VAMPIRE PANIC
Original Release: Sammy, 2004, PlayStation 2
An original fusion of a number of different game types, held back somewhat by "budget" AI and overly dark graphics
Vampire Panic (PS2, Sammy, 2004)
Where to Buy: Play-Asia
How to Emulate: PlayStation 2 Emulation Guide
Review by: C. M0use
Made by refugees from Hudson Soft who worked on the original Ys games (among other titles), Vampire Panic is an unusual survival horror / beat em up that centers on finding beleaguered villagers and escorting them to safety before monsters can kill them or yon local vampire can prey on them.
We play as a tandem of a knight and some chick who looks like a sexy gender-swapped Vyse from Skies of Arcadia, apparently agents sent from some kingdom to this remote island village to investigate the possible appearance of a vampire. They're not a minute too late as the village is about to be under full assault by the vampire, who is teleporting around picking off vulnerable people. His rampage has also apparently stirred the beasts to violence and created some shuffling undead enemies roaming outside the safe walls of the town.
The action centers on your safe hub of some sort of a church that the baddies can't enter for some reason. When a villager is bitten, you have a limited time to escort them back to the church to be healed, or they'll turn into one of the tougher zombie enemies. The town area also contains an apothecary you can bring herbs to for mixing into healing potions, and a smith that will upgrade your weapons with scraps of ore you find. You can also switch between the two characters at the church, each of whom has their little differences and strengths/weaknesses, and if you act fast enough you can recruit a third character who sports a pair of guns.
Most of the common enemies are easily dispatched, only becoming a real problem if a big group swarms you. Some of the game's challenge is in exploration and time management, as (in Night Trap style) there's a set length of time before each villager ends up being discovered and killed. Most of it is in escorting the villagers back home safely, as they have basically no survival instincts and can also be hit by your weapons for bonus fun. They also sometimes throw the curveball of being fussy and refusing to move until you either bring another character or item to them, or requiring you to rescue someone else first.
But the biggest challenge is when the vampire shows up. You might happen to run into him preparing to bite a victim, but the initially confusing "Alert" meter in the upper right will also summon him when it fills up. That meter fills when you make certain types of noise, and will only reset when you're inside the church. He can be fought off temporarily, but has a lot of potent moves (including a long stun-lock that's easy to get hit with). If he bites you, he'll retreat but you'll have to haul back to the church to get uncursed and avoid a game over. This aspect is a bit like the prowling werewolf enemy in obscure PC title Ecstatica, except you can't gradually kill him by attrition; you have to find a special stake hidden in his castle, where he can randomly appear to hound you even if he's not Alerted.
Another piece of the challenge is that there are a bunch of conditions that the game just doesn't tell you about, leaving you to discover them through extended play sessions. For example, you're on a total timer of about eight hours (of real time) before your employers strafe the island with magical nukes. That's plenty enough time to do everything, but there are tons of timed events you have no idea are going on at first and are easy to miss. You don't have to rescue every villager to finish the game, and can in fact escape early once you find a boat and two suspiciously familiar-looking sailors to repair it, but the amount you rescue is part of a kinda opaque formula that determines your ending rank and what bonuses you get for New Game + runs. The number of times you save also plays into this, but from reading around no one ever seemed to figure out *precisely* how it works.
Completing the game once throws you a nifty curve: the next time out you can play as the vampire, with the goal of biting as many of the villagers as possible (you start out as a gimpy shuffling corpse and have to gradually power up off of them). Completing this mode opens up a "True" mode that allows you to actually save every last villager, fight the true boss and get the true ending.
Though the graphics are none too impressive, the game has a nice Dark Souls / Ivalice / Witcher type vibe on the strength of its design and some low-key kinda baroque music. It's all fairly pleasant, and specifically it was kinda like wandering around in the dark Slavic forest world of Quest For Glory 4 again. It actually plays like a VERY rudimentary Dark Souls though, complete with the invincible roll dodge you'll want to spam frequently. And just to throw some more game references in, the villager-saving mechanics reminded me of finding and guiding the passengers in obscure SNES title SOS.
There is a lot to like about this title, but ultimately I felt the challenge was too predicated on things that are just cheap, stupid and frustrating. As with SOS, the constant "escort missions" of villagers is the main culprit. They're just unfathomably stupid, walking right into the middle of fights as you're attacking monsters, doing absolutely nothing to proactively avoid them, refusing to run when they should, and so on. They're a major handicap when you have to fight monsters, between refusing to behave with any kind of intelligence and tending to be the priority target when you try to lock on to enemies. You will DEFINITELY end up cussing them out before you get done with this one.
Other stuff put me off too, like ambushing you by tanking your score if you save the game too much, or only being able to get the good new weapons by unnecessarily saving bunches of hostages in an area all in one big impossible-to-wrangle group. The "survival horror" camera system combined with the EXTREMELY dark and murky graphics also often obscure important things, like doors and key items. It's an interesting concept, but it lost me before I finished the game, it just ended up feeling too cheap and frustrating. I'd love to see the idea reimagined (in a better form) by someone else.
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