Unholy Night: The Darkness Hunter (SNES) Playthrough - NintendoComplete
567A playthough of Blazepro's 2017 versus-fighting game for the SNES, Unholy Night: The Darkness Hunter.
This video shows playthroughs of the story mode with two different characters:
0:27 Playthrough with Nightmare
14:37 Playthrough with Blaze
Unholy Night: The Darkness Hunter is a quite a unique breed. It's an unlicensed 2017 physical release of a game made for the SNES. Apparently the Kickstarter to produce the cartridges failed spectacularly, but it still ended up seeing a small production run by Taiwanese company Blazepro.
If that weren't news enough, there was a lot of hype built-up over the (apparent) fact that there were some NeoGeo-era SNK guys on the development team. Awesome right? What's more, the game ships on a 32 megabit cartridge (the same size ROM as Super Street Fighter 2 and Alpha 2, Donkey Kong Country 1-3, and Super Mario RPG came on). Even better, right? Imagine the potential - a game in 2017, built with modern tools by industry pros from the SNES era, making a game equal in size to the largest US commerical carts ever released. Could you possibly ask for more?
As it turns out, yes. Yes you can.
I really hate to say it. I was torn about how to talk about this game - should I be blunt and completely honest, or should I just politely not say much and let people decide for themselves?
Eh, screw it. You should make your mind up for yourself, but if you want my opinion, keep reading.
This is an absolute waste of $50, pure and simple. If it came anywhere near the quality of even the most mediocre fighting games officially released, I would've been pleased. I can get down with Doomsday Warrior or Ranma 1/2: Hard Battle and manage to have fun.
It looks really nice in still shots, to be sure, but graphically, this game is pretty poor. The backgrounds are completely static, and the only notable "feature" is the foolish looking parallax scroll of the background planes - it makes everything look like cardboard cutouts being slid back and forth. The entire thing is also displayed with huge black borders at the top and bottom - the later Capcom games have nothing on this one. The sprites have some nice detail to them, but there's not much creativity here. The characters look like they were ripped out of Darkstalkers and Guilty Gear, badly resampled and downsized, and stripped of personality. The animation doesn't help matters much either as characters jerk about with no sense of fluidity, making timing anything carefully a near impossibility.
Not that you really need good timing. The movement physics and hit detection feel way off and the fighters seem to suddenly speed up or slow down with little apparent reason, but the development team seemed to understand this well: combos are insanely easy to pull off by pushing random buttons, and the braindead AI rarely does much to meaningfully fight back.
And the sound. Ugh. The music isn't terrible, but when there are only a couple of tracks in the game that are repeated over and over (yeah, stages don't have individual themes), they get grating really quickly. The music is all super tinny and cheap sounding, and the samples sound okay but they're mainly limited to incredibly generic grunts and screams. And is it just me, or do the announcer's voice samples suspiciously like the ones in Children of the Atom?
With the presentation being this shoddy, I can only imagine that the 32meg cart was used to accommodate bloated, unoptimized code propping up uncompressed, badly edited art assets. I mean, Killer Instinct fit on a 32meg cart! This has only SIX playable characters and it looks and sounds terrible. And if you were going to go to the expense to produce a game like this on a physical cartridge, wouldn't you think that they would've at least made a good game to do it with? I mean, even the horrendous Engrish doesn't entertain.
Alright, apologies. I'm ranting now. But still, the fact stands that this a wretched excuse for a fighting game, and touting ex-SNK employees as developers does little here but to tarnish SNK's reputation. It's a big embarrassment, and an even bigger disappointment.
If you really want an unofficial fighting game on a physical cartridge, go find yourself a copy of Kart Fighter for the NES. You'll have more fun, I promise. Otherwise, you can buy a copy of this on Amazon. But don't. Please.
_
No cheats were used during the recording of this video.
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