PSP Recommendations: Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower

My, what a fitting time for a Darkstalkers post!

But actually, this entry mainly exists because Darkstalkers Chronicle: The Chaos Tower was just released on Playstation Network for PSP in America this past week, and since a new audience, however minimal, are going to be playing this game for the first time, they'd probably want to know how good it is. It's very good, actually, and one of the best 2D fighting games on the system. It's also an excellent port of a game that ties with Last Blade, in that it's one of the most horribly underrated fighting game franchises in existence.

Actually, The Chaos Tower is a bit more than a port of any of the older games - though it is a port of the Japan-only Dreamcast title Darkstalkers Chronicle: For Matching Service. It includes most of the elements from all of the previous games, similar to what Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition did for the Street Fighter II series. There weren't too many significant differences between each installment of the franchise, and not all of them were given home console releases either, especially outside of Japan.

For anyone who's never heard of the franchise and likes fighting games, this is now the time to give it a try. It actually inspired the gameplay systems of quite a few games in the genre, and most people probably don't even know it. The gameplay you see in the Capcom-developed Marvel games and Arc System Works' most venerable fighting franchises (Guilty Gear, Blazblue) takes cues from this game. The latter titles also take another cue from this game, as its characters and setting are incredibly bizarre.

Indeed, Darkstalkers has an incredibly colorful cast of characters, and they're all unique in their peculiarity. Your usual fighting game will only have a few off-hand characters for the sake of balance, just to make sure that not all of its characters are "normal." That actually describes Darkstalkers entire cast, as not even its normal-looking characters are exempt of craziness.

Someone like Donovan, for instance, looks like your average guy at first glance, until your realize that (a) he's half-vampire, (b) his sword is actually a living being, and (c) he travels around with a strange-though-intriguing young, emotionless female companion (Anita). And Baby Bonnie (B.B.) Hood is even worse! A young girl who resembles Little Red Riding Hood to a tee; well until she whips out her Uzi. They're all weird, sure, but that's part of what makes them appealing. Capcom designed them to be bizarre but not repugnant, and you'll definitely find one character that you'll want to stick with.

( Oh, and B.B. Hood the best character in the history of the genre. Fact.)

The good thing about a 2D game is that most of them will always look great in the future, especially if they're preserved well. Darkstalkers is no exception to that, as each character is given various animations to make them look as exaggerated as possible. It was a game that, at the time of its original release (way back in 1994), used the anime-style fighting game graphic design in the best way. Yet another way in which it inspired Guilty Gear, whose unique style relies on the same technique.

Darkstalkers is also the game that made chain-combos popular. Chain combos are executed by pressing one button after the other in order to string together a quick-though-easy combo. A beginner's example would be light punch, medium punch, and then hard punch, with minimal timing required. The characters whose learning curves are low will all be able to perform that combo, but anyone who requires some practice may have other bread-and-butter combos. As you practice and get creative, you'll be able to perform larger and more complicated chains. Overall, they're much easier to deal with than Street Fighter II and IV's link combos, which themselves require incredibly strict timing and rhythm to perform. Street Fighter Alpha would later incorporate the chain combo system found here.

Darkstalkers characters also have movesets similar to what you'd find in the average 2D fighter, with some characters requiring either circular motions to perform special techiniques, while others require charging. That's perfectly OK, unless you're using a PSP-1000, whose directional pad and wonky square button couldn't be more unfriendly for this game. You'll want to use these techniques to finish off chain combos to maximize damage.

This game, The Chaos Tower, also sports a new mode called...uh, The Chaos Tower. It's similar to the World Tour mode in Street Fighter Alpha 3, where you'll have to fight various opponents while surviving with three chosen characters. It's not as tough as surviving the mission mode of a Guilty Gear game, but things will naturally become more difficult the higher you go up. It's nothing that will replace the main experience, but it's a fun diversion.

Unfortunately, there are a few problems with the port. Anyone who likes to preserve the original aspect ratio of their games may find a problem here initially, as the widescreen view is achieved by stretching the game's previous 4:3 ratio to fill the screen. Fortunately, you can turn this off, but it's a shame that Capcom didn't put enough care into the game to make a true widescreen image. Perhaps too much effort for what was essentially a low-cost port job.

If you've ever wanted to play a Darkstalkers game, this is definitely your best option. It's a shame we couldn't have had all of the games individually like the Darkstalkers Collection that was released for PS2 in Japan back in 2005. Unfortunately, these days Capcom doesn't see the franchise as a profitable venture, so it's unlikely that we'll ever see another game in the series ever again. Though given how Arc System Works still makes games similar to this one very well, maybe they could have them develop a new one. A game with Street Fighter IV's graphical style wouldn't be so bad either.