BEATING PHANTOM IN DMC1.
Buy Air Raid
Buy Air-Hike
Make sure you found the shotgun in the library. (smash the table).
Phantom only has two weak spots. The top side of it's back, and it's face.
The best strategy, is to perform a hightime (long) (where you press R1+Back+Triangle but press and hold Triangle) doing this allows Dante to attack, and seamlessly rise up two in one. Meaning, he's doing both offense and defense at the same time. Once you do the rising hightime, in the air-blash Phantom with a shotgun blast, double jump, shotgun again, and then slash down (press Triangle) in the Air. After so, you should have filled up your DT runes, and start Air-Raiding the fucker. (throw lighting bolts from the air).
That chain right there, should take off 1/4 to 1/3 of Phantom's life.
Keep doing that, and you should be fine. Note however, that strategy won't really work as well on Hard or Dante Must Die mode.
Also, keep in mind you can also knock back Phantom's fire balls, however--that's an "advanced" move so don't take the risk doing that.
Now, Phantom's attacks are all telegraphed (another aspect in which GoW sucks donky balls in)
If the camera is not on Phantom, then use your ears.
If you hear a jumping sound (it's quite obvious) then simply jump away.
If you hear a sudden silence (i.e Phantom is not walking around) that means he's sticking his head in the ground.
When that happens he'll summon lava columns from the ground. Simply run in a linear direction, DO NOT DOUBLE BACK.
Next, Phantom will spit a fireball from his mouth. You can hear it charging up, roll/jump to the side to avoid it.
All other of Phantom's attacks he'll do when you are next to his face. "mostly swipe attacks"
That's why you should do rising hightimes, they allow Dante to slash up and immediatly avoid the swipes that will pass him by below.
With the above strategy, you will be able to no-hit beat Phantom no normal.
PS: DO NOT PLAY DMC1 ON EASY_AUTOMATIC. It takes the controls out of you hands. Basically, the game does the combos for you, and that is not good. DMC is all about stringing together a few special moves in any order you want, whenever, and however. Easy Automatic strips that ability out from under you. Thus making the game harder than it is. Also, search for Blue Orbs fragments, there arel like..6 of them before the Phantom boss fight. 4 fragments permenantly increase your health guage.
That's the beauty of DMC1/DMC3, you don't need super fast reflexes like you do in God of War, it's a thinking man's action game. Sadly, apparently "thinking" and "gamer" don't go well, that's why most people here perfer GoW over games like DMC3 and Ninja Gaiden.
If you need more help, don't bother to ask. You'll realize DMC/NG vets actually press buttons MUCH less than n00bs. Funny how that "depth" works....eh
BTW, I've spent about 80 or so hours on DMC1, I'm still trying to get the just-parry done against Nelo Angelo, the timing is hard. So if you need help on him I can't give you "fail-proof" strats on that. I'm pretty good at Ninja Gaiden as well, although I'm sure there are a few others that can help more on that if you need help on NG.
I will say though that both DMC3 and NG have balance issues.
The balance issue in DMC3 is the sort of fucked up save system (it's kind of unfriendly to have to BUY your checkpoints) and NG, on normal mode flying swallow is all you need 50% of the time. But yeah...>_>
EDIT: If you like hard games, but only interesting ones--NG and DMC3 are probably the only two hard and interesting games that exist. Sorry, but if it werent' for those two games, action gaming would be reduced to SPIDER-MAN 3 yo!!
