Mission 13: The Devil Returns

You're traveling back through territory you've already been through in this level, so it should be somewhat familiar to you. Unfortunately much of it is blocked off from you, so you'll need to follow the voice of the forest to get to where you're going.

Ancient Training Ground

Leave through the eastern exit here. Any other exit will loop you back to the beginning of this screen. You can jump from the upper walkway to the ground below over the crack in the wall.

Forgotten Ruins

Jump off the balcony to your east here and head through the enemies to the clouds in the southeast.

Windswept Valleys

Ugh. The Assaults here have been infected by Chimera Seeds and are much quicker than they were before, and thus much more annoying. They'll also cut through the ground, Cutlass-style, and pop up beneath you. If you get frustrated here, a Devil Trigger followed by spamming Stinger 2 will do a good job on these guys with minimal risk to yourself.

Deal with them as best you can, then head to the east and up the stairs.

Ancient Plaza

The Assaults here are the regular sort, so they're much easier to beat than the Chimerassaults from before. Defeat them to move on to the northeast.

Lapis River

Defeat the Mephistos here if you like, then proceed through one of the portals underneath the bridge.

Red combat adjudicators can only be used by Dante.

Windswept Valley/Ruined Church

Head into the Ruined Church and get up to an A ranking on the Combat Adjudicator to get a Blue Orb Fragment. If you skilled up the Swordmaster style, then pressing lockon+forward+the special attack button (B on the Xbox 360), then simply spamming the special attack button, will launch you into a lengthy combo that will get you most of the way up there. Head through the southeastern door, underneath the stairs.

Lost Forest

The Chimaerassaults are probably best avoided here; run past them into the eastern exit. The movements through the forest are different now than they were your first time around; you want to go east, then west, then south, and south again.

Forgotten Ruins

Time for another boss fight.

Boss Fight: Echidna 2

Video Walk-through

Echidna, part 2. She starts off slow, but you'll kill her more quickly as time goes on.

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Echidna is mechanically identical to her previous form, but your techniques will have to be different in the absence of the Snatch move; it's going to be a lot more difficult to get up to Echidna's face to attack her.

Irregardless, that's what you need to do: get to her while she floats and pound her face in. She might be easiest to defeat with the Gunslinger style, but since we had upgraded the Trickster and Swordmaster, that was what we had to use. If you feel tricky, you can try to use the Trickster's shifting mechanism (forward+lockon+special attack button while in the air) to zoom into Echidna's face, then flip over to Swords and start using the mid-air combo that that style offers to you. Either way you go, hitting her early in the fight will be frustrating, as she tends to slowly back away from you, causing the latter half of your attacks to simply miss.

Look familiar? It certainly should.

As annoying as that is, things get a little better later on, especially when Echidna starts to embed herself in the ground and attack you that way. This is when you want to flip on Devil Trigger and unload your combos on her; you should be able to pound away for a bit before she repels you.

But yeah, apart from the lack of Snatching and using Buster to unload supercombos, there's nothing very different about this fight than the first time you faced Echidna. You should have a few more health bulbs and correspondingly more offensive powers (even if you're still trying to suss out how to use them), so you have the advantage there. If you wish, you can simply stay in Trickster style the whole time and dodge her attacks while very slowly wearing her down.