(reader SAL munches a virgin or two while talking all about Capcom’s original monster fighter…)

There are two main reasons why I chose to review Darkstalkers. One is because it’s one of my favorite fighting games of all time. The other it that it’s also a game that has been severely underappreciated. The only reason for this that I can come up with is that it was simply too advanced and complex for it’s time. That’s because from every other standpoint I can think of, this game simply had everything going for it.

First, a brief history lesson. This game was Capcom’s first fighting game produced after the Street Fighter II series had finally wrapped up. It came out in 1994, less than a year after Super Street Fighter II Turbo, and almost a year before their next fighting game, X-Men: Children of the Atom, would be released after it. It was also the first non-Street Fighter game to use their CPS-2 engine, which it obviously took full advantage of. Darkstalkers was quite widely available in arcades, at least where I’m from it was, and it’s revolutionary gameplay and amazing graphics used to draw crowds of onlookers. If there’s one word that instantly comes to mind to describe the game, it’s “cool”. This is by far the best depiction of classic monsters I’ve ever seen, from any type of media. I actually find myself even today comparing other Vampires in fictional media to Demitri, often dismissing them as not standing a chance compared to him in power OR coolness. But as cool as a game this was, it was also quite a difficult game to play. It was obviously intended for the Street Fighter hardened audiences that could handle themselves in SSF2T, and were now looking for a new challenge to put their skills into. This described me to a tee, but there were still a lot of players who weren’t up to that level yet, and found Darkstalkers a bit too demanding, ending up watching it more than playing it as a result.

Even just watching this game was a treat though. The graphics were simply beautiful. The characters are large and well animated, and constantly in motion. From Demitri’s glowing vampiric aura to Lord Raptor’s constant fidgeting, these guys were a sight to behold even when they weren’t performing their amazing looking (and often shape-changing) supernatural attacks. The backgrounds were equally full of detail and extensive animation too. And the animation wasn’t just Street Fighter’s repeated hand waves from the audience either. There were some complex background animations going on here, with plenty of patterns of things moving around seemingly almost randomly at times. The sound and music was equally impressive. The musical scores were all appropriately atmospheric and impressively well orchestrated, and the great variety of the songs made each tune easily recognizable as a character’s theme song after hearing it only a few times. There was also plenty of voice samples to go along with attacks, with characters shouting out move names in perfectly appropriate voice-overs. And not even just specials, but even normal attacks would have some characters yelling or grunting occasionally.

The game’s impressive visual and audio achievement was still outshined by it’s gameplay though. This game was simultaneously fun, intense, and strategically challenging to a point that’s rarely been seen in the fighting game world. Following the original Street Fighter II, the game consisted of 12 characters altogether. Eight of these were randomly chosen to play through against in the one-player game, which I guess you could call the challengers. Four bosses were also present, which again like in SF2 were fought in a set order after you fought through the other seven (you don’t fight against your own character in the one-player game, which I think is good). The first two of these bosses were playable though (Rikou and Sasquach), bringing the total up to ten playable characters altogether. This may seem a little low, but for Darkstalkers I think it worked well and wasn’t a problem. One reason for this was that the characters were so diverse from one another. Ten totally unique Darkstalkers actually felt like having more to play than some other games that featured more characters but who were more similar. Also, having less characters can often lead to more game balance, which was certainly done well in Darkstalkers. Although I’m not saying there weren’t some more or less powerful characters in the mix overall, every character had their strengths and weaknesses, and they were all substantially well balanced if used properly.

These characters were also incredibly cool. Not only in characterization and appearance, but another reason I think came from them all being immensely powerful. Some of these guys had normal moves that rivaled some special moves we’d seen in the previous Street Fighter games. Add in their amazing physics-bending special moves and abilities, and it quickly became clear that the Street Fighter gang wasn’t even close to being in the same league as these guys. And with that increased standard level of fighting ability, the boundaries of gameplay that people were used to in SF2 came crashing down. Dashing now made it easy to cover distance, for example, and each character had completely different dashing abilities to add even more complexity to that aspect. Limited air blocking actually served it’s purpose of eliminating cheap air traps without making jumpers too invulnerable, like it had the unfortunate side effect of doing in some of Capcom’s later games. The game managed to strike a good balance of focus on offense and defensive play by two things. First, there were very few unpunishable moves when blocked, so players were often forced to take risks with their attacks. And secondly, specials and supers took off a LOT of block damage, usually up to half of what they would take off if they’d hit, so a turtler could quickly find themselves losing large amounts of life despite not letting any attacks actually connect. The result of combining these two contrasting aspects together made for an exciting game that wasn’t unbalanced in favor of either offensive or defensive play, and left the issue of specific strategy much more open to the preference of the players to decide.

Moving away from Street Fighter’s limiting special move motions by splitting characters into the charging or circular motion variety, the special moves in Darkstalkers were welcomingly unique and diverse, in both their effect and the motions used to perform them. In fact, every character in the game had at least one move that was done with a unique command that wasn’t used by anyone else in the game. This game also saw the introduction of the now relatively well-recognized Jab, Jab, towards, Short, Fierce motion, which Akuma in fact stole from Morrigan’s Doppleganger for use of his Shun-Goku-Satsu (Street Fighter Alpha was the first game in which Akuma had this move available to him, which came out over a year after Darkstalkers did). Having such a diversity of moves was a delight for players like me who had now gotten used to the familiar Street Fighter II special motions, and effectively added a lot of long lasting play value as a result. I’m pretty sure my mastering every character in Darkstalkers was probably largely influenced by the fact that each new character I played presented a brand new challenge, with new moves to learn to perform and a new play style to learn to adapt myself to. Additionally, I think my experience with Darkstalkers actually had more of an effect in the level of my playing skill being what it currently is today than any other single game I’ve ever played.

The super move system was another great feature of this game. The super bar gained energy VERY quickly, but when it was full it started to decrease quite fast as well. If you let it run out you had to build it up again, so there was an incentive to use it on something pretty quick. You could either use it on a super move, which was only available to you when the bar was active, or use a special move that would use this power to enhance it’s effects, often times almost becoming like a super in itself. This meant you had access to all kinds of options when your super bar was full, rather than just one or two super moves. Some people may disagree, but I thought the pressure to use the bar quickly before it depleated added a lot of intensity and excitement to the game. I might have found it annoying if the bar didn’t build back up again so fast, but I loved this system because it resulted in the use of supers much more often than your typical fighter, where you usually end up storing those valubale supers up for the right moment because they take so long to get. Of course, in some games having this many supers flying around would mean a very quick game, but in Darkstalkers the supers actually weren’t the round-enders you normally see supers as being. Don’t get me wrong, they were still powerful enough to be worth trying to land, but usually not to the point of being able to take off half your life with one move. Most of the time you’re usually looking at taking about 20-25% maximum damage for eating a super. As a result though, this system also didn’t encourage people to hide out whenever their opponents’ super bar was maxed out all that much. You’d still probably want to watch out for their enhanced specials or super moves, but at least you know that even if you do take one it’s not the end of the round.

Priority was well done in this game too. Most moves actually didn’t have priority over others, especially normal moves conflicting with other normal moves. Instead, what would often happen is both characters getting hit and taking damage. This was good though, because it encouraged players to be a bit riskier. Using a hard attack may be slower and leave you more open, but if the other guy tried something like a light Jab, you’d trade hits and come out on the better side of the damage tradeoff. The only thing that would often out-prioritize normal moves outright was special attacks, but like I mentioned before they often left you noticably vulnerable when blocked. Even throws weren’t risk-free here, since it was relatively easy to escape from a throw, and the long missed-throw animation left you wide open for counter attacks if they happened to jump or walk out of range when you were trying to grab them. Add in the fact that the characters had such crazy moves that there often wasn’t anywhere on the screen you were truly “safe”, and you often couldn’t predict what would be coming next until it happened anyway, and it made for a very active and risk-encouraging gameplay style that’s very rare these days, and I personally miss.

Another unique thing worth mentioning is the game’s projectile system. There’s almost nothing more boring in a fighting game than a long and eventless projectile battle, and Darkstalkers made sure this rarely happened. First of all, there were hardly any characters who had traditional projectiles. And most of the projectiles that were there didn’t even travel full screen before dissipating. The other characters also typically had various long ranged attacks and numerous ways of avoid projectiles quite effectively to make up for it. And even when you had two projectile throwing characters going head to head things were still made rather interesting. Rather than following SF2 where projectiles simply collide and nullify each other on the spot (which is boring), or taking the Mortal Kombat route of having them pass right through each other (which is stupid), Darkstalkers introduced what I think of as the “momentum system” of projectile collision. Using this, projectiles have a status of momentum, which is strong when first created and grows gradually weaker as they travel across the screen. When two projectiles collide, their momentums are reduced by each other until one or both of them run out of momentum completely and disappear. If one projectile is able to nullify the momentum of the other one with some of it’s own leftover to spare, it can continue moving afterwards, though it will dissipate earlier than if it never encountered the rival projectile in it’s path. It sounds confusing, but in practice it was a brilliant idea that worked incredibly well. I sometimes wonder why they didn’t continue to use it in other games, though my guess is that it’s too complicated to code into games with more projectiles, since each projectile would have to have their own individual momentum ratings and stuff.

On top of the challenge of fighting other people in this wonderful fighting game madness, the computer even provided an impressive challenge. The bosses were all quite challenging to beat, and about the only game that comes to mind with a more genuinely challenging end boss than Darkstalkers’ Pyron is Gill from Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike. The endings were generally all worth playing through to see though, and effectively wrapped up the Darkstalkers’ individual adventures well. They obviously weren’t sure there was going to necessarily be a sequel at this point, but that turned out to be a good thing for the endings. Almost nothing irritates me more than cliff-hanger endings in fighting games. Except of course, NO ENDINGS AT ALL. But now I’m starting to rant about Capcom’s slacking off on their latest games, so let me get back to the good old days.

So, was there anything wrong with the game? Well no, nothing significant at least. One small point that comes to mind is that the dashing motion of double tapping was slightly unresponsive at times. It wasn’t a serious problem, but stood out mainly just because the control response for everything else was so perfect by comparison. Although it was pretty easy to get used to the picky dashing response with a little practice, it was a small but noticeable issue. The only other possible criticism I could see someone giving this game was that combo system was a little erratic in some ways. Moves could easily be chained together, but most attcks would often push opponents back a lot when they hit, making for many broken chains if the positioning and other factors weren’t just right. The game wasn’t really about large chaining combos though. Moves did enough damage on their own that even simple two or three hit combos could do significant damage. Personally I have never seen this as being a problem at all, but I suspect some players used to the chain-combo prevalent fighting games of today might consider it a fault that they can’t string six different attacks together while the opponent sits there helplessly.

Overall, there wasn’t just one clearly noticable aspect of Darkstalkers that stood out as single-handedly making it great. Rather, it was the combination of so many things done well. You could just see the attention and commitment that was put into the quality of this game, which became more apparent the more it was played. It’s one of those games that somehow just happened to turn out perfectly in almost every possible way. A game that drew me in right from the start, and then I found to be even deeper and more engrossing as I played it more and more. A game that challenged not only your reflexes but your strategic thinking, and remained challenging and fun for months and even years after its original release. It’s too bad the continuation of this series took such a downhill turn, especially with the mind-bogglingly worse third installment of Vampire Savior. But that still hasn’t interfered with the original Darkstalkers taking its place as a truly classic fighting game masterpiece. Well, to me it always will be at least. :)

- SAL

• Publisher/Developer: Capcom
• Score: 92%
• Reader Review by: Bitoku