Dark Rift

"Flupping fluppity flup!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

OPENING STATEMENT
For the loyal readers of my reviews, if there are any of you out there, you already know about my futile attempts to bring a bit of the reviewer’s culture to you in my opening statements. All of the bits about ‘Matt Chats,’ recommended games, and the like. Well, here you are going to get a very inside look, at the word ‘flup.’ Flup has no meaning. It is a word that can be used as filler for any other word. For example, my name would be ‘Flup 91486.’ RuninRuder would be ‘FluppingRuder.’ And, when we follow statements with many exclamations points, we call that ‘writing in the YSF style.’ (Do not worry, Yee Seng Fu. That is not meant in a bad way.) Why did you get random words for Dark Rift in the synopsis? Because the game is rather unoriginal, so I did not feel it deserved an original tagline, that is why.

GAMEPLAY--3
Take the most generic fighting game engine ever produced, which is the four-button system of Mortal Kombat. Put it in three dimensions, and take out the blood and gore. Voila! You have Dark Rift. Also, do not forget to slow down the characters exponentially, so moving across the board can take longer than the time limit imposed by the game. That is another vital part of this game. Stalling and making your foe walk towards you, and refusing to meet him or her halfway. Then, lunge forward and get a cheap strike on them. By then, time should be up, and you will have won! If you are groaning right now, you probably should be. A weapons-based three-dimensional fighting game in that day and age was a new concept, and it should have been done well. Can you believe that this awful experience was an ancestor of the immortal Soul Calibur?

GRAPHICS--8
Actually, Dark Rift is fairly impressive, graphically speaking. The visuals are the one place that this game excels. First, though, I had better get the negative points about the graphics out of the way. The backgrounds in all of the arenas are insanely simplistic, and they do nothing to add to the game. Also, the text is horrible, and it almost made my eyes bleed. It is that scary font, that attempts in vain to look Oriental, and instead only makes you look way too hard at the screen to try to determine what on earth it could possibly be saying.

All right, now to the good points. Despite the extremely low polygon counts of the characters, their designs are phenomenal. Vic Tokai can certainly create characters. Morphix is especially impressive, do to the special effects that come right along with him. His character is actually translucent, as he is intended to be. Also, there is no choppiness in the animation of the characters. This is probably the reason that they move so unbelievably slowly, but at least the animation is smooth. The frame rate is also consistent, so the characters will always move that slowly. But, the character designs are delightfully creepy, and the add to the atmosphere of the game when no other aspect of the game can.

MUSIC--4
SOUND--2
The music is completely generic in every aspect. Vic Tokai was clearly shooting for some creepy music, and he ended up with the same exact type of music that you have heard in every bad tournament fighting game since 1991. Effort would be nice, but rarely these days to companies put any effort into the audio capabilities of games, especially games that are not role-playing games. Creepy music would have gone nicely with the creepy character designs. This music that could have been extracted straight from a Tiny Toons episode, does not.

The sound effects are few and far between. And, the few that are featured are done poorly. There is a grunt here, a clash of weaponry there, and then nothing else at all for about thirty seconds. Then, maybe you will be lucky and get another grunt. Maybe, as I am not making any promises. There are not even consistent noises on the menus. Now that is just shoddy programming work. Vic Tokai pays his employees far too much.

CONTROL--1
I think negative ten would work nicely, but you all will have to settle for the lowest ranking possible. All right, the first problem with the control is that you are forced to use the Control Pad for both movement of your characters and menu navigation. How many times do I have to tell developers the the Control Pad is only there for an alternate method of movement, not the main one. The control scheme is four-buttons. The configuration of these four buttons is a bit wacky. I would have preferred to have them all set up on the C Buttons. Also, perhaps more importantly, occasionally, about five to ten times in each ninety-nine second battle, my character just ignores my command and sits there. This is especially important when you are in the middle of a brutal fistfight, which rarely comes along. The last folly here is the menu navigation. Not only do you have to use the Control Pad to navigate, but the menus are poorly thought out.

FUN--3
This fun ranking is all relative. As a tournament fighting game on the Nintendo 64, it is the fourth most fun game out there. In general, compared to all of the games in the world, it most certainly would not rank fourth. But, the Nintendo 64 is a very weak console in terms of fighting games, so if you only can play games on a Nintendo 64, for some very odd reason, bump that ranking up to a six. If you have access to any other console, by all means get some fighters for that and ignore all of the tournament fighters on the Nintendo 64 except for Super Smash Brothers. The lack of any interesting modes, complete dearth of decent audio capabilities, and horrid control make Dark Rift very un-fun indeed.

CHALLENGE--LOW
I will use an anecdote to describe the challenge in Dark Rift. I was playing this game for the first time. I played, first, one two-player game against a friend of mine who is very, very bad at tournament fighting games, but who had owned the game for more than a year, and had played it regularly. I absolutely destroyed him, do to the generic, commonly used interface and button combinations. Then, I promptly entered the Arcade Mode, and plowed through that. This is all with no previous experience with the game. If you cannot beat Dark Rift handily, then you better switch to a more laid back genre of games.

REPLAY VALUE--LOW TO MEDIUM
This is another very relative ranking. As I said before, if you can only play games on a Nintendo 64, bump this ranking up to medium. Otherwise, you can thankfully keep it where it is. There are not very many reasons to play Dark Rift at all, let alone more than once. It is fine for the occasional battle, but you will never play for an extensive amount of time after that first decimation of Arcade Mode. If we had some interesting additions, like the Mission Battle Mode in Soul Calibur, or the Ball Mode in Tekken 3, Dark Rift could almost be worthwhile. Sadly, Vic Tokai was not creative enough to think of any creative additions to throw on the side. And in games like Dark Rift, it is the stuff on the side that decides whether or not it is good.

PROS
*Morphix is one of the coolest characters in any game, ever.
*Character designs are nicely defined.
*For a game on the Nintendo 64, it feels rather creepy.

CONS
*The controls are mind-boggling.
*The audio induces muting.
*This is the fourth best tournament fighting game on the Nintendo 64.

CLOSING STATEMENT
Yes, the character Morphix is the only redeeming feature of Dark Rift in the long run. I would be all for Mr. Tokai selling the license to Morphix to either Capcom or Namco, and putting this game to rest permanently. Perhaps developers with some talent in this genre could do something with a potentially very cool character like that.

OVERALL--3

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 11/11/01, Updated 11/11/01