Dante’s Inferno (PlayStation Portable) Review
The devil stole my girlfriend!
~by tankMage (August 2025)
Score: 88/100 (Good)
Whoever thought of making a video game out of Dante’s Divine Comedy was either brilliant or crazy, probably both. Even crazier, they tried to port this game from the Xbox360 to the PSP. While the PSP was an impressive handheld, the Xbox360 was roughly ten times more powerful and any game made for the latter would have to be stripped down considerably to work on the former. And yet, the team that ported Dante did an amazing job.
While the graphics were scaled down tremendously and a good deal of content was cut, the game runs well and reproduces the console release rather faithfully. It even runs at 40 FPS. While that may not sound great, I was expecting 30 FPS.
Despite the excellent job the devs did shrinking this title down to fit on PSP, it suffers as a result of being ported. It also has all the quirks and flaws that the original came with, but Dante’s Inferno is such a strong game that its virtues outweigh its vices. Virgil would be proud.
Rescue the princess, but from Hell this time.
I’ll be honest, I haven’t read Dante’s Inferno (I’m more of a Paradise Lost guy) so I do not know how closely this game follows the epic. Something tells me Dante didn’t have his protagonist blowing demons away with a magic cross and swinging Death’s scythe around like a ninja. That’s fine, because the concept fits into video game format perfectly. Players will be right at home saving Beatrice (Dante’s wife) from Lucifer, just like in a million other games.
While the damsel in distress plot may seem worn out, Dante’s Inferno breathes new life into it. The hero, Dante, is not exactly a great guy and deserves to be in Hell, while Beatrice is innocent. Dante has to face the horrors and depravity of Hell with its nine circles as he sets out to rescue his love, spurned on in part by his own guilt. A lot of dialog and ideas were taken right out of the epic as far as I can tell, which gives the story a lot of flavor. They also included a Motion Comic (isn’t that just an animation or cartoon?) that tells the story alongside CGI cutscenes.
For the most part, the story and setting transform what would otherwise be a fairly generic God of War clone into a unique hack ‘n slash. Dante’s Inferno is made even more special by the fact that it never saw a sequel or any kind of follow-up aside from a remaster. This may sound crazy, but I like games that are one-offs, because they do not suffer from the dreaded sequelitis which has ruined so many franchises.
What do you get when you cross an Xbox 360 with a PSP?
It goes without saying that the PSP is not able to produce the sort of visuals the Xbox 360 can generate. It’s clear that a lot of layering and textures were scaled down or sacrificed to get the game to work. They even lowered the framerate from what I presume was originally 60 to 40 FPS. Despite being stripped down so savagely, the graphics still look good and there are a few really impressive looking areas. There are also a lot of really imaginatively designed demons which include babies with knives for arms and evil priests.
Dante’s Inferno is very explicit, depicting nudity and gore quite often. Some of the more, shall we say, provocative elements were removed in the port from what I’ve read online. That said, this game is very dark and gory even after getting toned down.
Hack, Slash, Repeat
The action is really good even with all the cut content, which I’ll get to later in this review. Dante has a lot of moves spread between the Grim Reaper’s Scythe, Beatrice’s Cross, and magic he learns from bosses. Players are free (for the most part) to adopt their own fighting style, but it still takes quick reflexes and even a little strategy to survive. Big bosses round out the combat aspect of Dante, but the quality of said bosses is inconsistent. Some bosses are exciting and even a bit challenging while most are just big punching bags.
Puzzles were also included. Some of them were interesting, but I got the feeling a lot of them were just designed to slow players down rather than make them think. This was particularly true of puzzles where you had to turn a crank while demons attacked Dante, which is something that irritated me about the God of War games.
There were also a lot of hidden things to find. These include Judas Coins (which aren’t really worth collecting unless you are a completionist) and damned souls. You can absolve or punish the damned to get souls and level up Dante’s Holy/Unholy skills. Speaking of the absolution/punishment system, this game has two skill trees. One tree is Unholy and based around the scythe and the other is a holy skill tree based on the cross. You get souls that are used to unlock new skills by finding things and defeating enemies like in most games of this type. Some enemies and the aforementioned souls can be punished or absolved, which grants points that go towards leveling up the two trees.
It’s an interesting system, but it’s hard to gauge how much exp you need. I ended up maxing out both trees long before I needed to by absolving weak enemies, which was tedious. Had I known I would get more than enough exp to max the trees out, I would have simply sprinted through the beginning of the game.
Dante’s Inferno has a bit of platforming, but 99% of it is very easy. Much of it comes down to Dante making his way down the cliffs of Hell after defeating a boss. The platforming adds some drama to the game, but it’s also boring at times. Platforming would have been better if they had made it a bit tougher, but I’m biased from playing stuff like Ninja Gaiden growing up.
Speaking of difficulty, I played on Zealot difficulty (which is basically medium) and found the game way too easy. I blazed through most battles once I got the hang of the controls and only had trouble with one group of enemies near the end. Maybe the higher difficulties are more challenging, but you have to unlock the hardest mode (Inferno) by beating the game, which means it’s not going to be all that hard since you’re already familiar with the enemies.
So much cut content, it’s a sin!
A lot was taken out of this game, likely so it would fit on a PSP minidisc. Many skills were cut and an absolution mini-game was removed. Special relics and armors got the ax as well. Some of the relics are DLC from what I can tell, which makes me wonder if EA cut them from the game for financial reasons rather than storage limitations. Several demons were cut and, from what I saw of the Xbox 360 footage, some areas were removed or abbreviated. Finally, I also think the cutscenes may have been parsed down a bit, but don’t quote me.
I can’t fault the devs for removing so much content. From what I can tell, the discs used by the PSP held 1.8 gigabytes while a regular DVD could hold over 4 gigabytes at the very least. That’s not to mention the huge amount of HDD space the 360 had, so it’s no surprise they had to leave a lot of content out. Dante’s Inferno is still a cool game even with all the cuts, though this is easily the weakest version of the game.
I jumped dammit! I juuuuuuuuumped!
Dante’s Inferno controls great for the most part. All the menus and stuff work fine too. However, the camera kind of sucked and sometimes works against the player. Jumping didn’t feel very crisp either. I would not describe Dante’s jumps as floaty or delayed. Instead, the word mushy comes to mind. To be more precise, he does not seem to jump very high compared to other games in this genre and his jumps feel kind of slow. I’m not sure if the console version had this issue or not. Either way, it’s a minor problem which is only troublesome on rare occasions.
And now for the relaxing sounds of damnation…
The spooky voice choir must have had a banner year when Dante was in development, because the soundtrack is basically choral/orchestral music played over tortured wailing. This is one of those situations where it’s impossible to imagine a game like this having any other type of music, so the devs made the right choice.
The voice acting is also excellent. People who take the time to look into details will probably recognize many of the actors who voiced Dante’s Inferno. They’re too numerous to name here, so I’ll leave it at that. One thing that bothers me is Satan’s voice-over. He just doesn’t mesh with the rest of the game, though I think this was more of a product of the writing, which had him talking like a modern person.
To be continued…NOT!
I’ll conclude here by saying the PSP version of Dante’s Inferno was a praiseworthy attempt at porting a big console game onto the PlayStation Portable. Artificial Mind and Motion succeeded where a lot of developers fail, since most ports of this kind are terrible. That said, this incarnation of Dante’s Inferno is still kind of weak. It’s hard to justify playing it when there’s a remaster that’s likely more true to the original. But, hey, it’s still a fun game.
On a side note, Dante’s Inferno was supposedly going to be a trilogy, with our boy Dante visiting scenic purgatory after Hell. Honestly, I’m not sure how such a game would shake out. Purgatory is basically the laundromat of human souls where people who were bound for heaven have their sins cleansed away, usually with fire. Sounds rough, but not as bad as eternal damnation, so I’m not sure how they could have pulled off a game about Hell Lite without being anticlimactic. Maybe that’s why we didn’t see a sequel, come to think of it.
Thanks for reading my Dante’s Inferno review!
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