Dark Awake - The King of Dungeons and Dragons

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Hello everyone! Here I am with one more entry of the blog after a few busy days that kept me from bothering you with my usual mumbo jumbo about God forsaken games. Anyway, are you having fun with “the Expendables” from the last entry? Spilled tones of pixilated blood already? In this entry I´m going to talk about yet another classic style game full of action and muscles, although this time around we will completely change the genre and we will go back to the 2D Versus genre with a game called Dark Awake: The King Has No Name. Let´s see what this sword and sorcery fighting game has to offer.

Developed by Eolith, a Korean developer that might be unknown to many despite having a wide experience in the development of arcade games, including the 2001 and 2002 entries of SNK´s classic series The King of Fighters, Dark Awake is a 2D fighting game that was originally released for the successful Taito Type X arcade board in the Japanese arcades under the name of Chaos Breakers. As I already mentioned in the entry I dedicated to the astonishing Yatagarasu, the beginning of the 2000s was a pretty dark age for the 2D Versus genre due to the fever for the polygons that games such as Virtua Fighter, Tekken or Soul Calibur spread among the players of the time, which, coupled with the downfall of the arcades in favor of the domestic systems (specially in western markets), made that Chaos Breaker remained unknown to most players except for those who often visited the arcades in the Land of the Rising Sun. Fortunately for the fans of the genre, and thanks to the big comeback of the 2D Versus genre with titles such as Street Fighter IV, Mortal Kombat 9 or BlazBlue among others, the small Japanese editor Recom decided to give Chaos Breaker a second chance releasing the game in 2010 as a downloadable title exclusively for Sony´s PS3 via the platform´s online service in a effort to get their own slice of the cake. The first that might come to our minds when we see Dark Awake are titles such a Golden Axe The Duel or the more recent Battle Fantasia, and that is because just like we could also see in those 2D Versus games, Dark Awake takes us to a world of medieval fantasy filled with all the typical topics of the medieval folklore. The story of Dark Awake tells us that in ancient times a huge and violent war took place between the gods and the dragons. This fierce battle set the skies on fire, made the seas boil and cracked the earth. The battle seemed to be endless, till the gods finally managed to steal the name of the king of the dragon (remember, register your trademarks!), weakening him and sealing him away in far away isolated island, condemning the remaining dragons to exile and defeat, but the war also took a huge toll on the gods, who decided to abandon the world. In doing so, they left being all kind of magical items that helped them to win the war, on top of the power of mana. Now the races that inhabit the world, such as the humans, dwarves, elves, orcs, goblins, trolls and so on, battle each other in order to obtain these items so that they can conquer the world. As I said, your typical fantasy stuff.

On top of selecting our characters, we will also be able to select magical items to use them during the combats.

The combats will take place between 2 teams of 3 characters each.

As I was saying at the beginning, we are basically talking about a classic style 2D Versus game, in which, as opposite as seen in most games of the genre where the combats follow the 1 vs 1 format, the combats will take place between 2 teams composed of 3 fighters each, having to defeat the 3 characters of the opposing team in order to be able to win, just as we could also see in SNK´s legendary franchise The King of Fighters in which the developing team had worked previously. The game´s rooster is composed of 6 teams, each formed by 3 fighters, offering like this a total of 18 playable characters, each with the own unique fighting style, and just like in SNK´s classic fighting game, we will be able to choose the 3 characters from a same team, or we will be able to create our own “dream team” by selecting the characters we prefer from among all the characters available (which will give way to “blasphemies” such as a team composed of a dwarf, an elf and an orc) and the order in which our fighters will fight during the combats. The teams will be dived into 6 races: the humans, the orcs (including goblins and trolls), the dwarves, the elves, the dark elves, and the undead. The characters are:

HUMAN TEAM

(PS3 VERSION)

(ARCADE VERSION)

 ORC TEAM

ELF TEAM

 DWARF TEAM

DARK ELF TEAM

UNDEAD TEAM

 

As for the game controls, the title follows the pattern seen in yet another of SNK´s greatest classics: Samurai Shodown. The game has four buttons: one for the weak attacks, another for the medium attacks, another for the strong ones, and finally one last fourth button for the attacks without weapon. One of the special features of the game is that, after selecting our characters, we will be able to select also a magical item that we will be able to use during the combats to get the upper hand. The list of items is pretty long, each having its own unique qualities that will be more or less useful depending on the members of our team and the rivals we are fighting against. Unfortunately, this is a far as the new features go, for the rest of features of the game are the typical ones you could find in any of the fighting games you could see in the arcades of the 90s, which is not something necessarily bad, and that makes complete sense, after all we are talking about a game that was released in 2004. The game features the typical power gauge, or in this case mana gauge, which will fill up during the combats, and which will allow us to perform the typical “ultimate attacks” of our characters as well as those of the items equipped, or summon or teammates to assists us during the combats among other things. The game also includes a “weapon clash system” similar to the one we could see in the already mentioned Samurai Shodown. On top of all this, each character will of course have their own set of special attacks that we will be able to perform during the matches by imputing you typical “hadouken-style” patterns, as well as the possibility of performing several other actions typical of the genre such as throwing our rivals, or quickly jump forward or backwards in order to get closer/far away from our enemies among other things.

As for the game modes, this is probably by far the poorest area of the title. The game includes your typical arcade mode, in which we will fight against the rivals teams in a series of combats until we reach the final bosses (all of them affected by the infamous SNK syndrome), and then there is the online mode, in which we will be able to face other players from all over the world. The main problem with the online mode is that, on top of having a code that is not as polished as it should, with the obvious problems that implies, due to the fact that the game has only ever been published in Japan, and with quite humble results, it will be rather hard to find rivals, and when we do, there is a good chance we will experience some lag issues that can be very annoying, although I guess this is still better than not having the option to play online at all... Another of the issues regarding the game modes is the lack of a local versus mode, which is something quite strange given the competitive nature of the title. In order to be able to play against our buddies in the versus mode, we will have to start a normal single player match in the arcade mode, and then our friend will have to “challenge” us with a second controller as it could be seen in the classic arcades. It´s indeed strange and rather awkward the use of this system in game for domestic platforms, although most probably is due to the arcade nature of the title and the luck of resources when making the port for Sony´s platform since we are talking about a minor publisher, but let´s try to see the bright side of things again: better this than not having the game released at all.

Finally, regarding the graphics of the game, the characters have good models with a big variety of designs which include from undead riders, to cannon riding dwarves or enormous trolls, all with a style similar to the one used by Games Workshop for their famous tabletop game Warhammer, or to Blizzard´s Warcraft series that fits perfectly with the game´s fantasy world. The animations are also good, as well as the stages where the combats will take place, all of them representing the typical places often visited in medieval fantasy adventures such as villages, forests, fortresses, ruins or caves. However, although the graphics are correct, one cannot help to notice that they are a tad outdated for today´s standards in the genre, something that makes perfect sense if we think that it´s been more than 10 years since the game was first released in the Japanese arcades.


All in all, despite certain shortcomings, Dark Wake is a pretty competent title, and although it is surely not at the level of the genre´s finest, it is still an interesting title and a solid alternative for the fans of the genre. You can purchase the game at the Japanese store for a more than reasonable price, although you will first need to create a Japanese PlayStation Network account if you don´t have one already. Enjoy!


GAMEPLAY VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSzla0VSvTo

Japanese arcade flyer