Upon initial launch, Night Slashers: Remake presents itself within a fake 4:3 arcade screen frame, where the first character appears against a beautifully drawn landscape, followed by incredible decaying flesh zombies. At that point we thought, “Damn, this looks great.” A moment later, the screen flashed in full widescreen, revealing real makeover and informs us that we were momentarily fooled by the original arcade graphics. The redesigned aesthetic, in contrast, is a giant leap down.
This anecdote tells you all you need to know about the biggest problem with this remake of Data East’s beat ’em up: its visuals are stunningly tasteless. And no, it’s not a nostalgia problem. The graphics of the far superior arcade original have been replaced with an art style reminiscent of the stiff Flash games of the early 2000s. The new shadow puppet-like ghosts lack depth, and their overly smooth limbs seem to float around in still animations and slide oddly across the floor.
After a while, you start to adjust and let yourself get into the game — which remains enjoyable — but, like the ugly Snow Bros. remake, it feels like the developer went to a lot of trouble for no reason. There are options to increase saturation and gamma, which help a little, and retro filters that do very little, and one seems to spoil the graphics via clumsy forced pixelation. As an aside, and for some inexplicable reason, the visual adjustments from the menu can’t be seen in real time because pausing the game turns the screen black and white.
Night Slasher’s main hook is its horror theme, blending ideas from Shelley, Stoker, Universal Studio’s monster classics and, of course, Romero’s zombie legacy. Typically Japanese, it features werewolves Teen WolfAmerican style baseball jackets, eccentric literary caricatures and just enough wacky entanglement. It’s a fun departure from the rough streets of the 80’s that typified the arcade belt scrolling genre of the time and, more importantly, it always looked great, with trucks plowing through hordes of zombies and morgue bags strewn about morgue shelf.
And while the new aesthetic is a step backwards, there are still positives in this remake. On its arcade release in 1993, Night Slashers was censored in Western regions and certain parts of Asia – but now it’s more bitter than ever. Blood spurts like a severed artery, and bodies melt and splatter under the hail of fists. There’s also a reworked soundtrack to enjoy, and it’s mostly good; but if you prefer a heavy synth to the original, you can easily change it in the options screen. There are now also special bonuses that can be unlocked through the game, including a number of color palette changes for your team and a custom mode where you can customize your game by turning certain functions on and off. A brand new character, Liu Feilin, joins the monster crowd with a nice array of attacks, and four-player co-op is an option for the first time.
However, the most important are the combat improvements. These include new or redesigned moves that expand each character’s playstyle quite a bit. You can charge to throw supernatural projectiles or perform slide attacks that stretch across the screen – and rap tors can now optionally and usefully throw attackers forward. If you’re in a fist fight, you can now break out of the pattern by moving instructions, a bit like recovering from vertigo in Street Fighter.
On top of that, enemies that collide with the edge of the screen will bounce, allowing you to juggle them for a lot of mid-air damage. You can still do all the cool stuff from the original, like slam zombies to the ground and then stomp on their heads, as well as run, jump, and make a real monster mush with basic tap combos.
More critically, the complete overhaul of weight balancing makes for a much more enjoyable console experience, and this is a welcome decision. The original arcade game is difficult for newcomers and takes time to understand all of its (admittedly deep) combat nuances. The remake lowers the entry lane, curbing enemy resilience and regularly dishing out extra lives. You also take far less damage when you take a hit, and your super attacks (traded for some of your health) are much more powerful. For some, the default difficulty may now be also easy, but there are options to increase through several levels, until you’re dealing with literal hordes of the undead.
But what bothers us is the very slight sluggishness as a result of the game’s excessively smooth pseudo-animation and noticeable flaws in the AI. Most enemies seem to be easy to take out with a quick tap combo and line up to go down in the easiest way possible. Additionally, with the second stage rock man boss, if you stand roughly in the center of the ghost, he will often punch you. This kind of looseness seems to be present in places where it wasn’t originally – possibly on purpose, possibly a byproduct of your enemies’ changing vision and reduced acuity. We also got stuck on the Game Over screen twice, couldn’t get out without a hard reset, and this definitely needs a patch.
It’s true that video games aren’t all about skin. Graphics don’t make a game, and that remains true here. With all the combat changes and encouraging challenges, it’s a fun game to play if you enjoy horror-themed arcade action, despite the short campaign.
However, when you’re remaking a game that already has a very attractive visual style, it’s important to either improve it or keep it. While Night Slashers: Remake fails in this regard, its worst crime is not offering the option to play a new version of the game with the original graphics.
That leaves potential buyers with a tough choice: buy this, at a relatively low price, and enjoy the new mechanical tweaks while squinting at the dirty redesign; or stick with the great-looking original arcade game and settle for a much higher level of challenge. The fact that Johnny Turbo’s Arcade port of the original was delisted in 2023 might make that decision easier, but you’ll be missing out on the prettiest version.
Conclusion
There are reworked ideas here that are worth noting. For fans of the original, it’s interesting to revisit Night Slashers with new characters, new combat options and a redeveloped and friendly level of challenge. If that were all, we could probably recommend this remake as a fun arcade diversion that messes with the template enough to offer a new experience. The modern visual style, however, is so lazily executed that it’s mostly unappealing, robbing the game of its aesthetic charm. If that’s not an issue for you, the price might still be low enough not to scare you off completely.