Oh, if only...
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.
Not to be confused with the
Capcom Vs. series, which are traditional 2-D fighters with a cast of hundreds.
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
- Guilty Gear: Dust Strikers
- Onimusha: Blade Warriors
- DreamMix TV World Fighters, which focused on characters from Konami, Hudson, 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 Evangelion mechs (and one from Gunbuster)
- Tales Of Versus for the Tales Series
- The Digimon Battle Spirit and Digimon Rumble Arena games.
- 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.
- Attacktix is a table version of this.
- Heroclix uses a similar concept for a tabletop game with Comic Book heroes.
- Sunday VS Magazine: Shuuketsu! Choujou Daikessen! which is basically a crossover fighter between manga magazines Shōnen Sunday and Weekly Shōnen Magazine. Featuring characters from their respective mangas (Fairy Tail, Air Gear, Negima, Inuyasha, Project ARMS, Zettai Karen Children etc)
- The fangame Card Sagas Wars takes the concept of the Mascot Fighter Beyond The Impossible. Now if only it were playable...
