What comes with admittedly great animation and well-choreographed fight scenes also carries a very strange disconnect from the source material, as though Shankar is trying to fix his problems with the series, rather than celebrate it as is.
That’s the sad thing with Netflix’s Devil May Cry, is that it isn’t a celebration of the series, or a peek into an otherwise unseen era of Dante’s life, it’s a completely new universe that insults parts of the original while stealing others without caring for any of the context behind them. This anime should have been a breath of fresh air amidst waiting for the next entry in the game series, but all it ended up being was a vehicle for controversy and a rift in the fandom.
