RAdvantage
By
RANews.
RAdvantage is bringing you tips for some of the hardest achievements on the site. As always, our DMs remain open at RANews, if you have tips for any 100 point or other very difficult achievements you have earned please let us and the rest of the community know.
Tip Provided By:
BahamutVoid| Game | Console | Genre |
|---|---|---|
 Devil May Cry 3: Special Edition [Subset - Bonus] |
PlayStation 2 | Hack & Slash |
| Achievement | Description |
|---|---|
 Dante Must-Die Rank SS |
Get Rank SS in Each Mission on Dante Must-Die Mode |
There are plenty of resources online that have the specific requirements for each level so I’ll instead focus on how best to approach each level. At this point in the game you should have everything in the shop bought and all styles maxed out, except for items as those will count against your ranking. You’ll need an S in each category, with your main concern being style points. More red orbs are awarded based on what style rank you have at the moment of an enemy’s death, so anything before that should be spent on building a combo up of varied attacks. The weapons you choose should be based on what you personally find intuitive. Each enemy may be more vulnerable to certain moves from certain weapons, but any time spent focusing on how to use a weapon you’re less familiar with will interrupt your flow and ultimately count against you when it matters.
To make things easier, you really need to focus on some mechanics that you may not be aware of. Jump-cancelling is one of the more famous tricks in this game; Kick Jump allows you to jump off an enemy’s head to potentially stay in the air indefinitely, as shown in Secret Mission 3. What’s important to us, however, is how this essentially resets your mid-air state, allowing you to use another aerial move such as Killer Bee or Air Hike without having to touch the ground. This can even be done in the middle of performing the attack, allowing you to either use highly damaging mid-air attacks consecutively or escape from any situation.
Rolling to the side while locked onto an enemy will make you invincible for enough time to completely ignore enemy attacks; this also applies to the beginning of any jump. These two simple changes to how you play can completely nullify any reliance you had on the Trickster Style which will allow you to focus on Swordmaster or Gunslinger for style grinding. If you are extremely confident then you should equip Royal Guard, although you should be particularly careful about using releases to kill enemies too early. Combine this with the invincibility from Jumping, Rolling or even Kick Jumping to give you a little insurance when trying to time a Just Guard/Release.
Another mechanic for building style quickly is the DT Explosion; by holding down the Devil Trigger button your remaining charges will begin to glow and releasing will cause your Devil Trigger to begin with an explosion. 3 charges is usually enough for its purpose, activate when around a group of enemies to instantly rocket to SSS style. This should be your main use of Devil Trigger; playing through missions will help you understand how much you need to use to counter how long it takes to clear enemy rooms, as activating it haphazardly will lead to less time for you to build up a decent style before everything drops dead.
You may have thought that most of the guns can interrupt the flow of combat due to their varying cooldown times after firing but it’s important to know that switching to another gun and firing will completely ignore any cooldown. I heartily recommend you practise different combinations to understand how you can make up for a weapon’s drawbacks and increase how much damage you can deal in a short amount of time. The Spiral in particular is recommended for bosses since consecutive use of it doesn’t penalise you like other repeated attacks, and switching to Ebony & Ivory can allow you to maintain a style ranking from the other side of the arena. Kalina Ann on the other hand has a similar use to DT Explosion; use it while surrounded to rack up that style rank while also knocking down everything.
Royal Guard also has this property of eliminating cooldown which means you don’t need Ebony & Ivory in your loadout to perform the previous trick, just tap Guard to reset your character’s state. This also applies to most character actions, meaning you can repeatedly use certain moves like the Rebellion’s Stinger much faster than just using different moves in between.
If you ever feel like you’re just missing out on the requirements, here’s some extra tips:
- Taunting during combat increases your style rank, so do it whenever you feel confident you’re safe or if enemies are dying too quickly. This is especially important for Easy.
- Certain combat rooms can be repeated, the most important of these being Secret Missions, just be aware of how much time this takes.
- Use Rebellion’s Stinger, or Beowulf’s Killer Bee from a high point, to traverse levels quicker
- You run faster while in Devil Trigger but use this sparingly as DT has other uses.
- You will need to play through a mission multiple times to get a feel for what category you are lacking in. You do not need to fight every enemy unless you are lacking in orbs or style.
There are many more minor tricks that the community have built up over the years but I feel these are the most important needed to make SS ranks for the entire game much more achievable.