10 Biggest Capcom Fails

A few years ago, Capcom fans noticed that there weren’t a whole lot of Mega Man games coming out. Then, Capcom announced a whole bunch of them all at once! Mega Man Universe would bring Mega Man back to 2D excellence. Mega Man Legends 3 was going to resurrect a fan favorite franchise on the 3DS. There was also a Mega Man first person shooter and a Mega Man online game that were in development. Unfortunately, every single one of these games was canceled and Mega Man’s creator, Keiji Inafune left Capcom shortly thereafter. We haven’t seen a new Mega Man game since, and that’s why this is on our list of 10 Biggest Capcom fails. Oh, well. At least we have Mighty No. 9 to look forward to.

Is this a Street Fighter game, or is it a Final Fight game? Neither! Actually, this is a sci-fi platformer for the NES that used Street Fighter names but had nothing to do with the series whatsoever. It was poorly designed, incredibly difficulty, and stands out as a sore thumb on Street Fighter’s legacy.

This hasn’t even happened yet, but we are calling it now. Dead Rising 3’s console exclusivity for the Xbox One will be a huge failure for Capcom. The Xbox One isn’t polling so hot in the next-gen popularity wars these days, and Dead Rising 3 seems to have taken a turn for the grim, abandoning the wacky zombie murdering tones of Dead Rising’s 1 and 2. This new tone has alienated a lot of the Dead Rising fanbase, and going console exclusive will just make it worse. It doesn’t matter if Dead Rising 1 and 2 were also console exclusives, now is not the time to be drawing lines in the zombie sand.

Resident Evil 6 was supposed to be a grand return to form for the Resident Evil series. Leon was supposed to play like early survival horror Resident Evil titles, Chris was supposed to play like later action titles, and Jake was supposed to play like the “run for your life” Nemesis titles. That was a great idea, but do you know what we got instead? We got Leon Kennedy running down an exploding street before jumping onto a helicopter. This isn’t a Zack Snyder movie, goddammit! It’s survival horror!

You knew that Street Fighter: The Movie was going to show up on a list of 10 Biggest Capcom Fails. Nothing good ever came from this venture. The movie sucked. The follow up arcade game sucked. The follow up console game about the arcade game sucked. Practically the only good things to come out of this movie were the numerous internet memes it spawned. For you, the day Capcom made a crappy movie based on a fighting game was the worst day of your life, but for M. Bison, it was Tuesday.

Capcom is actually known for some pretty amazing licensed titles. Ducktales, for example, was one of the most highly regarded platformers of the NES age. However, even Capcom couldn’t make a pizza mascot good. Yo Noid had horrendous controls, random chance mini-games at the ends of stages, and it was just a poor re-skin of a unknown Japanese ninja game. To add insult to injury, my Domino’s pizza is still cold!

When Professor Layton vs Phoenix Wright was announced fans of both series went insane. Then it never came over here to America. Similarly, the sequel to Miles Edgeworth: Ace Attorney Investigations never came out in America either. Not to mention there were countless non-localized Monster Hunter titles. Heck, Monster Hunter IV just sold 3 million copies in its first week in Japan alone, and there are no plans to bring it here to America!

Capcom is well known for reusing their old sprites in games such as the VS series, but the most blatant cash-in on this was Capcom Fighting Evolution. Many of the sprites used in this game were hastily copy and pasted from other titles and didn’t even thematically fit together. Heck, the fighting styles of these characters varied wildly, and U.I. elements were even quickly copy-pasted into this new game. The Street Fighter characters had a super meter that was just a flashing yellow bar. The super meter in Super Street Fighter II Turbo looked better than that!

This failure was big enough to cost Capcom some Better Business Bureau points. Simply put, Capcom put all of the DLC for Street Fighter X Tekken on the disc. So you purchased the disc, but you still couldn’t access all of the content on it because you didn’t purchase an unlock code. Of course, anyone with a cheat device or a modded console just unlocked these characters and costumes the old fashioned way, but by finding that out, the rest of the general public was made aware of this DLCs existence. If Capcom just sold us the DLC right away, we probably wouldn’t have cared, but they were planning to delay the DLC to November to coincide with the Street Fighter X Tekken Vita release. Eventually they did cave and sold the DLC early, but by then the damage had already been done.

Finally, we have #1 of the 10 Biggest Capcom Fails, which is just Capcom doing what they do best. In the late '90s, everyone wanted to make fighting games. They were the big hit craze, and this was very much Capcom’s fault. So to stay on top of the fighting game market, Capcom released tons of different fighting games, from the Marvel series, to its spinoff the VS series, to Street Fighter III and Rival Schools, and Power Stone, and Street Fighter Alpha, and so on and so forth. Not only that, but they released several different versions of these games, which meant you constantly had to buy the new version to stay current. Street Fighter II started the craze, but then there was Street Fighter II Hyper Fighting, Super Street Fighter II, and Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Eventually there were so many fighting games on the market that the common gamer couldn’t afford to keep up with them all, and that’s what lead to the fighting game crash of the early '00s.

Now, Capcom is back on the market with Street Fighter IV, and they still haven’t learned their lesson. We have already seen Super Street Fighter IV, Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition, and Super Street Fighter IV: Arcade Edition Version 2012. Now a new game, Ultra Street Fighter IV, is on the horizon. Capcom, when will you ever learn?