OBSCURE O.V.A.S, *Night Warriors: Darkstalkers' Revenge

Named after the second installment of Capcom's fighting video game franchise, Night Warriors was given this name as opposed to the regular Darkstalkers to separate it from the American animated series which was geared more towards Saturday Morning cartoon viewing. The OVA series was strewn through a quartet of 40-minute episodes. Ronin Warriors director Masashi Ikeda was in charge of this Madhouse production. The anime came out at the same time of Darkstalkers 3, so none of the characters that premiered in that game have showed up in any anime adaptations since then, even though Night Warriors goes out of its way to highlight the characters original to the second game which few people cared for.

The entire anime has several conflicting segments that sometimes coincide with each other, but most of them are unrelated throughout the course of the series. There's a feud going on between vampire lord Demitri and succubus Morrigan as the bloodsucking count was booted from the demon world long ago and the sexy bat-lady stands in his way. While this is happening, Felicia is a catwoman trying to put on a circus for kids to have them not be afraid of her kind referred to as The Dark. Bulky priest Donovan is a dhampir with an agenda to hunt down all of The Dark and its related monster spawn, one of which is a cursed set of living samurai armor, and along his journey he becomes the caretaker of another half-breed, the psychic orphan Anita. The Chinese vampire sisters of Hsien-Ko and Mei-Ling are also on their own crusade, but it seems closer to the focal point of the whole OVA, a demonic alien named Pyron who invades Earth in order to duel its most powerful fighters. Most of these other characters are only briefly shown in some of the opening titles like Sasquatch, so they never get a real part in the overall story. Lord Raptor does get a decent team-up with Felicia as he was voiced by Scott McNeil who was the only returning voice actor from the American Darkstalkers cartoon as both shows were dubbed by the same studio.

Night Warriors is a passable adaptation of the video games, but it usually fails to have the level of fun that the games had which is what made the underrated American animated series tolerable. The spurious fighting scenes appear like they are right out of the game, however the entire plot is drawn out over four episodes which should have been at best 30 minutes long each. Night Warriors takes itself too seriously to be enjoyable regardless of the fact it's from a game where popular movie monsters are beating each other up.