Dante in dmc 2 is too serious and it s not because of character development but simply because of a terrible game and terrible writing... I replayed dmc 2 recently and simply dante is not dante, even if I like dmc 2 dante... Dmc 2 it's a game that doesn't even bother mention since the character are all flat and the story is pathetic, dante from dmc 1 is different if you saw him, he is serious when needed but because he had motivation, but he is like dmc 3 dante many time, when he found a new weapon and play whit it or when he taken joke of bosses, however he became serious when fighting stronger hopponent such as vergil mundus Ecc... Dmc 2 simply is serious because of the bad writing, there are almost no dialog in that game, they are all serious... There is no sense to it, I read many things about this, about dante losing Trish or something happened to him to make him so serious, but this is not the case, it's simply bad written, the game story itself is stupid, I mean just replay it and you will find out yourself how bat it is, dmc 2 must deserve a 6 out of 10 in general... If I had to put it in the story we can assume dmc 2 is just a simple job for dante, look almost like an episode from the anime, a bad guy want to kill people and dante stop him that's it (if we delete dmc 2 from Canon nothing will change since is pretti useless to the timeline) so he is serious like he is sometimes in the anime because he gets bored probably Infact he was never in difficulty in dmc 2, but this is just an assumption of mine, the truth like I sayd before is that dmc 2 is a terrible game in everyway even in character development