Followed by Rankin Bass vs. Capcom.note
"Games like this make it seem like Capcom has a lot of enemies. Everybody wants to fight them."
A lengthy series of Massive Multiplayer Crossover Fighting Games, all of which feature Capcom and another company.
It's composed of several crossover series, which are listed chronologically:
Fighting games
- Marvel vs. Capcom
- X-Men: Children of the Atom (featured Akuma as a Secret Character)
- Marvel Super Heroes (featured Anita as a Secret Character)
- X-Men vs. Street Fighter
- Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter
- Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes
- Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes
- Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds
- Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3
- Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite
- SNK vs. Capcom
- Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Cross Generation of Heroes
- Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars
Also see SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters Clash, a Card Battle Game series which acted as a precursor to the above-listed fighters.
Related:
- Namco × Capcom, which stars the titular game companies, but is a RPG instead a fighting game.
- The Project × Zone series, which added two more companies (Sega and Nintendo) to the mix.
- Sonic the Hedgehog/Mega Man: Worlds Unite, a comic book event that involves several game worlds besides the title two and is effectively a "Sega vs. Capcom" story.
- Taisen Net Gimmick: Capcom vs. Psikyo All Stars, a Mahjong game for Sega Dreamcast starring various characters from Capcom and Psikyo companies, with Ryu and Morrigan Aensland playing against Tengai and Koyori, as other characters from different franchises of both comapnies.
- Street Fighter X Tekken pretty much only features those two series, the exceptions being their companies' respective mascots and three PlayStation exclusive characters owned by Sony, despite also being a fighting game.
- Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS and Wii U features Mega Man and Ryu being able to face off against the heroes and villains of Nintendo (as well as Sonic the Hedgehog, Pac-Man, Cloud Strife, and Bayonetta). Super Smash Bros. Ultimate sees the two return with Ken Masters in tow to battle all of the previously mentioned characters, along with some new faces thrown in, including the Hungry Wolf, Terry Bogard & Chucking People Off of Cliffs, Kazuya Mishima fighting game characters who the Street Fighter cast has faced off with in the past, with additional content from Monster Hunter, Resident Evil, Ghosts 'n Goblins, and Devil May Cry also being present.
- Capcom vs. Osamu Tezuka Characters, a 2020 art exhibition whose promotional art
plays up the concept as a traditional Capcom vs. title.
Tropes:
- Bootstrapped Theme: This is a recurring element for the Capcom side. For instance, characters like Ryu, Batsu, and Alex have their home stage themes as their background music, even though in their original games the background music are not tied to them but to the stages. Another example is Mega Man Trigger/Volnutt receiving the theme that accompanied the Flutter vs. Gesselschaft Boss Battle in MML1 which followed him from NxC into Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. (Tron herself would later get this theme for herself in Marvel vs. Capcom 3.)
- Card Battle Game: The SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters Clash series, which is the first official crossover with SNK.
- Continue Countdown: Many of the games would have a Continue Countdown for a losing player. The second and third Marvel vs. Capcom games would even give the player a message of encouragement if they decided not to continue."Don't give up! Challenge again!""You're not gonna go out like that, are you? Get back in there and try again!"
- Cool Versus Awesome: The whole point behind these series. The most beloved characters in video game history clashing it out between each other, and with comic book and anime superheroes and villains.
- Costume Evolution: Certain characters change outfits as the series progresses to keep up with their updated designs in the original media, most notably Iron Man, Hawkeye, Wolverine and Storm. The Hulk's The Professor/Merged Hulk incarnation was also used in the earlier games, before reverting to the more iconic Savage Hulk persona from 3 onward.
- Enemy Mine: The plots usually revolve around heroes and villains from both companies working together to take down a threat that endangers their respective worlds, such as Galactus in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 or Yami in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom. As a result, it's entirely possible to build a team of characters who are mortal enemies in their own series. Penny Arcade references this in this strip.
- Fake Crossover: There is no continuity between the games, and the storylines are not referenced anywhere else. However, there's a surprising aversion during the Spider-Verse storyline, where the villain Morlun drops in on Spider-Man of Earth-30847, who is explicitly shown to be the Marvel vs. Capcom version of the character, up to and including having a confused player standing at the arcade machine, watching the scene unfold.◊
- The Grappler:
- The Capcom characters Zangief and Haggar retain their movesets from Street Fighter and Final Fight respectively.
- Hulk, Nemesis, Juggernaut, Colossus, Sentinel and Omega Red all have at least one extremely powerful grapple ability to supplement their slow but powerful attacks.
- She-Hulk's primary fighting game involves three variations of the same grapple: the basic grab, a long-range version with slow startup, and an aerial version. If it lands, it stuns the opponent long enough to follow up with combos for big damage. Thanks to having off-the-ground attacks, even her aerial throws can also be used to start combos.
- Thor has an extremely powerful command grab which is one of the main tools of his moveset, and can be done in both the air and the ground. One interaction with Mike Haggar even has Haggar praise Thor's grappling power and "mic skills" and say he'd gladly get Thor in touch with his agent.
- New Work, Recycled Graphics: A hallmark of the pre-3D installments. This began to become an issue as time went on and the arcade hardware and home consoles running the games started to get more and more sophisticated. Examples include:
- The Marvel vs. Capcom series reused sprites from Street Fighter Alpha, Darkstalkers, X-Men: Children of the Atom and Marvel Super Heroes. The characters who got new sprites were generally ones who hadn't appeared in any prior 2D fighting games, such as Rogue and Gambit in X-Men vs. Street Fighter, Mega Man and Captain Commando in Marvel vs. Capcom, and Jill, Cable, Hayato and the Original Generation characters in Marvel vs. Capcom 2.
- The Capcom-produced installments of SNK vs. Capcom fared better in this regard. All the SNK fighters had to be redrawn in the more anime-inspired Capcom style, in addition to Capcom characters who'd never before appeared in 2D fighting games, such as Kyosuke and Maki. Capcom also went a step further and did brand new sprites for returning fighters like Ryu, Chun-Li, Akuma, M. Bison, Dan, Eagle and Yun, which served to make the blatant recycling of sprites from the early-to-mid '90s games look even more blatant by comparison.
- This goes all the way back to X-Men: Children of the Atom, the unofficial start of the Vs. franchise. Akuma just reuses his more realistic-looking Street Fighter II Turbo sprite, which clashes badly with the anime-style sprites used by the X-Men characters.
- Power Creep, Power Seep: Kind of necessary, especially in the Marvel crossovers, where you have Ryu and Zangief taking on the likes of Thanos, Phoenix, and Shuma-Gorath.
- Shout-Out: With its own page.
- Superheroes: You'll see (most of) the best known ones from the West (Marvel) and the East (Tatsunoko). And Bravoman and Wonder Momo (Namco).
- Spotlight-Stealing Crossover: X-Men and Street Fighter characters usually tend to dominate the cast, with Marvel vs. Capcom 2 being especially infamous in this regard (with over half the roster being more Street Fighter and X-Men than anything else), though Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and its Ultimate update toned things down a bit (only four Street Fighter characters, and while there were still a considerable amount of X-Men, there were plenty of other characters as well), and Infinite keeps Ryu and Chun-Li as the only Street Fighter representatives with the X-Men characters getting removed due to
Marvel's corporate pettiness over their film rights then being owned by 20th Century Fox. Capcom vs. SNK, meanwhile, is almost exclusively Street Fighter and The King of Fighters characters.
- Wolverine Publicity: One could say that's the whole point of this series with the non-Wolverine examples.
- Expect Ryu and Chun-Li to be present in any crossover game.
- To a much lesser extent you also have Ken Masters (who usually only appears in crossovers that are specifically focused on fighting game characters and/or exclusively have the Street Fighter roster on the Capcom side; he was absent in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, Infinite, and Tatsunoko vs. Capcom and and is an alternate mode for Ryu in the original Marvel vs. Capcom), Zangief (who was replaced by Alex in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, by Hugo in SVC Chaos, and Haggar in Marvel vs. Capcom 3 and Infinite), Akuma (missed Tatsunoko and Infinite, and like Ken is only playable through Ryu in the first Marvel vs. Capcom) and Morrigan (who was replaced by Demitri in SVC Chaos, a game which, unsurprisingly, was developed by SNK and not Capcom, and does not appear in any Street Fighter specific games).
- Let's not get started on the non-Capcom examples, especially the Trope Namer. He is the only Marvel character who has appeared in every single Marvel vs. Capcom entry from X-Men: Children of the Atom all the way up to Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. He even has TWO versions of himself in MvC2. The only Marvel characters to come close to meeting his near-perfect attendance record would be Spider-Man, Captain America and the Hulk, who have appeared in every installment of the series that were not X-Men only.
- Wrestler in All of Us: The only way to explain many, upon many, upon many, upon MANY of the specials and supers in this series.
