Vampire Chronicle

"Awful Vampire port...steer clear."

Wow was I dissapointed by this one. Being a huge capcom fan and a huge Darkstalkers fan as well I was really looking forward to this. Where to begin...

Packaging:2.0

Well, I know packaging really shouldn't matter, but to Capcom fans it does. The cover art should have tipped me off as to how bad this was going to be: its a really crappy Logo. Thats it. "Vampire Chronicle". Thats all it says. The Saturn cover has a cool as hell collage of the fighters, extremely well drawn and colorful. Even the american Darkstalkers 3 PS1 logo is prettier (and thats sayin alot.) If you pay 60-100 dollars for a game you want the cover art to be second to none. What were they thinking here?

Port: 2.5

My god, what have they done to this game? For some reason or another, every 2d outing by capcom on the DC has been flawed in the port department (excluding SF3: Doublt Impact, the only Capcom 2d fighter ever perfectly ported to DC). Marvel Vs. Capcom and Alpha 3 had this weird shimmer effect and grainy colors. SF3:3rd Strike has blotchy colors. Mars Matrix...Dont know what the hells going on there. Gunbird 2 has this weird texture...basically somehow or another, every one has been screwed up in some way. Imagine all of these problems + more, combined into one game, and thats Vampire Chronicle. The game looks AWFUL. I had to put it on 3 different tvs and a PC moniter before I could belive it. Its THAT bad. The characters look compressed (and are noticibley smaller, more on that later), the colors are blotchy and washed out. The "shimmer" effect is in full force...Blah. Its just plain bad. From what I can tell though all the animation frames are there, but the overall look, I would have to say the hacked up-load time-slowdown ridden PS1 version is better. Much better in fact. And thats saying alot.

My friend and I decided to put the DC version side by side with the saturn one. Not only was the saturn version cleaner, more vivid, had zero grainy-ness, was beatiful...The characters were WAY bigger. It really is shocking to see them both side by side.

Sound 3.0:

I kid you not. They screwed up the sound. Sound effects are completely washed out by the music. Everything sounds muffled. How on earth did they manage to mess this up as well?? The saturn one sounds better. You heard me correctly.

Gameplay:5.0

Well, your probably saying to yourself at least it plays good, right? Wrong. The speed is completely off. The speed is way too fast. In fact, I could not get the game to run at a comfortable speed no matter how I set it in the options. Even on normal its too fast.
The only addition this game has that the other versions don't is a version select ala SF2 aniversary edition. You can select 5 different versions of a single character, based on the 5 different versions of that character from the 5 different Vampire games. But you thought there were only 3 vampire games, right? Well, in japan, theres 5. Vampire, Vampire Hunter, Vampire Hunter 2, Vampire Savior, and Vampire Savior 2. Basically, Hunter 2 and Savior 2 were small variations of said games, with different characters/ move variations. Confusing I know. So basically, I can play my Vampire Hunter Lei-Lei vs. your Vampire Savior Phobos! Whopti-do!! Wow this was really worth 70 dollars!

Source Material: 10

The sad thing is, the game this port is based on is so wonderful. If you don't already have it, go on ebay and get the Saturn version. Its leaps and bounds better than this version, and its like 10 bucks on ebay. It even has nicer cover art. The playstation version is missing alot of frames, but I'd still even reccomend that version over this one. Vampire Savior is one of my favorite games ever. But like I say stay FAR FAR away from this version. It will ruin the experience for you.

This game was originally only available on Capcom of Japan's website, and was never released to the japanese mass market (or american mass market for that matter). Trust me, there was a reason.

Reviewer's Score: 5/10, Originally Posted: 10/14/04