Slashing With Style
The Dishwasher: Vampire Smile can initially be a bit of an off-putting game. It centers on Yuki, a troubled young woman who, under your guidance, must exact revenge against three businessmen who wronged her. During this journey, she will carve a bloody swath through robotic ninjas, zombies, robots, teleporting secret agents, mutants, and numerous other abominations. On the moon. And sometimes she will take a break to whip out her violin, which for some reason sounds like an electric guitar, and play an impromptu concerto. All of this random action is drenched in emo style, with characters spouting insipid dialogue such as "It's like there's pain...but I'm numb" that wouldn't seem out of place in a crappy internet fanfiction.
If you find yourself at odds with the game's absurdist emo stylings, rest assured you're not alone. I was too, at first. But this is a video game, not a fanfiction, and in this medium quality is derived first and foremost from gameplay. Underneath the melodramatic one-liners and nonsensical story, Vampire Smile hides some of the smoothest swordplay you're likely to find in a XBLA release.
The most important feature of the game is Yuki's Blood Shift ability, assigned to the right stick. This move allows Yuki to break up her body into numerous blood particles, scatter them to the other side of the room, and then reform the particles back into a whole. Essentially, it lets her teleport. Although initially this move seems to function the same as a dodge in most any other game, it's really much more liberating than that. There's no finite energy supply governing the use of this feature, meaning it can be performed over and over, and you can dodge up and down in addition to left and right. So basically, Yuki can fly.
Blood Shift-ing around in the sky is certainly fun, but the ground combat is no slouch either. Although Yuki begins the game brawling with bare hands, she'll quickly acquire a katana. Swordplay is more reminiscent of God of War than Ninja Gaiden here; while the game is unabashedly mashy in its approach to combat, there's still strategy in knowing which moves to use and when to use them. Given that Yuki obtains new weapons and techniques at a blistering pace, knowing which situations are suited to which fighting style becomes a necessity.
Timing also plays a heavy role in combat. Dodging at just the right time triggers a slow motion effect that looks pretty neat, but it's not just the dodges that need to be carefully timed. Smart usage of your numerous magic abilities will reduce difficult encounters to a walk in the park. It's lucky, then, that the controls are so fast and responsive. If there had been any delay between your button presses (or mashes) and the onscreen action, this would have been a much more tedious game. As it is, Vampire Smile nails the responsive feeling that fans of hack and slash want.
Visually, the game is pure chaos. That's not to say that its grey-drenched, hand-drawn style doesn't look nice; the characters and environments actually have a lot of character, despite some awkward looking animations. But even in the earlier levels, Vampire Smile reaches levels of sensory overload usually reserved for endgame setpieces or a long game of Geometry Wars. Lights flash, the camera flies around, speed lines shoot out of the corners of the screen, and viscera splatters everywhere. The numerous effects are so visceral that they actually obscure a lot of the gorier kills, but they go a long way towards selling the idea that mentally, there's just something not right with Yuki.
The journey to purge Yuki's inner demons and exact revenge is incredibly intense, but it's short. The game clocks in at around 2-3 hours, depending on the difficulty and your level of skill. Unlockable difficulty levels give the game some additional legs, but the main replay value comes in the form of a second story, in which you play as The Dishwasher himself. This second story sports a new set of cutscenes and shows a slightly different take on Yuki's story, but the levels themselves remain the same. It's cool that there are new story beats, no doubt, but none of the game's cutscenes are voiced, and most of them don't really have music either. And honestly, if you've come to Vampire Smile for the story, you've been grossly misguided. Luckily, the missions can also be played in co-op, which makes the already crazy action even more frantic. An arcade mode is also present, and it offers a set of challenges that can often be more grueling than the story mode.
Vampire Smile really caught me unawares, and I suspect it will do the same for many who check it out. The game's melodramatic stylings and lame dialogue put me off at first, but this game knows what it does best and mostly sticks to the action. With numerous options for both offense and defense, combat requires more strategy than you'd think, and the multitude of insane enemies will keep you on your toes. Co-op and arcade modes only sweeten the bloodstained pot. This madcap bloodbath is the best release XBLA has seen in a long time.
