Devil May Cry 2 Could have been great but turned out to be a rather lazy game.
Firstly the story line seems to be, stop this evil dude, Arius, from performing a ritual to open the realm to some evil God. That'd be fine and all if it wasn't just that. The story includes both Lucia the "new" character and Dante the old devil hunter and allows you to play both sides getting the story from their sort of perspective except it doesn't, the majority of Lucia's time is spent just going through to same places as Dante or places where you're not sure if they are the same or not. On top of all this for Dante you get to fight a funny blob thing with all the previous bosses in it and after you beat that there's the last and it just leaves you sitting there scratching your head going, "Wait, who is this and why am I fighting them?". Luckily Capcom has seemed to have buried Devil May Cry 2 and except for Bloody Palace shall never be mentioned again.
The combat system really is where the worst of it is. You gain no new moves and both Lucia and Dante get two Devil Arms each in the game except they're both just long range, low damage and short range, high damage. And it adds to this androgynous game play where you're performing the same set of moves to kill the bad guy, even when you fight the bosses only the last ones seem to have that feel of their unique moves with unique counters to them.
Thirdly the games lost its' attitude, it feels like someone was forced to write the script against their own will. The bosses are just for the most part strong random enemy encounters that are generally mindless zombies that attack on site. And Dante seems like he just woke up before the mission and is completely tired the whole way through.
The textures seem mildly improved though that might be because the camera is further away, and the only addition that makes you glad Capcom made this game is the "Bloody Palace" mode and only because they included it in later games. While I did finish the game on all the difficulties it was only in the vain hope that I'd get Super Dante and Super Lucia so I could blast all the demons back to hell but no soup for me, that and I was a fan of Devil May Cry 1 and was hoping that by some spectacular feat the harder difficulties would make Devil May Cry 2 more interesting.