NotCliche

Recently, I was alerted to a notice that the local arcade Zone-X has new Tatsunoko VS Capcom machines in every outlet in Singapore. I’m a big fan of Capcom 2D fighting games so after I found out, I headed down to the nearest outlet to try it out.

The character roster consists of 18 playable characters, 9 from each side. I don’t know much about Tatsunoko besides Casshern Sins and Neon Genesis Evangelion so most of the characters on the Tatsunoko side are unfamiliar to me. As for Capcom, they have went for the approach that only one character will represent each series. This is a nice change from the usual Ryu/Ken/Gouki appearances. A few people might ask the question, “Why did Chun Li appear even though Ryu is already there?”. My answer? Ryu is representing Street Fighter while Chun Li is representing Street Fighter II. Just see the picture at the top of this post! Personally, I found it great since newcomers like Soki from Onimusha : Dawn of Dreams can appear, making each character unique and not carbon copies of each other.

Anyway on to the gameplay. For my first game I went with Ryu/Batsu, from Street Fighter and Rival Schools respectively. The game has changed compared to Marvel VS Capcom 2. Sure, the concept behind tag team crossover fighting is still there, but things like the controls and game mechanics has changed.

For starters, I was thrown off by the fact that you didn’t have punches or kicks. You have Weak/Medium/Strong attack buttons and a Partner button. This is 4 buttons in total, which is strange for a 2D fighting game. It took some getting used to but thanks to the game control scheme sitting on top of the arcade machine, I managed to figure it out quick. To swap your character, you have to press Back + Partner. Without looking at the controls on top, I never would’ve figured it out. I was assuming from the start that you had to press Strong Punch + Strong Kick to swap but unfortunately, punches and kicks were missing.

Doing Air Combos (a staple in 2D fighting) is easier in this game. All you have to do is hold down+right, press strong attack and you’ll launch your opponent into the air. Jump up and combo. I’ve yet to figure out how you switch characters during an air combo to extend the amount of hits and damage so I’m not doing anything impressive, considering it is really easy to do combos in this game. It seems that the AI is completely helpless against these combos, making me wonder what the difficulty setting was set to.

One interesting addition to the game was gigantic robots. One stage before the boss, I had to face off with the PTX-40A from Capcom’s Lost Planet. Since it was a robot, it was massive in size and it can only be used alone if you chose it as a playable character (no partners). It has super armor but it can be dizzied. In the end, I just ended up spamming hadoken to victory.

After fighting a gigantic robot, I was expecting something epic to be the final boss. Turns out it was Yami from Capcom’s Okami. I never finished the game so I didn’t know what it looked like, but it certainly wasn’t epic. That was until I realized that this particular boss had 3 forms.

In Marvel vs Capcom, you had 2 characters as a team so the boss had 2 forms. In Marvel VS Capcom 2, you had 3 characters in a team so the boss had 3 forms. See where I’m going with this? It was a big shocker to me that the boss had 3 forms while your team only had 2 characters. At least they had the decency to replenish a bit of health in between forms, but even then it isn’t enough for someone who is seeing the boss for the first time. Eventually I was caught in the last form’s flaming beam attack which chipped the hell out of Ryu and he died.

Overall, it was a fun game and a good revival after 8 years since Marvel VS Capcom 2 was released for the arcades (or 7 years since Capcom VS SNK 2 if you want to be picky). If you see it in your local arcade, give it a go! Zone X charges it at 95 cents – 1 dollar per credit and if you’re good at fighting games, it’s money well spent.

Disclaimer : Screenshots of the game found on gamefaqs and google.

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