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Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom: etc, etc, etc

In a sentence, imagine Street Fighter II with slightly nicer graphics and hyper combos.

In more than a sentence, why is it that Capcom’s fighting games are allowed to be so lazy and yet get relatively good reviews? Street Fighter IV, Marvel vs Capcom 3 and the 1.1 versions of both of those. Shallow and lazy. Particularly the versus series. Great potential for some kind of interesting story mode reduced to a handful of cool cutscenes.

So. What do you get in Tats vs Caps? Not a lot. Punch people in the head on seven stages in Arcade Mode. Punch people in the ahead against the clock in survival mode and punch as many people in the head before your life runs out in Survival Mode. Even for a Capcom game there is a paucity of unlockables. Extra costumes, still images from the ending, three movies, two and a halfish, some artwork, spinnable 3D models and a stage viewer are all available. After you unlock them. And buy them from the shop for waaaay too much ‘zenny’ the in-game credits. Perhaps the worst unlockable in recent years is one of the special illustrations. At various points in the game you unlock five special illustrations. The first two are the game cover and an alternate cover. The third and fourth images are special illustrations of the character line up (barring the new characters for the Wii release). However, the fifth image you unlock is exactly the same as the first image. Unless I’m missing something but I spent literally minutes trying to spot the difference. There’s also a mini game to unlock but unlocking it is on the wrong side of frustrating and playing it is the wrong side of enjoyable.

Although they aren’t strictly like for like, comparing what you get for your cash with the likes of Super Smash Brothers Brawl just doesn’t justify the purchase. Especially if you aren’t familiar with the DC comic strip Tatsunoko heroes Force. The game won’t help you with this either because obviously there wasn’t enough space on the disc to provide character biographies. Even some of the Capcom characters are a bit obscure.

There’s online fighting which is exactly what you expect from an online beat ’em up game. Expect to lose hard and fast to everyone online. Expect to fight Ryu too. A lot.

It’s playable and probably fun with a group of friends but in this day and age you need to do a bit more than this. Also what irks me about these games is how transient the line-ups are. Would it really be impossible for capcom to just include all of their characters? Especially when the meat of the game (punching people in the head) is so shallow.

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