Collection essentials #337: Vampire Savior (Saturn)

This game is also known as Darkstalkers 3 outside Japan. Darkstalkers is a really cool series of 2D fighting games from Capcom, the same company that brought us the incredibly famous Street Fighter, and this series unfortunately isn’t anywhere near as popular. Darkstalkers is very similar to Street Fighter in a lot of ways, but immediately stands out very much due to a very different setting with very different characters. You could kinda say it’s like “Halloween Street Fighter”, with much of its cast being inspired by mythological creatures such as werewolves or Bigfoot in a sort of horror-esque anime-style setting.

There are gameplay differences between Darkstalkers and Street Fighter. And, well, we are talking about the third Darkstalkers game here in particular, and I actually haven’t played much of the first two games at all so I don’t know all the little differences between them. Darkstalkers actually wound up introducing gameplay elements that went on to be adopted in Street Fighter such as blocking in the air. 

Health in Vampire Savior is handled a little differently than the norm. When you take damage, you’ll be able to recover some of it automatically if you can avoid getting hit again for a time. Also, when a round is won, instead of resetting health bars back to full, whoever won the round will keep their life bar where it currently is; a fighter’s life bar has to be fully depleted twice to win the match. 

This is one of those fighting games that has a meter you can build up and spend for super attacks, something that was quickly becoming a common sight in fighting games. One thing Darkstalkers did differently was remove the cap on how much you can build up your meter. You can store basically as many full gauges of meter as you want, more than you’d ever realistically use in a match, so if you want you can save all your strongest attacks for a big onslaught near the end of the match. Also, in addition to specific attacks that require depleting the meter to use, any of a character's “special moves” has a “super” variant that’s stronger and uses up a gauge as well, adding more gameplay variety.

The cast of characters and their moves is just so darn creative and well thought-out that it makes this game really stand out. I think my favorite character is B.B. Hood, who is basically Little Red Riding Hood with weapons. Even though the bones of this game are very much like Street Fighter and many other 2D fighters, it feels like a totally unique experience.

Vampire Savior was one of the games I imported early on in my days of owning the Saturn, and I enjoyed it a lot. Although the Saturn port only came out in Japan, there’s a way to turn literally all the game’s text into English, so character quotes after battles are actually readable as well as the text for the characters’ endings. It’s an easy choice to play casually with friends due to the amusing characters and gameplay that’s easy to grasp for anyone who’s played a 2D fighter before. In modern times, you can get this game on modern platforms as it’s included in the “Capcom Fighting Collection”, and I wholeheartedly recommend it.