No, but so what if I did? This is just something I have completely disagreed on with DMC fans. The combat in these games should stand up on it's own, regardless of how stylish or difficult the player wants to make it. My incentive for getting a high stylish rank should be to avoid dying, not just for the sake of getting a high score.
I'm not sure I see this idea that the combat doesn't stand up on its own, given that the mechanics in 5 are easily the best in the series.
Anyway, point being that you need to explore the movelist and experiment with it in order to get the most out of the combat. The style system is there to incentivise that, and you can wilfully ignore it if you like, but at that point you're playing yourself. Why buy a game that predicates itself on sick combos if you aren't going to attempt sick combos?
And while it may not be your bag, the ranking system does offer material incentive in the form of extra upgrade currency. You can grow your moveset quicker if you style, which in turn allows you to style more, etc etc etc
I'm here to beat the game, and if I can beat the game doing the most mundane trivial stuff that's a fault with the game, not me.
What's your yardstick for measuring this against? Outside of Ninja Gaiden and Sekiro, I can't think of many character action / hack'n'slash titles that actively force the player not to do the basic combo over and over again. Heck, you can beat DMC1 and 3 that way if you're of the mind to do so.
The only DMC game that's ever straight up forced the player to use other tools is the reboot with its colour-matching enemies, and those were a total train wreck.
Now that isn't totally true on higher difficulties, but at least DMC1 and DMC3 were hard enough right from the start. I'll look for an unlock all difficulties cheat code because that may be the only thing saving this game at the moment.
I dunno if there's a code, but the spoiler tag in my last post has one method of getting early access to higher difficulties.
I finished DMC 3 Normal, Hard, Very hard, Dante must die (difficulty) was fucking ridiculous i gave up.
Preach. DMC3 Dante Must Die is a special kind of insane.
I hear god-tier players going on about how once you've finished DMD you'll never go back to non-ridiculous difficulties, but I didn't find that to be true. Once was enough for me, that shit at the end with the chessboard, boss rush, arkham and vergil is completely and totally off the chain.