It's amazing how much I've learned from video games over the years. Thanks to Sony, I recently got some practice in prepping for doomsday.
I always sort of scoffed at people that hoard important items during the end times, something that seems to have happened a lot in the last year or so. But when Sony announced earlier this year they would shutter the PlayStation Store on the PS3, I started panic buying. You see, the PS3 has tons of "PSOne Classics" for sale that aren't available on the PS4. You have the standard stuff, Crash Bandicoot, Spyro, etc. But there are also a ton, and I mean a ton, of rare, expensive JRPGs that can be had for under $10. I love physical media as much as the next person, but at the end of the day experiencing the games is what's really important. Do I want a physical copy of Suikoden II? Yes. Can I afford it for $300? No. But there it is on the PlayStation Store, for the perfectly reasonable price of $9.99.
Sony did renege on their decision to close up shop, thanks to a throng of angry gamers who can't, won't or don't want to be forced into buying expensive next gen consoles. But now I'm stuck with a bunch of awesome games to review. What a shame. And what a coincidence that I'm going to start with Darkstalkers, a 2D fighter and the first PlayStation game I ever bought. It's going to be a tough one, this game holds a lot of nostalgia for me personally. My original copy, in its super awesome long box case, has been lost to the ages. I haven't touched this game, or any of its sequels, since probably the mid 90's and honestly I don't think I'm alone in that. While a few compilations have been released, most recently in 2013, there hasn't been a truly original game in the series since 2000. That's more than 20 years. The characters have lived on through other games, if your first fighting game was Marvel vs. Capcom and you were confused as to where Morrigan, Ankaris and Felicia came from, well, here you go. I'd never say never in today's remake happy world, but it looks like Darkstalkers is something of a dead series.
The biggest difference here is the inclusion of a forward and back dash, all characters can jump forward or back by double tapping the D-pad. This may not seem like much, but it fundamentally changes the way you need to attack and which characters are valid. This is compounded by the lack of fireball heavy characters in the game, no one in Darkstalkers has a projectile they can use to dominate a round like a Hadouken or Sonic Boom. I'm not sure a single character has a non-charged projectile that can reach the edge of the screen. Speaking of charged attacks, you will build up a special meter by landing attacks and performing special moves throughout the fight. This will allow you to use charged versions of your special moves and a super move if its high enough. None of these are completely overpowered, but they do kind of change the way you plan out your attacks. It's not a huge difference from SFII, but its enough.
While the gameplay is solid, the graphics and sound might be the strongest point. Simply put, Darkstalkers looks absolutely beautiful. The hand drawn, 2D graphics were some of the best of their time and the characters and backgrounds are incredibly detailed. Each fighter is very expressive and their animations are extremely fluid...and that's with frames removed as compared to the arcade version. The backgrounds are super detailed, they have tons of animation and there's always something to look at. It's kind of like TMNT: Tournament fighter, but on a much more powerful console. The colors are super vibrant and everything just pops off the screen. It really showed off what a huge jump the 5th generation consoles made from their fourth generation counterparts. It's funny, at the time the graphics were considered a bit of a disappointment. I dug up an old review that said something to the extent of "the graphics don't stand out like its contemporaries Tekken, Virtua Fighter or (Battle Arena) Toshinden." That same reviewer today would hammer all three of those games for being "dated" while heaping praise on Darkstalkers' look. The sound is awesome too, all of the tracks really fit the levels and work perfectly with the game's motif. I find Capcom games always have great sound. I don't know if this was the case, but it almost sounds like this was handed to the Mega Man's sound team rather than Street Fighter's. You'll get no complaints from me about a game that plays like Street Fighter and sounds like Mega Man.
Gameplay is solid, though it isn't as deep as some of the fighting games we have discussed in the past. As I mentioned before, Darkstalkers is more predicated on dashing and applying pressure than turtling up and lobbing fireballs. They really wanted you to use that dash, it seems to have a few frames of invincibility and all of the characters have a few effective anti-airs. Low pokes seem to be really important and it's really difficult to block low attacks in general. I found them to be the best way of starting combos, which is critically important. I'm not entirely sure, but I think the combo system focuses on "moving up the chain" of strikes, for lack of a better term. Basically, you land a weak strike and from there, you're supposed to go weak again into medium into heavy into a special for a combo. That may not be exactly how it works, but its close and I found that was effective for me. Overall, I found the hit detection to be fair and the priority makes sense. I do think cross-ups felt different, but other than that it still felt a lot like a more aggressive version of Street Fighter.
The biggest issue here is that there just isn't that much to do. As was common at the time, this is a straight up arcade port. There are no unlockables, no story mode, not even a tag team battle. You have tournament and versus, that's it. Again, that was pretty common at the time. But the fighting engine here isn't quite deep enough to support itself on its own. Street Fighter only had arcade and versus, but each round feels so different it doesn't matter. Fights in Darkstalkers started to feel the same after a while, you wait for your opponent to whiff on an attack, you rush them down, hit a combo, rinse and repeat. I also found that all the attacks took huge chunks of life off, making some rounds feel incredibly short. That was one of the mixed bag kind of thing bout the game, I lost a lot of rounds where the computer just melted my life bar in seconds, but I also had some exhilarating comeback wins like that as well. My last issue comes from the insane difficulty spike about half way through the arcade mode. It happens in a lot of fighting games but it was very, very noticeable here. None of it was game breaking, but it was definitely noticeable.
I did like the cast of characters, they were all well designed and had distinctive playstyles. As I alluded to before, MVC players will likely recognize Ankaris (the mummy), Morrigan (the Succubus) and Felicia (the Cat woman). I think Dimitri (the Vampire) has appeared in some version of MVC or another. Victor (the Frankenstein monster), John Talbain (the Werewolf), Bishamon (the samurai), Rikoku (the merman) Lord Raptor (the zombie) and Sasquatch (the uh, Sasquatch?) round out the roster. Talbain was probably my favorite to play as, while I think Lord Raptor was my favorite design. A heavy metal zombie with an electric guitar? That's awesome. They are all balanced for the most part, though the game seems to favor the quicker characters. Victor was the only one that felt both bad to play as and easy to play against, mostly because he was just so damn slow. The two boss characters, Huitzil and Pyron are unplayable in any form. That's a shame, they didn't seem that much stronger than the normal characters, so it would have been nice to at least have a code.
At the end of the day, Darkstalkers was just a really solid fighting game. So why didn't the series get bigger? Like Grandia II, I feel like the reason why falls squarely on the shoulders of one game: Street Fighter Alpha. The then-new take on Street Fighter was an instant sensation for the 5th gen consoles and was far more familiar to everyday gamers than Darkstalkers. At the same time, it also had a deeper fighting system and more consistent gameplay than Darkstalkers, making it more attractive for hardcore fighting game fans. I'm not going to sugar coat it, SFA is definitely the better game and I understand why that happened. But Darkstalkers was fun in its own right and I feel like it was aesthetically different enough that it should have been given a bigger chance. I have heard that the later titles in the series are also better (there are two more, at least in the US) so maybe I will track those down, but even still it just didn't have the accessibility and name recognition of its bigger, more human-centric brother.
Still, I think Darkstalkers is worth playing today. It's a good, fun fighting game that's far better than a lot of the junk that was out there at the time. It's a great looking, great sounding game that is relatively easy to pick up and play. The cool characters and dark aesthetic make it stand out at least a little bit from its contemporaries. Still, the gameplay has its flaws and it isn't as deep as some fighting game fans would like. Fighting game fans who don't like titles where rushdown is the name of the game are going to have a bad time, I can tell you that much. Looking at some of my past fighting game reviews, I feel like Darkstalkers' closest analog would be Guilty Gear. Both are really good games, but GG has a lot more to do and a much deeper fighting engine, so I can't give Darkstalkers a higher score. I originally gave GG an 8.25, but after closer consideration I'm going to give it another quarter point, bumping it to an 8.5. For Darkstalkers...
Comments
Post a Comment