What, No Samurai Pizza Cats?: A Review of Tatsunoko vs Capcom

With that many colorful characters, how can this game go wrong? Answer: It doesn't.

How many of you have ever heard of Capcom? Okay, I figured a bunch of you. They are after all responsible for the Meg Man, Resident Evil, and Street Fighter games. Alright then, how many of you have heard of Tatsunoko before? Ooh, I’m not seeing a bunch of hands. Well, I’ll make it my goal that by the end of this review you know what Tatsunoko vs Capcom is and decide to by it.

Capcom has made a nice handful of games for their Capcom vs series over the past decade with Marvel vs Capcom 2 being one of their most beloved, generating an HD remake this past year. Japan saw the release of Tatsunoko vs Capcom last year as well, but the ability to release it anywhere outside of Japan was sketchy at best due to the problems with copyrights laws and who owns what from the Tatsunoko brand outside the land of the rising sun. We are fortunate that not only were these licensing issues sorted out with minimal lost of the original game, the US release has four new characters and all new art for each character ending. That’s good news.

The Real King of Fighters

What makes the Capcom vs games stand out among other fighting games, including Capcom’s own, is that they basically adhere to the same principles that make the Smash Bros game sell so dang well: Favorite characters fighting each other without any inherent story structure. Marvel vs Capcom had a huge collection of favorites from both sides of the equation, and Tatsunoko vs Capcom strikes yet another great balance between known characters and unknown characters to create a rather diverse roster to choose from. Ryu and Chun Li are there, as are Mega Man and Zero, but so are a handful of Tatsunoko’s best.

If I had a dollar for every time I performed a slide kick to a guy in a bird costume...

Oh right, you may still be unaware who Tatsunoko are. I’m still mostly unaware myself. Tatsunoko is one of Japan’s anime leaders and have been for quite a while, so the company has a heck of a lot of recognizable and loveable characters to choose from. You may not recognize any of them at first, but after playing a bit you’ll learn to love them.

That’s yet another benefit of the US version: it’s been rebalanced. Capcom took notice of how the game had been played and altered it just enough to fix anything that needed fixing, such as possible exploits for people to hit infinite combos. Balancing like that makes me happy, mostly because I find no fun when on the receiving end of an infinite combo. It’s even more important since an online feature has been added now, meaning you’ll thank Capcom when you aren’t getting your butt handed to you by some jerk that found a glitch or two to ruin the game with.

Tatsunoko vs Capcom is a smooth presentation. It’s a great fighter for the Wii and will do a lot of good to help people with Smash Bros addictions but no new outlets. Consider this your new option over Turtles Smash-Up