Vampire Hunter

I was thoroughly impressed with this one. Id personally put it up with the ranks of the Castlevania animated series in terms of quality. The animation is beautiful. While there are some times where it could look a little jank, most of the fights in it look stellar. Madhouse wasnt sleeping through this one. All the character designs are great. It has really solid pacing and it never feels boring. Its obviously not perfect though. This story doesnt really adhere to the whole show dont tell thing. I think Donovan is a great character. But there are many scenes where Hsien Ko and her sister ... and literally just talking about his characterand the philosophy of why he does things. In that sense the writing tends to be really awkward. It presents really good themes and concepts to the viewer, but a lot of those themes are just spoken through hefty monologues by certain characters. Honestly that is my only problem with this one, but it is a big one depending who you are. If you are a fan of the franchise its absolutely worth watching.

Overall/Enjoyment:
Most games never survive the transition to another medium. They are usually universally terrible and this would be the first adaptation I've seen that I liked. I was surprised when within the first few minutes of watching I thought "hey, this doesn't completely suck..." By the end I had concluded "yeah, that wasn't bad". I'm not a huge Darkstalkers fan, but I played enough of it to think "ehhh, what the hell, why not?" I think even if I wasn't vaguely familiar with the characters I would've still enjoyed this. I watched all 4 eps in a row fairly painlessly and could've easily watched more ... (see Characters below).

Story:
Make no mistake about it, this is definitely a show for people who like shows about fighting. If you don't like fighting games or shows like DBZ or Yu Yu Hakusho or Kenshin or even Bleach/Naruto then... I have no idea why you are even reading this. Otherwise I thought the story was about as good as anyone could expect for a show about a fighting game. To try to criticize the story beyond that misses the point and does a disservice to its accomplishment.

There's a lot of repetitive use of the word "dark" (you could make a deadly drinking game out of it) and the general setup is fairly generic, BUT, the OTT plot is perfectly suited for the show, considering fighting games are OTT by design. I've seen much worse excuses to get characters to come together to beat each other up.

In fact, I thought the premise that ties them together was actually pretty good as far as these kind of shows go. They actually make some kind of effort to explain the presence of "the dark" and make interesting use of what would otherwise be a cliche mix of "something from space", "an ancient race", and "something from another dimension". Which was already a lot more than I was expecting.

I actually liked that it kept itself kind of serious (I'm tired of anime with goofy/wacky sight gags and comic relief). It gave it a dramatic feel but not so much that it lost sight of being an anime about people fighting.

I really liked how they centered the story around Donovan/Anita. They could've gone many ways with this: It could've been another ambitious story about an overpowered vampire and his quest for domination or some trumped up tournament to see who is the worlds strongest. I feel their choice in a "protagonist" was probably the best one they could've made of all the characters available. Sure the "half-demon" thing is overused, but in a world where humanity is being devoured by darkness, something about the virtue of a man who is constantly at war with his (literally) inner demon and the traumatized little girl he has vowed to protect just seemed right.

The ending was a little disappointing, mostly because I think it crossed that line of cliche over-the-topness, but eh, I've also seen much worse and more frustrating endings, so...

Characters:
The characters have some questionable dialogue sometimes, but otherwise I thought it was surprisingly solid if not pretty good. Again, experience had me already expecting much worse. I thought they captured the characters unique personalities pretty well and didn't go too overboard with any of them. I thought they did a good job with introducing Donovan, Anita, Demitri, Morrigan, Huitzel, Pyron and the sisters. Felicia, Talbain and Bishamon showed promise. Lord Raptor was pretty much just an odd cameo, so aside from him, I liked how they were handling use of the characters and not just rushing/stuffing everyone into the story in some contrived and insipid manner. For this reason I actually felt the story was too short. I would've liked to have seen this as a series and see them try to include all the characters and somehow tie them into the epic confrontation with Pyron.

Art:
I actually didn't think the art was that great for an OVA. I did like how they didn't get overly retarded with the designs and stayed mostly faithful to the game (both in characters and combat). So for that it still ranks high with me.

Sound:
The sound was fine, more surprisingly however was that the dub didn't make me want to gag. Considering how cheesy and potentially disastrous the dialogue probably was, I thought they delivered it well. I assume the dialogue was cheesy only because I've watched enough fighting anime to tune out all but the worst of hammy speeches.

Fan Service defines it. Not nudity kind of fan service, though.

The art and animation is quite good so you may like the show, but the characters and the story is as plain as in the game... here is where the "fan service" comes in: If you are a fan of the game (like myself) you will find yourself quite enjoying it because unlike other game adaptations the characters are actually using their game moves, using their special and combos and even the basic attacks. The fights are pretty well animated and you can really see Darkstalker in them... but if you never played the games ... it might not impress you...

The use of the roster is mid. They do show all characters but few play some relevant part, it would have been more interesting having more of them participating in the ending. Still, it's way better than modern game adaptations that instead of using characters from the game just introduce tons of new ones created by the director of the show and ignore the already existing ones that the fans would like to see...

Also it seems it was supposed to have a sequel that wasn't made. Darkstalker is three games: the first and second are the same story they just introduce more characters, and the third got a few new characters and a new final boss. This show covers the first two games.

Overall, I think it's quite good, but that comes from a fan of the games, if you are not into them you may not like that much.