A particular form of
Fighting Game.
The
Mascot Fighter is rarely a series in and of itself, and is usually based off another game or anime series, or is a
Massive Multiplayer Crossover.
Mascot Fighters are usually characterized by 2-D gameplay, even though the characters and graphics may be in 3-D. They are almost always four-player, and usually have multi-level playing fields. The action of a Mascot Fighter is usually fast-paced, and often chaotic. With four players, usually every man for himself, attacks can often come out of nowhere, so long
Combos are usually discouraged, if even possible. Battles can be to the
ahem "death", but more often than not, you can also win by
knocking the enemy off the stage entirely. Items and Weapons that appear at random intervals and locations are also a big part of gameplay, and can often turn the tide of a battle.
Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny will nearly always apply.
This genre pretty much sprung fully-formed from the head of
Super Smash Bros., with the other games in the genre jumping off from there.
Note: Just because it's a crossover fighting game does not necessarily mean it's a Mascot Fighter. The distinction is in the
gameplay (For an example, compare the mechanics of
Smash Bros. to the
Capcom Vs. series).
Other games of this genre include:
- Viewtiful Joe: Red Hot Rumble
- Jump Super Stars, based on several manga series found in Shonen Jump, from Dragon Ball and One Piece to Yu-Gi-Oh! and Naruto.
- Battle Stadium D.O.N. is quite similar, albeit with a character selection limited to DragonBall, One Piece and Naruto
- Sunday x Magazine for the PSP has the same premise as JSS, but using characters from series published in Shogakukan's Shonen Sunday (like InuYasha and Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple) and Kodansha's Shonen Magazine (like Mahou Sensei Negima! and Fairy Tail), as well as Cyborg009 (which ran in both magazines at different points in time), but plays in a more traditional way than JSS.
- Guilty Gear: Dust Strikers & Guilty Gear: Isuka
- Onimusha: Blade Warriors
- Dream Mix TV World Fighters, which focused on characters from Konami, Hudson Soft, and Takara, from Solid Snake and Simon Belmont to Bomberman and Optimus Prime.
- Castlevania Judgment does this with just Castlevania characters, including the aforementioned Simon Belmont.
- Dissidia: Final Fantasy
- Neon Genesis Evangelion: Battle Orchestra obviously enough does this with the Evangelion mechas, Jet Alone, The Cameo from Gunbuster and various Angels.
- Tales Of Versus for the Tales Series
- Digimon Rumble Arena, Digimon Battle Spirit and their sequels are this for the anime instalments of the Digimon franchise.
- Capcom's Power Stone series is one of the rare examples of an original franchise of this genre.
- The Naruto Ultimate Ninja series of games play like Mascot fighters.
- Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Smash Up. It's even helmed by one of the multiple developers of Super Smash Bros. Brawl to boot.
- Shrek Super Slam.
- Fullmetal Alchemist: Dream Carnival plays like one of these.
- Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee and its sequels/related games do this for the Toho Kaiju.
- Although not a traditional 2D fighter, Wormux is a freeware Worms clone that pits teams of mascots from various open source projects against each other. The mascot teams include Tux, the gnu (GNU project), Konqi (KDE), Wilbur (GIMP), the SUSE lizard, Mozilla's Firefox and Thunderbird, the OpenOffice seagulls, the BSD daemon, and more.
- The fangame Card Sagas Wars takes the concept of the Mascot Fighter Beyond the Impossible. Now if only it were playable...
- The website says well over 800 cards, closer to 900, which is the number of characters that will appear in the game. However, there are still "only" 36 playable characters, many from completely unrelated video games. Unfortunately, not even the beta with 4 playable characters is available for download yet. Still, the videos on Youtube show that the game does exist, if only on the developers' computers.
- The video game Marvel Super Hero Squad, based on the toy franchise and TV show, fits well in this sub-genre.
- The Newgrounds Rumble (Seen here), which does this for the site Newgrounds, including characters such as Pico and Nene, the P-Bot, Salad Fingers, Hank from Madness Combat, the Tankman, the Alien Hominid and other characters who were featured on the site.
- Two Tom and Jerry games: Fists of Furry and War of the Whiskers.
- There was this doujin game based on Suzumiya Haruhi. It even had Konata Izumi as a Guest Fighter.
- Cartoon Network has two. The first, a game on their website called Titanic Kunfubot Offensive. The other, Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion, was released in North America to home systems on November 15th, 2011 - a Nintendo 3DS version was released earlier on June 2nd, 2011.
- The Gundam Vs Series was originally a Mecha Game, but the action got more fast-paced as time went on to the point where the crossover games (Gundam Vs. Gundam, its Updated Rerelease Gundam Vs. Gundam Next Plus, and sequel Gundam Extreme Vs.) are effectively a hybrid Mecha Game/Mascot Fighter.
- The Kunio Kun game Nekketsu Kakutō Densetsu was based around four-man brawls (and is an example predating Super Smash Bros.).
- A Sony mascot fighter is set to happen, including Nathan Drake, Sackboy, Kratos, and more. Sweet Tooth's model can be seen here.
- Rag Doll Kung Fu Fists Of Plastic is another rare example of an original franchise with this type of gameplay.
