-Tutorial Mission is completely stupid and fails to teach the player anything about how the games core mechanics work against
 real enemies they start fighting immediately after mission 1
 -Dante acts fundamentally differently from any of the other enemies that Nero encounters for the rest of his segment (other than Dante 2) and the tutorial doesn't amount to much more than a glorified jpg of your button layout.
 -A better tutorial segment was in the prologue when the demons are in the city but instead of teaching the player how to play the game against enemies that they'll actually be interacting with for the next few hours, the designers instead elect to barely teach the bare minimum of the game, chuck the player into a bossfight, offer automatic mode as a supplement for a real learning experience, and say that they did their job.

-The Proud soul system is a strict downgrade in retrospect to the Red orb system
 -The fact that abilties become more expensive post purchase of other abilities is wasteful and needlessly extends the time it
  takes for players to get even reasonable numbers of moves
  -This is a much bigger problem considering just how small the moves list actually is for Nero intrinsically.
 -By the end of Mission 2 I had 11927 red orbs, which is waaay more than the number of Proud Souls I had with 2 S ranks
  11927 red orbs vs 1952 Proud Souls
   -Unintentionally adds an extreme emphasis on items to get you through missions instead of focusing on moves and early player
    learning.

-Anima Mercury displays an amazing degree of wasted potential.
 -This is the case for pretty much all of the upgrades Nero finds are either used for traversal OR combat, rarely both.
  -Evil Legacy gives Snatch and Hellbound mid way through mission 2 and this is an amazing way of keeping up with the older
   games' approach to unlocks and traversal items as concepts.

-Gyro blades are the definition of unfun time wasting
 -At a core level they're a piece of combat centric world traversal. which keeps it in like with the success of 3
  -They're basically room specific item centric puzzles.
   -They're bad because they're supposed to be the equivalent of the upgrades Dante got in 3 in theory
   -They fail as Item Centric Puzzles because they require incredibly minimal thought by the player
    -The games direction tells the player how to complete the puzzle
    -The Puzzle doesn't get faster even when the player knows how to solve it effectively.
    -The Puzzles are frustrating because the physics of the Gyro Blades are incredibly random in relation to the position the
     attack came from
    -An incredible amount of time interacting with the blades is spent waiting to interact with it.
     -The 5 second startup time after activating them is a huge flow breaker.
     -After a decent launch a decent amount of time is spent actually running back over to the Gyro blades which is frustrating
      because even IF the player has sprint unlocked (which isn't really a logical first purchase in a new game, non-speedrun
      playthrough) the distance of travel is in this annoying sweet spot where it's too far for regular running to be quick
      and too close to the player for Sprint to actually be activated by running and be a decent enough of a time-saver.
   -The Gyro blades are incredibly room specifc, only used in combat for 3 rooms in the entire castle segment
    -This in and of itself is capable of damning the worthiness of the Anima Mercury as an item.
    -They act like Holy Waters that don't penalize you for using them for the mission end screen.
     -They actually increase your stylish level for killing enemies with them
    -On a surface level, the Gyro blades could have been an attempt at doing the exploding barrels from DMC3's mission 3
     in a much better way. They're parts of the environment that, once interacted with, absolutely demolish nearby enemies
     in a much more efficient way than the player could reasonably perform.
     -However, it's worth noting just how they possess the same problems as the barrels did, lock-on tries to focus the player
      on them, they're way too brief to be a major game mechanic, except now it's much worse because we gave up a combat
      upgrade for these timewasters
 -The Gyro blades Are unnecessary wasted potential and the reason for them being in the game is flawed.
  -The wasted potential is based on the fact that they are treated in the same way as the Devil Arms are in 3.
   -This applies to virtually every upgrade that Nero finds in the game
   -Whereas the Devil Arms/Styles/Mechanics that Dante got at the ends of Missions in DMC3 changed the way players approached
    combat and traversal without being room specific and followed the player everywhere after they were acquired. Things like
    Anima Mercury are room specific Gimmicks that arguably could have been fulfilled by universal combat upgrades to Nero
    Similar to the Evil Legacy and Credo's Shield.
    -As far as I know there is nothing special about the relationship between the Gyro blades, and the things that they break.
     -The game even says that only something capable of making an impact would break the obsctructions that the Gyro blades clear
     -In theory, an upgrade to Nero's Devil Bringer that allows him to make incredibly powerful punches would suffice over the
      Gyro Blades, keeping him simple to learn, and maintaining an overall focus on the Devil Bringer for upgrades rather than
      handing out newer weapons.
      -Assuming this upgrade could have been a style that was swappable like the grabbing and holding abilities, then it could
       have served as a great learning experience so players weren't so overwhelmed with options when they were handed the keys
       to Dante.

-The game is incredibly cut down the centre with a strange focus on exploration that is seemingly aided by the items Nero
 finds that helps him traverse a level.
 -The game is incredibly combat focused yet the upgrades Nero gets are usually to help the lackluster exploration
  -Nothing the player finds during exploration is ever really worth doing on repeat playthroughs
   -Red orbs cease to have meaning very quickly. Blue Orb fragments are one time deals, and no new fights or abilities
    are unlocked through exploration.

-The dice game is another un-fun time waster that misses the point of what makes Devil May Cry amazing
 -To it's credit it's better than the Gyro blades because there ARE consistently faster ways to finish these segments
  -However, there is still a lot of waiting time between rolls
 -The game board size is WAAAAAY too large
  -In theory this was meant to force the player to react quickly to certain events in a pattern
   -Once the player learns that moving on Yellow circles will move them along quicker, the segment should end, the player
    has learned and applied the ideas of the segment, so forcing us to do it multiple times is silly.
  -At least it didn't waste an item upgrade before I could interact with the dice.

-Agnus 1 is an incredibly poor bossfight
 -The core pillars of the design of the fight are frustrating, uninteresting, and not teaching the player anything they don't
  already know about Nero.
  -Arguably it could have taught Nero how to use enemies as projectiles to damage other enemies but there's no reason he had to
   be so poorly designed to do this.
 -The fight is incredibly visually confusing
  -Between the Gladius animations and affects
   -All of which are new to the player because they are new enemies to the player at this point
  -And the lazer beam attacks across the floor
  -On top of the fact that the player isn't necessarily too comfortable with remaining in the air or positioning themselves
   on or over the safety platform in the centre of the room
   -Which is incredibly claustrophobic
 -In spite of how frustrating and stupid his design his, his fight is still incredibly simple and easy to see through
  -Generally the success of the fight is reliant on the way the AI is feeling.

-Yamato is one of the biggest pieces of wasted potential I have seen in a while.
 -It is a reward from a bossfight, it is a devil arm, it is access to Devil Trigger
  -In spite of this, Yamato only amounts to a range increase for Nero, Summoned Swords, and two DT specific moves.
 -This is a waste of potential because we never get to play as Nero using Yamato exclusively. This differs severely in respect
  to how he's depicted in cutscenes wherein he uses the Yamato as a standalone Devil Arm.
 -The opportunity to really show how different Nero's interpretation of the Yamato is from Vergil and Dante's would be a great
  way to develop his character through his gameplay, in the same way that we were able to see the differences between Dante
  and Vergil through the way each character interpreted and used Beowulf.
 -Once again this flies in the face of the way the old games approached Devil Arms, boss rewards, and gameplay variety
 -This also acts as both a disappointment and a potential hype increase for players interacting with the Red Blue Orb statues
  -The player has just received a New weapon and they've seen two of the same kind of statues (red with red flames) which
   obviously doesn't co-respond to the colour scheme established for Vergil in 3 (blue although blue statues are damaged by
   red queen.)
   -This just furthers the confusion and deepens the disappointment when it's revealed that the different statues are character
    specific, not Devil Arm specific.

-The level design of the forest segments
 -The overall level design of the forest segments is incredibly linear, like most of the rest of the game it is ostensibly a series of
  varied hallways that really could have used more natural elements of the design (rocks, trees, and cliffs in the design)
 -The Forest suffers surprisingly from the over-reliance on invisible walls. Several routing optimizations could have been made if Nero
  were allowed to jump over certain barriers, particularly the arbitrary Gyro Blade barrier which has absolutely no place existing in the
  forest. to begin with.