Capcom vs. SNK: The King of Arcades: 2008

SNK had an overall good few years for the arcades while on handhelds and consoles it was more of a mixed bag and very few of what they were putting out, like the Days of Memories visual novel games, were coming out in English.  What's more, after Capcom's complete and total absence in arcades for a good while, they at last came back to challenge SNK this year in 2008.  Will their new arcade games be enough to make up for all the strides SNK had already been making while they were gone?  Let's find out.

The King of Fighters 98: Ultimate Match(SNK)

The original KOF 98 was a celebration of the end of the Orochi Saga, but didn’t quite bring everyone back.  Ultimate Match rectifies that by bringing absolutely everyone back and then some.  Everyone from the Orochi Saga missing from the original game is now added, but this version is far from just a character roster update.

In addition to new characters, several old characters now have alternate move sets based on previous SNK games, like KOF 94 and Real Bout Fatal Fury 2.  These “EX” versions of characters are practically new characters entirely and have their own character portraits different from their regular ones.

With the added characters and bosses there are also all-new stages along with boss stages from KOF 96 and 97 for Goenitz and Orochi.  Now in the single player mode there are 4 different bosses and several different penultimate teams before them.  Because Rugal is no longer the only final boss, his introductory cutscene from the original is removed, but it’s more than a fair tradeoff for quadrupling the boss count and with all the new characters there is now more ending artwork to get.

KOF 98 implements several balance changes to characters and how the super meters work to make for an even better game, but the gameplay and in-game graphics are 1 to 1 with the original Neogeo game, including all the new stages and new character portraits.  I’m not sure if the Taito system is running an expanded ROM of the original KOF 98 or if this version was made from the ground up, but it looks and sounds exactly as it did on the Neogeo during gameplay.  Outside of gameplay the HUD and character select screen is cleaner, straighter and more uniform.

The King of Fighters 98: Ultimate Match lives up to the “ultimate” in its title because it is the ultimate old-school KOF game in terms of multiplayer potential.  SNK crammed as much as they could from the Orochi Saga into this game and polished it all, making it one of the quintessential King of Fighters games to play with others.  Some might even call this one the very best KOF game ever made, as if the original sometimes being called that wasn’t enough.

Samurai Shodown Sen(SNK): First impressions of this game were good.  It has a new and interesting story for a Samurai Shodown spin-off game, once again playing with historical context.  In this game, the fictional European country of Lesphia has been taken over by the traitorous Golba, a prominent veteran of the American Revolutionary War who seeks to conquer Europe and make it stronger so such a loss can never happen again.  He’s basically a European Gaoh and voiced by Norio Wakamoto, which is a winning formula for a Samurai Shodown villain and it makes him the only one who isn’t Japanese.

A lot of the new character designs are interesting and diverse.  Half the cast are returning mainstays, but the other half of new characters fit in with them and I wouldn’t mind them being in more games than just this one.  There’s quite a lot more ethnic diversity in the newcomers too.  In Sen we get a woman from the Ottoman Empire, a dashing Spaniard, a Viking, a cowboy and the main protagonist Suzuhime, the princess of Lesphia who was raised in Japan.  My favorite character is J., a Lesphian who washed up in Japan and trained in the art of the sword.  Even though he’s technically European, J. is very much an anachronism of a black American in the same vein as Galford and Earthquake, sporting an afro and naming his sword Elvis.  That he's also a compassionate and motivated dude makes for a solid character I want to come back in a mainline game.

All the character artwork is some of the best in the series; rich in color, expression and detail.  Even the idea of being a 3D game in the vein of Soul Calibur doesn’t seem like a bad one.  After all, SNK already had experience making 3D Samurai Shodown games on the Hyper Neogeo 64 and we’d later see how well Haohmaru plays in Soul Calibur 6.

The end product made me sad.

The first thing that strikes me about Samurai Shodown Sen is that it is UGLY!  Shockingly ugly!  It came out in 2008, but Soul Calibur 2, a game released a half a decade prior, looks better in every conceivable way!  I’d even go as far as to say the first Soul Calibur is more appealing to look at.  The models in Sen look chunky, with lots of visible jagged edges, almost like the models were made for a lower-end PS2 game.  A lot of times the animations look about as stiff as the most awkward animations in the Maximum Impact games.  A lot of Samurai Shodown Sen matches look like robots fighting.  The in-game cutscenes have decent enough movement animation for 2008, but with how bad the game looks overall it doesn’t do a lot to help.

Grey rocks with some grey running water.

Most of the stages almost look like beta test stages with very little in the way of fun details to look at and the color all around is so washed out that I swear the developers applied a deep greyscaling to everything.  With only a few exceptions, it looks like characters are fighting on a cloudy, gloomy day with a subtle fog rolling in.  Even the darkest and edgiest stages in Samurai Shodown still have color and detail!

This is all before even getting into the gameplay.  I don’t like to call games “rip-offs” because that’s like saying “Simpsons did it” and taking inspiration from something else to get started can lead to amazing new things.  That said, Samurai Shodown Sen is a Soul Calibur rip-off.  It has the vertical and horizontal strikes, the gameplay where the different button combinations combined with the movement stick do a subtlely different move, most projectile moves are missing and there’s combos, something nearly foreign to Samurai Shodown.  It does distinguish itself from Soul Calibur a little bit by employing some of the Samurai Shodown staples, namely a catch-all special button akin to Samurai Shodown 5 and the rage meter, but those barely change the overall feeling that I’m playing a bootleg Soul Calibur.  The controls are stiff, inputs don’t work sometimes and even the dismemberments you can finish opponents off with don’t have the kind of weight or spectacle a good heavy slash finisher does in the main series.  Instead the different ways you can finish off your opponents is presented with more visceral pain and writhing, which I suppose is one way to do it, but it’s not as fun.  Calling it mediocre is the nicest thing to call it, but the best word I can describe it with is “joyless."

If I didn’t know any better I’d swear that Samurai Shodown Sen is unfinished, especially considering the endings.  Each character starts the story with a text scroll introducing them, which is what the KOF Maximum Impact games do and it’s more than what other fighting games do, so that’s fine.  Characters also get unique cutscenes for the bosses, which is more than I expected.  However, the endings are just more text scrolling.  No dramatic finishing off of the final boss or hand-drawn cutscenes like KOF 11.  Just some more text and the translation on that text in the console version released in English is still bad even in 2008.  Lame.

The whole game is lame.  Don’t even bother with it.  Just play a Soul Calibur game.  This is a major loss for SNK and effectively killed the franchise for a decade.

Street Fighter 4(CAP): Street Fighter finally came back after nearly a decade of absence and in a big way.  Street Fighter 4 pushed the 2D fighting game genre forward into the newfangled HD systems and and did so very gracefully.  I love the way Street Fighter 4 looks.  The game is played in 2D, but the graphics are in 3D with a paint-like finish full of the same color, exaggerated character designs and movements you would expect from Street Fighter.  This was very impressive at the time because a style like this in 3D had never been done, or at least not successfully.  The best-looking 3D fighting games were Tekken and Soul Calibur and they went for a more photorealistic style while the 2D games from SNK and Arc System Works were the anime-looking ones.  This was a bold new look.

I also love how Street Fighter 4 plays.  Say what you want about the balance of the original Street Fighter 4, but the core gameplay harkens back to the classic Street Fighter 2 games, where it’s easier to understand and players aren’t punished as much for throwing out moves without worrying about cooldown or windup.  It may go back to the simpler days, but it still has some new tricks to keep it interesting.  Focus attacks are a fun addition, acting as a guard-breaking move that can either leave the player wide open or they can land it to leave the opponent wide open.  Super attacks with the meter are kept, but 4 introduces the stronger ultra attacks, which can be done after you’ve taken enough damage.  Ultra attacks are my favorite addition because they take full advantage of the adjustable camera aspect allowed by the 3D visuals to make them look powerful and epic when they successfully land.  Landing an ultra attack is like landing a level 3 super attack in the alpha games, but with double the hype.

The biggest thing holding Street Fighter 4 back is that we’re determining The King of Arcades.  The arcade release of Street Fighter 4 was a big deal that everyone was swarming to by virtue of it being a new Street Fighter game after nearly a decade, but they weren’t very widely distributed.  When people speak fondly of the original Street Fighter 4, they are almost certainly referring to the console version.  The arcade version is pathetic.

Simply put, the arcade version is starved for content.  It has 16 playable characters, less than Street Fighter Alpha 2 and 3 from a decade prior.  The only story presented for each of them is a very short series of semi-still images with some text at the end of the arcade mode, which again is less than other Street Fighter games from a decade prior.

Really?

The console version adds 9 more characters, more stages and both story introductions and endings that are fully animated, all done with a top-notch English dub featuring the biggest A-listers you could ask for.  This is not that version.  This is the weak version with practically no story or characterization and a low character count.  If I played it in an arcade back then I would be wowed by the visuals and have fun with the gameplay for a while, but would swiftly go back to one of the previous Street Fighter games that have more to offer before long.  It’s a step in the right direction, but overall it doesn’t come close to the likes of KOF 11, with its enormous character count and hand-drawn, story-heavy cutscenes.  I would rag on it more, but at least the console version made up for it shortly after its release.

Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Cross Generation of Heroes(CAP)

Capcom had a double-whammy of fighting games this year.  Very few people expected Japanese animation giant Tatsunoko to be Capcom’s next opponent, but it ended up making for a great game.  It has the gameplay of Marvel vs. Capcom, with the air launching and quick-swapping, but it’s much easier to do combos.  It’s very easy to pick up and play and it’s very nice-looking and colorful, if not as sharp and detailed as Street Fighter 4.  It was made on Wii-based hardware, after all, but with that in mind it’s impressive how this game never has a problem with slowdown even when multiple screen-filling super attacks are being thrown about on top of active and moving backgrounds.

Pretty.

The Tatsunoko side of the character selection is interesting for English speakers because different characters are recognizable by wildly different generations of people.  A lot of them never got an English release, but a few like Hakushon Daimaou, Tekkaman and Science Ninja Team Gatchaman did under different names way back in the early days of anime.  We’re talking the Speed Racer days.

Some of the others got new releases around the time of the game’s release.  Karas was a brand new property and got an English dub, Casshern had his then-new anime Casshern Sins air on Toonami, Gatchaman gets new English releases to this day under its proper name and I myself was watching the 2008 anime remake of Yatterman online, which for whatever reason was never released in English, but still got some attention from English speakers.

The Capcom side has some interesting and seldom-seen characters in their stable.  Alex from Street Fighter 3 is finally in, which you think would’ve happened sooner, and Batsu from Rival Schools is in this one after getting snubbed by Kyosuke in Capcom vs. SNK 2.  I doubt anyone expected Kaijin no Soki from Onimusha: Field of Dreams either.

The most notable innovation that I have yet to see any other fighting game do is the giant characters.  Gold Lightan from Tatsunoko and the PTX-40 A from Capcom’s Lost Planet are as tall as the screen and can be used as a single character instead of a team of 2.  Lightan is more melee-focused while the PTX-40 A is more gun-focused.  They can do tons of damage, but they’re also bigger targets for a lot of character’s moves and since they can’t swap out, they can’t recover health, making them surprisingly balanced despite acting as sub bosses in arcade mode.  Sure other games might have a dedicated mode where you can play as a giant boss character, like Galactus mode later on in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, but here they’re meant to be used just like any other character.

The little details for the fans are present and accounted for.  Stages have lots of detail and cameos from both sides and there are some character-specific win quotes.  The final boss is quite possibly the best in the Capcom vs. series with 3 different forms and each character ending concludes with an animated cutscene from Tatsunoko themselves.  It’s a polished package.

We didn’t get this one in English.  We later got the updated version made for consoles: Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars.  The updated Wii version of the original already added a few new characters, but Ultimate All-Stars added to it further with new characters like Frank West while taking out the Hakushon Daimaou character for licensing reasons.  The biggest loss in Ultimate All-Stars is that the animated endings were taken out and replaced with more Udon artwork, but at least this time the artwork has text to go with it and I think the extra characters make up for it.  Whichever version you play, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom might be the ultimate in the Capcom vs. franchise that doesn’t involve SNK.

The Winner

Capcom really had to play catch-up with their 2008 lineup.  SNK had some stumblings with Metal Slug 6 and Samurai Shodown Sen, but those weren’t enough to bring them down after KOF 11 and 98 Ultimate Match.  That SNK completely outclassed Capcom in making an inter-company crossover only further damned Capcom’s chances.
 
Unfortunately for Capcom, their answer to SNK’s big winners was a game so lacking in content that it felt like a beta test and one great game that wasn’t.  For Capcom to have possibly won here they needed both games to be anywhere between great and a master work that covers all the bases.  Since the arcade version of Street Fighter 4 faltered, SNK is the winner.
 
As long as SNK doesn’t also come out with a beta build with almost no content and a pathetic character roster, we might have our ultimate winner.