Vampire / Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors - Arcade / Playstation / Playstation 2 (1994)
But aesthetics and presentation aren't nearly as important as gameplay. Capcom tried their damndest to make Vampire more than just "Street Fighter with monsters," and implemented a slew of new gameplay features. For one, it's the first fighting game that allows for air-blocking -- and additionally, Morrigan and Demitri were tossing fireballs in midair a whole year before Akuma hit the scene. Speaking of fireballs: instead of simply canceling each other out, projectiles in the Vampire series push against each other until the one with greater momentum overpowers the other and continues across the screen. Block canceling and reversals also make their first appearances in Vampire, and it's also the first Capcom fighting game to include a "dash" maneuver and a Super gauge (a pair of concepts borrowed from SNK's own Street Fighter clones). The way Vampire's "Special" gauge works, however, is somewhat unorthodox. When it fills it up, it begins flashing and slowly decreases over the course of several seconds. While it is flashing, executing a special move will result in an enhanced version of that move, and will empty the gauge completely. Each character also has a unique EX attack that can only be used while the Special gauge is flashing. This "use it or lose it" approach to Super Moves is unique, but can be rather restrictive. Vampire is also the beginning of the series' tradition of completely over-the-top super moves. Before Vampire, a Hadoken with a shadow-trail was considered an impressive super. Sasquatch's tremendous ice beams and Victor's screen-filling lighting attacks definitely upped the ante.
In terms of story, Vampire is about as deep as the first couple of Street Fighter titles. In short: bunch of monsters decide to fight each other for some reason. All of them have their own backgrounds and goals, but they're usually about as simple as "vampire wants to rule the world" and "horrible sea mutant searches for love." But Vampire is no poorer for this, and in the days before King of Fighters, nobody really expected a story from a fighting game anyway.
Vampire eventually saw a fairly decent Playstation port. Load times, missing animation frames, and flattened sounds make it far from being arcade perfect, but it's still Vampire on a console. However, given that it came out in 1996 - two years after the original arcade game and a month after the Saturn port of Vampire Hunter - the PSX port feels a bit unnecessary. Too little too late. It was actually ported by European developer Psygnosis rather than Capcom themselves. The Japanese version also has a video intro featuring various gameplay footage and a vocal rock song called "Trouble Man", which was used later on in both the anime and American cartoon. The staff roll also has a song called "The Rain". Both of these were excised from the overseas releases, but remnants can be found on the CD.
Vampire was pretty cool for its time, but is relatively unpolished and clunky compared to its sequels and more recent 2-D fighters. Still, every series has to start somewhere, and if there's one thing Capcom excels at, it's tweaking.
MP3s
Phobos Stage
Darkstalkers
Darkstalkers
Darkstalkers
Darkstalkers
Vampire Hunter / Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge - Arcade / Saturn / Playstation 2 (1995)
Otherwise, Vampire Hunter is great. Newcomers Lei-Lei and Donovan take center stage and bosses Phobos and Pyron join the fray as playable characters, raising the number of heads on the character select screen to fourteen. The biggest change to gameplay is the addition of "Hunter Chains," which involve stringing together a series of weak-to-strong basic attacks. It's the basis for the combo system used in Capcom's beloved Marvel Vs. games, and makes Vampire Hunter a much more dynamic experience than its predecessor. Also new are recovery rolls, which allow you to slide forwards or backwards before getting back up after your character's been knocked over. This is important, since Vampire Hunter also introduces pursuit attacks which allow you to attack a downed opponent simply by tapping up and an attack button. The Super gauge now thankfully uses a stock system, making ES and EX attacks much less of a hassle than before. The soundtrack is also worth mentioning: it's mostly remixed tunes from the first game, but it too is an improvement. Zabel and Victor's stage themes stand out in particular.
There was a Saturn-exclusive port of the game, which did happen to make it to America, but it's hard for me to rate it without ever having played it. But given that the Saturn (and the Dreamcast after it) seemed like it was built to play 2-D fighters, I'd imagine it was at the very least a better port than Vampire was on the Playstation.
As good as Vampire Hunter is, it's more of a transitional game than anything else. Capcom had just begun to tap into the series' true potential and would take full advantage of it in the next installment.
MP3s
Zabel Stage
Darkstalkers' Revenge
Darkstalkers' Revenge
Darkstalkers' Revenge
Vampire Savior / Darkstalkers 3: Jedah's Damnation - Arcade / Saturn / Playstation / Playstation 2 (1997)
Probably taking a cue from the recent popularity of SNK's plot-driven King of Fighters series, Capcom tried giving Vampire Savior a deeper backstory than previous installments. It's set a number of years after Vampire Hunter, during a time of upheaval and chaos in Makai. Belial Aensland has finally kicked the bucket and the resulting power vacuum is shaking the demon world to its core. If things weren't bad enough already bad enough, Jedah Doma has mysterious reappeared. Slain a century ago after the betrayal of his servant Ozomu, Jedah has somehow pieced his vaporized self back together and returned to Makai. Seeing the demon world in a state of stagnation and decay, Jedah decides what Makai needs is a fresh start. He creates Majigen: a separate world within Makai, and a womb for its new god. His plan is to draw all souls into Majigen, fuse them together into one being, and then reboot existence, recreating Makai in his own image. (And the human world will be next, naturally.)
Complicated, huh? All you really need to know is that Jedah has created a pocket dimension and sucked all the Darkstalkers into it, and now everybody has to beat the hell out of everybody else before Jedah succeeds in his plan. God do I love fighting game storylines.
Presentation-wise, Vampire Savior is top notch. The sprites haven't changed, but they still look just as good as they did three years ago, so no problem there. With one or two exceptions, all the stages have been overhauled, and they look amazing. Serious love and attention was put into designing the Majigen locales, especially Vanity Paradise, Tower of Arrogance, and Iron Horse, Iron Terror. Some of Vampire Savior's spooky/techno-pop tunes are the best the series has to offer, but a few less-inspired tracks keep the score from being as quite as solid as Vampire Hunter's. The only real problem with Vampire Savior's backdrops and BGM's is that there aren't enough of them, since they are no longer character-exclusive.
Vampire Savior boasts a roster of fifteen characters, one more than Vampire Hunter's. Four new characters join the cast, but Pyron, Phobos, and Donovan get the boot. Fortunately, the new guys are cool enough that the three exiles won't be terribly missed. Lilith, Q-Bee, Bulleta, and Jedah are possibly the best set of newcomers to grace a fighting game sequel, with the possible exceptions of Fab Three (plus Malin) from King of Fighters 2003.
Now: let's talk gameplay. Vampire Savior is the fastest-paced fighting game you will ever play in your life. Simple as that. Vampire Savior's blazing combos and rushdowns are akin to something out of a King of Fighters Halloween coke party. Vampire Savior even leaves Guilty Gear and the Marvel Vs. series in the dust. It's not at all uncommon for matches to be over within fifteen seconds. In addition to the sheer speed of the action, Vampire Savior takes a different approach to how matches are set up. Each player has two life bars. When a player loses a life bar, there is a one or two second pause before he gets back up and resumes fighting. It's a clever system, and the only other game that really uses it in Killer Instinct. Players' health isn't restored between rounds because there aren't any rounds. When a player takes damage, a portion of his depleted life bar flashes white, and slowly regenerates so long as he doesn't get hit again during the process.
In addition to ES and EX moves, Hunter Chains, pursuit attacks, and everything else introduced in Vampire Hunter, Vampire Savior also includes Dark Force attacks. Each character has one or two Dark Forces which are executed by tapping a pair of same-strength punch and kick buttons. For the cost of one stock, your character becomes powered up for a limited time. Bulleta's Dark Force allows her to fire missiles just by tapping punch buttons. Zabel's Dark Force has him swinging Le Malta around like a chainsaw. Lei-Lei gains super armor, meaning that getting hit won't interrupt her attacks. You get the idea. Dark Forces are accompanied by an ethereal background shift which doesn't have much of a bearing on gameplay, but sure looks cool.
Vampire Savior was supposedly quite popular in Japan, but it never really took off in the States. It appeared at my local arcade and replaced X-Men Vs. Street Fighter, and was then replaced by Marvel Super Heroes Vs. Street Fighter about a month later. Never saw it again after that. Apparently American players don't want to bother learning how to play a 2-D fighter that doesn't let them pick Ken or Wolverine.
Two ports of the game appeared on the Playstation and Saturn consoles. The Saturn version was virtually identical to its arcade counterpart, and uses the 4 MB RAM cart to completely eliminate load times. Unfortunately, since this was only released in Japan most of us probably had to settle for "Darkstalkers 3" on the Playstation. While inferior to the Saturn version, Darkstalkers 3 is surprisingly decent, especially after the abysmal Playstation port of X-Men Vs. Street Fighter. Though there are a ton of missing animations and load times, it's still a close approximation to the original and was much easier to find in New Jersey in 1998-9 than a Vampire Savior arcade cabinet. Both versions include the three characters cut from the arcade game (Donovan, Phobos and Pyron). The PSOne version also has a slew of extra options to make up for the lessed port quality, such as an art gallery, a character edit mode, the ability to turn on full "Savior 2" or "Hunter 2" modes, and options to change combo cancels and double jump options. Unfortunately the minor bits of blood have been completely removed from the American version.
MP3s
Opening
Darkstalkers 3
Darkstalkers 3p>
Darkstalkers 3
Darkstalkers 3
Darkstalkers 3
Darkstalkers 3
Darkstalkers 3
Arcade Flyer
Darkstalkers
Darkstalkers
Vampire was a labor of love on Capcom's part, and it shows. For one thing, the graphics are absolutely gorgeous for when it was released. Vampire's vibrant, anime-style graphics and animations make Street Fighter II and most of SNK's games at that time look rather shoddy by comparison, and became the norm for all future Capcom fighting releases. The soundtrack is great (as is expected from a Capcom arcade game), and boasts an almost surprising level of variety.
Morrigan Stage
Bishamon Stage
Japanese Cover Artwork
Darkstalkers' Revenge
Darkstalkers' Revenge
Now this is more like it. Vampire Hunter improves upon Vampire in virtually every possible way, and is a far smoother and more enjoyable title. To get the gripes out of the way first: the backgrounds and character endings are the same as they were in Vampire, and for some reason Capcom decided to recolor everything, and the character portrait artwork has been redone to make it look more anime style. Some characters look kind of silly because of this: it's hard to take Zabel seriously when he's bright pink. Sasquatch and Gallon's brown fur just makes them look dirty, and Felicia just looks unhealthy and pale. All the endings are exactly the same as Vampire's, which is also kind of a bummer.
Victor Stage
Morrigan Stage
Lei Lei Stage
Demitri Stage
American Cover
Japanese Cover
Darkstalkers 3
Here it is: the pinnacle of the Vampire series and one of the most overlooked masterpieces of electronic entertainment. Vampire Savior blows the previous two Darkstalkers games out of the water, and I'd argue that it's the second best 2-D fighter Capcom's ever made. (The first starts with a "th" and ends in "ird strike.") This is where Darkstalkers really enters its stride and proves that it is much, much more than just Street Fighter with monsters.
Deserted Chateau
Forever Torment
Tower of Arrogance
Lilith Winning
