Beaten: Darkstalkers Resurrection (on 3/20/13)

System: PS3
Status: Beaten (on 3/20/13)

Darkstalkers is a series I've always liked in concept and art style, but never had the chance to actually...you know...play it. The concept of various movie-monster beings fighting it out was interesting to a much younger me, and I still find the concept cool in a fighting game. The problem being, the series is basically unknown in the states, since we only got a few of the games, and really hasn't existed at all since the PS1 era.

Darkstalkers Resurrection really doesn't fix that. This is basically a port of the two arcade games, with a bit of window dressing on the outside. You can pick which arcade game to play, and there's some art and achievements attached, but otherwise the games are left entirely untouched and original. This is likely great for those who want to play the original versions, but naturally, this leaves the fighting games themselves feeling like...well, a PS1 era fighting game. You get an arcade mode, and a 'challenge' mode where you have to do specific combos for each character (a huge pet peeve of mine, its not actually a challenge mode).

I went through the game and beat each one on arcade mode, and really don't have any incentive to play it any further. Completion is out of the question for all the achievements, since the challenge mode is a rude joke. The sad thing is, I keep a large fighting game library to have plenty of options when I have friends over...this likely won't even register in my mind as an option when that happens.

Beaten: Persona 4: Arena

System:  PS3
Status: Beaten (on 1/7/13)

Fighting games tend to be quick turn-arounds for my list. Its really easy to get the credits screen since it only takes beating one character for that, and for my criteria that counts. For this one, I at least went the extra mile and actually finished every character's story mode when I was playing it. Unfortunately, I haven't touched it since, and my PS3 being replaced cost me all the saves I had on the old one, so that means doing the story again. At least I actually have a TV big enough to see the whole screen now...

As a review, the fighting game aspect is alright. It reminds me a lot of the Jojo's fighting game on the Dreamcast, where you have your main character and then a summon that you can call in to do extra attacks. The summon can be broken by others attacking it, and the game has RPG-like status effects that can be applied. I didn't spend enough time to really learn the system innately, it was a little slow for my taste and the character sprites take up a huge section of the screen. I tend to prefer my fighting games small and quick.

Story wise, it is interesting to see characters from the two recent persona games interacting and seeing how the story works out between them and in addition to the original stories, but it gets forgettable fast. It doesn't help that in order to see the true ending, you have to see the same scenes over and over from different characters. I ended up skipping over most of the dialogue because it was the same conversation from different angles over and over.

Fighting games are always hard to complete, especially when they include trophies for online play, which in all likelihood no one is doing anymore. This one also has the issue that 'challenge' mode is glorified 'learn this combo' for all the characters. What ever happened to challenge modes that were challenges? Guilty Gear did that rather well, each was a fight with special conditions and challenges, and I haven't played a fighting game that has done that well since. Rather sad.