Cassidy: Unless you're doing a Dream Match Game where the entire point is to include the entire roster, 50 is getting too high for a solid, balanced cast. Once a fighting franchise has more characters than they can reasonably fit in one game, they start cycling through them, rather than including everyone.
Which is why I don't really care if we lose a couple characters. They'll probably be back in a future title.
Let's see... 11 newcomers on top of what we have? For me, those would be:
Takamaru, Isaac/Felix/Matthew, Sveta, Robin, Tiki, Ridley, Mewtwo (not a "newcomer", but shhh.), Cranky Kong, Duster, Isa + Kachi, and [F-Zero character].
...darn it, I need a 12th. Medusa.
edited 28th Feb '14 10:31:57 PM by Enlong
I have a message from another time...Crossover games tend to have larger casts than average. Street Fighter X Tekken, for example, has 55 playable characters, and Marvel vs. Capcom 2 has 56.
The community for SFXT is dead because the balance is so bad (that's not an exaggeration; a crossover of the two biggest fighters in the world and it's not even included at EVO), and I'm given to understand that MVC2's meta game is composed of maybe six or seven characters. They're not exactly paragons of balance.
Every game is designed for balance. And yes, there's a difference between balance in the competitive community and balance to the rest of us. But you can't push the boundaries so far that all but a handful of characters simply get ignored. That's not good for anybody. It's not fun to play, and it's a waste of money.

The animations aren't very basic, they also have physics, complicated hitboxes and collision detection, and then there's balancing them out on top of that, which becomes more difficult exponentially as you add more people, not linearly.
You cannot firmly grasp the true form of Squidward's technique!