What I like about Dante's Inferno above all else is Dante's journey of redemption… patchy and inconsistent as it may be. Although DI is a violent, dark, gory, frightening game, at its heart is a story about someone trying to right past wrongs.

I like that Dante starts out a sinner as bad as or worse than any other. He has made mistakes and keeps making them because he doesn't know better; he thinks his actions--his anger, his violence, his treachery, his deception--are justified according to his understanding of the world. For a while, he is never made to appreciate the effects of his unconscious actions; however, his past eventually catches up to him. Because of his behavior, Beatrice is murdered, Francesco is executed, and Dante himself is stabbed in the back and condemned to eternity in hell. (It is a moment of chilling irony when Lucifer later admonishes Dante,telling him that violence only begets violence.)

It is only when Dante is told by Death that his actions have damned him and those he loves that he realizes his need to change. And although the moment of death is usually leaving things a bit too late, Dante decides there's no time like the present to start atoning. He doesn't deny his sins. He doesn't complain that it isn't fair. He kicks Death's bony butt and resolves to right his wrongs then and there, the mark of the hero emerging from her/his own ignorance.

Dante's attempts at atonement begin with the mortification of his own flesh, the stitching of the cross into his chest, to remind him of his past, to make his pledge to be a better person (or Christian in his specific case), and to transcend the corporeal and aspire to the spiritual. Then, his atonement develops into the facing of and the true repentance for all of his past sins, symbolized by his victory over each successive circle of the Inferno. Then, he saves the souls of his loved ones (and possibly others, depending on your actions in the game): Beatrice, Francesco, his mother, even his father who remains unforgiving and unrepentant to the end.

It is this spiritual journey, more than any physical journey, that ultimately makes me appreciate Dante as a heroic character, and DI as a game that attempts to tell a grand story.

I did mention that the story isn't without flaws. The narrative is sometimes disjointed; I was sometimes left feeling that I needed just a few more details to really connect all of what was going on. Next, in the game, you can absolve or punish souls you encounter, but if you choose to punish them, that makes Dante a hypocrite. He judges and condemns others for their sins, while he believes that he himself deserves another chance, which detracts from how heroic he appears at the end of the game. (Incidentally, how did Dante gain the ability to damn or absolve souls to begin with? Why is he able to do what the bishop could not?) Also, the Dante you see in flashbacks and the Dante you control act like two entirely different people. I know that's partially the point, that Dante's a changed man, but the difference between the two is so vast, there's no trace of one in the other. The former is a self-serving seething xenophobe. The latter is a gentleman by comparison, albeit one who's rather handy with a scythe.You would think that either the old Dante might occasionally doubt his false righteousness, or the new Dante would struggle more to remain truly righteously righteous. The difference is too night and day.

However, in the end (provided you absolve more souls than you damn), Dante's redemption does feel complete. Dante's ascent to Purgatory by Beatrice's hand and the removal of his stitched cross, symbol of his past transgressions, seems justified, and you feel it will be a purer, more fully spiritually-realized man who engages Lucifer's forces in what I hope will be more than one soon-to-be-released sequel.