Wrong, coop was hyped up by the trailer with clear showcase of up to 3 characters fighting together. There was even some crazy combos setup, like Nero throwing a Riot into Dante's Real Impact. But in the end, only mission 13 (which is a big empty room) allows for coop. Here is the trailer if you don't believe me
As for V, you can like him, that's not the issue. He is broken on many aspects and that's a fact. Shadow basically give you infinite iframe with his dash, and I tested it by spamming the dash into Urizen homing tentacle, he didn't hit me. Shadow is supposed to teleport to the enemy if this one is out of his reach, but sometime he don't and just whiff a few attacks for no reason. Same for airborne enemies, Shadow is supposed to use his specific anti air moves against them, but sometime he don't and whiff at the ground.
Griffon is just a glorified Blue Rose with an uppercut move. He isn't broken or anything, but you spend so much time holding the shoot button during fight, it's just tedious. You spend most of your time holding the button with him, and sometime throw a headbutt (which does a surprising amount of damage for how cheap it is).
Finally, both Griffon and Shadow do very little damage, and that's where mister SSS enter the fight. Nightmare is so broken, it's just ridiculous. His laser just annihilate the whole room doing huge AOE damage and sending everyone flying. And in contrast, his punch is slow af and cover a very little area, meaning that when you summon him, you are just praying for the laser spam, or taking control to do it yourself. Also you can just take control, teleport with him and do the omega laser then stop the summon, and he will pulverize whatever is caught in it for free.
And it doesn't stop here. Nightmare is invulnerable and if you're not riding him, you don't lose DT when he gets hit. BUT he still take the aggro of most enemies when summoned. Meaning that he will basically taunt half of the room when summoned.
So to sum it up, V got the Shadow dash which make him invulnerable with infinite iframe, Griffon can charge up in the background since he fly and will avoid most attack because of that, and you got the DT charge with the book while Nightmare is the answer for anything and does the job better fat better than the other two. So the best strategy is to spam charged attack with Griffon while reading the book and avoiding everything with Shadow, then spam Nightmare when you can.
I'm not saying V isn't fun to play. Blasting the room with Nightmare is cool and he is a new concept of gameplay which is a really good thing in DMC. But sadly he is in a broken state, and the best way to realize it is to play in DMD with him. That's when you realize Griffon and Shadow do no damage and Nightmare is just busted. Situations where Griffon and Shadow got both 1 hit are frequent in DMD, and the answer is always the big slimy boy. Nightmare is far too powerful and overshadow everything else V has. So in maximum difficulty, you are forced to play optimally and just rely on Nightmare for everything.
But yeah, he is fun to play in SoS, and you can pull some funny combos with him. But even then, the summons are clunky to control and you must manage them while they run around with only one way to effectively reposition them : dashing.
