It’s a no-brainer that the battle in the early 90s arcade fighting game scene was between Capcom’s Street Fighter II and Midway’s Mortal Kombat. Lost in the shuffle with the other fighting games vying for players’ attention was another Capcom fighter in Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors (or Vampire: The Night Warriors, for you Japanese players). The horror-centric fighter was able to ride the wave of Street Fighter II‘s popularity, but obviously never hit the same level of success as the two main heavyweights. Yet despite that, it’s still very much a beloved series for fans of Capcom’s fighters, and even influenced the Street Fighter series with some of its mechanics and art style.
Screenshots courtesy of Mobygames.
It’s a given that the majority of fighting games (especially those from the early 90s) aren’t really known for their deep stories, and Darkstalkers is no different. Earth is in the process of merging with the demon realm known as Makai. This resulting merger brings about the eponymous Darkstalkers—creatures of myth and legend. Ten supernatural beings have materialised to wage their eternal war for the domination of the night. It turns out later that the powerful alien Pyron has returned to Earth to devour it, leaving the Darkstalkers as the last line of defense.
Just how Capcom came about with the idea of Darkstalkers is a confusing one. According to Darkstalkers art director Akira Yasuda, the concept for a fighting game involving monsters came about from a colleague of his named Akitomo, which was then put into motion by designer Junichi Ohno. However, Ohno stated in an interview with Japanese gaming magazine Gamest that the idea came from a brainstorming session at Capcom, where Japanese yokai monsters would battle it out amongst themselves. Still another possible origin came from Capcom USA producer Alex Jimenez, who said the game started out as a Universal Monsters game, but Universal refused to license their characters out to Capcom. Jimenez decided to create his own characters for the game.
Regardless of the game’s origin, Capcom decided to make Darkstalkers showcase their new CPS-II board, which had previously been tested with Super Street Fighter II Turbo. The idea was to create a fighting game where the characters broke away visually from the norm of fighting games of the time. To that end, each character and its stage had its own designer The result was a set of characters whose looks and animations made the Darkstalkers roster not only visually distinct from the other fighting games at the time, but also conveyed a unique personality for each character. One could say that the more comic book stylings of Darkstalkers were a precursor to Capcom’s Street Fighter Alpha series, with the character of Rose being the most Darkstalkers-like in her design.
It’s still amazing today the amount of animation each character displayed, even in their basic attacks. That’s on top of the characters having their own unique animations for being cut in two, burned, frozen, cursed or poisoned. There’s a reason why Capcom kept reusing the sprites for its many crossover titles. Then again, it probably also helped that the animation team took cues from Hanna-Barbera cartoons (seriously) when it came to the look of the animation. Even the backgrounds sported more details than Street Fighter II. Things like the cats roaming around amidst the neon signs in Felicia’s stage, or the women fanning themselves in Dmitri’s stage.
Obviously, there’s a bit more violence and blood in the attacks with Darkstalkers, given its horror leanings. However, the development team did include some more goofier fare in the animations. Again, this contrast only served to help separate Darkstalkers from the rest of the fighting games at the time, which in turn gave the game more “freedom” to apply more of a comic book feel as opposed to the “grounded” look/feel of Street fighter.
But we’re dancing around the obvious fact that a big part of the appeal of Darkstalkers is its characters. The vampire lord Demitri Maximoff, succubus Morrigan Aensland and catwoman Felicia are probably the most popular of the fighters, having been in several crossover games. But really, the entire cast is noteworthy, each with their unique backstories and motivations. That was due in part to Jimenez and his team, who developed the stories for each character:
Jon Talbain is an Englishman who is cursed with hereditary lycanthropy, who fights to regain his humanity. Bishamon is a ghostly samurai inhabiting a suit of cursed armour, who also fights to break his curse and rid the armour from his body. Lord Raptor is a zombified Austrailian rockstar who seeks power. Victor von Gerdenheim is the obvious nod to Frankenstein’s Creature, who seeks impress his father/creator who died shortly after Victor’s birth. Anakaris is a 5,000-year-old Egyptian pharaoh that fights to regain his authority and restore his empire. Rikuo is a merman seeking revenge for the fall of his race. Lastly, Sasquatch is a member of a tribe of Bigfoot living in the Rocky Mountains, seeking to prevent the other Darkstalkers from invading his land.
Rounding out the cast are the aforementioned Pyron as the game’s final boss, and a sub boss in Huitzil, a member of an army of ancient robots constructed by Pyron 65 million years in the past, who were tasked with destroying all organic life on Earth.
Using the same six-button system as Street Fighter II, Darkstalkers brought with it unique gameplay and new mechanics that set it apart from its forbearer. Like SSF2T, Darkstalkers has a Super Combo gauge called a Special meter, where as the player attacked their opponent, the meter would fill up. Once filled, the player could unleash a unique ES attack that would cause significant damage to their opponent. Or, if the player chose to do so, they could use the Special meter and unleash a more powerful variant of one of their special moves, referred to as an EX attack. A precursor to the latter mechanic was first used in the PlayStation and Sega Saturn versions of Street Fighter: The Movie, but would later be wholly adopted for Street Fighter III.
Darkstalkers furthered its unique fighting experience with crouch walking and air hovering for some characters, air blocking, and chain combos. The latter two mechanics would be incorporated into the Street Fighter Alpha series. And like SSF2T, Darkstalkers also could have its speed adjusted when selecting your character, increasing the franticness of the gameplay. While at first glance it was relatively straightforward to pick up and play, once you drilled down and saw the way the characters played, Darkstalkers brought with it a learning curve that made mastering it more difficult than other fighting games at the time.
That lack of accessibility didn’t stop Capcom from pushing Darkstalkers to try and match the success of Street Fighter II in the merchandising department. Seeing as the series’ art style more closely resembled a comic book, it was a no-brainer that we ended up with plenty of manga and comics released over the years. And since it was the 90s, North American fans also got a 13-episode cartoon that, much like its Street Fighter II counterpart, was of questionable quality. Best to stick with the OVA, in that regard. And yes, we did get action figures (courtesy of ToyBiz), though they didn’t appear until 1999.
Ultimately, Darkstalkers never did reach the popularity of Street Fighter. As for the reason why, that’s a good question. One could simply chalk it up to Street Fighter II being the focus for Capcom because it was already popular, and they simply didn’t want to split resources between the two. It might have been the fact that Capcom in Japan had been engaged in the “upgrade syndrome” with Darkstalkers as they had been with Street Fighter II, with certain upgrades getting a worse reception from arcade fans than previous releases. None of these upgrades were officially released outside of Japan until 2022’s Capcom Fighting Collection.
Regardless of the reason, it’s a crying shame that Capcom haven’t really revisited the series in earnest since the 2005 PSP release of Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower. And even that game wasn’t really “new”, since it was a port of the 2000 Japan-only Dreamcast game Vampire Chronicle for Matching Service, which was the equivalent of Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition. In reality, we haven’t received an original Darkstalkers game since Darkstalkers 3 back in 1999. Yet Capcom has seen content to just release collections of the original games (and their upgrades), and call it a day, or resort to using characters from the series as cameos in other games.
In spite of all of this, is Darkstalkers still worth it? Absolutely! If you’ve never experienced playing Darkstalkers, you’re missing out on a game that was wholly unique from Street Fighter II in terms of its presentation and fighting system, aspects of which were later adopted by the former. While the series has obviously been surpassed by other fighting games (including Street Fighter), how many games can you name that had you pitting a zombified rock musician against a nunchuku-wielding werewolf?