Some artistic masterpieces contain a level of detail that are never noticed by the layman’s eye. da Vinci’s Last Supper hides the clues to a secret melody in plain sight, while Edgar Wright is audacious enough to divulge the entire plot to his movies in the exposition of his characters.
And then there’s the fleeting intricacies of Darkstalkers 3, a fighter game that contains so many details that I wish it changed genres and was a point and click adventure game instead. A weird wish, I know.
Beautifully animated, this fantasy and monster-themed video game keeps delighting its audience with the enormous amount of creativity it displays within the half a second interval of a button press.
Mortal Kombat has its gore, and Street Fighter has its legion of competitors, but what makes Darkstalkers 3 special is the open left field to which it makes all of its greatest hits.
As a short example: one of the characters I picked is B. Bonnie Hood, a Little Red Riding Hood-type character that fully embraces its tropes as well as torpedoes them away with a bazooka power-up. In addition to her titular red hood, B. Bonnie Hood is equipped with an uzi as she double-jumps and dances her way across her defeated opponents with murderous intentions.
Even if you hate fighters or are as bad as them as I am, Darkstalkers 3 is a great game that deserves a playthrough. Darkstalkers 3 owes much of its relevance to being done in a timeless format that makes it look better than some of the 3D graphics of its more-advanced peers.
And with that, comes one last caveat…
Maybe it doesn’t matter to you, but furries are abound in Darkstalkers 3. Maybe half-human characters are more common in fantasy tropes in order to allow the audience to think about having sex with them. All the same, if you’re going to go halvsies, then make the other half some other animal. Whatever happened to manticores, griffins, or even platypus? Or is there not enough cleavage on a eagle/lion hybrid?
How far I got within 30 minutes: Got halfway around the solar system with a lot of button mashing
Would I play this again: Fur sure
Numbers of days so far in the Year of the Play-a-DayStation: 1
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