Four in February #1 - Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein [DC]

The first game I completed of my Four in February was Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein. This is a fighting game by Capcom that was released in 2000 for the Sega Dreamcast in North America and 1999 in Japan. The game was first released in 1998 in arcades across the world. It's a sequel to Capcom's earlier Star Gladiator - Episode 1: Final Crusade, Capcom's first in-house 3D fighter. I had wanted to play Plasma Sword for a long time, since I had Star Gladiator but not a Dreamcast as a kid. It was the allure of the odd that drove me to it; Star Gladiator was such an unknown game in my friend group, and I had never even seen the sequel.

 

The cover art to Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein is pretty great. There's the hero, Hayato, a colorful bubble, some designs of circuitry or windows in a spacecraft, and a huge title. The colors really make it look like a Dreamcast game, that vapory millennium orange and pink. The Japanese cover shows the whole image that Hayato has been clipped from, a shot of the cast amidst the stars. It resembles a Star Wars poster, and, from what I understand, this series was slated to originally be a fighting game about Jedi and other force users (I mean it still has tons of similarities too), so this seems fitting. Europeans got a weird blue cover with the cast all around. I don't think it lives up to the other two.

Graphically, Plasma Sword is a pretty nice-looking game. Bright colors and flashy effects abound across the well-animated characters. Unlike the first game, backgrounds continue out into infinity. The characters from the first game appear here along with clones for each. The designs are all pretty cool and weird, though some of these clone characters are way too similar. It's not like having clones in a fighting game is unheard of, though.

Sound follows suit in terms of high-quality compositions and sound effects. The music is a bit more rock/metal than the more grandiose epics of Star Gladiator. It's a bit more what you might expect from a one-on-one fighter. The sound effects include a lot of voice samples that help bring the characters to life with all of the slashing space swords and laser effects.

Plasma Sword is a game about slashing space swords; each character has some type of weapon, from your standard beam saber to axes, scythes, yo-yos, and huge disks. The game combines Street Fighter inputs with a 3D fighter combo system. It's a bit like Street Fighter EX, and I am sure that isn't too surprising. Characters have a super meter to fill up can execute big specials with it. They can also create a small area that the opponent cannot escape from to try to execute heavy damage on to them.

The main arcade mode is your standard fight against a number of opponents with a rival match in the middle and a boss at the end. If you do a good job during the normal eight matches of the arcade mode, you might get to fight a strong, final opponent and possibly get a better ending. Otherwise, the game has your standard training, versus, and team battle modes to enjoy as well.

I had fun playing Plasma Sword, and I will definitely play more again in the future, hopefully against other people. It's a fast and weird game, and it represents the Dreamcast well with. I wish there were maybe a few more modes, less clones, and music that sounded as good as Star Gladiator, but Plasma Sword is pretty good otherwise.

Plasma Sword: Nightmare of Bilstein receives a Good (8).

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