After over a year of being out in Japan, Tatsunoko vs Capcom gets a revision. And strangely enough it came out in the America as well.

You might not know who Tatsunoko is. And, frankly, until the American release for this game was announced, I didn’t know either. I did my research and learned about their anime series, and realized there were a few I actually did know(Yatterman, Karas, I knew a bit about Casshan). And I watched some gameplay videos for a while too… Wow, this looked really fun. When I found out it was announced for the US I knew I had to get it.

Was it worth the wait? Are the characters fun to use? How’s the fighting engine?

Read my review and you’ll hopefully get an answer to all those questions.
(Note: I did not play “Cross Generation of Heroes”, I did not play the arcade version… and I am by no means a pro at fighting games)

Developer: Eighting
Publisher: Capcom
Date of Release: January 26th 2010

Platforms: Wii

Genre: Fighting
Players: 1-2 (online enabled)
Rated T for Teen

Looks and sounds
The graphics are really good, especially for the Wii. The visual style, using cel-shading, is really good, making everything fit very well together. The character models are very well done, each really well representing the character’s look and style. The animations are really cool. Some attacks look right out of their respective anime, and everything is really nice and smooth, there’s really nothing to complain about here. Also, all the animated endings from CGoH have been removed, replaced instead by still images and text. Weird and kinda disappointing choice.

The sounds are okay. Other than Frank West, all the voice-acting is in japanese, and it sounds quite good. The music is not too great. It’s all techno stuff. Not bad, but not very memorable. There’s one thing that changed here from CGoH, where you had music for each character and the music constantly changed as characters were switched out and such. Now it’s just stage music. The whole constantly changing music thing is pretty annoying, so I think it’s a good change.

Gameplay
And here’s the link to my Character impressions.

Basics
The gameplay here is… surprisingly simple.  You have 3 attack buttons: Low(weak), Medium and High(strong). A fourth button is used for controlling your partner. Normal attacks come in various shapes and forms. The attack you’ll do depends on. Just like any other fighting game really. Special attacks come out when you do charges, quarter-circles, half-circles plus any one of the buttons. Pressing a different attack button after the input changes the attack’s effect(for example, Ryu’s hurricane kick goes further if you use the strong attack button). Some characters have certain special attacks that are only done when a certain attack button is used. Super attacks (called Hyper Combos here) are done the same way as specials, except you have to press any 2 attack button instead of just one of them. And each character has a level 3 super which takes more of the special bar, but is usually pretty powerful (dealing between 20000 and 30000 damage). On that note, each character has between 35000 and 55000 HP. The giants have a bit above 65000.

The partner button has a few uses. You have to wait a little bit after each use f the partner Pressing it alone summons your other character to do an attack (your partner can get hit at that time). Each character has a different assist attack. By pressing back and the partner button, you switch character (the character than comes in will also hit the enemy). Pressing forward and the partner button while guarding from an attack brings out the partner for a counter-attack. You can also switch characters during an air combo with a quarter-circle forward and the partner button.

The fighting takes place in a familiar manner. You choose 2 characters for your team (or 1 if you want to play as a giant), then you fight face to face with your opponents, and the first one to remove all the life from both of the opponent’s characters wins. It’s the usual formula that always works. Dish out normal attacks, combos, supers and defend properly until one of the two players lose. The gameplay is a bit faster than other fighting games. Maybe a tad bit slower than MvC2. Combos are fast and easy enough to perform, even for beginners. Each character has a different fighting style, so none of the characters really plays like any of the other characters, which is really cool. There’s really no “clones” here.

Advanced techniques
There’s a few “advanced” techniques.
After any hit, you can press the partner button plus any attack button at the same time, which will do a “Baroque”… it’s basically a cancel. It uses some of the red section of your life bar(so you have to have gotten hit to be able to Baroque), and right when you do it you can do whatever you want instantly. More attacks to boost your combo, call you partner, you can block, whatever. It’s a really useful feature, and it’s quite easy to do as well.
When you’re guarding, pressing all 3 attack buttons(or the R button on the Gamecube controller) as your enemy hits you does an advance guard, which give you less(I think two third’s less) “recovery time” from the guard, letting you take action faster after guarding.
After doing an attack that sends your enemy flying in the air, you can follow them up to start an air combo, which can deal major damage.
Pressing all 4 buttons at once does a mega crash. It uses up 2 hyper combo bars, but breaks you out of any combo or grab (other than Hyper Combos). It can also be used to combo the enemy, but that’s a bit harder to do.

While I call those “advanced” techniques, they’re really not too complicated to pull off, and with a bit of practice anyone will be able to use each of them effectively.

Game modes
There’s a few modes. Arcade makes you go through 8 fights against the CPU, the last being the final boss. As far as fighting game final bosses go, this one is pretty tame, as long as you don’t have characters that are completely mismatched against it. All unlockable characters are unlocked through arcade mode.
After that, you have Time Attack, which requires you to get to the end of a string of fights as fast as possible.
Survival mode requires to survive as many battles as possible against increasingly strong AI enemies. There’s the always useful Training mode too.
Online is pretty self-explanatory. I haven’t tried it myself (yet), but I heard it works quite well. There’s free battles which are just for fun, and ranked matches where you can get XP or something of the sort.
And finally Versus mode, which is a major disappointment to me. Why? Well, usually Versus mode let’s you fight against the CPU and another player can join in to replace the CPU. But here, you can ONLY fight against another player. May I ask why? It’s the first time I see something like this in a fighting game! If I want to try out different teams against the CPU and switch characters after every fight, I can’t. I NEED to use one of the other modes to fight against the CPU, which requires going through multiple fights every time. That’s really not convenient.

After finishing the arcade mode, you get a mini-game where you try touching the letters in the credits. Getting all the yellow letters(just a hint here: kill Yami using Roll, it will make the letter-collecting mini-game a lot easier) opens up a new mode call Ultimate All-Shooter, which is a mini-game that’s… really not too good. A vertical shooter where you have a choice of 4 of the game’s characters… it’s just not really fun. There were apparently other mini-games in the “Cross Generation of Heroes” version of the game, but they were all removed here.

There’s also an in-game shop where you can buy galleries and character colors and such, but they cost a lot, so if you want everything you’ll find yourself playing Arcade mode a LOT.

There’s a good amount of modes, like most fighters. There’s quite a lot of things to do.

Overall
Do you have a Wii? Do you like fighting games? Well buy this one, now. There’s no ifs or buts, this is a great fighting game, and any fighting game fan with a Wii should have it. If you don’t have a Wii but like fighting games, find a way to check it out, because it’s really that good.

It might look simplistic with it’s 3-button system and easy to execute specials and supers, but all that really does is make the game more accessible to people who are new to the genre. Veteran fighting gamers will easily find the depth in the game. Playing against people who know what they’re doing will be a huge challenge, and, unlike some fighting games, revolves more around actual skill, tactics and timing instead of memorizing long attack inputs(I’m looking at you, virtua fighter/tekken/soul calibur).

So the game is really fun, really accessible, has a great cast of characters, it seems fairly well-balanced to me and it looks pretty good.  Capcom did great on this one, and you should get it even if you don’t know who Tatsunoko is. Who knows, maybe you’ll find a character you particularily like and will end up watching some good anime series you might have missed? That’s what I’m doing.

(Notes: I didn’t play the online, somehow I couldn’t find opponents after over 10 minutes of the game searching so I gave up… I’ll upate this review when the online finally starts working for me… And I didn’t try the wiimote-only controls, because they look way too simple and random… I used the gamecube controller which, while not ideal, did the job well enough)

Pros/Cons
Pros
- Easy to learn
- Quite deep despite the simplistic-looking gameplay
- Cool cast of characters, all of them quite fun to play as
- New characters
- Looks good

Cons
- No CPU in Versus mode… WTF?

The Save Factor
The game has a starting price of $50. I say it’s worth every penny if you’re a fighting fan. If you’re not familiar with the genre, I’d say rent it first, or try to find it for around $30.
Save Factor: $50

jobocan Console, Games, Review, wii