Dear Capcom: Just make a new Darkstalkers fighting game. Please. I can’t take this decade-long back and forth any longer. And like clockwork, hopes are once again renewed based on the news that Capcom has filed a new trademark in Japan for the monster mashing fighting franchise, which it also did back in December. Is it happening dot gif? Hold your horses, because there’s more than likely nothing to get excited about here unless you like mobile card games.
Have you heard of a mobile game called Teppen? Launched in 2019, the mobile card game by mobile developer GungHo Online recently hit its one-year anniversary and a milestone of over 4 million downloads. Using Capcom franchises as the basis for cards and expansions, the game has found its footing as a pretty decent competitive mobile game that lovingly makes use of those Capcom properties better than Capcom itself has done as of late. Now, I’m not a betting person, but based on the August 4, 2020 trademark filing by Capcom and its verbiage of “provided and the provision of information on this online game, the provision of games for mobile phone use and for smartphones and mobile communication terminal device according to the online and the provision of information,” I would have to assume that this filing is most definitely for a mobile release, and probably for something Teppen-related.
The Darkstalkers franchise in its pure form has vanished ever since 2013’s Darkstalkers Resurrection, a game that former creative head at Capcom Yoshinori Ono once said was one where the company would look at its sales and make a decision to bring it back based on performance. Spoilers: It didn’t perform all that well, and so we wait once more.
This is all to say that Darkstalkers is probably still dead and Capcom continues to do everything correct lately except for its fighting games, which continues to be a new sore spot in a post-Street Fighter V world. Sorry kids, you’ll have to get your Morrigan fix somewhere else.
