Darkstalkers Series

It does seem like a Multiple-Choice Past for her.

What did Phoenix Wright call her? "Little Red Murder Hood."

Oh Project X Zone, Mv C Infinite could learn so much from you,

She's so evil she can enter makai - which normally obliterates humans and mortals who aren't pure of heart in some way - pure evil apparently is fine - because her soul is blacker than your average Darkstalker.

You know it's entirely possible for BB Hood to hate Jon Talbain by association and still do errands for her grandmother. She has two grandmothers, one is still alive.

... Yeah, now that you mention it, that's true. That said, it's not that common for the fact that any given person must have two grandmothers (possibly more, in Speculative Fiction where Has Two Mommies is possible) is brought up, so you could forgive us for assuming that it's the same grandmother.

Besides, Little Red Riding Hood is only ever mentioned to have a single grandmother without specifying which side of Hood's family she's on, implying that the other one is either dead or is so estranged from the rest of the family that she's disowned by them and thus doesn't merit even a passing mention (either directly or indirectly).

Necro'ing this thread because a thought has started nagging away at me:

Why didn't Capcom ever make a Darkstalkers game with Dante in it? Not even talking about modern Capcom, but 00's Capcom, back when Devil May Cry was at the peak of its popularity and Dante was getting a bunch of Wolverine Publicity. It didn't have to be a big budget game, (especially since 2D fighters weren't as popular in the middle of that decade) could've been a smaller scale game, or even as paltry as a port of 3/Vampire Savior or just a console version of Chaos Tower with a Dante sprite added in, similar to how Ingrid was added into the PSP port of Street Fighter Alpha 3. Just something to capitalize on Dante's popularity and give some attention to one of their more underrated IP's.

Not like Capcom themselves were a stranger to the idea, given Dante's infamous cameo in Jedah's ending from that Capcom All-star's game. So what exactly was the hold-up?

edited 8th Apr '18 2:25:08 AM by Rynnec

If I had to guess, I think it was a mix of Darkstalkers having had a downfall post Vampire Savior/Hunter 2, and the 2D fighting game genre going on life support. So it's a mix of a brand looked down upon, with a genre looked down upon. Remember, Ingrid was the remnants of a failed major project with Capcom Fighting Evolution. And not to mention that they had a chance to add Dee to Chaos Tower. Donovan's Vampire form, something built up ever since the second game, and all they managed was a headswap of Demitri. If they weren't going to make new sprites for a major canon character, they weren't gonna make them for someone like Dante.

Sounds to me like They Just Didn't Care.

Which is tragic.

Than you didn't get anything out of that post. The one time they ever did anything directly with the Darkstalkers games themselves post the last game in the series, well over a decade after its original release, they were more or less out of sprite artists and didn't have the resources to even properly implement a major canonical Darkstalkers "What If" character in a satisfying way.

There was no way they'd also fit Dante in there. It wasn't a matter of not caring, but of being unable to follow up as they might of wanted to otherwise.

edited 8th Apr '18 8:14:46 AM by Hashil

...I was referring specifically to half-assing Dee, not Dante's inclusion or lack thereof.

I always assumed the headswap was to imply a connection between Demitri and Donovan (with the former possibly being the latter's father)., though that was before I recently watched gameplay footage and saw just how much assets were reused for his movepool. That explanation did shed a lot of light on why Capcom didn't use Dante to give publicity to an IP that would've naturally suited him.

OMG I discovered this amazing fact by complete chance!

You know how the localization of the Darkstalkers games changed Lei-Lei's name to "Hsien-Ko"? I always thought it was utterly nonsensical and couldn't figure out just why the guy(s) in charge of the dubbing thought it was a good idea, considering Lei-Lei is a perfectly serviceable Chinese name.

... Until today, where in the course of idly searching for some trivial info about Chinese romanization and the like, I saw that "hs" is used in the Wade-Giles system to represent a "sh" sound, which is now more commonly represented by the Pinyin standard of "x" (i.e. instead of "Hsio", it's "Xiao"). Naturally, I remembered Hsien-Ko, and so looked up her Wikipedia article to see just her name is supposed to be pronounced in Chinese anyway (it's hé xiān gū, BTW). Then I notice that the name even has hanzi of its own (何仙姑), so I plug that into the search box just for the hell of it.

... And lo and behold. Turns out the localized name is a reference to a female figure of Chinese myth who is one of the fucking Eight Immortals. I repeat: Hsien-Ko, a jiangshi (Chinese variety of vampire/zombie), is named after one of the Eight Immortals of the Taoist belief system.

Now I'm torn on what to make as my new headcanon:

• The individual sisters are named Lei-Lei and Lin-Lin, but after they merged into a jiangshi they collectively adopted He Xiangu's name as their new collective name.
• The sisters are named He Xiangu and He Meiling^note The mythical He Xiangu is said to be the daughte of He Tai, thus clarifying that "He" is a family name rather than "He Xiangu" being a lengthy three-hanzi given name.. "Lei-Lei" and "Lin-Lin" are retconned out of existence as names because they're stereotypical Japanese choices of Chinese female names that, in hindsight, don't sound realistic.

edited 24th May '18 11:01:55 PM by MarqFJA

Huh.

And here I always just preferred Hsien-ko because it sounded less stereotypical.

On a related note, this might actually justify why Hsien-Ko is playing with the big boys that comprise most of the rest of the playable cast: She's far above an ordinary jiangshi in terms of power, and not just because she and her sister were still alive when they performed the magic ritual that turned them into what they are now. And when I say "far above", I mean she's only a few steps away from being a Physical God among all jiangshi, just like Morrigan is strongly implied to be a Physical God among succubi/demons when at full power (i.e. post-merger with Lilith).

edited 25th May '18 6:58:50 AM by MarqFJA

Maybe by the standards of Jiang-shi, but I don't know that I'd rank her up so high by the standards of the rest of the universe.

Still is some pretty snazzy trivia, though.

If we take the OVA into account, she and her sister did fight and survive against Pyron, so that has to count for something.

Is Pyron a planet or a solar system buster? I was always under the impression he was the latter because of his ending.

Planet level at the lowest, Solar System to possibly even Galaxy-level at the highest due to his sheer size. So yeah, with all that, Hsien-ko is one of the high-tiers of the verse.

The fact that they fought against him and didn't end up as cinders on the floor is what I was referring to.

edited 25th May '18 9:46:07 PM by Rynnec

When did Hsien-ko fight Pyron? iirc the only one not to get crushed and seemingly killed by him was Demitri in the OVA.

edit: I found a clip, but to say they held their own's kind of overselling them. They survived but otherwise didn't phase the guy once.

edited 25th May '18 9:43:56 PM by Hashil

You know, I just realized that Meiling's human form (she normally assumes the form of a talisman on her sister's head) wears a hat with a yin-yang symbol, which is Taoist just like the mythical lore of the Eight Immortals is.

Sounds dandy & all, but it's a shame since Darkstalkers won't be having a sequel anytime soon. I love to be wrong on that.

Compare to Sasquatch, Victor, Rikuo, & Anakaris, I say they did just fine.

Just a little something for fun, a picture of Morrigan done by webcomic artist Mary Cagle (Let's Speak English, Kiwi Blitz, and Sleepless Domain) in her style

https://twitter.com/cubewatermelon/status/1044047354096242688?s=19

Storm Collectibles, the company that currently does figures for Steet Fighter, King of Fighters, Mortal Kombat and Tekken (among other games) announced today that they got the Darkstalkers license.

They do◊ great◊ work◊.

Edited by comicwriter on Feb 16th 2019 at 12:01:08 PM

Cute Q-Bee, the Sasquatch family and lots of Morrigan: Teppen's Darkstalkers art shows off why the series characters need to make a big return

Youtube channel host Thorgi's ideas for a story and roster of Darkstalkers 4. Video is 46 minutes long.

Edited by windleopard on Oct 31st 2020 at 4:50:10 AM