How does the style rank work in Devil May Cry?

The game grades your fighting the way a crowd grades a performance.

The system was born from a bug. Testing Onimusha: Warlords, Kamiya discovered enemies could be kept in the air by slashing them repeatedly, and built Devil May Cry around the discovery: combat as juggling, gunfire and sword work woven together, with an on-screen gauge applauding in real time. In the 2001 game the gauge climbs from Dull through Cool, Bravo and Absolute to peak at Stylish. Repeat the same move and the gauge stalls, forcing variety. Take a hit and it collapses back to Dull. Taunting an enemy at close range can hold your grade, which tells you everything about the game's values.

At the end of each mission the same philosophy becomes a report card: a grade from D to S built from your time, the red orbs gathered, your stylish rating, the items you used and the damage you took. Devil May Cry did not ask whether you survived. It asked how you looked doing it, and an entire subgenre, called character action or Extreme Combat, grew from that question.

THE LADDERS

Each game renames the applause

Devil May Cry · 2001

Dull, Cool, Bravo, Absolute, Stylish. Five words, and a mission grade from D to S on top. The vocabulary of the genre starts here.

Devil May Cry 2 · 2003

The gauge speaks in phrases instead: Don't Worry, Come On, Bingo, Are You Ready, Showtime. Mission results run from D, glossed Don't Worry, to S, glossed Showtime. Its in-fight judging is remembered as the harshest in the series despite the game's easier difficulty.

Devil May Cry 3 · 2005

Seven rungs and the series' most quoted ladder: Dope, Crazy, Blast, Alright, Sweet, SShowtime, SSStylish. Mission grades now run to SS. Stone combat adjudicator statues in the game demand a set rank, in a set weapon, before they will break: the game literally grades you at statues.

Devil May Cry 4 and 5

The fourth game runs Deadly, Carnage, Brutal, Atomic, Smokin', Smokin' Style, Smokin' Sick Style. The fifth: Dismal, Crazy, Badass, Apocalyptic, Savage, Sick Skills, Smokin' Sexy Style, with an announcer who calls your rank aloud, a flourish inherited from DmC. The letters never changed. The applause kept getting louder.

WHY IT MATTERED

A scoreboard for showing off

The standard

Devil May Cry became, in the words of its own critical record, the standard against which other 3D action games were measured, with reviews of God of War, Chaos Legion and Blood Will Tell all reaching for the comparison. The rank system is why: it turned mastery into something visible, gradeable and worth replaying for.

The history of the series How Devil May Cry 3 saved the series Bayonetta, the sibling

How does the style rank work in Devil May Cry?

THE LADDERS

WHY IT MATTERED

THE FIRST WORD