I recently picked up Capcom Fighting Collection 2 for the Nintendo Switch, and while the entire collection contains 8 games from Capcom’s fighting back catalog I primarily picked this game up for two reasons…Power Stone and Power Stone 2. I have some pretty fond memories of these Dreamcast-era arena fighters and getting the opportunity to play the arcade ports on the go has scratched the decades long itch I’ve had to return to these games. However, to my surprise, the majority of time spent playing this collection has NOT been with Power Stone. Instead I’ve spent most of my time digging into this obscure 3D fighter tucked away on this collection called Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein. I had never heard about this game before finding it on this collection, and exploring it has been extremely fun. It is an odd 90s sci-fi inspired fighting game with over-the-top characters that pack a lot of charm and flair in a world that is equally weird and engrossing.
Plasma Sword takes place hundreds of years in the future on a planet called Zeta, and the main villian is Dr. Bilstein who is this maniacal terrorist who is hellbent on destroying the galaxy. This game is a direct sequel to an earlier Capcom 3D fighter called Star Gladiator (in fact this game is called Star Gladiator 2 in Japan), in that game Hayato and the hero characters believe they killed Bilstein but he is rumored to be back on Zeta wreaking havoc and as you complete the arcade mode with various characters you peel back the layers on how each character is connected to Bilstein and their pursuits to either stop him or help him. Midway through arcade mode you’ll face off against a mini-boss character giving you a few lines of story dialogue, with the rest of the story coming at the final boss fight at the end. The futuristic setting lays the groundwork for some cool character designs and sci-fi effects that gives the game a certain charm that can really draw you in. All the weapons are futuristic plasma weapons, swords that glow with the flair of a Star Wars light-saber, full robot characters that shoot guns at enemies, and tons of other oddities that are dripping with sci-fi inspired goodness.
So why am I so captivated by this game, well I think first and foremost this sci-fi setting really helps make Plasma Sword feel like something special. To my knowledge, we just don’t get a lot of fighting games in a sci-fi setting. As cool as you would think Jedi fighters with light-sabers fighting droids with guns would be, we just don’t get fighting games using this type of furturistic space themed sci-fi as a backdrop. And it’s something that gives Plasma Sword a uniquely late 90s retro vibe that I think any fans of sci-fi and fighting games can appreciate and really enjoy. The characters lean into sci-fi weirdness so hard that it is actually comical at times: Gore is this dog looking thing with a fully exposed brain, there are two full robot characters with guns they can shoot, and then there is Saturn, who is…..yeah….I mean just look at this guy. For fighting games, I think it is important to have characters that are unique and fun to engage with. Outside of the general setting and over-the-top character design, the special effects in this game are really cool in general, all of the plasma sword and plasma field attacks are so flashy and fun to pull off that it keeps me coming back for more battles. Additionally these moves are also not too difficult to pull off, once you learn a characters basic specials all the plasma based attacks are all the same button combinations so it makes things easy to get into and simple to jump in and play multiple characters.
The combat in Plasma Sword is so smooth and responsive, centering around multiple special plasma abilities you can leverage offensively and defensively that consume your plasma meter that you build up throughout the fight. Every character has a few plasma specials that you can use by pressing a direction and ZL on the Switch controller, for defense, you can do a counter-move if you time it right to do a Plasma Revenge which negates your opponents attack and backstabs them. These are both really satisfying to pull off but the real star of the show in my opinion is the Plasma Field. Basically what you try to do is trap your opponent inside a plasma field where, for a short period of time, you have special abilities and combos and your opponent has no access to their own plasma abilities. This is again where Plasma Sword stands out with its sci-fi theme, because when you successfully pull this off you literally trap your opponent in another dimension and the whole color and backdrop of the stage changes. It is so trippy and flashy, and just awesome to pull off every time. Your opponent can block the plasma field and still block and do basic attacks once they’re trapped in it so you still have to be careful with how you use it. But some of the things you can pull off in here are truly spectacular and a real highlight of the game for me so far.
So, this experience with Plasma Sword has also made me reflect a bit on fighting games, the genre as a whole. I haven’t really been a huge fan of fighting games over the past 15 years or so, I can’t remember exactly when I stopped gravitating to these games but I just remember feeling less excited to play these games. Especially in recent years, it has really started to feel like the genre as a whole is pretty inaccessible to those of us who want to just play casually. But it wasn’t always like this, I remember fondly when I was a kid, just goofing around with my brother playing Tekken 3 on the Playstation or playing hours of Mortal Kombat or Street Fighter or Smash Brothers. Somewhere along the way, fighting games became so dominated by the competitive online scene that those of us who just wanted to play casually felt like the genre was just out of reach for us. There was that pressure to compete, and if you didn’t have the hours to pour into becoming a competitive ranked player then why even bother? But honestly, I’ve felt none of that playing Plasma Sword, and the more I have these experiences with games it just reinforces in general that all these games are so much more fun when you just take your time, have fun at your own pace, and create your own experiences. Don’t concern yourself with whatever the meta strategy is for these games, or which characters and combos are the most broken. I’ve been having fun with this one just going through arcade mode with all the characters, enjoying the whacky storylines, and slowly improving as I learn more of the game mechanics. And I feel like that’s how it used to be, and it took this obscure, nearly 30 year old fighting game to remind me of how fun this genre can be.
I was also reflecting on what can cause a game like this to get overlooked during its time. Why is this a game I never heard of compared to the more popular 3D fighters of that time period? When I look at the reviews on this game that were written when it came out it looks like this game was just overshadowed by games that were more technically impressive at the time. So this game hit home consoles in April of 2000 on the Dreamcast…this was pretty poor timing because there were VERY impressive arcade ports of popular 3D fighters that year with Soulcalibur hitting the Dreamcast a few months before and Tekken Tag Tournament hitting the Playstation 2 just a few months after this. But this is exactly why I think it is so important to revisit these old games even if they didn’t have the best critical reception or sales numbers. This little cult gem of a fighting game was tucked away in the early 2000s, overshadowed by the more popular and technically impressive 3D fighters of the day. Looking back on it with fresh eyes, its possible to be able to evaluate it on its own merits and see what makes it unique. I often think about what games in overcrowded genres right now may get looked at fondly years from now when the dust settles, maybe its a roguelite or an extraction shooter or something that is currently not able to compete with the genre titans but given enough years, you might look back and think….that game had something special.