Unfortunately, there’s no real easy way to represent all of Devil May Cry 3’s difficulty coding in a diagram as the changes in each difficulty are quite complex. I think you can see where I’m going with this. Extensive testing has shown that Dante Must Die mode is the exact same across all three regions, so we can complete the grid now. The original version of Devil May Cry 3 has four difficulties when we exclude Heaven or Hell: Easy, Normal, Hard and Dante Must Die. Here we have a grid that represents the three versions of Devil May Cry 3. This means that American Easy is the other versions’ Normal, while American Normal is the other versions’ Hard. The phrase that’s commonly used to describe the American difficulty is ‘a step above the other versions’. To do this, I will explain exactly how the regional versions of the game differ. I’ll start off by addressing the question of whether the difficulty difference could have been an accident. As usual, there will be a summary at the bottom if you don’t wish to read everything. Was the difficulty difference in the American version of Devil May Cry 3 an accident?.To be crystal clear on the matter, I’ve challenged myself with two main questions: Getting to the bottom of this is something that I’ve been doing on and off now for around thirteen years, so I felt that it was time to set aside some research time and finally try to solve the mystery that has been bugging me for over a decade.

However, this explanation just always seemed to bug me – it seemed like such an incomplete explanation. The evidence that’s used to support this is the release of Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition, a game which standardised the difficulty across all regions.

It’s quite common to see people asking why on forums, and it’s also quite common to see the answer being ‘it was simply an accident’. It was becoming apparent that there were not only regional differences between the Eastern and Western releases of the game, but even between Western releases.Īfter thorough testing and investigation, we finally had our answer: Devil May Cry 3 in NTSC format (typically North America) was harder than the NTSC-J (typically Japan) and PAL (typically Europe and Australia) formats. …to deny the fact that Capcom’s stellar sequel is one of the most challenging titles of the last ten years would either make you a robot with superhuman reflexes, or a videogame prodigy…Īs global players started talking about and sharing footage of the game, something didn’t seem to add up. In fact, it wasn’t uncommon for the game’s difficulty to be the very first thing mentioned in a review’s opening paragraph: When Devil May Cry 3 released in the West in March 2005, reviews and forums alike were buzzing about the challenge it offered following the disappointment of Devil May Cry 2.

Dmc 5 difficulties