The Devil May Cry game series has built itself on over-the-top action, demonic invasions, and pithy one-liners. Netflix's Devil May Cry certainly does the same. However, unlike the 2007 anime series, this show is not set in the same continuity as the games. Instead, it weaves its own story about Dante's early days as a Demon Hunter. This is not to say that the creators are ignorant of the games' story—it's quite the opposite, actually. This Nextflix series takes characters, events, and other pieces of lore from not only the games but the manga as well. It's obvious from the first episode that the creators of this show have both a love for and an in depth knowledge of the source material as they use it to shape a story that is at once familiar and new.

One thing this show does that the games do not is flesh out the greater world. Rather than taking place on some random island or a made up city, this show sets things in America—early 2000s America to be exact. This is an America ruled by jingoistic notions and fundamentalist religious values—literally as we see with the power behind the throne, Vice President William Baines. While technically on the side of the angels (as he is fighting for the survival of the human race), Baines truly believes he is doing god's work and is on a genocidal crusade to wipe out demon kind.

But it's not just the world that's been expanded upon, it's the demons themselves. Rather than simply portraying them as a universally evil monolith, this show works to provide a lot of nuance to them as a species. Even the White Rabbit and his demonic lieutenants have understandable motivations beyond “evil for evil's sake”—and that's before even getting into the idea of demon civilians. In fact, it's the low level demons you will sympathize with most, as they're basically being crushed by xenophobic manifest destiny on one side and a strict feudal system that sees them as nothing but slaves on the other.

As you may have gathered from this review so far, despite Netflix's Devil May Cry being a product of Trump-supporter and Henry Kissinger-fan Ali Shankar, this show is anything but right-leaning politically (save for the brief appearance of an AM radio conspiracy theorist who looks suspiciously like Zack “Asmondgold” Hoyt). Rather, the show is a critical take down of the Bush-led America of the early 2000s—specifically the War on Terror, the invasion of Iraq, and the persecution of Muslim immigrants (with demons standing in for Muslim people in the story to make the prejudice on display doubly clear). What's great about this political commentary is not only does it explore the folly of the times in a creative way, it is used to develop and explore our heroes on a personal level.

As Dante and Lady learn more about the demons and themselves, they are forced to confront the fact that many of their long-held beliefs are wrong. Sometimes they are able to accept these new truths and other times choose to double-down on the comforting lie. This makes them feel remarkably human even as they battle their way through an endless gauntlet of superhuman fights.

And to be clear, the action scenes are absolutely one of the high points for this series. They are smooth, flashy, and creative. They manage to walk the tightrope between over-the-top fun and just plain silly perfectly—just like the games. The visuals also do a good job at showing the horror of what's going on. Normal people (outside of Lady herself) have little chance of going up against a demon and surviving—and the series does not shy away from showing this in all its bloody glory.

However, the big standout moment for this series visually is not an action scene at all. Rather it is the entirety of the sixth episode. Done in two different animation styles than the other episodes, this episode tells the parallel backstories of both Lady and the White Rabbit—and has absolutely no dialogue until the scene where they first meet. It is an episode of pure art—visual storytelling at its finest (and not something I ever expected to run across in a show about killing demons in stylish ways).

Both this episode (which includes a new song from Evanescence) and the rest of the series as a whole don't slouch in the soundtrack department, either. To fit the early 2000s aesthetic, we have everything from Limp Bizkit's “Rollin'” (which serves as the series' theme song) and “Papa Roach's Last Resort” to Rage Against the Machine's “Guerrilla Radio” and Green Day's “American Idiot.” The show also contains a remixed version of Nero's theme in Devil May Cry V, “Devil Trigger”—only now in a musical style more stylistically tied to Dante. It's a banger soundtrack from top to bottom (especially if you're a 90s or 00s kid).

And speaking of Nero, his voice actor Johnny Yong Bosch, voices the younger Dante seen in this show—which makes total sense considering that Nero is Dante's nephew in the games. He does a fantastic job at portraying a Dante who is still in the process of perfecting his persona, making him as endearing as he is cool. The other standout performance comes in the form of the late, great Kevin Conroy in what may be his final posthumous role. The way he delivers Vice President Baines' religious rants has such power and conviction that its downright terrifying.

In the end, Netflix's Devil May Cry is a thrill ride from start to finish. Yet, rather than doing the bare minimum of fun fights and explosive action, the show fleshes out a world that seems all-too-real and uses a show about killing demons to explore xenophobia, religious zealotry, and the difficulty of accepting when you are wrong. The only real questionable aspect of the show is how it ends on a shocking cliffhanger that shifts the status quo so drastically, it all but demands a second season to be properly explored. Luckily, it looks like we'll be getting just that sometime in the indeterminate future.