LogFAQs > #971226936

One of the biggest mysteries in DMC is coatless Vergil. In DMC3 there's a version of Vergil without a coat. That's all. No role as the final boss in Vergil's retelling, no Nelo Angelo DT.

This might be an OC Vergil made up (Frontrunner for absolute bottom of the barrel creativity wise) or he might exist simply so Vergil can alter his story to explain how he lost his blue coat.
It's never made clear exactly what happened because when you play the game you get to freely pick between all his costumes. For example you could have Vergil wear his coat for the first handful of missions, lose it after fighting Agni&Rudra and be coatless for a while, then either inexplicably find it after defeating Red Vergil a second time, only to again lose it before Mission 18 and then find it again by the end.

The vagueness isn't helping and alongside how reined in the story is compared to DMC4 and 5, it makes it seem plausible Vergil has reworked the events of DMC3 to tell the story of how he lost his blue coat and the lucky space rock he kept in the pocket rather than this simply being another one of Vergil's lame dark side/super form OCs.
Dante and Vergil's goals are mirrored as are their personalities but also is their ownership of a coat. Dante starts the game without a coat on but he puts one on after the first mission. Vergil has a coat on all game, even the ending scene where he's about to fight Mundus (Even though that contradicts any stories Vergil could tell about losing it during the events of the game) but by DMC5 he's lost it.

It's possible that in Vergil's fight with Mundus, Mundus picked him up by the coat and sung him around and gave him the ol so long "king" Vergil. Perhaps Mundus grabbed Vergil's collar and pulled it down so it was preventing him from using his arms and then punched him in the stomach. Maybe Mundus set Vergil's coat on fire with a blowtorch and landed some good hits while Vergil was shrieking and scrambling to take it off.
Regardless, it had to be something Vergil's ashamed of because he tries very hard not to simply explain why he swapped his coat out for a different one.

You know what's plausible? You ever seen what V's wearing? It's a black coat thing. After V and Urizen fuse back together Vergil is wearing one too. It's most likely that any story Vergil will tell you about the misplacing of his classic blue coat and the procurement of his new black one is just an elaborate way for Vergil to avoid confessing that he cannot wait to go home and start tapdancing while re-watching Twilight. He is more MCR fan than man or demon at this point. If dressing kinda similarly to V is as close as he can get to being a version of V that won't disintegrate from pure weakness, Vergil will settle for that.

Vergil imitating V's look is a shameful state of affairs, but Urizen was apparently outright incapable of even dressing himself, so let's call Vergil's new costume - regardless or reasons or meaning behind it - the lesser of two evils.