Iconic re-imagining of moves emerged due to limits that were placed on the developers
Back in the day, the Marvel vs. Capcom series and its predecessors weren’t looked upon fondly for their game balance, and as it turns out, there was a very good reason for this.
Citing lack of time to adjust the game’s balance, the development staff put their focus on making the gameplay very flashy, adding iconic moves and having a good tempo in the 1996 release of X-Men vs. Street Fighter.
“Due to lack of time, we basically abandoned balancing entirely, but the location tests got amazingly positive feedback and before development even ended we were asked if we could do a sequel,” wrote former Capcom staffer, Atsushi Tomita, about X-Men vs. Street Fighter, where he served as a Planner.
“Our focus was on making it very flashy and feeling good to see extreme animations when you unleash your moves, and having a gameplay tempo that felt good as well. We put our all into realizing this in our short development period,” he said.
This contrasts heavily with fighting game titles in the modern era, where significant resources and time are invested into making these games as balanced as the developers can possibly make them.
Previously, the developers had said that Marvel’s lack of popularity in Japan gave them a ton of freedom, but even internally at Capcom, some people weren’t fans of how the Street Fighter characters were being used in X-Men vs. Street Fighter.
“‘A game like this shouldn’t be known by anyone and just disappear quietly,’ (since it was believed it would tarnish Street Fighter’s image),” wrote Tomita on what he had heard from his fellow Capcom staffers back then, before the Versus series took off and became a huge hit.
“The reason [the previous games] didn’t become a hit in Japan was because of lack of familiarity with the [Marvel] characters and basically being something nobody had asked for, but by adding Street Fighter characters this changed and we didn’t really do any changes to the system itself besides adding character switches (tags),” he said about X-Men vs. Street Fighter following up Marvel Super Heroes.
With a heavy focus on over the top gameplay and not being worried about balance, the developers behind X-Men vs. Street Fighter had a lot of freedom, which they used to redefine some iconic moves.
“The character designers at the time all wanted to focus on characters and pushed things like effect design off on the newbies, but Mr. Sagata on our team who was in charge of effects actually surprisingly liked doing them and was very good at it,” noted Tomita.
“We thought that if we put some extra effort into this area, this is somewhere we could compete with the mainline [Street Fighter] series, so we attached new effects to all of the Street Fighter Alpha characters.
“The first thing Mr. Sagata showed me was a Yoga Fire that reached the end of the screen, and I thought ‘What should I do here?’ but having him show me something as amazing as this, I felt like I had no choice but to say OK and just figure out the balancing of it later,” Tomita said. “And like that, the effects just became more and more extreme and it kept escalating.”
“Ryu’s Hadoken, that was initially his Shinkuu Hadoken. His regular Hadoken was smaller, but as we added flashy effects on all the other characters, his felt really too plain. With that in mind, we figured ‘Well, he might as well shoot a beam, then! Shinkuu Hadoken Beam!’, and that’s how the current one was created.
You can also check out how Arthur from Ghouls ‘n’ Ghosts was originally planned for the first Marvel vs. Capcom game but this plan fell through.
Translations provided by Nicholas “MajinTenshinhan” Taylor.
Source: Event Hubs
