Hurdles for a Legendary Collection

Whenever I see someone asking why there isn’t a collection for the Mega Man Legends games, I point them to the Japanese-exclusive PSP ports. Of course, these get ignored as they’re in Japanese and don’t fit the schema that the Legends series doesn’t have a port on then- and now-current consoles and Steam. The PSP ports are important, however. That handheld console was the locus for Mega Man trying to get a new start. It had both remakes of the original Mega Man and Mega Man X, both of which were intended to remake both series and move them. Both ended up as curiosities rather than sales hits.

I don’t like to admit it, but Mega Man was no longer the same icon in the mainstream culture as it had been in the 1980s and 1990s. The Blue Bomber would remain an icon for gaming for sure, but Capcom moving to the evergreen model also meant pretty much everything was put on ice. Merch would appear on the figurative store shelves, that one cartoon that most seem to have passed by, and the collections. Those collections, alongside Mega Man 11, kept Mega Man relevant and afloat. As much as I have a personal distaste for the evergreen model, it does allow people to buy and get into these games much easier. You could argue that emulation already did that, but just buying the games and launching them rather than finding the ROMs and ISOs, then setting up the emulator to run the games really is that much more work.

We’re not in a Mega Man Renaissance. It’d need a whole lot of new games across the different Mega Man series to be that.

Because we live in the era of Evergreen Collections, there have been some expectations for a new Mega Man Legends Collection. I fully admit that I am one of these people, because there are no real ways to show any support for that particular section of Mega Man outside the new comic miniseries that just came out. That is honestly the only way you can show support for Legends at this moment in time. I would always recommend caution and not expect any sort of new releases for the Legends games that weren’t just PSN PS1 Classic releases.

With a recent interview, this suggestion has been more or less justified. Shingo Izumi, the current Producer for Mega Man, stated that there are no plans to develop such a collection, but it would be one of the possible candidates. The Legends games have issues that the rest of the Mega Man series don’t. Some aren’t Capcom’s own fault, while others are directly related to how late 1990s Capcom liked to do business.

Let’s start with the biggest one, and that is the constant and steady drop of sales. I’ll have to trust VGChartz and Namu.wiki for these numbers, but they align with what I recall seeing across the years.

JPN cover. Note how the Bonne family logo was embossed in an angle compared to the rest of the text

Mega Man Legends was released in 1996 in Japan and a year later elsewhere. It sold around 830,000 units across all regions. Breaking this down, Japanese sales were 120,000, North America 390,000, Europe 260,000, and the rest of the world bought 50,000. The N64 port would see 130,000 units sold, with most of them being in the US at 127,000 sold units.

1999’s The Misadventures of Tron Bonne saw a very limited print in the West, limiting its availability and making it stupidly expensive, which gives some colour why I’m having some hard time finding solid sales numbers. Estimations cap at 110,000 sold units, with Japan seeing 61,127 units, North America 20,000, and Europe only 5,000 due to that extremely limited distribution. Bought mine for 15€ back then. Other regions added 25,000 sold units. Even for a side game, these are sad numbers.

In the year 2000, Legends 2 would sell worse than the first game did at 420,000 sold units. 100,000 in Japan, 170,000 in North America, 120,000 in European regions, and 30,000 in the rest of the world. By this point, it was clear that the series had failed to establish itself and the market wasn’t interested in it.

This would be the end of the series, with mobile games taking the slot. Not that these games would contribute much to the survival of the series, but at least they’re something.

The PSP ports of the first two games, initially released as stand-alone, saw sales at 11,500 and 2,500 units respectively. The 1+2 Value Pack sold only 10,000 units. When the three games hit PSN, their sales have been described as “negligible.” Digital sales that sell low don’t get their numbers published. Despite hype and loud fandom, this didn’t translate to sales.

The history of the series’ sales starts relatively strong with the first game, but it was less than expected. It nailed the Greatest Hits/Platinum status and managed to build a niche fanbase, but as Keiji Inafune would admit later, the game wasn’t the hit they had wished for. The devs had expected the main audience, elementary school kids, to follow the name Mega Man (or rather, Rockman) from 2D action to 3D action-adventure with RPG elements. This would appeal to the older otaku audience, however. Inafune called it arrogance in his book What Kind of Decision is That!

While the sales of the first game were strong enough to warrant a sequel and a spin-off, in hindsight we should call those numbers poor sales as the game cost Capcom around a billion yen, or about $10 million. That’s 1997 USD too. This was the reason why Legends 2 saw a delay. This was still in an era where three years between titles was considered to be long.

There were other reasons for the games’ lack of success other than the core audience rejecting the Free Running RPG nature of the series. First is that the devs were inexperienced with 3D game design, as Inafune admits in the aforementioned book. The game is, in the end, surprisingly flat with verticality mostly being used to fence player progression until Springs are found. Platforming itself was awkward at best. Controls were janky, as left-right camera motion is controlled by L and R. It didn’t help that the turning speed in general was rather slow. This was the industry standard of sorts at the time, as the PS controller lacked the dual sticks at the time. Lock-On would freeze Mega Man in his place, making the accurate shooting a chore. The game would auto-aim a little bit for the player, as long as the enemy was in the middle of the screen.

Some of the same issues would persist in Legends 2. Some were changed, like how Lock-On allows the player to move around. Nevertheless, both games have the core tactic of circling the enemies and shooting, making it the de facto tactic for how to defeat pretty much any enemy in the game. Some controversy and fan criticism was given to how the first game’s single island had one dungeon connecting to all other dungeons in the game was lost when the second game was set on multiple islands. I’m not going to give a full review of the games. That’d be unfair, I am far too positively biased towards the games.

The main issues with Mega Man Legends 2 were that Capcom was expecting it to be a new Mega Man 2, where the series would properly kick off and find mainstream popularity. If the sales are anything to go by, there was never a large enough audience to justify the series’ continuation, something the fans who fell in love with the series would mourn. Yours truly included.

In the same book, Inafune mentions how the lessons learned with Legends directly translated to the Battle Network series. From an outsider perspective, we can pinpoint a few things. First, the whole collecting cards and using them for battling was popular among the target audience at the change of the millennium. The linear RPG model with real-time action nailed interest down better. Connected life was becoming more common too, with Digimon taking advantage of this earlier. Link-Battling made for a more social game as well, with tournaments being held. Less expensive development turned in bigger bucks, and that’s all she wrote. Mega Man Legends walked so Mega Man Battle Network could run.

In hindsight, *Battle Network* carries much of *Legend*‘s spirit

There is more to this than just sales numbers, however. Mega Man Legends games all have some elements that make their new releases inconvenient for Capcom.

That’s why you get energy back when you drink soda in the game; it’s an energy drink

First, there are some legal issues. The Japanese version of Legends had licensed the Oronamin C energy drink to appear in the game. These sorts of licensing agreements always come with territorial restrictions, time limits, and platform limitations. When the game hit PSN, Capcom had to relicense the drink, as Sony does not allow changes for PSN PS1 Classic titles. If Capcom had simply removed the drink license, like they did with the Western versions, they would’ve had to release Legends as a whole new title on PSN rather than as a Classic. Similar things happened with Rival Schools.

Similarly, the Yoyogi Animation Academy building in the game is an actual animation school and there is a character that gives out the school’s phone number the player could call. While this was removed in the later releases of Legends, this is another example of Capcom using real-world trademarks at the time for promotional licensing.

Is all the music in the games legally Capcom’s, or do they have a need to relicense the Japanese openings and ending songs?

Further legal complications could stem from Capcom opting to use non-union voice actors and actors under limited studio contracts in the late 1990s. This applies to all three Legends games, as there has been speculation on how legal complications can arise when voice actor contracts don’t include residual rights for later re-releases. In the worst case, Capcom might need to find the original VAs and make a new contract with them for each new release, and even then it might just be for a limited time. There is no major lawsuit of any kind regarding the voice actor contracts, but it can be an obstacle for any new release nevertheless.

Robert Norman Smith’s role as Tiesel Bonne could be an issue. He pleaded guilty to possession and distribution of CSAM in 2008 after being arrested in 2006. Unsurprisingly, this killed his career. He would be a repeat offender and see additional charges in 2020, and drowned later the same year. While we shouldn’t assume guilt by association, it would be worth questioning if Capcom themselves want to have one of their game series associated with a dead paedophile.

Outside Smith’s own doings, the Legends games carry some legal baggage that Capcom would need to address both in-game and in the real world before they can even put the games into a Collection.

I’m not sure how much bad blood Capcom wants to carry, but knowing certain aspects of Japanese corporation culture, Keiji Inafune’s and Capcom’s internal conflict didn’t leave anyone with a good aftertaste. He had been the public face of the franchise for decades and his resignation from Capcom was met with numerous Mega Man related cancellations. Legends had been Inafune’s baby, and it is possible that Capcom, at the time, simply clapped back the only way they could by hitting his possible legacy.

Legends 3 comes into the picture with this, as Inafune left in the middle of its early production. Capcom said that the game was cancelled due to the lack of fan support, which we can dispute however much we want. Capcom didn’t deal with the fallout and got tons of bad PR, but the main issue was again legal. Because fans could submit character designs, ideas for the plot and concept art, legal issues rose as to who actually would own the intellectual property created in this fashion, who would get the credit for the work done, and if there would be any compensation. At best, Capcom was getting supposedly free ideas and suggestions from fans, and at worst was outsourcing the game’s development to its customers without compensation. Capcom aimed to alleviate these concerns by sending gifts and letters to some of the participants. The official word from Capcom, however, was that the game didn’t meet the internal required criteria. Within Capcom, games don’t get just one greenlight to go, but there are multiple points of evaluation where they need to get that green light multiple times.

Because of this, I personally believe any work done on Legends 3 should be scrapped and started anew to avoid any issues. The ready demo that was meant to be released might work as some sort of window to how the game was intended originally, but as an extra only. We would see the game’s engine being recycled to the Gaist Crusher series, which honestly seems to share a lot of the same basic controls.

Legends 3 was a PR nightmare for Capcom, if we’re being straight about it.

The fans love the games and want at least one more entry to finish the story. The story, however, is the least of Capcom’s concerns. Inafune probably had more than a few ideas how the third game would’ve played out. Legends 2’s scenario writer Makazu Eguchi still works with Capcom, so he probably would be the person who has the best idea how the third game was intended to end the story. The Director and Story architect Yoshinori Kawano seems to be associated with Capcom still, so having two thirds of the core team making the story is still there.

However, whatever form a hypothetical Mega Man Legends 3 would end up being, it would be a completely different game from what it could’ve been if it had been made right after the second game, or from the Legends 3 on the 3DS. I’ve personally raised some questions as to whether I really want a sequel to a nearly thirty-year-old game by developers who have different sets of goals and values. It wouldn’t be the same after all this time. It would be, at best, a simulacrum of what it could’ve been updated for modern sensibilities.

All that said, sales numbers are very much what Capcom looks at when determining success and whether or not something gets new entries. They also need to be convinced by third parties with enough data to justify something. This isn’t anything new to Japanese corporations though; they run on established data. Looking at Capcom’s history, they’ve got some collections of their Arcade games for sure, but console-specific games rarely get collections. The Mega Man IP is different. Digital Eclipse had approached Capcom in 2015 with a suggestion of preserving the NES Mega Man games.

Understanding the difference between Digital Eclipse and Capcom’s mindset is important there. Capcom had already done collections of their arcade games in the 1990s because arcade hardware was becoming increasingly scarce and breaking down. This would accelerate with time. Console games, on the other hand, had already seen ports to the newer platforms. The Mega Man games had seen ports to the PlayStation, which were used for the Anniversary Collection.

Seeing the PSP remakes of Mega Man and Mega Man X failed to garner enough purchases, Mega Man remakes aren’t on the table despite remakes being the company’s modus operandi with classic games at the moment. Capcom considers remakes to be replacements for their older games, which don’t seem to meet their current level of demand for quality. Much like how Capcom’s internal staff had managed to convince higher ups of the need to port arcade games to new systems due to hardware failing, how Digital Eclipse wanted to make Criterion Collection of games with Mega Man collections, GOG had to convince Capcom to allow the original Resident Evil trilogy’s PC ports on GOG. Capcom was questioning if these games would even sell considering they’re so old and there are new, better versions of the games out there.

This is where an issue comes up. If we follow the idea of treating Legacy collections as definitive, preservative versions of the games, Capcom would have a need to re-license all the real-world materials. However, I don’t think this would be an issue; Capcom would probably opt to remove these. However, they’d probably have to make new contracts with the voice actors, and in case of dead ones, either negotiate with their estate executor, the heirs, or some rights management company.

Does Capcom have any data to justify a Legends Collection? All the sales data we have is now decades old, and even then it didn’t scratch up enough dough to keep The Misadventures of Tron Bonne on Japanese PSN too long. Some contract had expired; it was taken down. There has been no real Mega Man Legends merch to buy that wasn’t part of something else. Out of all series, Legends doesn’t even have a Complete Works book. A third party released the two main games’ music on vinyl a while back, but you can’t really gauge interest based on niche of a niche. The now-current comic is relatively easily available and probably is the best way to give some indication that there is an audience out there for the games.

That’s of course assuming they don’t already know that. Capcom knows Mega Man Legends has its dedicated core audience. They just don’t see it as a large enough audience. Would a remake be a better option, something that improves and fixes everything that’s wrong in the first game while expanding upon it now that designing 3D games is their bread and butter? They’d probably avoid all the licensing issues by recording all the voices from scratch. While I’d imagine this would make for better mainstream appeal, it’d probably leave many fans and preservationists dissatisfied.

Circling back to the interview, what Izumi said is still disheartening. They have no plans to make a new Collection at this moment. When they consider one in the future, Mega Man Legends would be one candidate among many. All things considered, for Capcom there would be more lucrative IPs they could farm into a modern collection than Legends. I don’t believe Monster Hunter Collection would become a thing, something like Onimusha, or a collection to hype up a new Sengoku Basara. Perhaps there is bad blood in Capcom still and keeping Legends is a jab at Inafune, but I wouldn’t want to believe in this.

Mega Man Legends Legacy Collection doesn’t have unsurmountable hurdles to beat. What it has is baggage that needs to be sorted out every time Capcom wants to re-release the games. A three-game collection would be a bit empty, so throwing in all the mobile phone games with translations would be a nice add-on. Perhaps having the Legends 2’s PSP port’s enhancements as selectable options would be nice; the game plays really well on PSP.

Here we’re met with two things: keep the development time as short as possible and cost-effective. Deliver a Collection that has minimal content and was cheap to make; hope it sells well so that cost-sales ratio looks good. Alternatively, make an enhanced Collection, add more value at a slightly higher price, and hope it’s enough to attract more people than just the core fans. The elephant in the room would be Legends 3. To be brutally honest, I don’t think Legends Collection would sell enough to warrant Legends 3’s production. I wish it could after all this time, after all the good word we’ve spread about the games throughout the years. However, game development doesn’t work on good vibes, especially nowadays when developing is costlier and takes longer than ever before, at least for big studios. There must be correct justifications for Mega Man Legends 3 to become a reality, and most of it has to come from inside Capcom’s staff championing for it and convincing the deciding body it would be worth the time and money. Improving customer relations isn’t enough, or finishing up the story. If the story was that important inside Capcom, somebody could’ve turned the third game’s plot into a comic or a book already.

Historically, Mega Man’s target audience has been elementary school kids. The X series aimed a bit older, but was still enjoyed by the same audience. Legends assumed this audience would follow the series everywhere, but didn’t. Battle Network took that slot, and after that, Mega Man never really found a way to entertain new generations of elementary school-aged kids. The more I look at Legends, Mega Man losing that core audience is why the series has languished. While I’d like to think a game series could stand on its own two feet without many changes, the Mega Man as a series always changed to try something new and be a hit with kids.

I’m afraid now the Blue Bomber only has older fans, people who grew up with the games. These things need to cycle in new fans of the same target age while the majority of the fans cycle out to other things as they grow older. Just as with comics, some fans will stay there for a lifetime, but even then the cycling must go on. Otherwise stagnation will set in and nothing will end up working. Trying to make new stuff for the target audience contradicts the need to make the old stuff for the older audience, often in a more mature manner for better or worse. Future Mega Man games have a very thin line they need to walk by not to veer off too much to either direction.

Mega Man (12): Dual Override got me

You know me, I see Capcom doing a new Mega Man title and I’m already there. So, we get a whole minute and a half trailer, most of which is fluff. A hall counting up to eleven and over, opening a sealed room where Capcom stashed the Blue Bomber in for their pony jar experiments.

Then almost twenty seconds of beta footage with each scene having reference to past Mega Man thing. A Beat balloon in the teleport-in spot (Mega Man weirdly teleporting in at the far left of the screen.) The next scene has a Wall Blaster mounted unto the ceiling and Gamma’s blueprints on the right side in the back as well its face plastered around the pillar in the next sequence. I do love that we see a bottomless pit sequence with exploding balloons that you have you as a stepper while a yellow Pipi flies over and drops an egg of fireworks. Something about this screams Robot Museum, but I’m probably wrong, but it has that intro level feeling.

You can also see small particle effects flying off as the slide ends. All these small touches show love and care, and often extend to the big things too

Nevertheless, this stage is clearly about celebration, and that’s what this trailer is about.

Then Mega Man has his parts opening up, showcasing one of the worst cases of unnecessary LEDs in robots in a while, ending the spiel with Proto Man’s whistle.

This is going to end up in a model kit as a gimmick

I’m an old fart who has played Mega Man since its beginning. It’s my favourite game series out of all and I’m an absolute sucker for this trailer. It’s clean, it does its job showcasing how to do proper 2D action level design in terms of clearly stating what’s ground and what’s death. Screens are laid out as puzzles and obstacles to clear rather than continues stream of hallways with enemies like in Castlevania or Metroid. I won’t go deeper into this, because how Mega Man games nail stage designs most of the time is a post I need to write.

2027 and the game is coming to every single platform that’s out now. Yes, that also means for the Switch and PS4. If I’m as lost cause for a proper Mega Man game that isn’t mobile slop, I’ll buy it three times down the line.

That 2027 smarts. We’ve got past experience what it means when a Mega Man game is revealed too early. We both know that getting hype is the recipe for a disaster yet here I am, smiling like I’m on something and I know I’ll bitch about whatever damn gimmick they’re going to introduce. I didn’t mind the Gears in Mega Man 11 even if I tried to play the game mostly without them. Gimmicks have been something that each Mega Man game has introduced. Some have stayed in the series, most of them have changed to something else. Rush, sliding, Charge Shot, collecting letters for Beat, the Rush Armours, Rock’n Arm and so on. I hope they’ll do something else than the Gears, but if Override refers to a mechanic that similar to Gears, I hope its an evolution of the system in a manner that allows a more seamless usage. Surely, Dual means we’re going to get something with Proto Man, but I’d wish against multiplayer. Balancing the stages for both single and multiplayer would require extra focus and effort, something I’d rather see put into single-player only.

Whatever the gimmick ends up being, if its something that’s used “externally” like the Gears rather than as something integrated into the basic motion and controls without extra, like the slide and Charge Shot, it shouldn’t be as a part of the Boss Battles. That’s my biggest gripe with Mega Man 11, where the game insists on the Gears gimmick, everything was build around it and it didn’t really flow properly. It was just extra buttons to press to slow or speed things up. You could build a whole new kind of game around that idea.

The thing with Double Gears was that it was an external insist, not part of the core controls.
As a side note, Mega Man’s getting back his PlayStation-era proportions to some extent after the NES size throwbacks

I understand if Capcom wants to drop numbering new Mega Man games. However, I hope they don’t. I want them boldly claim that 12 on the box cover, but there are about 130 Mega Man games before this, 24 of which are Classic series entries. Maybe this is a slight rebranding, and the next Mega Man X game, God willing there is such a thing, could utilize the Maverick Hunter X naming to differentiate the two series for newcomers. A possibility of Capcom wants to separate these sub-series from each other for clarity.

One thing about Dual Override still, the music doesn’t like the techno wah-wah 11 had. If the demo track is anything to go by, they’re still doing that a little bit but not to the same extent. There’s something off about both Nintendo and Capcom putting this sort of second-tier wah-wah sounds on 2D games when they could do better. Still, the demo music does remind me a bit of the PlayStation-era tracks.

Referring a bit to my previous post, what’s my gut saying here? Jumping seems to be nice and snappy, shooting doesn’t seem to have any issues and Mega Man gets scuffed as he gets damaged. He doesn’t blink during invincibility after getting damaged, but has electricity sparking around him. The level is well designed in terms of clarity, you see what parts you can jump and where they end. Down the line, challenging platforming requires this. 2D platformers that obfuscate their platform’s edges don’t realize that. However, all the lighting effects from explosion and shots are just enough too bloomy to obfuscate their hitboxes. I would’ve preferred them to be a bit more cartoony or defined, but players should learn them after one or two hits. At least they’re all colourful bloom. Perhaps I would’ve preferred the game to be more anime in looks in general, but that’s fine. It keeps the same look as Mega Man 11 in broad terms.

All those firework crackers, explosions and the Charged Shot are just enough too bloomy for me. It melds together, but that’s not what this sort of visual style does. In that, the game looks safe, nothing out of run-of-the-mill.

We don’t see the player hugging any of the static objects when landing or jumping to them, so can’t say much about physics yet. However, after a slide there is a clear stop in motion, so either you can’t walk directly from a slide, or the player didn’t continue onwards after initiating the slide. I hope the latter is the case, as one defining aspect of Mega Man controls is the flow these controls have. They shouldn’t have any points where the momentum stops, unless you let go of the D-Pad. In other words, the player should be in control all the time, and if the game introduced these moments of stops, that raises both of eyebrows.

The logo is very bland. I hope it’s a beta logo, but if they’re not going to revise it to look bolder, that can say something about the game itself. I hope this won’t be a safe entry in the series, as we’ve had compilations and rereleases for the last decade that showcase how things work. I’ve wanted Mega Man games to be a bit more expanded, something the Intro Stage did early on. We can have more than eight Wily Numbers, or we could have more stages like with Doc Robots, just without the recycling. Stages aren’t the only way to expand Mega Man, however. Item Replicator, Super Adapter, all these things that add to the player’s arsenal and core play are just that. Mega Man (World) V is great because it tried something new changed the core just enough with the Rock’n Arm and its Grab abilities. No new buttons, no new modes per se, just adding to the core controls, expanding what the player can do.

Lastly, new Robot Master Design contest. I really dislike how it’s done. It should be a contest for kids under ten, but because it’s a general competition on Twitter, age restriction applies. I find this extremely disheartening, as kids should be the main audience for Mega Man, but I guess I have to swallow the bitter pill and admit to myself nobody under 25 even knows what a Mega Man is. Kids have such an unrestricted imagination when it comes to this kind of thing. Give them a general direction what to draw, and their imagination goes wild. They don’t think the proper logistics of it, they make it up and explain how shit just works. A middle-aged dude who has art degrees or studies how to design emotionally appealing stuff won’t have the same spirit. It’s going to be by-the-books and sad.

Yes, there has been a number of comic artists like Hitoshi Ariga who have designed Wily Numbers, but these have been largely by the numbers by people who have been with the games’ history at the ground level. I’m not sure how to put this in plain words, but these bosses designed by adult players have don’t really have that spark of ingenuity and pure, sparkling imagination kids have.

I don’t know if I’m going to enter the contest. Would that be going against myself if I did? I’ll have to think this over a few times, nevertheless.

I’m hopeful this game will be good, something that pushes the series forwards again. I hope Capcom will return to form and put a Mega Man X into production as well, and use that as a springboard for something new and bold, expanding what we’ve seen in Mega Man 11and now in Dual Override. I shouldn’t be hype, but nostalgia and hope are strong weapons. With my emotional connection with the series, I can’t really deny my human nature. Damn, I’m eager to see more. What timing for me to start replaying the Classic series.

Playing chores

Dailies and weeklies have really put me off from playing tons of games. You know, I was really into the mobile game UmaMusume when it was new, even if it was stupid hardcore title. I dropped it mostly because I missed a day there, a day here, unable to finish the Log In bonuses and such. I tried getting into Street Fighter 6 recently, using it as a medicine to my block of playing competitive versus games online, but the same thing happened here. I’m looking at other somewhat recent games I’ve played, and all the ones I dropped mid-way through were mostly because of the whole daily grind.

Video and computer game publishers and developers have done a lot to keep players engaged with their games longer than just the base game. An endless content game is a dream, where players would never leave the game and would end up paying more through additional characters, all sorts of items, maps and whatnot. Games as platforms is a term some have used, like Capcom of Street Fighter V. We no longer have editions, expansions or any sort of separate releases. This of course means the original versions of the games are lost and rendered unplayable; you can’t go back playing the first iteration of SFV.

Lootboxes of course are another thing that adds to a game’s grind, which has been under fire due to the whole gambling element behind it. UmaMusume did get some pennies from me, but ultimately it was largely worthless. I don’t own anything about the game, and once it dies, I will never be able access the game again. It would be great if it’d get a raising simulator on the consoles without the gatcha bullshit, but that’s not how these games make their money. Without companies nickelling and diming the players, they wouldn’t see the same amount of revenues. Yet Baldur’s Gate 3 showcased how a complete game without any of the anti-consumers practices can yield both customer love and high sales. After all, nickelling and diming mostly works for a select group called Whales, who put everything they have into these games, mobile or not.

I’d rather see companies making positive emotional connections with the players with single-purchase titles, like the aforementioned Baldur’s Gate 3. On the long term, it’ll yield more fruitful profits than putting off sections of your potential market. Then again, publishers and developers haven’t exactly made themselves friendly to the market with the whole translation bullshit with advisory companies as of late.

Gaming shouldn’t feel like a goddamn chore. You shouldn’t be forced to play a game for any reason. Gaming is different from sports, despite both are at core part of the same overall game culture. The main difference is that games, be it card, tabletop RPGs or whatever form of mechanic or electronic gaming, is for entertainment and fun. Human is a being that requires play, as do most other animals. Play is a universal language between the more intellectual species what play is. An ant probably can’t figure out why you’re rolling a ball at it, but a puppy or a monkey sure can. Species across can discern different kinds of play. Playing is an absolutely important part of life as a tool of teaching and relaxation. Gaming can’t magically become “something greater” or some other grandiose bullshit, because it already is equally as important as storytelling among others as well as part of it.

When I was a wee lad, I kept hearing that playing is for kids. Adults, or teens, don’t play games anymore, they’re serious about things. Of course, this is yet another form of bullcrap people tell say. Later in life these same people build doll houses or with miniature train tracks, the same people spend hours on hours dotting down words into a word puzzle. It’s all a form of play. Only the method is different. Hobbies in general are an action of play. Some hobbies are just more acceptable than others against the tapestry of culture. You won’t find many people who’d see similarities between a Street Fighter player and someone who play hockey. Both are an act of playing, requiring physical and mental training as well as strategizing on different levels. Neither is an act required to live, they’re both about playing a game.

Trophies fall into the same chore-inducing category with dailies and weeklies. Sure, they often pose you a challenge to beat and some find them satisfactory new ways to play games. My old age does come through, but people did do challenge runs and find new ways to play games themselves without devs coming them up. Weeklies and dailies are the same thing, putting up challenges and other chores that ultimately hamper the player’s own way and wishes to play the game. These force a change the way we play games, if we give them any weight. Of course, the game gives these things weight by dishing rewards for a well-done job, turning playing games into a whole new kind of Skinner’s Box. All just to keep players engaged longer and making that lizard brain kick a bit more when shiny thing drops on the screen.

There’s a danger in video and computer games nowadays with all this additional gamification on top of the game itself. Some already find the act of playing boring and not satisfactory enough. Now you have to have a little Ding! going in the corner telling you how you’ve just rescued 50 players in coop mode or how you’ve just parried 40 attacks from your opponents.

I sincerely question the current state of playing games. Rather than expand and explore the market, we’ve seen companies trying to appeal to smaller demographics and going to the source to change how games are made. Instead of expanding the market, they’re doing their best to make as bland and washed out games they can to ultimately appeal to nobody. Games are increasingly less about playing the game and more about the framing devices the developers can built. Players are guided through everything and nothing is left for them to explore through the games’ mechanics themselves. It’s handholding at its finest, as if the devs and publishers are scared to let people use their own head. That said, most will just use an online guide if they get stuck, so there’s that.

The reward for being good at a game has always been the permission to pass further in the game. Now that gaming media wants all games to be beatable without effort, maybe the constant key jangling has its place. If your game can’t be engaging and rewarding on its own rights, you might as well resort for the worse option.

Pay for what you find valuable

Ubisoft’s Philippe Tremblay wants you, the customer, to get comfortable with not owning their games. Seems like he missed that people who use Steam as their main driver more or less already are.

Tremblay wants to push for the subscription model for video and computer games as that has been somewhat a success as a continuation of television. The whole streaming wars thing might disagree with this view, even when Disney+ seems to be bleeding customers. People seem to prefer when everything is in one place rather than multiple services each popping here and there with worse options than the last. These services are going fast the way of the cable TV.

Ubisoft has been the proponent for sub-based products, with them launching Uplay+ in 2019, rechristened as Ubisoft+ the year later. Now the service has been split between Ubisoft+ Premium and Classic, both at different price points. Rebranding away from Uplay was a good move, as the name has been marred in negative connotations and implications ever since Ubisoft launched their original Game Launcher to compete with Steam. Not that Ubisoft’s own name isn’t controversial in itself, with some marking the company being worse than EA.

Customers have multiple types of behaviours, as Tremblay states. Some come in for one game, which they later purchase. He mentions how Ubisoft is fine with a customer coming in, subscribing, then later buying that game and ending the subscription. If they were fine with this model, they wouldn’t have a need to find a way to stop this sort of customer stopping their subscription. That’s a loss of revenue for Ubisoft.

Multiple sub tiers splits these games, if this interview is anything to go by. Earlier access to upcoming games, different editions with different amount of content and some rewards that go unmentioned. This business model shatters whole games into bits and pieces; no Ubisoft game is whole anymore. Whatever you think about games being art or not, Ubisoft clearly makes a stance of them being a corporate product and them needing to service the corporate interest by any means necessary even if it means screwing the customer from their ownership.

Once you give an inch to gaming subscription, it’ll take the whole yard. While Tremblay says, there’s no reason to force things, just give people options. Certainly, there is a customer section that doesn’t give a toss about ownership and simply wish to consume games momentarily and then move on, but the lack of ownership and games being tied to service model always means they’ll become obsoletely as product at some point. When the service ends, so does the access to these games. Even with games you own, if they have an online-only component that relies on servers, it’s already a dying thing. There’s really no way to resurrect a dead service-model game without hacks and mods, and no game publisher is keen on giving instructions how to recreate custom servers or enable local play. Games like Elite Dangerous will end up waste of digital space once the servers die despite nothing really stopping the developers from making a genuine single-player mode for it.

Despite streaming service adoption, physical media, DVDs and BDs, hasn’t gone anywhere. Probably one of the main reasons why game consumers still buy physical media is that we know how badly gaming companies tend to screw us over. Streaming services get shit thrown at them every time a show or a movie license expires and vanishes from their library, but the games consumer usually is aware when companies try to screw them over for some reason. Like trying to prevent mods, or selling mods. Having a physical copy is a means to ensure future access to that title. There’s also the classic idea of building a library of games, which is something Steam encourages with constant sales.

While subscription based gaming probably is the dark and depressing future we’re going to get, the worse is streaming games. Cloud gaming would be other name for this. If Google couldn’t make it work, neither will Ubisoft. Tremblay streaming Ubisoft’s new games for couple of minutes shows how out of touch he is with the issues regarding cloud gaming. These range from standard performance issues to horribly downgraded graphics and input lag. Latency will be an issue Ubisoft won’t be able to solve.

However, Tremblay saying game customers have to get used to not owning games has a ring of truth to it. There’s an upcoming generation that has lived with subscription model as a standard, and that easily translates to the whole You will not own anything and be happy. This generation will rent things easier and give away their freedom to do anything with the things they spend their money on, as well as have no responsibility over them outside what the service provider demands of them. That’s where future is screwed, as then we won’t have any say on the things we put out money in. Subscription to Netflix gives you a small library of titles to choose from, and even if you are paying for the service, they’ll choke the bitrate for their own reasons. They have licenses that come and go. If a thing sits on your shelf, these issues no longer exist.

While older generations have to acclimate to upcoming changes with how media is available, we also don’t need accept it wholesale. We can champion on personal ownership for the copies and other items we put money into and have the say on the things we have at hand. We can have the best of both worlds, but that requires voting with your wallet.

One bit I find interesting is Tremblay mentioning how their older titles from the subscription service finds constant consumptions. Considering how bad rap Ubisoft’s modern games get, that shouldn’t be surprising. People loved the Prince of Persia: Sands of Time trilogy and outside Thief, Splinter Cell was considered the only legitimate challenger to Metal Gear Solid, sometimes cited as the better game series to boot. I can’t fault a company or a corporation wanting to make money, that’s their reason to exist in the first place. However, Ubisoft shouldn’t screw with their paying customers, as it’s very easy to simply pirate a game. Locked behind a subscription means very little if the other option is being free from the shackles that bind you.

Steam has made certain kind of DRM palatable for consumers. No game is owned on Steam, and it has been a successful venture for Valve. Even the older generations are mostly fine with Steam. It has become an industry standard for the most part. Tremblay putting it in so many words and making it clear how customers will not own Ubisoft products in the future is a PR stumble. The response was similar to Sony pulling some of the movies from PSN due to licenses expiring. Of course, when you use the term Buy, the general understanding is that you buy things to own. I don’t buy the argument that because somewhere in the eighty page EULA companies change the meaning of the word is applicable. To quote Rossmann, that’s rapist mentality. Companies aren’t straight with the customer what they are actually doing and what kind of transaction it really is. Valve got into trouble with EU about this some years back and had to change description.

The relevance here is that if the customer has spent his money to access product, they have all the rights to access that product even if it means via piracy. For example, if you’ve paid a streaming service some extra to have 4K quality video, and they decide, for whatever reason, not to deliver that, you have the moral right to find it wherever you can, piracy or not. If customers have found your service and products worthwhile enough to pay for them and you screw them over, nobody should be surprised when they pirate the piece. When people stop pirating your product, then you’ve got a problem in your hand as that means your product is no longer desired. Companies screwing customers justifies the use of piracy. Hence, if buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing.

Ubisoft’s corporate evolution isn’t about making better games or more games. It’s about how much they can screw the customers until they hit the wall. Sycophantic publisher/developer fans will always stick with them. Arguably, access to hundreds of titles for measly coupla ten bucks sounds good, but the lack of any control over the titles themselves and how easily you will be screwed over really stains the whole thing. Paying what you find valuable encourages that sort of thing more.

This also applies to Microsoft’s PC Game Pass, but that’s a whole another deal and already shows that Ubisoft is chasing the torchbearer with a smaller library. That, and Microsoft hasn’t come out to cause a small uproar like Tremblay by saying you’ll have to get used to not owning the stuff you buy.

Service model gaming probably will be the future for big publishers. However, that’s where all the smaller companies and developers can find a fitting niche by putting their games out in a more traditional fashion. Hell, I’d be rather excited if some indie developer would publish their game and include an .ISO file with some labels and artwork so you could burn and print your own legit copy and put it on your shelf.

The Capsule Computers Enigma

You have probably heard about the Enigma Protector by now. It’s the thing Capcom is using on the side with Denuvo. It’s raised a bit of a hell, with Capcom’s games on Steam that got it getting review bombed into negativity. While things aren’t exactly as clickbait articles want to put it, it’s an interesting thing nevertheless. If nothing else, Capcom has a PR trash fire in their hands, and seems like there’s not much they can do about it.

To rewind back a bit, Capcom has shown anti-mod behaviour for good couple of years now. This shouldn’t be surprising, as mods became illegal in Japan in 2018. According to the Unfair Competition Prevention Act amendment, you may not sell tools or programs that alter the save or unauthorized products keys as standalones on the Internet auctions or otherwise. You may also not act as the modder, be it data or hardware. This may lead to civil measures, which include both injunction and claim for damages, but may also result in criminal penalties; imprisonment up to five years, a fine up to five million yen, or both. Things like Datel’s Action Replay and save editor devices went extinct fast there. Similarly, while adding new games to miniconsoles is prohibited under this law. It comes with no surprise that a corporation would tow, if not even enforce, a law they wholly agree with.

Not that the law is necessary for Capcom to want protect their IPs and brand. The nude Chun-li mod during Corner2Corner Street Fighter 6 tournament was largely met with amusement by all, but just as Tifa porn during Italian parliament meeting, the main parties involved weren’t amused. Capcom soon put out messages about mods breaking public morals, putting general visual mods into same category as cheating. To quote the exact phrasing, for the purposes of anti-cheat and anti-piracy, all mods are defined as cheats. Largely because they can’t tell a difference from a cheat mod and a general mod. Whether or not Capcom defines this through morals or technical issues is left ambiguous, I’d wager its bit of both. Otherwise, mention of public morals wouldn’t be there. Capcom has taken down nude mods and vids with them from YouTube since 2019, which would coincide then-new law amendment. Maybe I’m latching too hard on this, but I can’t help but to feel Capcom sees themselves being more justified to go after mods after the amendment than before.

Should probably note that the Enigma Protector was implemented in Resident Evil Revelations, and possibly leading to breaking the game and tons of mods. While Enigma was cited a probable cause, there is yet to be any solid evidence for it. It’s just as possible Capcom just screwed the update themselves, and they had to roll things back. Resident Evil 5 had it added last year too and there’s yet to be any hubbub about that. Enigma has been place in Capcom products at least since 2022 with Capcom Arcade Stadium, with some reports mentioning stuttering, though supposedly this happens on console versions too. Perhaps an indication of emulation issues or something else as there have been issues ranging from missing sound to crashing on launch. Resident Evil Village had stutters whenever a weapon was used at some point. Seems like the issues are somewhere else, in the end.Thus, the nude Chun-li fiasco incident just threw more coal to the fire rather than acted as an instigator.

The loss of money from Street Fighter 6 costumes probably isn’t high on the list though. While Capcom’s pricing for their costumes in SF6 is stupidly expensive, it seems very weak reason to ban character appearance modding. After all, pretty much every Capcom fighting game on PC since Street Fighter IV has seen extensive visual modding, and in case of Marvel VS Capcom 3, extensive character modding. Though considering the abovementioned law, it might be reason enough as that would arguably put Capcom in a worse competitive position.

FluffyQuack, one of the more high-profile modders, had his say on Patreon, and I largely agree with his final take; Enigma is more or less just another layer of protection Capcom puts on their games to prevent piracy and cheating, not against mods. I’d wager Enigma is a much cheaper option to Denuvo, so it’d make sense they’d want to change between the two after a certain period has passed.

What the ‘net is whispering is that whole thing with Enigma Protector is ran by a single Russian guy in or near Moscow. Back in 2020, Security Intelligence had an article about EnigmaSpark, a malware packed with Enigma Protector. The malware likely aimed for entities and organizations who had interest to have peace in the Middle East. The official website has effectively no information on the authors or on the location of the business, and WHOIS is being hidden. Their site is served from Russia, so the word that they’re using COMODO certificate circumvent sanctions seems to have something to it. The author’s phone number according to ICANN lookup also puts the region into Moscow with +7495 area code. The more I try to look into this, the fishier it smells. Enigma originating from Russia in itself isn’t the issue, but the lack of information and everything else surrounding is.

Though I like the rumour that the version Capcom is using can be found on Russian torrent sites, and the source code is out there in the wild for anyone to nab who finds the proper magnet link.

Capcom’s priority with Enigma Protector isn’t preventing cheating or modding, but preventing piracy. What Enigma Protector isn’t is DRM. It’s a Virtual Machine implementation, which aims to obfuscate the execution from outside view, and is just one dime in the dozen. Enigma Protector isn’t intended to work to prevent modding, but its VM implementation may cause some issues how the mods run, but this can be circumvented by modders easily from the looks of it. Enigma Protector isn’t malware either, but seems like it was packed with one at some point in the past.

Capcom doing business with a Russian entrepreneur doesn’t really jell well in the current state of the world. While they’ve used this particular protection for years now, they’ve never been open about it either. Things blew up now because of Capcom’s anti-mod stance being reiterated in a very anti-consumer fashion in recent weeks. Considering Street Fighter V effectively worked as a root-kit at one point, consumers are very much on the trigger whenever they manage fuck up somehow with their protection schemes. Who would’ve thought their anti-cheat method would open a full-blown local backdoor.

Capcom’s standard action seems to be removing Denuvo and replacing it with Enigma Protector, as they did with the Mega Man Battle Network Legacy Collection. Retroactively adding weird protection to games should be frowned upon, but the ultimately, the whole thing has been less dramatic than initially presented, something I got swept in too. However, the Enigma Protector itself rather than its consequences should be more in the spotlight and I’m the wrong guy to look deeper into this. I’ve got no idea where to begin to dig up who is behind the program.

If Capcom is to grow bigger than what they are now, anti-piracy and anti–cheating measures will probably increase to some extent in the future. They want to protect their bottom line, brand and IPs, which ultimately punishes the legitimate customers rather than prevents piracy. While Capcom has all the rights to protect their products, it should not end up in the customer getting screwed. Nevertheless, it would do them good to gain some customer trust by looking into things and make a clear statement whether or not the accused Enigma Protector is an issue or not.

Capcom Fighting Collection’s success will pave way for more collections

Devilotte with her underlings and you probably will never get to play as her in Capcom Fighting Collection

Capcom Fighting Collection is almost upon us, with the usual marketing heads and Internet influencers having early access codes to showcase and market the title for you. In effect, you’d get the same experience from watching captured footage from a CPS2 arcade board, or just random Fightcade streams. There’s no reason to assume the Collection won’t have equally as competent emulation as what you have access to now. This makes the Fighting Collection a nice collection for arcade purists for sure, and online for some of the games is nice, but the reality of competition is that you can already play all the games in this collection in the aforementioned Fightcade, or FC for short. Sure, it’s illegal to download ROM files and all that, but again, not many really give a damn. As these are direct ports of the arcade games, Capcom is fighting their own shadow here. Not all games have online in the Fighting Collection, something FC provides, and if they’re raw arcade ports, they lack options and additions some titles got with their home ports. For example, Cyberbots had three additional playable characters, Chiyomaru Kagura, Princess Devilotte de Deathsatan IX (a fan favourite), and SHADE, that weren’t accessible in the arcade original. They also added full-voiced dialogues to the game. If you’d be going with the Saturn port of the game, you’d get a nearly arcade-perfect port, something Capcom had a knack for doing for the Saturn. Few cut frames of animation here or there because the hardware is a fair trade in exchange for more content and voices. We may disagree on this, but seeing Capcom already has done all this work for the previous port, there should be no reason to have their subcontractor do any less than their best to match up against these older ports. Of course, arcade perfection will be used as an excuse and some will buy it. Capcom has already made their money on these arcade games though. CPS2 encryption wasn’t broken until the millennium had changed, and at that point, Capcom had moved on from the system and wasn’t making profits off of them.

Shuhei Matsumoto had an interview with John Carson of Gameinformer about Capcom Fighting Collection, which of course serves more as a PR fluff than anything else. Though not just for the customer, but also for the industry as well. While fans have seen this collection more as a Darkstalkers collection with some other games thrown in, the reality seems to be that KOBUTA and MUUMUU, long-time programmers at Capcom, finally wanted Warzard/Red Earth ported to home consoles. Matsumoto confirms that the versions will be arcade ports and specifies that they’ll be versions used in tournaments. While it is nice to see these titles preserved for modern consoles, the fact that emulation and gaming archiving scenes have already done that. All these versions, and many others of these titles, have already been preserved for future generations. It may be through emulation, that has been more of a necessity than anything else. Game companies themselves have been notoriously bad at archiving their own code and artwork, something that Sega is infamously bad at; they’ve lost all the masters and source codes for Saturn games. This is why all Saturn games’ ports, like Princess Crown on the PSP, are running through Saturn emulation. Emulation which isn’t exactly accurate still. Saturn’s architecture wasn’t exactly orthodox and is a challenge to tackle properly. While we can discuss whether or not emulation is a proper contender against an official product, the question of how these have been ported to modern systems does make it relevant. If these are running on an emulator, then the comparisons should be completely relevant. If they’re proper ports made to run on modern hardware, then we should give them all the support we want. I’m guessing all the games in Fighting Collection will run through emulation, so in practice, there shouldn’t be any difference in you choosing between Fighcade and Fighting Collection; you’re getting the same shit anyway, except FC can update its emulators for even more accurate results.

Matsumoto: I genuinely want these titles to be played once again on current gen consoles. I also want people who may have seen them but never had the chance to play them to get this opportunity. That said, we do not think that this will necessarily increase the possibility of these series being revived.

This quote also damns the whole Capcom Test, an old thing they’ve done and which I discussed two posts ago. Matsumoto lays it down nice and flat, something that game companies don’t really like to do. Transparency is a positive thing and grows trust with the customer, but that also means competition sees what you’re doing. Take the quote as it is; game series will not see a revival from you buying Collections. This will, at best, see Capcom putting out more collections. A few years ago I went through Capcom’s Investors report, which mentioned the revival old of IPs. This is the route they’re going with it, packaging old ROMs with emulators. Things like Mega Man 11 and Street Fighter IV were only possible due to these games having an internal champion that took it upon themselves to see pitch the title and take all the heavy glory. These games may make or break them. The future of old Capcom IPs is a zombie state in collections of all sorts, repackaged lovingly with bare-bones ports with bells and whistles added to them via picture galleries (of artwork you can track down on the Internet in higher quality thanks to scanners [I doubt there’s going to be much new content in this regard]) and online play (which is already provided by emulators that are probably more accurate than what Capcom is packing in.)

Old fans and customers had hoped for new entries in long-sleeping IPs, but ‘lo, just pay for ROMs and emulators.

This isn’t bashing Capcom or telling you not to buy the collection. This is more about whether or not Capcom is giving you any better options than what is currently available for all, piracy or not. Capcom could take some actions if they wished to do so, but that might sour the relationship with the hardcore fighting game fanatics that play these games all day around. This barebones collection is for the people who want to play certain titles online in an official capacity, Capcom enthusiasts, and new fans who just can’t be arsed to track down the proper ROM file and an emulator. Capcom’s fighting an uphill battle against an enemy of their own making of sorts, and with the promise of this Collection not affecting any future game developments and being just the raw arcade ROMs with their usual unrealistically high expectations for sales numbers, all this is so goddamn awkward. The Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection, while admirable in scope in most cases, suffered from games stuttering, game dropping inputs, input delays, bad online code, the game volume having issues, and stuff like that. There’s no promise of Capcom, or their subcontractor, making things any better, except for online play. That’s what the talking heads and PR always seem to go towards nowadays and how online play has to be 10/10. There’s never a moment given that the games themselves need to be more than what’s already out there, especially when you can go for a better online play for all these titles now with FC and other alternatives.

What is the supposed reason for this Collection to even be? Maybe people will buy it and play and for an hour or two, then move onwards to something else, because that’s how things just seem to work nowadays. Hardcore fighting game players probably will throw in the money and never even touch the game because Fighcade exists. I’ll probably buy it just to get a legitimate version of Red Earth to play at home. That’s as good a reason as any. Putting this kind of thing together probably is relatively cheap, and can give support for future Collections as well as bring in some cash into Capcom’s coffer. If this Collection’s core reason to exist is to celebrate Capcom’s fighting game history, it’s not doing so well. While I’d like to see Capcom doing collections of games that haven’t seen wider ports from the original arcade and one-console-ports, that might not be the most sensible in terms of marketing and sales. Bolting all these one-time titles with Darkstalkers is a good move, something they probably could replicate by using the clout Rival Schools has among Capcom fans and throwing in Star Gladiator games and Kikaioh to form a theoretical Capcom 3D Fighting Collection. Power Stone has its own collection on the PSP already, which honestly is superior to the original games in many ways. It having an anime and all other stuff might just make the Capcom executive veterans nostalgic enough to try to put it out as a digital-only upscale for Steam. I’m eager to see what’s it gonna be when the game launches tomorrow, and despite all the perceived negativity I have here, there’s always a slimmer of hope its (hopeful) success just might give Capcom some ideas to try out something else that isn’t Street Fighter when it comes to fighting games. That’s a one-in-a-million chance though, so don’t rely on it.

The CAPCOM Test Collection

The Capcom Test is an old term dating back to the 1990s, though the practice probably dates well into the 1980s when Capcom was becoming an arcade powerhouse. Capcom used to rent yellow arcade boards to arcade operators for a time to test the game among consumers and to encourage the operator to make a full purchase of the arcade title. With consoles, this had to change, especially with the death of rental stores. Now the method is to put out a collection or a limited-budget production title, like the numerous Darkstalkers collections, to see if sales would be generated to ensure a new, higher-budget title. Often the sales number and the revenue these Test games have to make is unrealistically high, as Capcom moved towards a high budget, high-revenue model with their mainline games since the early 2000s. Personally, I would put the shift starting from the original Resident Evil to Devil May Cry 2. DMC2 was developed by an ex-arcade development team that was out of their depth in making a console game of this calibre. It is a lynchpin game, where Capcom would slowly, but surely, move their focus further on bigger-than-life titles with grandiose visuals. By all means, titles like Monster Hunter were part of this, as the franchise had grown bigger and bigger in terms of how grandiose it is despite the play part subdued. Hell, certain elements have been completely excised from Monster Hunter World. There has also been a further focus on the framing story sequences, which have slowed Capcom games down quite a lot. Mega Man is a good indicator of how Capcom sways. Aside from Mega Man 11, things have been very quiet, baiting with nostalgia via licensing.

The very recently announced Capcom Fighting Collection is, by all means, a Capcom Test. Social Media has people asking others to buy the game as it is seen as a Test for Darkstalkers series, a series that has already had more Tests than most other franchises. While yours truly is a fan of the series and would love to see a new entry, I also highly doubt this collection will yield any positive results for the fans. Capcom often has unreasonably high expectations of their titles, as any title is more or less expected to make Resident Evil or Monster Hunter tier revenue. That is not going to happen, as there is a finite amount of money the consumers can shell out and Capcom’s competition is harsh. Street Fighter 6, which got a teaser, too, did not exactly lit the audience. Simply displaying a fujoshi’s wet dream Ryu in RE Engine is not enough to make out what the game will be like. Sure, most people who have been in the arcades or given a glance at the fighting game scene know how a Street Fighter generally functions, but as usual, the core audience wants and needs to see and know more.

Would probably do good to showcase what’s been talked about

This Collection probably is not testing just Darkstalkers in a vacuum. While there is an obligatory Street Fighter II thrown in there, the rest of the titles are peculiar. Warzard/Red Earth is a CPS-3 system game that has not seen a homeport until now. Should’ve included all three Street Fighter III games while they were at it. Cyberbots is a cult game with little to no audience or live scene. Pocket Fighters is mostly a throwaway, it is not going to make any ends or means. What is peculiar about this collection is that it only has 2D fighting games. There is no Rival Schools, Star Gladiator, Power Stone or Tech Romancer. Not even a word is being whispered about Street Fighter EX titles in a collection, and I am sure Arika, as the developer of the games and owner of the series original originals, would be willing to cooperate. The reality probably is that this is a reasonable budget title for Capcom to test waters whether or not there is an audience for a new fighting game to go alongside Street Fighter but yet is distinctly different in visual and style. Darkstalkers still retains a very unique look, with the whole Western cartoon animation thing going on with its Universal Horror monster closet, while Cyberbots is strong mechanical mayhem to a tee. Red Earth is deeply rooted to its character growth system and will offer only a limited interest due to its low number of four playable characters. However, I believe this is the only way we would have ever got Red Earth ported; as a port of a collection.

Nevertheless, the styling is clear; a standard and safe Street Fighter II fair, a horror fighter, an SF mecha fighter, and a fantasy-themed fighter. All titles are going to use rollback netcode, so at least online play should be nice and nippy. If I were somebody at Capcom looking whether or not to greenlight a new project based on one of these games, I would have a line of code that would record how many hours each of the games are played to see what series, and what iteration in case of Darkstalkers, is the most popular and go with that. For better or worse, statistics still rule.

Maybe we’ll get at least a Capcom 3D Fighting Game Collection if this one sells reasonably to justify porting their 3D fighting games to modern platforms. I

The other side of the coin is that we are on Mega Man‘s 35th anniversary year as well. We have yet to see any kind of title being announced. Sure, it’s late February and there is a lot of year left, but there is not much Capcom can do in regards of collections. The latest Collections are not very old and are still in circulation, so putting out a new one wouldn’t be the best move to pull. Sure, something like Mega Man Legends collection would be nifty, but that’d also put the lens on the cancelled Mega Man Legends 3, and that’s something that probably salted the ground with Mega Man quite a lot. Mega Man is the other side of the coin due to how it depicts Capcom’s priorities. The best we can expect is a game during the Blue Bomber’s 40th anniversary. I honestly don’t expect a full-fledged Mega Man game on our shelves in the next five years.

There is no definitive way to say whether or not past Capcom Tests have been successful. When it comes to arcade games, we definitely can see how certain games floated to the top and became the cream of Capcom history. We can mostly point to Darkstalkers as a prime example of how the Capcom Test has flunked a series. I would say that the same can be appointed to the Mega Man series, which is now in the mobile game hell with Mega Man X DiVE. However, looking at a certain lack of titles that have come from Capcom’s collections as of late, chances are that even if the Fighting Game Collection sells, the hopes for new Darkstalkers should not be raised. Vote with your wallet and showcase the game, if you want to make your voice heard.

Though there’s always the question if modern Capcom can actually produce a new fighting game that isn’t a hyper-realistic million-dollar piece. All this sounds nice, but seeing how Capcom is doubling down on making the most Hollywood-like top-tier graphics experience with their RE Engine, the question that has to be asked is whether or not there is anyone who could head a cartoony horror fighter. Darkstalkers is very much a cartoony fighter with bright colours despite its motif. While Darkstalkers themselves are serious things. While the story hardly comes through the games themselves, their background is rich and gives all of the more than just that one shade of blood red. There’s whole mythology you can only see in sourcebooks. While the story and the result of these matches were equally as serious, the animations were always tightly knit to the Tom and Jerry kind of gag animation. You could cut your opponent open mid-fight, but he’d just flip back together and get up. It’s tons of fun, and in my older days, I’ve slowly come to appreciate the craftsmanship the series has in terms of animation over titles like Street Fighter III and King of Fighters XIII. If Capcom would be making a new entry, I hope it’ll be colourful fun, filled with cartoony gore. I hope my fears are crushed and Capcom can actually rip themselves off from sticking to either anime or hyper-realism.

The second bit is that Darkstalkers is known to be a hard as hell game to get into. While the first and the second game are relatively easy and simple, that’s only by comparison to modern mechanics in fighting games. Then you have Darkstalkers 3, or Vampire Saviour, a game that has people who want to get into it, and people who have played it for good two decades or so. There’s very little middle-ground when it comes to skill ceilings. The game’s speed is still unmatched, and the mostly polished mechanics make a game that’s very hard to get into. Sure, there are a few bullshit regulations and rules on how some of the mechanics work and Dark Force is utterly useless with some characters, but those mostly add to the meta-skills the player has to learn. It’s easy to say that Guilty Gear is a poster boy for having a gimmick with each character, but Darkstalkers did that first by having the first character to airdash. One character in the original game’s cast could airdash as we think it nowadays, the others couldn’t. Sure, Morrigan’s forward dash would actually lift her off from the ground, but that’s not the same in function. Other characters have long hops that force them into an aerial state. All this is to say that while the very core basic walking might’ve been shared with all characters, characters would also have different ways to do more advanced movements, like dashing forwards or hopping or just disappearing for a moment while sliding forwards. I take that back, actually. Guilty Gear is still the poster boy for gimmick characters, Darkstalkers has characters that are built around certain unique options only accessible to a single or limited number of characters.

In the modern environment, where eSports is a thing and has to drive sales, I can’t see Capcom putting an effort into making a game that has a high learning curve which is also further affected by each character in a heavier manner than in Street Fighter or King of Fighters. Guilty Gear mostly has bullshit single-character mechanics that might as well be a whole different genre. I can still hear Jack-O playing tower defense in my head. Heavily in-depth and complex fighting games don’t seem to make good sales or nice eSports titles, especially if the game’s emphasis is blitz-speed with no pause of any sort for Super Moves. The cartoony animation has to carry that wow factor. Perhaps it’d be better if Capcom would make a new Cyberbots instead. Their realistic approach could work very well for that game, and there has been a serious lack of quality robot fighting games as of late. Alternatively, a new Red Earth title could emphasize player-build characters through an easy interface with expanded RPG-like growth mechanics and elements thrown in, but that’d be effectively Soul Calibur.

I’ll most likely be picking up this collection on launch day just to be able to play a legitimate copy of Red Earth without resorting to emulation. That’s a sticking point with some, seeing this collection moot because all the titles innit can be played through Fightcade. While an option, emulation doesn’t really showcase Capcom what the customers would like to have as it doesn’t show up in their revenue tape. In a sorted twisted sense, it can also show that people are completely fine playing the old games over and over again. All Capcom needs to do is to release a new collection every decade or so to test the waters. We’ve been through this a few times already. That’s kinda sad innit. Here we are, getting a collection of games we’ve played tons already throughout the years, just to test waters with if Capcom might want to make more money in making a new entry.

Capcom fans are weird beings. On one hand, the fans want new entries for their old games. On another, there’s always a want for something new. It’s just Capcom wants to test first if there are enough existing fans to justify making a new entry. God only knows how the hell Capcom ever manages to produce new IPs, but they really need to get on that boat too in the near future.

Mega Man Legends Series Homepage image gallery

Capcom Japan used to run their website like they were fans of their own games. Contrast this to whatever modern corporate website you have now that is largely impersonal and doesn’t give you anything but the minimum. Certainly, you can still find businesses running websites that want to approach you as a person and as a fan, like Falcom’s in most cases, but more often than not they’ve become cold. Capcom’s http://www.capcom.co.jp/newproducts/consumer/dash, or Mega Man Legends Series’ Homepage, used to be a website that I visited numerous times during the first tens after stumbling upon it, but nowadays that link goes directly to a 404 error site. Luckily, someone managed to use the Waybackmachine to archive the site multiple times, but as with usual, a number of the images have their hyperlinks dead.

Seeing as I started my hobby of saving a lot of images from the Internet in case sites or users would vanish, this Mega Man Legends page was probably my first attempt at archiving images. Needless to say, a lot of images without their proper content are jarring, but gladly text is easier to archive than images. This post contains all the most relevant images regarding illustrations and similar stuff, with marketing material and such still being mostly available at Waybackmachine.

Continue reading “Mega Man Legends Series Homepage image gallery” →

Battle Network’s near perfect combat

Mega Man Battle Network is known for its unique battle system that hasn’t been replicated outside its sequel series, the Lego Ninjago: Spinjitzu Smash Flash games, with one of them outright ripping sprites for testing purposes, and to a lesser extent in One Step From Eden. All these mentioned titles don’t really replicate the polish Battle Network had, mostly because the team went through numerous iterations during the first game’s development and managed to polish it up in the second and third game. The three last games in the main series sadly don’t do justice to the combat system, and it’s all because Battle Network‘s combat system maintains a very delicate balance that’s very easy to break in terms how well it works. Think of the many versions of Tetris that change the shapes and number of tiles per shape, and you get the gist of it.

A standard field layout, with red being the player side and blue the enemy side

At the base of the Battle Network combat experience lays two elements; movement and resources. As every game’s battlefield is a grid of 3×6 panels, most often initially split as 3×3 for player and opponents, movement becomes impossibly crucial. The 3×3 area is a combination of multiple factors, one being that it is both claustrophobic and roomy enough to allow swift motion from one panel to another. Motion between panels is animated through a zip, where the characters sort of teleport between the panels. While you could have a character jumping or running, or just doing away with the animation, the zipping has a small frame of animation that deactivates and actives the hitboxes on each panel.

Timing becomes incredibly important, as in some games successfully avoiding enemy attacks might require high-level of movement management, though rarely frame accurate. Because of this the play often gets hectic as the player is required to navigate panels, or whole lines and rows of panels, to which opponents’ attacks land all the while trying to land your own hits. The 3×3 panel layout is perfect for this, as it keeps the area wide enough that going from one corner to another requires moving four panel’s distance, as there is no moving in angles. It allows wide enough variety in enemy attack patterns as well as options to escape to enforce quick movements without necessitating for the player to move too far. Perhaps it’d be better to showcase a video, and then go deeper why the system works the best in its most famous form.

A very simple, very easy battle, where the player still has to mind the Mettaur and Ghost’s movements. Instead of using Battle Chips, he chooses to delete the Mettaur by Buster. While doing this, he blocks the Ghost’s attack, in which it moves in front of the player and licks him, By positioning in front of the Mettaur, the Ghost has to retreat. Longplays are a nice way to grab a small segment and just embed from a certain timecode onwards.

4×4, the layout One Step From Eden uses is one panel line and row too big, as traversing the area becomes too large for fast-paced action. Even if movement speed was raised, it’d still be an extra panel to traverse Not only that but the balance breaks as there is no longer a central panel. All attack patterns can become far too widespread. 2×2 would be too small on the other hand and too limiting in every sense, which is the case with Mega Man Star Force, as it effectively butchered the play by limiting the player to one row of movement while enemies have 5×3 area to cover. Moving only left and right is not nearly as engaging as full-range of movement. One of the main issues that end up popping up also from a larger grid stems from the player’s need to scan a much wider area for enemy action. With 3×6 you have large enough space to keep an eye on everything that’s happening, yet with larger fields require splitting attention due to wider spread space, enemy patterns and landing attacks. The issue is inverse in smaller grids, where you end up having less space to keep an eye, which also has to simplify the patterns.

While *One Step From Eden* flows well, it’s hampered by its expanded field

The full range of movement there is with the caveat that the player can only move in X or Y axis in Battle Network. Allowing the player to move diagonally would break the balance, though in larger fields it might become a necessary addition. The 3×3 layout and up-down, left-right movement offers a balance between the player being able to effectively navigate all those safe zones while leaving the chances of player cornering himself by mistake or making bad judgement calls. 4×4 or larger does contain the same thing, but again that extra low and line build that safety margin too much, making balancing the attack patterns and movements that much more difficult.

The 3×3 panel is perfectly balanced to offer tile-based movement that isn’t too widespread or too tight. It’s an optimal solution.

All this of course can only be supported by the resources, which are aplenty. First is, of course, the selection of weaponry in form of Battle Chips, which go from single-row attacks to multi-panel X-shape shots. A standard Virus opponent often has only one form of attack and defence, though sometimes this defence is just moving. The Viruses are thus paired with other types that either compensate each other weaknesses or pose a challenge for the player in terms of panel navigation. Some Viruses have passive defences that must be circumvented in an indirect manner, some have none. For example, there is a Virus that has a shield in front of it that prevents direct damage from ahead and moves towards the player area. Once it reaches its area limit, it puts the shield on the player side and causes gradual damage via Poison. Early on the best method for the player to deal with this Virus is to use a Wide Sword, a close-range attack that does 1×3 area of damage in front of the player, the player being in the centre. Other times the player finds himself against a tree Virus that recovers HP faster than the player might be able to dish out due to the panels having a beneficial element. Thus, either cracking or literally burning the grass off from the panel the tree is standing of negates this effect.

Bosses often had extra shielding or similar gimmicks. Here, the player probably tries to limit the Boss’ movement through cracking the panels

Resources like these change how the player must meet the battles, at least until the player unlocks game-breaking combos and other fun post-game content. Combining action games’ fast movement, albeit in a more limited sense, to an RPG standard rock-paper-scissors Elemental system makes the resources an essential part of the play, and managing to design and develop these resources makes or breaks the whole system. Not only does the player have to have access to a wide variety of solutions to a single combat problem through the selection of Battle Chips, but also have them balanced so that these strategies must be changed from time to time.

The Battle Chips selection changes as the series grows, and many of the staples get dropped in favour of new Chips. This has caused numerous balance issues, as many high utility Chips are dropped in subsequent games and their replacements are not nearly as useful. While this forces the player to adopt new tactics for each game, the truth is that the selection of weaponry does determine how well the battles are fought, and how enjoyable the play ends up being. While there are a couple of hundred of listed Chips and their combined Program Advances, the majority of these Chips end up being copies of each other in different strength. This is of course to give the player chance to use the same family of Chips in stronger form as enemies become tougher and acquire more HP fat. This is another standard RPG mechanic though, much like how Final Fantasy has Fire, Fire 2 and Fire 3, so does Battle Network have Cannon, HiCannon and M(ega)Cannon.

The selection of these battle resources allows the players to express themselves and their favourite ways of battle. While others prefer the straightforward Cannons, others might aim for more damage with combinations of Chips. One method would be to use Area Steal, which takes one 1×3 area from the enemy side and turns it into area player can enter. This temporary steal deprives the opponent panels to move in and greatly expands the player’s movement options. This disrupts the opponent’s movement options while greatly increasing the player’s. Either side can, in effect, steal all of the opponent’s side bar the one they are standing on, causing what’s called an Area Lock. This is extremely useful in games where Battle Chips randomly hit enemy panels for damage multiple times. Area Locking an enemy to a single panel forces all the hits to concentrate on one panel, causing e.g. a hit worth of 80 repeating on one panel five times, causing total damage of 400. Add Chips that increase damage per hit, and the damage increases significantly.

Battle Network needs to limit access to these resources so that the player can’t have the perfect build all the time. This is realised first in making a Folder with a set limit of 30 Battle Chips. You can’t have less or more. By doing this, the player is forced to insert multiple different strategies into the Folder, often in a way where combinations of Chips can also work on their own, if necessary.

An example of similar Chips and Codes in a Folder

Secondly, all Chips have a letter code that limits what the player can choose in one go. Unless multiples of the same Chip is selected, no Code can be mixed and matched, outside the *-Code. For example, the player could have Cannon A and Cannon B or Cannon B and Bomb B, but not Cannon A and Bomb B. This locks the player from having all the strategies at his and at the same time but also introduces the chance of having only one Chip they could choose of they build their Folder without much thought. The amount of same Chips per Folder varies between games, with the first game allowing ten of the same, second game dropping this to four, third game rising it to five, and the sixth game introducing the idea of each Chip having a megabyte size, with larger Chips only be allowed a lower amount. Higher ranking Chips are more limited, with Giga Chips only allowed one entry per Folder.

Thirdly, the player can only access five Chips from his library via Custom screen at the start of a battle by the standard. The importance of having a Folder with large amounts of the same Chips, or same Code letter, becomes pressing depending on the player strategies. The player has to live with the selection the random number generator has given him until about ten seconds pass as dictated by Custom Gauge. At this point, the player can access the selection screen again, where he can choose another set of Chips, with the used one replaced with Chips from his Folder. The cycle between Custom screens is called a turn, though by standard a turn can last as long as the player wants. Under certain conditions, the Gauge can be fastened up or slowed down. In certain games, it becomes a puzzle element, where specific battles must be done under a turn limit and the Custom screen is opened automatically when the Gauge has filled up.

Custom Screen open at the beginning of a battle, with BN3’s Boss visible

The player can affect the number of Chips in their selection during the Custom screen by using the Add command rather than selecting any Chips. In the first game, it adds five more Chips to the Custom screen, with another use adding another five. This wasn’t the best system, as you’d lose all the additional Chips the turn you chose to use something. It wasn’t much fun. The second game introduced a change to the Add system, where the player had to sacrifice up to five Chips in the Custom screen to gain access to additional Chips. This Add system totalled to a maximum of ten, but the addition was permanent for the rest of the battle. This made the risk and reward already presented by the random choices as you might find it necessary to sacrifice stronger weaponry for a wider selection. It also expanded turn-by-turn options dramatically. The number of Chips available could be affected with outside effects, like Styles that changed the player’s element and weapons, but also via Customisation blocks that would become available in the third game. These ended up as the only options for the player to expand the selection, as the Add function was removed. However, this also removed the added risk and reward option, and further limited the maximum amount of chips from 10 to 8, drastically changing the nature and the balance of the battles themselves.

The balance in a combat system that heavily relies both on certain kind of spatial movement and a large variety of resources and conditions. The first game doesn’t exactly use the system the best, with everything being more or less unpolished. By the third game, the balance between damage output, method variety, hit patterns, additional conditions, panel elements and more extensive character customisation that affects all these directly made the balance stand on its tiptoes, but perhaps ultimately also showcased how well the developers understood it all.

The Navi Customizer from BN3 further expanded how the players could play and with what strategies

All these things have to tick in proper sync to work, something that the staff of the later games didn’t understand as well as the previous team. For example, removing the Add option might not seem an important decision, but it nevertheless favoured few types of approach more in character customisation and Folder building over others. Chip selection, or rather designing how the Chips would work is nothing short of do-or-die, and sadly from the fourth game onwards, the Battle Chips were never quite balanced, often teetering on practically useless to game-breaking on their own. Of course, the enemy selection had to be on par with this, which again became an object of inquiry as the games went on, with some enemy patterns being simply not fun. The system lends itself for challenge battles well enough, though it became questionable when Battle Network 5 introduced Liberation Mission, a combination of turn-based strategy with turn-limited battles. While others enjoyed the challenge they posed, its attempts to shake the combat experience by putting the player in the middle of the field, sandwiched by two enemy sides, didn’t work out all that well. These combat scenarios became janky and even more dependent on proper Chip selection that forced players to farm certain kinds of resources, putting far too high emphasize on the Chips themselves rather than having a combination of player’s action parts and collecting.

Some of the higher level player-VS-player battles showcase strategies that aren’t used all that much in single-player campaign, and they can end up being relatively boring to watch and slower-paced than in-game matches. Balancing the Chips selection between single and multiplayer play is rather hard, as some Chips ended up useful only in one area or the other

The system itself is nearly perfect. At its core, it’s something that only a video game can do, similar to Tetris. However, because it is reliant on how the resources are designed and managed, it is very easy to screw up. Despite the first and the last three games managing to screw up this balance nicely, the wide variety of Battle Chips and their combinations despite other system changes also means the players can and will find ways to cheese the system. As such, the best way to expand the system is not to change the absolute core of the system, that is the movement and the 3×6 grid, but to expand on resources and the ways all the combatants can make use of them.

This is probably one those things where Battle Network truly failed in its play. While most of the enemies were Viruses, majority of the standard Bosses didn’t utilise Battle Chips until later on. Instead, they all have their own gimmick and are designed around them. However, if the Bosses would’ve had similar access to at least a proper Folder of their own in addition to their specialised field, the games could’ve been a step more challenging as well as throwing a wrench to the player’s gears at times. This might’ve taken away from the uniqueness of each of the bosses, though evidently, developers agreed the Bosses should use Battle Chips at least to a limited amount.

Secondly is that most storyline End Bosses simply don’t conform to the established rules. They are largely inanimate and despite their hype, end up being lacklustre due them becoming an issue of hitting their weak point, which is often covered until certain phases. Incidentally, post-game Bosses end up being far more entertaining in their difficulty and methods, as they break the rules just enough to be unique all the while having all the same benefits most other characters, including the player’s, have on the field. Bass is probably the best example of this, as his level of strength is relative to the game he is in. Initially being covered by Dream Aura that requires 100HP worth of damage, Bass gains new patterns and strikes in each subsequent title relative to the overall balance and content of the game.

While BN3’s Bass BS isn’t the most difficult version of him, in many ways it is one of the more iconic ones. This Japanese voice-over here describes its attacks and a method to beat him. The battle here showcases some creative use of Battle Chips, as well as FolderBack, a Giga Chip that restores all used Battle Chips back to usable state. It happens to be the most broken Chip across the series

The system doesn’t lend itself to be modified and replicated in large fashion without a complete overhaul. Any change to the core requires a total change to effectively every part of the system to achieve a similar balance. This is one of the reasons why Battle Network didn’t spawn copycat series despite its popularity, as any game that might use a system derived from it would instantly be called out. Star Force tried to adapt some of the core mechanics, but it didn’t pan out all that well. Player movement is one of the most fun aspect of the system, and reducing it to one dimension made everything else having to compensate for this, which they can’t. The system was already robust in the first game, though unpolished. Be it by design or happy accident, this prevents similar iterations and alterations that something like Dragon Quest would lead to.

For better or worse, Mega Man Battle Network combat is still unique since nothing quite like it has turned up. Perhaps it’s better that way, as the system was already explored and almost broken under Capcom, and variations of it have not succeeded to the same level. This, combined with the whole thing not being to everyone’s taste, probably means we’ll never see it outside few oddities once in a decade until Capcom decides to re-release or remaster the Battle Network games. Here’s hoping for that Phantom of Network remake.

Another’s World

I can’t decide whether or not we live in an era where we are demanding authors’ and artists’ works to be untouched by outside forces, or we demand changes to these works for whatever reasons. I don’t really care either way, but the blog’s standpoint is that if a work is by one primary author, it should be left alone by external forces and be allowed to contest in the marketplace just as any. If the work is by a team effort, then it is subject to the hierarchy and decisions of that hierarchy, for better or worse. In video games, it’s rather common to see consumers demanding one of a game’s creator’s position to be the highest priority, that a game franchise should not continue because its perceived primary force is either in a bad position or abandoned. At the same, the same consumers keep consuming games that have the original teams long gone and don’t give a one damn about who’s in charge and what’s being done by whom.

Mega Man as a franchise is a great example of this. The first game’s original team effectively broke away, with only the core who wanted to do a sequel worked on the second game on their free time, and the third game had a producer who didn’t know what was going on so Keiji Inafune had to pull triple duty. The rest is history, with Inafune effectively being the only guy who worked on the first game and was coined as the Father of the franchise, until Mighty Number 9 hit the corner and the consumer opinion changed vastly. Still, the franchise has numerous games that have been worked by stupid amount of different people and some of the most acclaimed games have been developed by someone else other than Capcom, namely Minakuchi Engineering and Inti-Creates.

The Game Boy Mega Man titles, or Rockman World titles, were not developed by Capcom. Outside the second game, they were handled by Minakuchi Engineering, a game developer that mysteriously vanished around 2002. Due to developers going uncredited as part of branding and recognition, their website could only claim to have worked on over forty titles, including Mega Man X3. It wasn’t a practice to showcase who developed the game in the Japanese game industry, and as such none of the games until Mega Man Zero show any names or branding that would contradict Capcom. As far as the customers and the reviewers knew, the Game Boy games were developed by Capcom themselves. The second World game (I’ll just call the GB Mega Man games as World games from hereon) was developed by Japan System House, another dead developer, but one that has less favourable reputation. They later restructured into Biox Co., Ltd, and then into JSH Co, only to change back to Biox in 1997. GDRI has a list of titles confirmed they worked on.

We’ll never know the real reason why Capcom switched their developers for the World games few times around, but looking at the quality of World 2 game, it’s most likely that the sad quality of programming and designing was the main reason. The game was put into developed right after the first game and released five months later. Programming is one thing, but sound effects being completely off, sound being tinny hell and the whole package smelling like cheap chop job, it’s no wonder Capcom would turn back to Minakuchi Engineering. They became Capcom’s most important second team with Mega Man then, handling the rest of the Game Boy games, The Wily Wars and the aforementioned MMX3 before Inti-Creates took their spot. While World 3 is still about as uninspired as the previous games on the Game Boy, the fourth and fifth games have been praised for their quality and design, as well as taking some steps to try innovating with the franchise a bit.

I doubt anyone will contest me too eagerly if I claim Mega Man to be rather static franchise. For each series entry, there’s not a whole lot room for innovation as much as there is for improvement. Giving Mega Man a charged shot was more or less a natural evolution of ramping up his ready arsenal, with Rush being normal evolution of the Item Weapons. Giving Mega Man a a slide improved his mobility, but also allowed more complex stage designs and enemy patterns. Small changes like these seem that much more significant, when the core game play was effectively perfected on the first go. Understanding limitations and how to work with them isn’t anything special for original creators, as pretty much all of the changes Mega Man has seen in its franchise run are by from other than original creators. They’re also an example how someone else, like a third party developer, can understand the idea better than the originator, and understand the customer wants and needs that much better. Mega Man (World) 4 has two things that elevates this title above its three predecessors; Item Replicator is a way for t he player to gain items that would might want and need, alleviating the lack of resources with new type of resource in P-Chips. Collected Chips can be turned into Lives, different kind of restorative Tanks and so on. Item Replicator would go down as something that would appear in later games, like Mega Man 7. It’s a surprising major change, but not as major as the second improvement; proper cut-scenes with higher production values than most in the series. While Mega Man games have had introduction and ending sequences, in-game cutscenes have been rather sparse. World 4 had short, to the point scenes moving the game along in certain points. While nothing world changing for video games, Mega Man always asked for something like this, and after this the series would see far more of these story sequences, for better or worse. There are other small tweaks that change how the player has to approach the game, e.g. the charged shot now has a kickback that will mess with jump trajectories and can push Mega Man off a ledge.

Even a small thing like completely changing how the Stage Selection screen looks and functions gives a massive change in tone. Rather than presenting a static four faces (or the standard eight in NES games,) Mega Man (World 4) opted to use a selection wheel with the stage view underneath. This is one of those small improvements that stack upon each other, until few games later the you have completely different kind of game in your hands. The core of the game hasn’t been touched, but everything else has been improved in a way or another.

Minakuchi Engineering understood after their first take how Mega Man games are at their core play out, how the stages need to be structured to present the player a puzzle-like challenge that more often than not requires dexterity and action. Perhaps even better than Capcom did, as after World 4 Capcom was more or less gearing up for the SNES entries. The last portable hurrah for the original series of Game Boy games would end up being the best in the franchise, with Mega Man (World) 5 changing some of the series’ established structures more Capcom has done at any point in the franchise history to this point. If Capcom wanted to shake things up drastically, they’d make a new series. Minakuchi Engineering understood how Mega Man functioned and now they could go and break it.

World 5‘s largest change is straight on the box itself; Mega Man now had a rocket punch as his main charged weapon. Dr. Wily didn’t end up being the villain of the game and the robots you fought were aliens. While the game plays like a Mega Man game in two dimensions should, it wasn’t chained down to the small progression any more. The Mega Arm, or the Rock’n Arm, doesn’t function like other standard weaponry. With purchasable upgrade it can grab items and enemies, meaning you can launch it to an enemy and keep causing it extra damage it would otherwise not receive due to the invincibility flicker. The Arm also has to return after being launched, meaning the player has to mind themselves for that period when they can shoot anything. While on the surface this seems like standard small addition, in a Mega Man game it breaks the slow gradual change in design, and the same applies with the Special Weapons, which now have far more wildly different applications. Both World 4 and 5 have some stages that you can tackle through different paths, and NES games already introduced few select hidden rooms for items, but Minakuchi Engineering ramped this up, and Capcom ramped this up again in Mega Man 7. Hell, if you look things in proper light, you’ll see that Mega Man 7 was very much influenced by the Game Boy titles. Starts with four stages selectable at the start, hidden room galore, Item Replicator, Mega Man has access to a weaker Rocket Punch with his armour, more and more cutscenes and more attempts to break away from the established moulding.

This is applicable to whatever form of entertainment. As long as you have someone who understand the underlying functions and structure, the original creators/authors are not required. That’s a big caveat, but something that anyone willing could be able to pull off as long as they’re willing to learn the ropes. World 4 is like a safe bet, not shaking the boat and showcasing a well-made meal everyone can enjoy, though it won’t blow anyone’s taste buds. World 5‘s meal would be still as expected, but the new chef prepared it with ingredients and new preparations methods that heighten the taste and texture.

I can’t wait to see when will Konami finally produce a new Metal Gear game to see how the franchise will be handled. Give it five or six more years, the Japanese game industry seems to have a habit to let a franchise lay silent for a period after some kind of hard negative event has taken place. Nevertheless, perhaps a Mega Man -like game with the grabbing mechanics and all that which World 5 made itself so good would’ve been a better option. There are always more room for more 2D action games.

Capcom’ next year’s plans is to continue on the same path

Capcom’s yearly integrated report was out at the end of the quarterly year, so nab yourself a .pdf copy if you’d rather read it yourself. Otherwise, let’s see what this year’s report says and how the year has come to pass. Grab some snacks and a drink, this’ll be a doozy.

Right off the bat, the report states two thing; Monster Hunter World has been Capcom’s most successful game to date, though the state the number of shipped units rather than sold units. Shipped units just sounds better, as it always is a larger number. The claim for the game’s success is twofold; Globalisation and Digitalisation. The aim for Iceborne, the Ultimate or G expansion to the game, to push further sales. It should be noted that the two games are treated as two separate entities, as this sort of updated version of the base game has been the standard for Monster Hunter since the first game.

MHW made the series a global success. Despite 4U selling well on the 3DS, the truly wall-breaking moment was MHW. The game’s overseas sales ratio increased to 60% of total sales compared to previous 25%. Bulk of Iceborne’s sales are expected to be digital, and whatever data they gather from that will determine Capcom’s future plans. Considering how well the game has been doing on Steam alone, it’s probable that Capcom will push more of their games on digital frontier and cut down production of physical goods. This has been a trend for a while now, but this most likely will only matter for the Overseas markets, as Japanese markets still prefer physical goods over digital. If MHW was offered as a physical product for PCs without any ties to Steam, it’d sell just as well there.

The report starts properly after this, listing Capcom’s Capcom’s method of business and ideology. Capcom shows itself as Creator of entertainment culture that stimulate your senses. Bits like this should remind you that company indeed is Japanese. Their net sales for the end of the year, that is March 31st, was 82.9 billion yen. This is their main bread and butter, counting home video games, PC online, mobile titles and DLC. Their multimedia net sales, that is all the merch in books, toys etc, movies, their arcade games and Capcom’s own arcade centres, events and eSports, netted then 17.0 billion.

Here’s the kicker though; Capcom lists four of their major franchises next, the ones you should consider to be the essence of Capcom at this moment; Street Fighter, Resident Evil, Monster Hunter and Mega Man’s sales are listed, tho after the report Mega Man reached another million units sold. The sales numbers in respective order is, 42 million, 91 million, 54 million and 35 million, now 36. Fiscal year 2019’s biggest hits were, unsurprisingly, Devil May Cry 5 at 2.1 million units sold, REmake2 at 4.2 million and MHW at 4.5 .MHW is noted to be a catalog title, meaning it is a game that was published earlier and not during the fiscal year, showcasing that a game can continue to sell for a long damn time as long as it is available.

The core idea of Capcom’s Single Content, Multiple Usage is effectively effective franchising. It all starts with digital content and with a popular video game. The core of this digital content can be expanded to PC online gaming, via multiplayer modes or similar as well as create spinoff titles or additional tools, wallpapers or whatever other applications for mobile devices. The base concept of something like Resident Evil can be put into use in arcades by using the same world and characters in different pachislot games or similar arcade games. Other business section is major, as that mostly includes third and second parties using that core game to expand the amount of uses. Books, comics, character toys, events, tournaments, eSports, television shows and movies are all part of this extremely expansive Other Business section Capcom is not directly involved with in most cases. All this leads into creation of a new game, that will be used multiple times over. The importance is in having strong IPs that can be used multiple times, that the titles have global popularity to ensure that these franchised elements will sell (though if we’re completely honest, most of the franchised stuff Capcom puts out stays in Japan) and then you have the movies. It is probable that Capcom has the most games made movies out of. We can question their quality in many ways, but they still make money. Every time Street Fighter the Movie is shown on telly, Capcom gets about a million yen.

This method of using single content is nothing special in of itself, yet the whole movie business makes it a bit special. Konami, for example, has a very similar multimedia approach to their business, though they are rather separate in most cases. Konami can have a successful toy franchise going on, but no real game or other media of it. Capcom recognises their main point is the games, and they aim to make a mass-appealing game they can franchise further. This ideology probably permeates the game design at its core level, where designers at Capcom have to ask themselves How can this be used multiple times down the line? This also explains why certain IPs, despite being strong previously, have not appeared in any modern form outside ports, as they can’t be used multiple times nearly as easily.

This method of franchising is dependent on the core quality of the game, however. Capcom’s quality in games was all over the map during 00’s and early 10’s, but after some financial problems they’ve managed to level out with increasing sales. Their Operating Incopme is up 13.1% from last year, Margin is 1.1 point up, a slow but steady rise from 2016. Their net sales are 5.8% up, continuing the trend from 2015, where their sales dipped. It should be possible for Capcom to reach their 2014 level of sales during this next fiscal year. After the slump of net income from 2013, Capcom has been doing much better with 14.8% rise from last year, about triple the amount since 2014. Research and Development costs have gone down a bit, mostly thanks to establishing their new engines and streamlining development, but it is expected to rise next year. The balance of work in progress for games went down major 34%. This was gained by closing down overseas studios and release of games that requires lots of works, i.e. REmake2 and DMC5. This is interesting though; Capcom split its stocks 1:2 last fiscal year, meaning the payout was decreased, but dividends increased. They’ve been managing to pay out dividends 29 times in a row. More people may have access to stocks, but payout per stock is smaller. Might’ve been a good chance to jump into the bandwagon at that point. Return of Equity, a.k.a. the measure of how effectively management is using a company’s assets to create profits, is up one point. Should be noted that it barely beat 2009, meaning ever since 2010 Capcom was in a rut and had to fight hard to get back up.

With WHO recognising gaming disorder, something I’ve covered few times already (it has no basis), Capcom has Sustainable Development Goals, effectively meaning Capcom wants to showcase themselves as a company that balances their own economic growth with the sustainability of the society. In short, Capcom is supposedly trying to showcase themselves as a company that would not take advantage of people with gaming disorder. EGS, Environmental, Social and Governance form EGS material issues that come in four sections; Securing and Training human resources, Promoting diversity, Development of Solid Relationship with Society, and Enhancement of Corporate Governance. This needs a bit breaking down, as EGD and the four spots mingle slightly. All this is according to UN’s goals, which Capcom wants to go by. Furthermore, Capcom is to continue their 2011 program of supporting educational themes whenever a classroom requests such, meaning that Capcom has a program that would educate students about video games and career opportunities. However, this is largely Japan-only, though with Capcom wanting to globalise themselves further, they might want to tackle most major schools around the world in some manner, and maybe even send e-mails to smaller schools around the globe, offering some assistance in game studies.

Capcom is tackling Environmental issues with the usual fashion, like changing old light bulbs to LEDs to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and reducing paper resources by digitalisation. This has reduced costs, but also means that Capcom can showcase their push for further digital sales as part of ESG. Energy conservation will be their future goal.

For Social, Capcom is aiming to hire more non-Japanese employees and increase the number of women in management position, but an approach like this won’t serve well in of itself. All these people need to be competent in their work, as companies that will hire or kick up people into the higher up’s board for the sake of diversity does no good for the company itself. Whether or not this goal will be healthy on the long run will be seen. Forced diversity is not a solution, but that is the wind of the era. Capcom has been increasing the amount of women workers in their ranks, though in reality it shouldn’t matter what junk the employee has between their legs, just the quality of their work. It should be noted though that Capcom’s Relationship with Customers has a spot mentioning how they’ve monetised DLC without high-pressure microtransactions, something that a company like EA can’t say with all the lootboxes and whatnot. According to Capcom, games should be enjoyed for the entertainment value they provide with gameplay, not fir the thrills associated winning a lottery. Capcom intends to deliver core content for free for their games, with DLC being its own thing at a low cost. With their mobile games, they supposedly intent to continue have small as possible gacha elements. Localisation and culturalisation gets mentioned as well, and rather than talk about translation or localisation, Capcom wants to culturalise games so they’d be enjoyed in whatever locale. This sounds highly suspicious, but it also explain why mention of dragons got removed from Monster Hunter World in China.

Capcom is surprisingly effective when it comes to Relationship with the Regional Community, as they Capcom is involved with number of events in Japan, offering possibilities for cities and municipalities to make profit off of their own from these events and whatnot. This also doubles as an effect of Capcom getting their name out there to people who wouldn’t recognise it otherwise.

For Governance, Capcom has been increasing ratio of external directors and increased dialogue with the shareholders. Basically, Capcom wants to have more openness with their shareholders as well as be more transparent all around. Capcom even lists reasons why external directors have been selected, e.g. Masao Sato is expected to be able to contribute to the auditing and supervision of the Board of Directors via his experience and knowledge from serving the police administration. This is part of the whole “visible” governance, and we’re even given a third-party assessment of Capcom’s corporate governance. Capcom’s strength lies in capital efficiency and information disclosure, with Effectiveness being the lowest. This is pretty much as expected, as per the business culture Capcom resides in.

Rather surprisingly, Capcom has an increasing number of annual discussions regarding the market opinion. Whether or not these discussions with take true market opinion into count, or just what the gaming press wants the opinion to be, is wholly another question.

Regarding Capcom’s achievements for the year, there’s nothing much to cover. Their catalog titles i.e. older titles continued to sell decently, with MHW being still a top seller. Their two new releases, DMC5 and REmake2 sold extremely well, and apparently Capcom is satisfied with the sales of ports and such. As for arcades, Capcom apparently started an online crane game, and have been aiming to expand their target market towards middle-aged and the elderly. Plaza Capcom was opened in Hiroshima, which probably explain why they closed down one arcade and opened two new ones at different locations. Despite their five different Pachinko and Pachislot models sold reasonably, the changes they made in testing their equipment meant lower overall sales; 3,422 billion compared to last year’s 7,803 billion. Numerous events were held to maximise sales of games, as well as further use of eSports like Capcom Street FIghter League powered by Rage. Net sales increased and operating margin was 31.5%.

Capcom’s intention to build a strong business portfolio hasn’t changed any. Their aim, after all, is to make games they can make multiple uses out of. For the next year, Capcom seems to intent promoting their mobile games more and explore possibilities more, which is why we’re getting Rockman X DiVE rather than a home game release. Standard consumer releases are abound from major IPs. We already know REmake3 has been in the works for some time and will be out somewhat soon. Whether or not something else like DMC5 will be out is another question, tho Capcom would count MHW Iceborne on Steam a new title, and the base game a catalog title. Capcom also has to restructure their development to handle the new regulations Japan has made regarding gambling, as it impacts their pachinko and pachislot business. Business as usual, and in hindsight, REmake2 and DMC5 last year was Capcom reviving old IPs for new generation. Much less than what was expected, but the reception and sales of both titles speak for themselves.

Kenzo Tsujimoto’s section is up next, which is more or less a view on Capcom’s CEO’s commitment and look at the company’s history. Without much going in too deep, Capcom has six points in their philosophy, something we’ve already seen; Aim to become the best in the world, Compete with strong IPs, Stable long-term growth, Managing their IPs and companies properly to ensure the two aforementioned, enforce and encourage relationship with societies locally and globally as well as with stakeholders; and avoiding management risks with transparency. We’ve effectively covered most of these spots, but I’d like to give some spotlight on the third bit about stable long-term growth.

Capcom struggled most of the new Millennium to find their spot in the gaming market after the crash of the arcades, but their long-term growth has been better than most of their competitors. Their Operating Margins have been overall better than their main competitors’ with +66% operating income and margin being +7.9 points. While Konami may have +90% income, their margin is just below Capcom’s at +7.5 points. Contrast this to Square-Enix, who has -8% income and -3.3 points in margin. This of course could change during next fiscal year, when Final Fantasy VII Remake hits the store shelves. Neither Sega Sammy or Bandai-Namco can really compete with Capcom or Namco, as their respective numbers are -53% and +41% in Operating Income, with +1.8 and +1.1 points in margins. Effectively, Capcom has been making most of their last financial year’s success with just three titles, one of which was a catalog title. If they manage to keep both REmake2 and DMC5 selling well as catalog titles all the while rolling new titles as part of their main growth driver as per their management strategy, they should see further increases in profits and margins during 2020. Nevertheless, it seems that their most stable source of profit is still in arcade and amusement equipment with no real changes how well they’re selling.

Capcom will aim to increase profits with three-angled long-term plan. This plan consists of increasing digital sales on the global marketplace, preparing for the next generation of standards that will be rolling around during the next few years as well as focusing on eSports and aiming to popularise a new culture for content. First part is easy, overall speaking. All Capcom needs to do is release their new games via Steam alongside the usual home console market. That’s effectively what it amounts to. Capcom’s overseas games sales have increased drastically since 2015, while homeland sales have not really changed any. You could say that Capcom’s secret of being successful is to have IPs that are globally attractive. After all, Japan in itself is a very small market compared to the Americas, Europe and Australia, and the rest. China is of course a place they’d like to gain a strong foothold, but that’s going to be difficult still. Make digital the first option, and you’ll save in manufacturing costs. Capcom is also taking note of both Cloud gaming and Subscription services and are exploring ways to enter both of these. Cloud gaming, however, is still a pipe dream, while subscription services should be nothing new to them, technically speaking.

With new standards like 5G wireless, Capcom can’t help but make use of third-party outsider know-how. This is mostly for mobile market and most likely relevant only in Japan, but the underlying message does touch upon upcoming Microsoft and Sony consoles as well.

eSports was a major thing for Capcom last year, and apparently it netted some 1,096 million USD for them during 2019. That’s nothing to be scoffed at, and it is estimated 2020 eSport scene would net some 1,790 million USD. This is through the usual establishing of new leagues, analysis of trends and then promoting regional developments. As long as Capcom manages to establish a profitable and sustainable ecosystem, they should be able to maintain their practices. I’m sure this is part of the reason why Street Fighter V is the way it is, where the game is stable and easily accessible in various regions. The Marvel VS series, while superbly popular in the US, didn’t exactly have the same position in Europe, for example. Street Fighter V aimed to be very safe game and something they can build further revisions on easily, and it has been that. Certainly a success in financial terms, but not really a loved game in the series. However, in the next five years Capcom will assess if there is any more growth in eSports and whether or not it is profitable to continue promoting sales through it.

All this really amounts to Capcom’s plans to effectively follow 2019’s lead in terms of business. MHW has made them recognise that games can, and in future will have, longer sales periods than before. This is partially because digital marketplaces don’t run out of copies and are constantly available. On the long-term, if Capcom is to keep their current standards in visuals and sounds, the Hollywood look in their games, it will cost them more to research and develop. Something they are well aware. This probably means Capcom will put out only few new games per year, which most likely will be sequels or remakes, that they will bet on as their heavy hitters all the while ports and catalog sales are supporting them and making the risk of these big titles slightly smaller. Digital, however, is the thing that is being pushed further.

Interestingly enough, Capcom seems to aim to have their younger employees work on their popular IPs, meaning legacy IP in Capcom is a living thing. If there are more people like Yoshinori Ono, who want to revive a sleeping but still popular IP, in principle we could see some level of resurgence of some IPs down the line. This might be wishful thinking, but history has shown how legacy IP under younger employees can bloom like no other. Take Mega Man and Street Fighter as examples.

Rather than establishing new IPs, Capcom intents to expand new markets and find new customers. You can expect to see more remakes in the future, as games are considered to be obsolete after some time have passed. This seems to be their long-term plan; remakes and ports. At the same time, they aim to curb sales of used-games somehow as well as address piracy, especially in the Asian markets. Capcom loves to talk about their IPs, but at the same time the they’re not having new blood in their library. In the end, their aim is to expand into new territories they’ve yet to make an impact and raise global earnings. This applies to their arcade business as well, where they aim to attract new customers and enhance their lineup of titles.

Their analysis of game industry and market hasn’t changed, with general consumer and PC market overlapping somewhat and offering the most balanced place to be successful in. Mobile market may have large sums of money moving about, but the competition is extremely intense. Consumer market is 77% of all of Capcom’s net sales, followed up by mobile with 2%. PC online, like the crane catcher, makes double that at 4%. While they are in a good position to expand, Capcom currently has mostly high-risk options in their Value, Rarity, Inimitability and Organisational evaluation. Capcom doesn’t have as high competitive edge as they want to believe, as other companies possess all the same external edges as they do. Capcom being slow at making quick decisions probably have already bitten them in the ass couple of times, but the lack of direct competitors to their main selling IPs should be a concern. In Mobile market, however, Capcom is still at a complete loss. Then you have their directors competitors still rolling their IPs in the media and can easily overcome Capcom.

What is Capcom’s plan for the future then? To use their existing Intellectual Properties to make games and leverage them into further franchising. They are no intending to make new IPs at the moment, but deliver further remakes. REmake3 is the direct result of this. Long-term and steady growth seems to be their aim. Expanding their target market and find some new regions in Asia to make some more money. While all this probably will continue to continue kicking just fine, Capcom is not offering anything that could add to their existing strategies or IPs. Perhaps it could be said that Capcom intents to keep their current core customers happy while offering new generation of players the possibility to play classics in a remade fashion and in modern terms. Their plant to “make use of sleeping IPs” ultimately ended up being a remake and DMC5 with some ports. Maybe they could follow suit with some other of their sleeping IPs, like Commando and turn it into a generic Call of Duty clone or something similar. I don’t expect Capcom to expand IP library anytime soon. Now if they’d begin to remake games that would need them, like the original Street Fighter, rather than games that were already well made.

I mentioned Capcom Hollywood games, because it sounds what Hollywood blockbusters are doing; one or two big budget titles per year by using well established IPs carrying the whole studio. Smaller games are not even a thing really with Capcom anymore. Mega Man 11 seems to have been a sort of fluke, as the franchise was moved to mobile once again. All the small titles Capcom has been pushing out as of late have been ports and re-releases. Currently, it seems Capcom is not intending to launch a new IP anytime soon, but in long-term, that should be one of their priorities as well. After all, all of the IPs they like to talk about has to be established at some point, and it is necessary to have something that’s designed from the ground up to the current generation. However, the global popular culture has been marred with rehashes, remakes, adaptations and reboots for good two decades more than previously. Sadly, it must be admitted that relying on existing franchises and IPs with a built-in fanbase to revitalise business has been successful. However, as of late we’ve seen big franchises like Star Wars and Star Trek faulting during the run with lessening revenues and falling consumer interest. Capcom’s management has to work hard to avoid the same pits Hollywood studios have stumbled upon. Capcom has a history of falling on their face and success with this kind of approach, but there’s only so much they can use as existing material for remakes, unless there’s going to be complete and utter reboots.

Old, reheating Capcom

Despite Capcom having big hit titles in the few recent years, mainly Devil May Cry 5, Monster Hunter World and Resident Evil 2 Remake, that’s pretty much it. Street Fighter V has been extremely safe game for them, the SF fandom can be very, very tribal about their loved title, and Capcom fighting games overall are still considered the golden standard. For a good reason too, but that’s not the main topic here, maybe we’ll revisit that a bit later.

For 2019, Capcom has released no truly new game. Everything Capcom has released this year has been either a remake, sequel or a port. 2018 was the same deal. Back in the day in the late 1980’s and 1990’s Capcom was blamed to rehash the same game over and over again with new sequels. This isn’t true, despite it feeling like that with a new Mega Man game almost every year or yet another variation of Street Fighter II. The Golden Age of Mega Man was a wild time in many ways, but at the same time Capcom kept pushing out new franchises to expand their library and offering. If there wasn’t something new on a console, the arcades probably had something interesting to check out, like Darkstalkers.

Modern Capcom is satisfied with the status quo they have going on now, at least on the front. Capcom is relying on their big-name, big-business titles. While SNK wants to become Marvel of video games, Capcom used to have this spot. I say used to, because as we are now, Capcom has become the company that does nothing but sequels or rehashes. Even Mega Man, franchise that used to renew itself every few years to some extent, is effectively buried again. Capcom lost all the momentum they gained with Mega Man 11 by not publishing any solid information of a new Mega Man game being developed. Well, there is Rockman X DiVE, but as with every other Capcom franchise, they go to die on mobile. DiVE is far from being a new Mega Man 11 in terms of impact and presence, mostly because the title is competing in a different market from the main bulk of Mega Man games. In the end, it is still a sequel, or rather a spinoff, to a well known franchise.

Has Capcom abandoned making new and strong IPs? In business, especially in Japanese business, sticking to what you know best and what has already established market slot and pull is the way to go. The reason you don’t get new sequels to long-dead franchises all the time or new IPs to bolster the library is because the current corporate culture in Capcom is not there. The young Capcom needed to expand and make new titles all the time. Not because they threw everything a the wall to see what stuck, but because there was that drive. The people who work in Capcom now are not the same people who launched these game IPs originally, and it’ll take someone exceptional, like Yoshinori Ono, to suggest and bear the weight of reviving an IP.

You would think that reviving an old IP with strong history would fit the category just fine. Reviving, however, means that the IP is dormant or dead, often because it has either seen a slouch in sales or the driving force behind the franchise is missing. Resident Evil has consistently seen good amount of sales and is considered Capcom’s modern mainstay franchise next to Monster Hunter. Both of these series are old, but have been reinvented as they’ve come along. They’re also consistent with Capcom’s changing image, with new blood coming in and tasked to make a new game for the series. Capcom shows that you can live off a limited amount of IPs under your belt just fine, as long as you keep quality high and the number of releases constant. A stagnant series that doesn’t have the drive behind or, or the corporate support compared to the other projects that are going on at the same time, doesn’t have much chances. As much as Final Fight plays an important role in Capcom’s history, it is a legacy series they can use to promote themselves and other titles for the old guard that’s out there, but Final Fight has been superseded by Devil May Cry as the action game.

At some point, old IPs become new again after they’ve been dormant long enough. Street Fighter IV is a great example of this, and we can see Toho doing the same thing Godzilla periodically. Capcom still intents to revive some of their old, sleeping IPs (just like they said last year) but what are the chances of that happening? Perhaps what they mean by reviving they mean remaking old games that were big hits for the modern generations that hear the legends of these old games but won’t play because they’re too old. Maybe it means more ports upon ports. Probably both, as rumours say Capcom is already working on Resident Evil 3 remake. Understandable, considering how well REmake2 was did in sales and reception. While Capcom has loads of legacy franchises under its belt, they’re intentionally not making any use of them outside collections and re-releases. All the R&D goes to big name titles, which is closer to putting your eggs into one basket rather than betting on multiples. It seems to be working for Capcom just fine, but as argued last year, Capcom has both the manpower and economic capacity to develop smaller titles with smaller teams. They sort of are doing this with their mobile department, but that’s a different market from home consoles, and arguably different from PC market as well.

There’s no reason for Capcom to change their pattern right now, their big budget titles sell well and they are successful. Their caution is to back these up with re-releases. It’s safe and sure way to make business, and business is their main thing. Capcom wants big titles, big revenues. Small titles with meager sales won’t make that cut, but putting some money on re-releases, that’s a different thing. I wouldn’t expect Capcom to actually revive an old IP that doesn’t have some presence already. Sad to say, but at the moment, Capcom truly is the company they were joked to be, rehashing everything and unwilling to bring anything new to the table.

Grave of the Darkstalkers

With it being Halloween season and all that, I’ve been on a small Darkstalkers bend. Going back to my source books, playing the games, remembering there was a terrible television animation and somewhat decent OVA that looked pretty damn nice with plot being somewhat nonsensical. Darkstalkers is a fighting game series I used to play more than any other, despite starting with Street Fighter II. With the third game being the last in the series, and Guilty Gear X hitting the scene, Darkstalkers went into a limbo only pop up whenever I wanted to something gofast from a fighting game, or roll out Q-bee once more.

Perhaps the most atmospheric intro a fighting game to date, outside the first game’s

It’s no secret that Darkstalkers as a fighting game franchise never really hit through the masses. Morrigan may have eclipsed the franchise as a whole in popularity, and nowadays the franchise itself is probably known for her rather than for any other reason. It’s rather funny, perhaps even rather pathetic, to consider how the series’ main character, Demitri, was dropped to a second place by the time Darkstalkers 3 rolled around and was seemingly killed off in an audio drama. I remember some fanfare for the games when fighting game’s golden age was still going, but after that the only people who kept the franchise alive to any extent were the fans. Despite it being recognised as a watershed moment for fighting games in terms of visual design, animation, speed and gameplay, all those reasons probably were also the reason why the series is now in the grave.

The above tournament video shows off Darkstalkers 3 at a decently high level of play. The series was never a Street Fighter clone in itself, unlike some SNK creations. No, Darkstalkers was as high production fighting game you could have at the time. While the first game was more experimental than the its successor, being slower in pace speed and trying out to find its footsteps, the second game, Vampire Hunter, brought in the blazing speed. Third game would take this and make a game that ultimately hard to get a proper controlling feeling of. It’s one of those games when you learn to play it even to a small extent feels like a massive reward, as it feels like you’re in control of something wild and dangerous, something that any moment now could go out of control. Out of all fighting games, Darkstalkers has tight timings, unconventional projectile mechanics (you don’t even use the fireballs the same way to control space as you would in almost any other fighting game) and attacks that simply defy normal comprehension. All this is of course by design, which makes the series something an anomaly, especially the third game; you’ll find a lot players with low-skill or high-skill. There really aren’t all that much people in the mid-skill tier, because you either know how to play the game or not. Part of this is that it takes dedication of get good at Darkstalkers, and the second part is that the core fans have been playing these games since the late 90’s and never really stopped.

Darkstalkers had some of the best promotional and production artwork made for a fighting game to date

Then you have that the fact that Darkstalkers suffers the same fate as Street Fighter III; Third Strike – Fight for the Future; only the third game seems to matter. This is apparent how most fans treat the series, and how Capcom themselves pretty much ignored all other titles in their latest attempt to resurrect interest in the series with Darkstalkers Resurrection. It didn’t go so well, with low sales ultimately being the deciding factor. When it was heard that a new Darkstalkers game would be in the hands of sales numbers, I didn’t even bother. Seeing how the franchise’s history was of neglect to that point, there was not reason it to sell or Capcom to put the effort in. Both were the case. Resurrection is effectively a port of the third game for the PS3, which also means some of the cast members are missing. Darkstalkers 3 is a rather peculiar case, where characters from previous games had to be cut out because of memory limitations in Capcom arcade system of the time, CPS-2, and thus Capcom opted to make two further versions, Vampire Saviour 2 (Vampire Saviour being the Japanese title for Darkstalkers 3) and Vampire Hunter 2, both of which were remixes of their numberless predecessors with characters and mechanics switched about. You wouldn’t even know these existed outside Japan, and the game’s name change, as well as some of the characters, ultimately confused some for a long time. Sometimes you can see articles and videos discussing Darkstalkers 2 when it should be Vampire Saviour 2. There is no Darkstalkers 2 per se, that’s Vampire Hunter. Nevertheless, despite Capcom releasing a versions for the PlayStation, Dreamcast and PSP where you could play all the characters, and even systems and movesets in later games, Resurrection was aimed at the tournament scene players only and lacked all the cut characters. This was Capcom’s best chance and spot to rebalance the game, include all the characters into the game and effectively rework the title with old assets without losing anything. Of course they didn’t, that’d take time and money, and it wouldn’t be ‘arcade perfect.’

Despite Darkstalkers being largely designed around Western character archetype and animation was based on old Warner-Brothers and other cartoons, it mostly found its place with the Japanese audience, who embraced it fully. It doesn’t help that the game’s humour and core is still very much Japanese, and very 1990’s in a good way. I keep misspelling good ans goof, but maybe that works when talking how humorous Darkstalkers really is at face value. The sheer visual prowess may fit the 1990’s Capcom, with all jokes hidden in there, but if they were to make a new entry nowadays, Capcom would be royally screwed. None of the 3D models of the characters in Marvel Vs Capcom or Tatsunoko Vs Capcom had the same charm, the same level of care and animation, as the 2D sprites. 3D models simply can’t represent the 2D in the same manner, and Capcom argued so during Street Fighter IV’s releases, that the technology to warp 3D models on the fly the way Darkstalkers requires didn’t exist or was far too taxing and hard to do. The sheer amount of unique sprites and animations in Darkstalkers is insane and is probably the reason why the third game hit memory limitations so damn hard. Just take a look at the EX Special Moves collection and consider how so many sprites are just thrown around that don’t get used anywhere else. Lilith’s standing sprite is also a sight to behold.

This might be cartoony violence, but it wasn’t exactly accepted back in the 1990’s either. The blood effects were changed to white, which made it kind of worse. Lord Raptor, the rock zombie that quotes Michael Jackson, has a throwing move where he jabs his spiky ribs into the opponent before tossing away. The blood’s colour was changed to white, and now it looked like he’s cumming buckets while penetrating the opponent. Not only the animation is cartoony, exaggerated and over the top to the point of being incomprehensible to some, but it is also gruesome and violent. If we’re completely honest, the visuals of Darkstalkers does not fit with current Capcom. Capcom used to be 2D sprite king back int he day, but nowadays they are all about pushing the limits of realistic 3D. Resident Evil 2 Remake, Devio May Cry 5 and Monster Hunter World are the trifecta of modern Capcom style, and Street Fighter V fits that look perfectly. The company culture of mid-90’s Capcom doesn’t exist, and Darkstalkers probably embodies that era of Capcom the best. We can entertain the idea that Capcom would put the money and effort into making a whole new 2D fighting game, seeing Skullgirls was heavily inspired by Darkstalkers in style; characters have unconventional ways of attacking, body morphing all around the place and excessive animation wherever wanted. Capcom could showcase that they could put the effort and money into making 2D game to beat all 2D games in terms of animation and visuals. They wouldn’t want to do that, mostly because it wouldn’t sell the amounts modern Capcom expects their highest-end titles to sell, and they wouldn’t want to dethrone Street Fighter III from the animation throne… despite Skullgirls already done did it. There are even Motion Collections on Youtube just to see what sort of bullshit is hidden in Skullgirls animations. The same can’t be said of most other fighting games.

Then you have the point of Darkstalkers isn’t really fit for what the eSports scene likes at the moment. Some character designs are intentionally risque and sexual undertones are as intended. Be it the flat-chested Lilith trying to be playful, Morrigan rather direct with her nightly pleasures of Felicia having her tits bounce, some of the characters probably would need to be redesigned in order to appease a minority. If Rainbow Mika’s standard costume is too sexy for ESPN, so would be Morrigan’s and Felicia’s. Not only that, but in terms how Darkstalkers is all about that uninterrupted play, it makes a poor spectator’s sport in the modern era. Most modern fighting games have that element of visual splash, the Cinematic Moment where audiences and players are intended to be hyped. When you pull off a super move in any of the current fighting games, the screen freezes, you get a huge ass close-up and camera going every which way. You get those slo-mo effects in Tekken and Soul Calibur too. Darkstalkers is very much the opposite, where the only times there is any pause is during throws is very rare special move, like with one of Jedah’s.

For an outsider there’s not much on the offer here. It’s extremely heart-pounding for the player, asks a lot of concentration, but the general audience who isn’t into this particular game, it doesn’t offer the same Cinematic hype Moments. The speed also probably also means people will miss numerous points of attacks and reversals, meaning some can’t keep up with what’s happening on the screen. At least on the surface and at face value. If we’d take the series and fit it to the current mould, it would need to be slowed down a bit with more planned Moments. Not to say Darkstalkers couldn’t be that, though that frantic pace has always been part of its soul. When you see a Darkstalkers represented in a VS game, it always plays a bit flaccid. There’s none of that heart in there, as the characters have fit some other, foreign mould. It’s like shaving a square peg down to fit a round hole. Sure it goes in there after that, but the nice parts are gone. A new Darkstalkers would be like modern F-1, where all the things that would make the cars go faster are banned. Capcom’s current concentration on eSports would make Darkstalkers dull and generic.

Perhaps it is Darkstalkers’ uniqueness that doomed in the first place. It’s not historically a lucrative IP, and despite Capcom saying they want to revive old IPs, they’re looking into something that doesn’t take whole sections of their budget, like Mega Man 11. Capcom released their business-year end of reports, and I’m intending to cover this year’s Integrated Report like I did last year. Part of the report is about Capcom having a hold on eSports via Street Fighter V, and another title from them might sway that boat. Spectators are made a big point, and as we’ve discussed, Darkstalkers isn’t the best spectators’ game.

I would still recommend you to fire up a Darkstalkers game, be it via emulation or that Resurrection pack. It might feel weird at first, but after you’ve gotten used to the game system and get things roll, you’re ending up with an enjoyable game that won’t take too much of your time, but to which you want to return again and again from time to time.

Collections, collections, collections

So there’s a new Mega Man collection coming out, this time adding the Mega Man ZX games into the Mega Man Zero collection. I’m not sure how many remember, but the Zero games got a collection on the Nintendo DS, for better or worse, and they contained a mode that made the game easier across the board in order for the player to have an easier time so he’d see the story from start to finish. The original games were more or less intact, except with the connectivity thing with later Mega Man Battle Network games. Throw ZX games and you have a set of games people have been asking for some time.

What’s to write about this? Capcom has been collecting Mega Man games into bundles for a solid decade now, excluding the few earlier Anniversary collections that we got for PS2, GameCube and Xbawks. No, scrap that, let’s count them in. Ever since those collections, Capcom has been releasing old Mega Man games collected in each generation, except the Battle Network and Legends series. Legends is stuck with copyright hell thanks to Capcom using licensed drinks and labels in it, and due to Sony’s asinine Classics line rule, they can’t just remove these from the games and release as-in; they need to be as they were when they were first released on the PlayStation. Sure, we got the DASH games for the PSP, but only in Japan, hence the use of DASH instead of Legends. Without the two extra shoulder buttons, there’s some wonky controls about. We’ve never seen DASH since in a compilation, just as digital downloads, and Battle Network hasn’t been around at all. Maybe that series is stuck with license hell as well, considering the TV show and shitloads of other stuff regarding it were tightly wound together those (glorious) years. A compilation of sorts with online play would surely make many fans happy enough to blow their loads.

I bet your ass there are people who want that Zero bust just to hotglue it

Capcom Test is a term used when people assume Capcom is throwing something cheap out to test waters. While this has some credibility, the fact is that Mega Man doesn’t need its waters tested. They already know that there is demand, at least towards collections. Mega Man 11 showed that a game with relatively low budget compared to their hard, big hitters can and will make its money back as longs as it is competently made. Capcom hasn’t come out with any news whether or not they’re even considering developing Mega Man X9 despite teasing it in that one remix soundtrack CD (that was a letdown.) While some would argue that Evil May Cry 4‘s re-release was to test waters, we know from the director that he had made an ultimatum; he was given DMC5 or he’d walk out. At that point there were no waters to test, but perhaps what Capcom was testing was if there was enough demand for a higher budget. Game itself would’ve been made anyway. RE:make2 on the other hand needed to testing, after all Resident Evil is pretty much second only to Monster Hunter and even that is debatable after World, which in itself was carefully testing waters by dropping numeric from the title and opted for a subtitle instead, just in case if the game would crash and burn, meaning they could do a “real” Monster Hunter 5.

Let’s pose the question; if Capcom Test is a real thing, what are they testing with Mega Man Zero/ ZX Collection? The first answer might be that they testing whether or not there is enough demand for a new ZX game, as some would argue that the story needs to be concluded somehow in order to tie it properly to Legends. That really doesn’t hold much water, as Legends itself was left unfinished, and Capcom never greenlit Legends 3 despite all the public shit that was going on about it a decade ago. Theoretical ZX3 or whatever bullshit they add to the end (ZXA is ZX2 by all means) and would let the developers almost complete free reign to take the whole non-linear format to new directions. After all, these Montezuma’s Revenge-clones are still very popular. This collection won’t test how much demand there is for the Zero series, I doubt any of the fans would like to see Zero revived again for a fifth entry.

No, if they’re testing anything it is how much fans are willing to dish out, testing out how much pain carrying that loaded wallet causes. For this particular release Capcom Japan online store is going all out and releasing the previous Collections again in a box that has a separate space for Z/ZX collection. Y’know, get all the games (except Legends, spin-offs and Battle Network) in one major box.

Classics Collection, those X Collections, MM11 and free slot for Z/ZX. PS4 has its own as well, but Japan only, as usual with these

Capcom hasn’t really overstayed its welcome with these constant Collections yet, but they’re at the utmost limit now. If they were to publish a Legends Collections, they really should make it a complete package with all the missing titles, like Mega Man’s Soccer, Mega Man and Bass and its WonderSwan sequel, translated Rockboard and why the hell not throw that Chinese-only Rockman Strategy. I’m sure you can already tell that I’m not exactly looking for this particular release, but it does support the notion that Capcom is still riding on nostalgia wave instead of putting their goal to produce a new, high caliber Mega Man for whatever real reason. Inafune’s shadow can’t be that long, that there is nobody willing take the position and say We have a classic, long franchise with a ready install base we can easily expand by hitting some of the current trends all the while pushing the envelope on the franchise.

Mega Man innovated themselves from time to time. X, Legends, Battle Network, Z and ZX are all significantly different from the Classic series, and even then each sub-series changes the formats game-by-game basis. While I fully expect some kind of Mega Man game to be made based on the current cartoon, it seems Capcom is treating it like they treated Street Fighter The Movie in that it works as a promotional vessel rather than an adaptation. I would like to say that Capcom can’t coast on collections much longer, but the reality is that fans and consumers interested in the franchise will buy these collections every time a console generation shift hits around the corner, and if a special version like the above or the one with all the trinkets, there will be customers buying it. Fans find themselves in a vicious cycle of thinking that if they don’t show support, no more future entries in Mega Man will be made, but at the same time, you’ve already bought and played these games two or three times over and Capcom still isn’t putting out anything new. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The customer loyalty is still there and that probably is ultimately what will keep all these afloat for now. Special edition packages with craploads of stuff in them have always been a thing, slowly I have to question if that is becoming the only reason Mega Man collections are selling? Despite the franchise now lacking a face, the emotional contact is still there. Zero series has especially fanatic cult following, claiming it being the height of the franchise’s 2D game play design. They’ve been asking for ports of the series ever since the last collection on the DS came out, but apparently the originals and that port aren’t enough. Then again, maybe that goes to the other collections as well. Perhaps people really are just abandoning their old machines every single generation. Maybe Capcom should just start releasing collections every generation and never make a new game, as they seem to make a decent buck with each of them.

Capcom is coming out with Rockman X DiVE that’s making its rounds, but goddamn if people aren’t sick of beloved franchises getting a mobile game rather than a full-blown, big budget title. A proper entry, if you will. Just look at how happy Breath of Fire fans were about BoF6. While mobile titles can be massive successes, thus far none of them have been considered as “true” installments into a franchise. Then again, we did get that social mobile game Rockman Xover, which was less than ideal entry in the series, and was largely lambasted people who didn’t end up sucking on Capcom’s dick. Only so many companies have managed to strike true with their mobile games, and the Big C is not one of them. X DiVE has budget behind it, it has good assets and lots of work put to make it the best kind of mobile Mega Man X game it could be, which kinda says to us that the hinted new entry in the series rather than X9.

Capcom really lost the ball by not announcing a new Classic or X series game. They didn’t even need to have it released yet, just have the info out, some concept art and nothing else. Keep the heat going on, but often fans will just take anything they can grab and roll with those, but only for so long.

Two-One Punch of Mega Man Million

Capcom recently updated their sales data in their Game Series Sales section, and with that we saw Mega Man gaining one more million units sold from 34 million to 35 million units since February 2019. That’s three million more units since June 2018. Their Annual report from the end of last, year, which I have a post about, stated that Mega Man 11 performed well. We could read between the lines that they were expecting it to perform worse, but the Blue Bomber still has some pulling power. With the cartoon series running, though not exactly making the biggest splash out there, the franchise has resurfaced again, much like how Devil May Cry made the news once more. Devil May Cry 5 performed a lot better, and if we’re completely honest, is the better game of the two. It was ambitious project that was true to the core gameplay but also pushed the 3D Action games just a little bit further once more. Mega Man 11, as much as the game is loved, did end up somewhat a shelf warmer. Compared to DMC5, MM11 is a lacklustre title. It was too safe a title.

It is because of Mega Man X Legacy Collection that the series gained one more million sales. Mega Man 11 sold some 870 000 units, so previous digital titles and X Legacy Collection must cover the rest. This is how Mega Man ultimately worked ever since the X-series was released. The Classic-series may have solidified the series’ status as an icon. Good games, to which Capcom would churn up sequel after sequel year by year, until they put the franchise in ice.

Neither Mega Man 11 or Mega Man X Legacy Collection sold one million units, as they don’t appear on Capcom’s Platinum million titles sold list. I don’t know Mega Man Battle Network 4 has sold so many units, it’s the very bottom feeder of the franchise itself. However, outside the NES era of games, most of Mega Man had one more or more sub-series running side by side. At best, Capcom offered 2D Action, 3D Action and RPG under Mega Man brand name during the busiest days of the franchise, and even more if you were in Japan.

If you were wondering, Mega Man 2 is the best selling title in the franchise

I would argue that outside the NES days of Classic series, when it showcased quality game design and tight controls in comparison to some of the schlock the NES and (especially) Famicom had, Mega Man‘s strength later on relied on its multiple approaches and titles on the market at the same time. Capcom did manage to avoid brand confusion by clearly having different kind of visual flavour across the board. The core mistake between Mega Man and Mega Man X is, really, that the two look too similar. X simply looks an older, edgier take on Mega Man. Which he arguably is, but that was the 1990’s. That was par for the course and I love it. Each subsequent Mega Man was different enough to tell the difference, even at their games, but recognisable enough to say that they were, indeed, a kind of super fighting robot.

Mega Man is a multimedia franchise, make no mistake about it. Despite the games are its main product and lot of the side pieces like comics and toys were there to support the sales of the games themselves, Mega Man saw its most success when you had a little bit of everything out there. Mostly in Japan, sure, but that really reflects the nature of the franchise world wide; the little bits of that everything that West ever got was cherished by the fans like nuggets of gold. When Hitoshi Ariga’s Mega Man Megamix got its English release, the fandom celebrated like no other. This wasn’t the first bit of comics Western world got from Mega Man, but it sure was one of the most wanted.

How did Mega Man gain all those millions of sales since the last update without neither of the two big releases hitting platinum sales point? I told you that already; combined sales of multiple products. Whether it is because 2D action games just don’t have the same market pull they used to, or because Mega Man had become such a standard for the genre that despite their high quality they’re seen as run-of-the-mill titles or just because the franchise’s envelope can’t be pushed all that easily like DMC’s, one Mega Man title hitting that platinum point in the current era of video game market must have something significant behind it.

On the other hand, Capcom could go the true and tested route, put together a standard Mega Man title like MM11 and comp it with something that’s a bit different. If they were brave, which they might actually become with these increased sales, they might even try to make a new sub-series that would break the mould. Love it or hate it, Battle Network was a smash hit. Legends, not so much. Still has a stupidly dedicated cult following, who still keep hope for Capcom reviving Mega Man Legends 3.

Maybe that would be a decent pull, start the project from scratch and make it play better than what Gaist Crusher did. If you didn’t know, Legends 3‘s engine and very basic gameplay was more or less directly lifted and heavily adapted for two-part game series, which never really went anywhere despite having a cartoon and toys that interacted with the games. I’ve got few posts from 2013 (Christ that’s old and they’re terrible) about Gaist Crusher but never got around getting the second game and reviewing it. I guess I lost my interest in seeing how the series did, just like the Japanese kids it was aimed at.

Capcom could just go full stupid and release Mega Man titles like usual, throwing compilations left and right all the while not really considering how to grow and further the franchise. You know what? Give Mega Man Legends the REmake2 treatment. Take the base elements of the game, expand on the whole connected underground tunnels concept, polish and fully upgrade the gameplay, add more optional parts and possible modifications, explore further the concept of Rock being able to turn black rather than just have it a an interesting joke element (I’m pretty sure this ultimately evolved into the whole Black Mega Man and Synchro concept in Battle Network) and make the game look like a real Saturday morning cartoon it was clearly mimicking.

I can always dream.

Still, with these sales, Capcom probably will be making few Mega Man titles in the future, that much we wager to be certain. If they want to revive Mega Man properly rather than just with one game and collections, Mega Man X9 is probably high on their to-do list.

Remakes and remixes

The one question that was thrown at me few weeks back was whether or not Resident Evil 2 warranted a remake. Ultimately, it did not. The original Resident Evil 2 is one of those timeless classics that still play well to this day, even though the PlayStation era 3D graphics are rather outdated. The game itself is still solid, but that goes for all games that are solid for their era; they’re solid for the future as well. However, not all games can stand the test of time, or even their timely competitors, but some games just tend to have a possibility of being great and for whatever reasons just didn’t measure up. Be it budgetary, lack of experience, skill or whatever, there are numerous fan favourite games that are more or less terrible, yet we love ’em. Chances are that those games would never get a remake.

The argument goes as follows; games that have good design and yet were terribly made should get remade because they would benefit from it. Effectively, realising the original concept properly. While that’s a nice sentiment, the business side of things doesn’t really support the notion. Why remake a game that didn’t make sales, has a very little or not following or has some sort of infamy around it when you could tap something better? Resident Evil 2 remake cost a lot of money to make and advertise. It’s part of Capcom’s current big three titles, Monster Hunter World and Devil May Cry 5 that are effectively the titles the Big C is banking on as seen in their last year’s annual report I have a post about. It’s no coincidence that all these three titles are part of their respective franchises. After all, creating a new IP has its own risks that your company probably doesn’t want to undertake when you’ve just put millions into some restructuring and R&D in order to make a new engine all the while demanding high-end graphics that pushes the visuals as much as possible. Square-Enix follows the same line of thinking with Final Fantasy VII‘s remake, even though they’re taking their sweet time to actually finishing it. However, there’s also one snag that applies to both RE2 remake and FFVII remake; they’re effectively completely new games.

Let’s question if remaking a game by completely changing it from ground up like these two did is actually remaking anything. The remake of original Resident Evil will be used as the point of comparison, a golden example of a remake. What makes it different from the two aforementioned remakes is that it still uses the same systems and designs from the original game, just improved in every way. You can still see where the roots are and side-by-side comparison is completely possible. For RE2 and FFVII, that’s largely impossible due to their nature of completely remodeling and changing the groundwork of the games’ designs. RE2 remake is effectively nothing like the original game and are separate products altogether, whereas with RE‘s remake uses the same base work. FFVII doesn’t even belong to the same genre as the original, opting to go for full-out action. It’s almost like Square Enix is wanting to move away from the time tested Wizardry+Ultima model they’ve made their bed with all the variations we’ve seen in most of the mainline Final Fantasy titles.

Remake is a nice word, because its semantics it usually is associated with in the game industry offers a lot of leeway. Sometimes upgraded ports are marketed as remakes, because it’s easy and has a nice ring to it. The positive association a remake tends to have nowadays would imply that it’s a whole new upgrade to push things further. An example of this would be the HD remakes of few last generations we’ve had, which offer nothing more than higher resolution graphics, sometimes wide screen support and nothing else. Questioning whether or not this is a proper remake or just an upgraded port shouldn’t be an issue. Reading the marketing slang shouldn’t be hard.

Then again, this line of thinking may be completely wrong. Should we consider remakes as something that takes the core essence of a product, like RE2‘s concept of surviving inside a zombie infested city and completely remodeling its game play and concepts, as proper remake instead? After all RE‘s remake can be called exactly that as well, but seeing that is effectively the original game with prettier graphics and updated stuff, shouldn’t that be more or less a remix instead? Sure, all the assets have been recreated from the ground up for the game and so on, but ultimately it is more or less a remix recreation of the original Resident Evil. Compared to remixes like this, a remake should push the game’s concepts to further extents and stand as its own standalone title. This would fit the idea of remaking FFVII as an action game as well, despite the whole genre change it has going on for it. Our golden example of a remake doesn’t really stand against how RE2 was remade. It would be possible to remake the first Resident Evil and change everything about it without losing the core concept of a resident filled with evil. Then again, Resident Evil itself is a sort of remake of Famicom’s Sweet Home, genre changes and all to go with it.

As said, marketing’s have their hand in this quite a lot. Using a dictionary or the like to determine the true meaning of a remake is largely useless, when it’s a nice term you can drop around to whatever re-release it fits even remotely. After all, marketing department have their hands full already trying to push whatever latest editions they have at their hands now. It’s like how Super Robot Wars titles tend to be affected largely by what Bandai-Namco wants to promote currently or if some series has an anniversary, in which case they can push few more units by having it include in a game. Let’s not forget that sometimes games that are completely new are sometimes dropped into the remake category just because it uses its franchise in some ways. The recent contest oriented Pac-man games at one point were marketed as remake of the original Pac-Man game, despite this being not the case to any real extent. That’s like saying Mega Man 2 is a remake of Mega Man just with new stages, music, bosses and weapons. That would apply to any kind of sequel, though there’s an argument there how Hideo Kojima remade the original Metal Gear three times around.

The original question remains; Did RE2 warrant a remake? Apparently the sales data showcased that it did. In a perfect world, there would be no need for remakes. In a less perfect world, the money to make remakes like this would go for games that mechanically would require one. The one we got is still driven by sales and demand, and by the fact that Capcom recognizes the position Resident Evil 2 has in the franchise, among the fans and as an overall game. No other title in the series warrants anything similar. RE4 is still modern enough to run as it is, and perhaps that’s the best justification for remakes nowadays; to modernise games that have a ready audience. You don’t see remakes that don’t already have an audience, or games that the devs themselves don’t dare to touch. There’s a goddamn good reason Nintendo doesn’t do remakes like most other companies.

Perhaps its generational. Most of the faces we know from the industry tend to tell that they don’t really want to work on sequels or keep a series going once they’ve finished it in their own minds. Sakurai was pretty much done with Smash Bros with Melee, yet here we are. Kojima meant Metal Gear to end with pretty much every major entry in the series. Shigsy didn’t touch 2D Mario in almost twenty years due to how much work they are compared to the 3D games. However, with new blood coming into these companies, it might become more viable to remake old titles that still have a place and possibility to strike true. The same applies to the consumer side, perhaps even mores so than towards the devs. The generation that grew up with the 360 and PS3 would have a hard time going back to earlier consoles, some have even remarked how not even the Third Generation of consoles look like, and I quote a younger friend, real games. Updating PlayStation era games to modern visual (and game play) standards would open new avenues without really losing anything due to the build-in fandom. On one hand, you serve the fans with an arguably better version of the game and attract customer who missed the original, or didn’t or couldn’t touch it because it was on PlayStation, PSN not withstanding. As much as even the industry likes to think otherwise, very few games are timeless in the proper meaning of the term. They may take the test of time within the context of the era, but putting them face to face with their modern counterparts, they lose in almost every area of design. Direct comparison without taking context and capabilities of each of the era would be rather unfair, but for a timeless classic that should not be a problem. After all, if Super Mario Bros. 3 can stand toe to toe with modern 2D action games in terms of designs and gameplay, the rest of timeless classics should be capable of this. For the early 3D games, that’s not exactly the case, just like how first games can’t really stack up against most other modern 2D games of similar nature.

REmake2‘s success probably makes Capcom wonder what other titles they have they could give a similar treatment. With their interest to resurrect some of their sleeping IPs thanks to Mega Man 11, IP which saw a raise in sold units from 32 million units to 34 million since June 2018, it’s not entirely impossible that Capcom would wake one or two of their classic series with a remake. Chances are that they’ll be testing the waters with some releases and bundles before green lighting anything, but you never know. Then again, they should finally remake the original Street Fighter.

Music of the Month: Rock the World

After spending good three days of building my new PC and troubleshooting things that have been popping up now and then, I completely forgot that I was supposed to write something for Sunday. That’s not the only thing I’ve forgotten lately, due to being so damn tired. Enough excuses, let’s get this on the roll.

So, whatever plans I might’ve had are more or less out of the window thanks to people ordering more and more stuff from the place I work, meaning the speed and production amounts have been upped ever so slightly but enough to push the proverbial breaking point of the manufacturing process. Rather, I’ll have to approach things by case-by-case basis and hope that I don’t put things out too late. Well, I’ll be doing Mega Man 11 at some point.

As such, I’ll use this opportunity to comment on the previous post about Capcom’s IR materials. It’s a long post in comparison to most and has quite a lot of hot air, but something that needed to be covered. Rather than spouting what Capcom says, here’s my personal take what Capcom wants to do in the future; high-end games.

Monster Hunter World and Resident Evil 7 have been big hits, and Capcom seems to think it is thanks to the games having high production values across the board, especially in the graphics department. While the term artisanal design was thrown in there, it ultimately means very little if not expanded. Effectively it means master craftsmanship and how something is worked by hand to perfection, but how well that applies to Capcom’s titles is up to interpretation. They are infamous for dishing out game sequels after sequels, though this has been on the slower end as of late. Game development has gotten more expensive with each generation and they feel it. Each title has to be bigger and more successful than the previous. The two aforementioned titles fit the bill perfectly, something Resident Evil 2‘s remake and Devil May Cry 5 do too. While the games will have something the consumers will have to scratch their heads over with, Capcom is putting a lot of money and time into them, hoping to get return in their investment. MHW is regarded a cornerstone within the company in terms of success, and they want to replicate that.

Furthermore, Capcom is surprised by the success of Mega Man 11. Without a doubt it has come as a surprise, and the Man of Action Mega Man cartoon basically exists to drive brand recognition, especially among younger consumers who have no previous experience with the franchise. The initial sales have been very positive and the reception of the game has more or less followed the same pattern. Above all, Mega Man 11 is a PR victory for Capcom and does go against their set idea of high-end games, something consumers should be somewhat happy about. MM11 was relatively cheap to develop, which probably served more to its favour than most think. It also shows that games don’t need to be at their highest ends in order to make a mark. Capcom probably took notice of this, as they’re also noticed the good sales the Mega Man X collection was having.

This has lead them to consider reviving some of their old IPs and the upcoming Capcom Belt-Action Collection is probably is part of the whole deal to see what sticks to the wall. Sadly, Capcom doesn’t have the licensing rights to some of their best beat-em-ups, but at least the collection has the first ever home port of Battle Circuit, something long-time Capcom and CPSII fans have been waiting for. When’s Wazrard getting a proper home release? Does this mean fan favourite IPs will be revived? Naturally, no. First three people who I saw commenting on the post said Breath of Fire, but I don’t see that being very likely. Firs being that BoF was never a great seller and that they have better options to fill the RPG quota if they want to. However, the one thing that is in BoF‘s favour is that Capcom recognizes themselves relying on limited genres, with fighting games, action and horror taking the top spot. Capcom has to diversify its selection at some point, but that may go toward mobile gaming.

According to the materials, Capcom has been making loads of money in the smartphone market, but still don’t have much success in there. What does this mean, exactly? They’re not the top dog and despite the few titles they manage to get money out, the competition is making bigger bank. This is largely an Asian thing, as the mobile game market is absolutely bonkers huge there, eclipsing both console and PC market without any margins of error. It’s no wonder companies like Blizzard want to release a game into the market like they were horny teenagers with free access to the corest of hardest porn. We’ll get to Blizzard’s PR disaster with Diablo Immortal on Wednesday, it’s a damn good example how not to do consumer service. But this is Capcom, they don’t give a damn about the mobile market in the West, as Asia’s the gold mine and they don’t have the tools or skill to mine money. Maybe Capcom wants to see if they can do something else in the market, or maybe they’ll put more effort into expanding genre selection on consoles and PC. That’s why testing waters with cheap releases and collections is important to them. I’m not saying you should go buy MM11 or any of the collections in hopes to gain BoF Collection, you should always buy only what you think is the best value for your money. More RPG related stuff Capcom has been putting out might sway them more, or showcase how something similar makes good sells. Like most Japanese companies, Capcom seems to be data driven. Showcase them data and examples to support your claim or suggestion, and it has geometrically highest chances of getting through.

Whatever Capcom puts into production and announces within the next year will be based on the success and methods MHW and Mega Man 11 have laid out when it comes to consoles and PC. Mobile, well, we’ll have to sit tight and see.

Capcom’s future; more DLC and possible resurrection of sleeping IPs

I was supposed to do this one few weeks back, but work’s being hell as we come closer to the annual end of the business year for the company. Working like a dog has its downsides.

Anyway, Capcom Investors Relations, Annual report. Maybe we should note that in their statement of corporate philosophy, the core statement is to create entertainment culture. Video games may be Capcom’s main business for sure, but movies and arcades are part of that too. If you don’t want to read the whole thing, I’m dropping a tl;dr read version at the end.

Kenzo Tsujimoto, CEO of Capcom, makes a statement that what made Street Fighter a globally recognized brand was the movie they invested in, not the games themselves. This is an interesting point to take, and if taken as face value, further enforces Nintendo’s old tactics of cross-media advertising. All the Super Mario cereals, cartoons and the like were there to make the brand recognizable in order to have the main dish, the games, in the consumer head space. Hollywood may think they have the jackpot when it comes to entertainment, but when it comes to games, no other media can replicate the feeling of doing it yourself. This applies to sports as well.

The 4 billion yen Capcom invested into Street Fighter the Movie netted them 15 billion yen. That’s no slouch. Tsujimoto continues that despite movies only getting few weeks of attention in the theatres, each new home release and licensed showing, like on television, always extends the time public is being exposed to the brand. It’s easy to see why Capcom would continue to invest into the Resident Evil movies. While they may not be all that great, they’re further putting exposure to the brand.

The games are still the main point, and Tsujimoto’s take that having something else to exist along the games’ three years of development is important to keep consumer interest relevant. The reason why so many game franchises fail to garner expanded audience attention is because there is no expanded media around them. You can argue that games can makes great sales on themselves and having targeted audience is great, but that really doesn’t expand the market all that much.

Japan manages to keep its brands relevant through numerous comics that adapt the games. These comics can run anywhere between few specialised chapters to years. Considering how much Japan reads, this is relatively traditional way to keep things in the consumers’ minds. In the West this doesn’t work as well, despite the latest Mega Man comic being excellent. The problem of course was that there was no Mega Man game to make use of it.

While this multimedia approach seems like done deal and what most companies do to some extent, this isn’t so. Vast majority of companies are more or less ignoring the world wide stage when it comes to their IPs. The few game based movies we’ve getting here and there have been less about expanded media and trying to capitalise on the Comic book movie boom that’s been so successful. These have been more or less failures, but as said, the brand just has to be kept relevant in the consumers’ minds. Twitch and word of mouth are good ways to get into the core consumer market’s mind, but this does not expand the market itself. This is Red Ocean, where companies cannibalise each other. Electronic games industry has to expand their market in order to survive and advance, and Capcom’s approach to expand the awareness of its brands into movies series like Resident Evil is doing just that. This is why we are getting the Monster Hunter movie. The game has a strong brand recognition, part of Capcom’s Big Four million-sellers, share the title with Street Fighter, Resident Evil and Mega Man.

Capcom notes that during the last gives years since 2014, the operating costs have risen. Monster Hunter World‘s success has increased revenues, but overall the trend isn’t exactly healthy. Capcom had almost a ten-year slouch between 2005 and 2015, and it is noted that sales declined in 2010. With constant major releases since 2014 has seen raise in net sales and thus in income. All this really means that Capcom has to keep releasing new and well developed titles at a constant pace, something that applies to every game company out there. More importantly, this does no mean the games have to be high budget, but we’re going to get to that a bit later. With Capcom internally reforming itself since 2015, things have become more rosy. This would sign that Capcom has somewhat new internal direction, which has resulted in successful titles like Resident Evil 7. Of course, the cost and workload of new titles on new hardware has been on a rising trend, but that’s to be expected if the company intends to push graphical and interface boundaries in their usual pace.

Hauhiro Tsujimoto, the COO, mentions that he intends to continue on Single Content Multiple Usage strategy. For example, Street Fighter V is a title like this, where the the base game is expanded upon rather than creating creating an additional, new title. He also mentions changes in the mobile market and specifically uses the term over-reliant when mentioning gatcha. Using lottery in the same context however would signify that in countries where any form of lottery is considered gambling and require governmental approval, these titles may be breaking the law. Tsujimoto also mentions that he experts esports to still have a rising market, something I do not share with him, considering the aforementioned SFV and Marvel VS Capcom Infinity have not exactly being mass successes compared to their rivals like Dragon Ball FighterZ.

Capcom’s further strategy to grow franchises as global brands is very similar to Sega’s on outer appearance. The major part of this is simultaneous launch of games across the world. Capcom has also taken steps to listen more to the consumer feedback, and uses how they approached Monster Hunter World‘s PC port’s problems solely based on user feedback. Beta testing was also important in making the title. All these have been more common among PC gaming, but considering how much modern consoles are dumbed down PCs, this only to be expected.

Another example with more robust examples is SFV. Server problems, continuing improvement of the game, expansion in esports scene and pricing strategies have all served the game more or less in a positive light, though the overall perception of the game is still questionable.

All this really amounts to Capcom aiming to iron out issues before launch and concentrate on consumer feedback whenever possible. The idea of One content Multiple Uses however does signify that Capcom will rely on digital distribution further, meaning future Capcom games of this caliber will be used as a base platform and you won’t be buying a full, one-package deal game, at least not on launch. SFV had an updated retail version with most additions included, but whether or not we can count that as a true new version of the game is somewhat an open question.

This also shows in Capcom’s financial strategy. Kenkichi Nomura, the CFO, mentions that Capcom intends to enhance their development environment and Digital Contents business. While this does not mean Capcom will cut production of physical goods, it does signify that the aforementioned plan most likely will be carried out with further titles in the future. However, digital titles do have longer lasting power thanks to them never really vanishing from digital stores, unless license runs out or the company goes down.

The most interesting bit of Nomura’s notions is in What is the status of Internal reserves and fund procurement?, where he states that game development has been on the rise since current-generation and multifunctional game consoles arrived. While it is natural for higher spec machines requiring higher development costs, singling this out is strange. Does this mean multifunctional consoles have some inherent in their nature that raises development costs?

Overall, it would seem Capcom wishes to further streamline their development process and eliminate stuff that would only cause costs. Usual business, nothing special to see here. However, Digital Content will have further emphasize still.

Of course, Capcom can’t compete in the field without original content, and that’s something they wish to emphasize.

The three titles showcased are Devil May Cry 5, the remake of Resident Evil 2, and Mega Man 11. DMC5 is the weirdest example, mostly boasting about the RE Engine and how engaging the IP has been across mediums. It would seem that this is more a showcase piece towards the fans at its core over everything else. In contrast, Resident Evil 2 is used to showcase of constant releases of their flagship franchise. Both emphasize the level of realism in their own ways, making both of them graphical cornerstones in the presentation, and how proper utilisation of both recognized brands will make a mark on the industry.

Mega Man 11 however is the most interesting of the three. The foundation for Mega Man 11 was diversity; all the members had different histories, different views what Mega Man was and had a wide variety of experiences from young newcomers to industry veterans working on it. It is specifically mentioned that the game may not look technologically advanced, but is designed to play extremely well. Or as they out it, it is loaded with techniques that could be described as “master handicraft”.

Capcom has a thing for technologically advanced games and they’re not afraid to use it in their PR. Pushing boundaries has been their thing for a long time now as a company, but at some point this meant that games that could not really push boundaries were put on the back burner. Mega Man games do not require to push the hardware to the maximum anymore, and titles like Mega Man X8 arguably suffered from trying to make a big-budget Mega Man game. It would seem that the success of Mega Man 11 has made Capcom take notice of this, it being lower on the budget and relying on visual design and style over raw graphics power. Reawakening dormant IP is Capcom’s keyword for MM11, and if they were to follow in suite, Capcom could have a one-two punch strategy with high-end games accompanied by less costing games with higher emphasize on core design. Without a doubt the upcoming Capcom Beat-Em Up collection is testing waters whether or not they should dabble in that genre again.

This coincides with Yoichi Egawa’s foundation to produce World-Class quality and profitability. He puts Capcom’s thinking to simple words; first, if the game isn’t good, it won’t sell; second, if you don’t pursue global brands, you won’t survive in the game industry. Considering Capcom had a slouch where their game simply weren’t all that great, this would ring true. Capcom is also one of the few Japanese companies that truly try to keep itself on the global market, and ultimately modern Capcom has surprisingly low amount of Japanese exclusive titles. They were also publisher for titles like GTA in Japan, meaning they’ve been dabbling on trying to introduce Western games to the Japanese market as well.

In addition to this, Egawa wishes to create hot mobile titles (in which manner is open to question) and address development of esports and long-term sales model. This would combine with his wanting to further enforce online-multiplayer. Long-term sales can be tied to the Digital Content method discussed previously, whole esports and multi-player is directly tied to competitive scene. He specifically mentions having artisan pride in developing games, something which further has emphasize on how Capcom wants to approach their titles at this moment in time. Capcom, however, is still a corporation intending to make profit, but it would seem that they are a corporation wanting to make profit with master craftsmanship level products, but they can’t do that without proper personal and budget. Thus, hiring and training has to be considered.

As for Social sections, Capcom has initiatives to hire more non-Japanese and women. They have installed a system that enables workers to have childcare leave and shortened work hours in order to allow them to spend more time with their child after birth. This also extends to men, and there a number of male employees who have taken up on this chance. Capcom states that 21% of their workforce and 10.3% of their manager staff are women. None of this should matter in terms of business, only that they drive business up. This is PR however, and part of this PR is that Capcom has follow the General Employer Action, which sees women consisting 20% of the newly graduated staff and have at least 15% manager women. While this would fight against the idea of best first, it is probable that Capcom’s training program will level the new workforce across the board. Successful business tends to run on pure meritocracy, but it nice to see Capcom extending its child leave program across the board. How Japanese corporate culture sees this is another issue altogether.

Part of the social strategies Capcom is enacting attempts at revitalization of areas across Japan. This includes helping with events and business by paying money to advertise on buses and such, using Capcom’s characters to promote regions and include arcades in given areas. Similarly, Capcom has managed to cut out environmental loads via Digital Content and further promoting power saving methods across the company, but the most important bit can be found in their aim to reduce environmental impact of their Pachislot machines. If you follow any pachislot manufacturer long enough, you will see parts and gimmicks being redressed and recycled. There has also been a slight trend to tone down the flashiness of pachislot machines, which would save power further.

With that all the way, Capcom’s risk management pretty much covers everything discussed thus far. Expanding market, making their IPs more global, developing regions, stabilise revenues and so on. The weirdest bit is to expand on VR, but this most likely coincides with Capcom’s wishes to cultivate a VR game market in amusement equipment business, meaning arcade-specific VR titles. This probably is better option than to dedicate workforce on home-use VR.

There are few statistics that are interesting relating to risk management; used game sales in Japan are on a downward trend, mostly likely due to longer development cycles and increase of digital content, and arcades have seen ever so slight increase in users. Is there a generation that wishes to be play more outside of their home in Japan? This would require further studies and statistics to say for sure.

Further risks and responses are Capcom usual; create sequels or remakes on obsolete games, expand market and boost brand recognition if core consumer disinterest becomes relevant, expand game sales periods with sluggish sales, and establish recurring cumulative revenue models and expand to different media if decrease in users is met for more boost brand recognition. Risk assessment section is probably one of the more important parts, as it has to be straightforward, cutting away most of PR bells and whistles.

Capcom’s analysis on the game market shows that they see console and PC market overlapping. This is due to the overlap of titles released across the two, whole mobile market is its separate thing. The continuing rapid growth of mobile market is still present, but Capcom hasn’t had the best success with their mobile games due to their over-reliance on gatcha and the way how smartphone gamers tends to jump between games. Furthermore, Capcom’s lack of know-how in the market is marked as one of the reason why they’ve been failing on mobile while PC and consoles have seen increased revenues.

Capcom’s constant move towards more DLC in their One Content Multiple Uses philosophy comes from sheer sales data; DLC has taken over package game sales as of 2017 and is estimated to increase with time. Mobile market is estimated to rise on a similar manner, though it should be noted how fierce the competition ultimately is; vast majority of smartphone users that make revenue for the company reside in Asia. However, in terms of best growth was seen in PC market, mainly in China and other Asian regions, but unlike with smartphones, the rate of growth is estimated to slow down. The Western view of markets are a bit skewed, and what we see in Capcom’s analysis’ that Asian PC and smartphone markets are on the rise and making more profits than their bread and butter console games consumer market. Furthermore, Capcom intends to capitalise on esports’ rising popularity and they are intending to see it to rise as a valid new form of sports in order to further their sales in competitive titles like Street Fighter V. In addition, Monster Hunter World is effectively cornerstone in current mindset Capcom has, despite their initial hesitation whether or not it would be a success. The same level of emphasize on graphics and polish should be seen in future titles, like the remake of Resident Evil 2, though clearly Mega Man 11 is buckling this trend a bit.

The SWOT analysis is pretty much everything we’ve covered thus far; Capcom’s main strength is in strong quality development of titles and their own IPs, but at the same their weakness is reliance on specific genres. Overall, Capcom mainline library of current games has a limited scope in these terms, and they are more known for their action titles than anything else. Another weakness is of course the lack of any major success in the mobile market. However, the opportunities Capcom sees is in the decrease of competition, meaning that the titles they put out like Monster Hunter World have no direct competition. There are no games like MH that would be on the surface. Expansion of esports and VR are soon a market possibilities, though with the lacklustre expansion of VR market overall puts this into question. Main threat is noted as the diminishing consumer presence due to the increased presence of entertainment in general. The ways we entertain ourselves nowadays has changed since two or three decades ago, something the electronic games industry should consider a threat in terms of general market. Of course, in mobile gaming the sheer amount of firms and titles released is Capcom’s main concern, especially with them lacking in software and skills in the market.

tl;dr version

Capcom intends to increase brand recognition via movies and other forms of entertainment. There’s going to be more DLC in the future, as Capcom has taken the philosophy of One Content Multiple Uses. The success of Mega Man 11 has made Capcom aware of the their sleeping IPs’ values. Monster Hunter World will be used as an example how to go onward with business in the near future. They also intend to expand in esports scene to promote their games and wish to see esports recognized as legit sport. They suck at mobile market and still want a nice slice of that pie. They have an upwards trend in profits since 2015, and they intend to keep it going with titles they consider to be high-end and have a high-cost.

Sega’s Mania effect

So after couple of decades of failed starts, concepts thrown around and DMCA’d fan titles, Streets of Rage 4 is a thing that’s coming out. Finally, might I add. Sega and Streets of Rage fans, rejoice.

I have to say, these redesigns are pretty damn nice

There are three companies involved with the game, outside Sega as the licensee; Lizardcube, who were in charge of the recent Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap; Guard Crush Games who have a history with beat-em-ups (or belt-scrolling action games if you’re Japanese) like Streets of Fury; Dotemu, who function as a publisher. Lizardcube is in charge of graphics, while Guard Crush Games handles the programming, though Dotemu has the handle on game design. This is pretty nice package, as Lizardcube has a pretty nice, French comics style that fits so many of these older titles’ revival, and Guard Crush Games seems to have a handle on programming just fine. Y’know, the hardest part of making a game.

I’m probably going to make a comparative post regarding the character designs, because both Axel and Blaze got a real nice new lick of paint.

There is exactly two things this game needs to do in order to be accepted by long time fans and be at least a relative hit with the general audience; faithfully replicate the Streets of Rage formula, and expand on it. This is effectively what Sonic Mania did, and it has been hailed as the best Sonic the Hedhehog game to date, which isn’t too hard to accept.

Which raises the question; did Sonic Mania‘s success kick this title off the ground? Both it and the new Wonder Boy were well received and raised new interest in certain section of older titles. Both of them function as data to further the idea putting the money and effort to realise a Streets of Rage title in its proper 2D mould rather than take the Final Fight route with Streetwise. After all, game genres don’t just die because new technology makes new genres possible with extra dimensions or additional gimmicks like VR. Despite how 90’s marketing wants you to believe, 2D hasn’t gone anywhere at any point. Sure, you the newfangled thing always gets pushed, but you can’t deny the customers the things they want. Just look at how well 2D Mario sells over 3D titles. That’s another dead horse I need to stop kicking.

All this data of revival games doing at least decently well is most probable reason Streets of Rage 4 got greenlit. Add Mega Man 11‘s upcoming release to the mix and we’re entering an interesting era, where old franchises are getting new releases in more budget range, but with none of the lacking elements. Hopefully more companies realise this; you don’t need AAA budget to make great damn games. Pretty much all of these classic franchises could be revived and developed at a fraction of the cost with modern tools. Easier to make profits. The only real problem is to deliver a wanted product, which didn’t really happen with the New SMB series after the first few entries. Once a franchise is revived, it needs to move forwards. Mega Man 10 failed in this term by simply being same thing again. We now have three Mega Man 2 games and that’s two too much.

Sega of course wouldn’t develop this themselves. They don’t care about the IP. Sega hasn’t given two shits about Streets of Rage since the mid-90’s, when they essentially gave the middle finger to the Western consumers. Eternal Champions used to be a big thing, but then Sega just neutered it. You can’t treat Japanese, American and European markets the same. Hell, you have to treat Europe as multiple market zones if you want to do it right. This was clear how Sega’s tactics with the Genesis in the US region only kicked off after the US branch pushed through their tactics of including a game with the console and marketing Sonic the Hedgehog their own way. If most of the data is to be believed, Sonic‘s been the most popular in the US. Sadly, Sega of Japan’s management killed all the motion their American and European sections had going on, effectively beginning their own downfall from grace. Westerners do classic Sega better than Sega themselves.

Streets of Rage 4 probably won’t be as large a success as Sonic Mania. If the game gets a physical release afterwards its initial digital showcase, we can deem it successful enough. If it gets a physical release from the very beginning, even if it was a Limited Run title, then the developers and publisher have boatloads of trust towards their targeted consumers. There are enough Sega fans that would purchase this title in an instant.

While Sonic Mania was clearly an international title, a game that didn’t have any specific region in mind, the same can’t be said about Streets of Rage 4. Both Guard Crush Games and Lizardcube are European companies, and that flavours oozes through in a very positive manner. Hell, even Dotemu is based on France. I hope they shower more than the average French. However, that probably will rub some people off, as Streets of Rage originally had a very American atmosphere to it, especially considering it was inspired partially by Streets of Fire. Hell, Blaze’s design is essentially Ellen Aim with more streetwise to her. The bits about Sega not giving a damn about the IP still stands, and their actions towards Western markets have been changing only during the last years. The Yakuza franchise is a good line to follow modern Sega in this. English dubbing usually drives sales, but there are titles where this isn’t case. Yakuza dropped this in favour of cheaper releases and simply because the fans didn’t like it. Despite Sega censoring and removing elements from some of the games, the audience kept growing. Despite this, none of the spin-offs outside the zombie romp got localised. Now that the Western audience has grown far greater, Sega’s taken the series’ position in the market into notion with better releases, and now is even considering publishing further remasters and spin-offs in the Overseas regions. Sega of Japan is slowly but surely taking a notion of Western markets.

If we’re going to go down this path, it’s relatively easy to see Sega considering the wants and needs of the Western markets to some extent. The IPs they’ve been giving up and ignoring still have a strong consumer base with nothing to fill that niche. A high quality title here and there goes long way in making profits and keeping your fans happy. I would say Altered Beast and Golden Axe could be next on the list of revivals, but seeing how terrible their last titles were, there’d be a lot of work to fix those damages in the eyes of Sega themselves.

Music of the Month; Give it a Shot

Funny that, this is the best song on the album. Otherwise it’s extremely disappointing

Generally speaking, I don’t do music album reviews, but for this once I’ll do a short exception; Rockman X Anniversary Collection Soundtrack is not worth the price. Outside the two versions of Give it a Shot and RE;FUTURE, the album’s pretty bland. Spending track space and time to remix six first games’ Boss Battle themes. These were clearly chosen because they could been easily selected over stage themes. If we’re completely frank, the Boss Battle themes are not the best parts of Mega Man series’ soundtracks. Most of these songs simply end up being grey background noise. This is a far cry from previous releases’ quality, like Chiptuned Rockman.

Speaking of reviews, you got two last month. I’m not exactly happy how either of them turned out (though I never am with my posts) and I know the end result of the Muv-Luv Kickstarter goods did give rather negative view. However, that’s mostly due to how high standards I tend to use in my reviews. If there’s something I see that could or should have been included or improved, I aim to mention it. If there’s a point of comparison to be made for improvements, I always aim to make that comparison. In that, the aim often is to give constructive criticism, the kind of I’d want to have. It’s no use calling things shit or terrible, it ultimately ends up meaningless jabber. While improvement suggestions are always welcome, those should never be expected unless separately requested. This may sound harsh, but the reasons why something may be lacking don’t matter, as this can lead into further questions. Too many times I’ve seen and experienced people pointing the lack of experience for a reason why something is lacking in design, which always follows with questions like Why didn’t you hire a professional then? or Why didn’t you find professional to help? The reasons, ultimately, don’t matter. They can make interesting trivia though.

The JoyCon review was approached the same way. However, a controller review has to take into account ergonomics, and this breaks the whole Why isn’t necessary question thing into the air. There I tend to look for why certain shapes were made in the form they are, and often the answer is to conform to the general shapes of hands. It’s not exactly the same question or reason, but close enough for some people to bring the point up.

Pachislot Rockman got announced and we’ve got our first look at some the characters somewhat recently. I’ll be doing a comparative review of Mega Man’s redesign, just like how I did one on the Man of Action cartoon design. While we don’t have multiple angles to use, the one in the linked page is more or less enough to get a good feeling what elements were incorporated across the franchise. Pachislot and pachinko machines tend to redesign characters, sometimes to very large extents, but often do keep the core aspects intact. To use an example, CR Cutie Honey has designs that combine some previous series’ entries into one with healthy dose of detailing. People who handled this knew what they were doing as well, as the bunny girl form is named Cutie Bunny.

As for the rest of the month, I’m planning a short overview on what are Lunatic Dawn and Exogularity booklets âge is self-publishing at Comiket. I should not be surprised that the fandom seems to have taken Exogularity as the title for some story or setting, when in reality Exogularity is rebranded Lunatic Dawn. Well, I guess that’s it, they’re both source books with different names. The actual post will have examples, of course, but that’s the gist of it.

You’ve probably noticed how weekend posts have been appearing on Sundays recently rather than on Fridays. This is me moving towards the new schedule I mentioned a month ago or so. I’ll take this chance to also mention that there’s no post next weekend, as I’ll be away. Truth to be told, I intended to write this post for Friday, but thanks to rain I fell ill. My fever’s not going down, and I’m actually writing this on a phone. You can see the irony here, as I’m giving you a Why despite my arguments above stating the contradictory. Well, I do think there’s a wide gap between a KS and this blog.

Remember to sharpen and oil your kitchen knives and such. Cooking will be much safer and enjoyable afterwards.

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