Vampire Hunter D

"Wait, there were vampires in this thing?"

How can you tell when a vampire is coming? Well, what I was taught as a kid was that you would know because the mirrors crack, milk turns in the breast and every sharp thing becomes blunt and every blunt thing sharp. So by perpetually surrounding myself with mirrors, nursing women and steak knives, I've managed to make it through life safe from vampiric molestation. SO FAR.

Vampire Hunter D has even less vampiric content than my life. In this game, nobody bites anyone's neck or sucks on anyone else. Nobody drinks any blood or even feels like drinking any. There are no stakes, no silver weapons, no crucifixes, no garlic wreathes, no women with provocative necks, nobody 'sleeps' in a coffin, sunlight isn't an issue, there's no heart-stabbing and no decapitations...

What the hell were they thinking?

And where can I lay the blame for this pathetic state of affairs? I choose to lay it squarely at the door of the Japanime upon which this game is based, even though I haven't seen it.

Vampire Hunter D (VHD) is a distinctly painful future-goth survival horror effort devoid of vampirism and set in the year 12090. The story is that vampires ruled the Earth for a long time, but now the fates have swung back to favour us puny humans, and in our hour of triumph we send out vampire hunters to nail the last of our enemies. The best hunters are the Dunpeals, those born to a vampire and a human. And the best of the best is VAMPIRE HUNTER D, whom we control in this game. To distinguish our hero from the game's title throughout this review, I will henceforth refer to him as just plain old 'D' when I like what he's doing, and 'Dunce' when I don't.

D is like Zorro's wicked twin. A seven foot tall scarecrow of a swordsman with deadly night-black tailoring, the most melodramatic cape ever twirled and a wide-brimmed hat, he is a truly remarkable onscreen presence. Just nudging the d-pad makes him break into an alarming elongated dash as if he was an arrow being fired at his destination, and he wields his cape the way moustached villains in silent films used to do. D's character flourishes and animations are the high point of the game, closely followed by the bizarre gothic architecture of the gameworld itself. Castle chambers are picked out by strange neon scribbles, shimmery metallic veins and diagonal panels. The graphic quality itself isn't fantastic, but it has definitely been used to work up a one of a kind aesthetic. Likewise, the game's rather strange music, mixing up odd synth themes and slow jazzy interludes, is likely to catch your attention somehow.

Oh, if only I could control and be this amazing guy in this amazing world, if only! VHD invokes the character-relative Resident Evil control scheme, which is fine with me although I know it is not fine with many people, but then kills off all hopes of control by disastrous, unchangeable button allocations and a few simple but deadly physics problems. The single biggest issue is this: When characters in Resident Evil hit a wall, they didn't stop running. You just had to start turning and they'd sort of bounce and slip their way back into action. Not so Dunce. If Dunce collides with something, he will stop and ignore all further orders until he no longer feels distressed. You must suspend all activities until Dunce's cape settles, then turn him far from the thing that stopped him before you do anything as bold as pushing forward on the pad and hoping that he might move again.

Dunce's reticence to move near walls and obstacles (including enemies he's getting personal with) gets him carved up with alarming frequency.

This wouldn't matter if Dunce didn't have a lot on his plate or a lot to do, but he does. A rich man's daughter has been kidnapped by a vampire, and Dunce's mission is to rescue her from the Castle Of Hell. This has little to do with the introductory FMV of people driving heavily armoured vehicles around and shooting down dragons, but let's cut Dunce some slack. After all, he has no personality to speak of, to the extent that all the wisecracks in the game must come from a parasitic organism living in his left hand. Ewwwww! Like, that is so gross! 'Left Hand' gabs away occasionally, his lips flapping heedlessly out of sync with his grating vocal performance, but his real purpose is to supply Dunce with some special powers during the game.

These freezing, shooting and flaming powers draw on your Left Hand meter. The meter drains slowly but constantly anyway, and is very hard to restock via D's 'Inhale' ability. You'll find that once that thing runs out, there's pretty much no rubbing life back into it, and I would say that after I'd completed half the game I was never really able to use my Left Hand again. I couldn't refill it rapidly enough to overcome the sapping effects of time, and to gather the one lousy unit of power required to do anything.

I am loathe to admit that D is also the possessor of a Vampire Meter, which increases if enemy blood splashes on him. This could potentially have been the oasis of vampiric action in the game's desert, but fortunately for my 'VHD is vampirism free' thesis, the meter barely does anything. I honestly believe the designers just forgot about it at some point. You can't spend from the meter, and it doesn't matter if the meter is full and it doesn't matter if the meter is empty. All the meter does is sluggishly shift the nature of the attack from your Left Hand amongst the freezy, shooty or fiery varieties.

Dunce doesn't fight any vampires of course, but an endless procession of 'Graaah!' type monsters, gargoyles, angry and mostly invulnerable swordswomen with extendible rubber hands (who aren't vampires), spidery things and dog-type demons. None of these creatures look particularly impressive. And the combat is torture! Dunce has a three-miss sword combo which appears to have a range of six feet and even throws off arcs of blue light, but does it ever connect? No. Does it actually have any reach at all? No. Does the lag of combo-ing consistently result in you being mauled? Yes. This is the kind of game where the most basic enemies are still a major threat even after you've put down fifty of them. It's the kind of game where eventually you realise it's best to never ever fight, and the sight of anything alive that's not yourself elicits groaning and swearing.

The best gag and worst nightmare in the fighting department grows out of the fact that to spin Dunce 180 degrees (typically a pre-escape manoeuvre) you have to tap both lower shoulder buttons at once - except that L2 on its own activates the lock-on targeting mode. You can probably see where this is going. A recurrent situation is that you're being massacred by several monsters at once. You desperately wish to spin 180 degrees and flee, so you jam at both shoulder buttons, but it doesn't quite work, and suddenly, of all the possible actions you could have taken at this moment, you've chosen to lock onto the monster. Now the whole control scheme transforms in an instant so that the d-pad is rotating you around the beast you'd intended to flee from, and helping you move in and out of the screen relative to the beast, and in a fixed camera angle environment to boot. This is confusing and horrible beyond belief, but it happens all the time in VHD. Your dreams of flight are dashed as you are, instead, completely screwed.

How much more insulting could things get, given that D looks like one of the greatest warriors who ever lived? But you can't control him, the enemies are super-cheap, and worst of all, they all re-spawn every single time you leave any particular room!

VHD is a sprawling game with a very punishing locks-and-keys multi-storey castle to navigate, not to mention towers, graveyards and an absolutely deadly sewer area, and to be expected to explore all of this and absorb what needs to be done whilst enduring the endless stress of monsters respawning - not to mention the complete lack of achievement you feel in killing anything, because you know you can never be free of the thing slain, it will be back soon - grows to be a real form of mental torture. At least D's Left Hand tries to help out in the navigation department, as part of what appears to be a genuine gesture on the game's behalf to counter what many people find painful in survival horror; just remembering the context of what they're doing at any one time. If you find a new key, the hand might remind you of doors that are still locked. If you notice that part of the environment has changed, the hand might suggest reasons why, which should help nudge you towards your next goal.

Occasionally D meets people who speak, though I couldn't follow the story and it seemed pretty uninteresting. It appears to be one of these Japanese loyalty and rivalry tales that I've never been able to relate to very well (...when it should have been about VAMPIRES!) and also it's obviously got a lot to do with shenanigans in the animated film. So fans of the anime may get something out of this. I got nothing, except the urge to shout, 'Talk to the Left Hand, 'cos the Dunce don't wanna hear it!'

In Summary...

DRACULA

--- D himself is a memorably striking presence (as opposed to character - no personality, remember?)
--- Unique gothic design shines, even through so-so graphic delivery
--- Some innovative weirdness such as the contributions from D's Left Hand

ALUCARD

--- Unbelievably awful control system and physics quirks
--- Deathly cheap combat with perpetually respawning and ugly monsters
--- Stupid Vampire Meter! Stupid Left Hand Meter!
--- If you haven't seen the anime, don't expect to ever know what's going on
--- What the **** has this game got to do with blood-sucking vampirism?

ANAEMIC

Once again in the world of gaming, I am hurt to see that a swathe of imaginative ideas has come largely to nought. Even accepting that this game bears no relationship to anything that I consider makes vampiric subject matter exciting, it's barely tolerable as a swordfighting survival horror tale on its own terms. The combat engine's massive holes and one of the worst control schemes I've ever experienced combine to pretty much smother any joy you might have been able to eke out of the gothic atmosphere. What's left? A senseless plot, a dysfunctional Vampire Meter, insufferable back-and-forthing through a sparse castle and a wiseass talking hand. That's no way to have fun, damn it. I'm going back to my steak knives.

-- Vampire Hunter D -- 4/10 --

Reviewer's Score: 4/10, Originally Posted: 03/17/03, Updated 03/17/03