Capcom vs. Whatever



"Games like this make it seem like Capcom has a lot of enemies. Everybody wants to fight them."

- Classic Game Room review of Tatsunokovs Capcom

A lengthy series of Massive Multiplayer Crossover games (mainly Fighting Games), all of which feature Capcom and another company (Hence the "Whatever" in this page's title).

It's composed of several crossover series, which are listed chronologically:

Fighting games

 * Marvel vs. Capcom
 * X Men Children of the Atom
 * Marvel Super Heroes
 * X-Men vs. Street Fighter
 * Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter
 * Marvel vs. Capcom Clash of the Superheroes
 * Marvel vs. Capcom 2
 * Marvel vs. Capcom 3
 * Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3
 * SNK vs. Capcom
 * SNK vs. Capcom Match of the Millennium
 * Capcom vs. SNK Millennium Fight 2000
 * Capcom vs. SNK 2 Mark of the Millennium
 * SNK vs. Capcom SVC Chaos
 * Tatsunokovs Capcom
 * Street Fighter X Tekken

Non-fighting games

 * SNK vs. Capcom: Card Fighters Clash
 * Namco X Capcom
 * Project X Zone
 * Cross Edge
 * Professor Layton vs. Ace Attorney

There were also other crossovers and pseudo-crossovers with other companies:

Psikyo:
Certainly the most obscure of the lot, Taisen Net Gimmick: Capcom & Psikyo All Stars is a Majhong game for the Dreamcast developed by Psikyo, a now-defunct arcade developer of vertical Shoot Em Ups and pornographic Mahjong games. Not much else is known about it.

Data East:
Not a game, but rather a lawsuit, Capcom v. Data East (N.D. Cal. 1994). In 1993, Data East published Fighter's History, a clone of Street Fighter with Serial Numbers Filed Off. Capcom sued for copyright infringement, but a California judge ruled in favor of Data East on grounds that the copied elements were scène à faire, or commonplace elements in the genre, and thus not subject to copyright.

Microsoft/Epic Games:
Well, kind of. A few days before the American release of Tatsunoko vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars, Capcom teased at a new title for the Xbox 360 to be revealed on the release date of said game, with the teaser banner "Capcom x Microsoft". The game turned out to be a 360 port of Monster Hunter Frontier, thus irrelevant to this page...

...but Capcom immediately followed that announcement with the news of an actual Capcom x Microsoft crossover: Marcus Fenix and Dominic Santiago will be appearing in Lost Planet 2 (add to that the fact that Wesker is a Preorder Bonus skin and...yeah). Watch the annoucement trailer here. (And for extra laughs, compare the premise of that trailer with the premise of Ryu's Tatsunoko vs. Capcom ending. Apparently, "Ryu" and "Gears of War protagonists" are interchangeable terms.)

Sony/Guerilla:
To balance things out, the Play Station 3 version of Lost Planet 2 let you play as Helghan troopers from Killzone.

Then, of course, there's Cole McGrath making an appearance in the Play Station 3 and Play Station Vita versions of Street Fighter X Tekken making that game a triple crossover of sorts.

Konami:
Beginning with the second Boktai game and the fifth installment of the Mega Man Battle Network series, Capcom and Konami began cross-promoting both series by including hidden features that require players to exchange data from Boktai 2 into Battle Network 5 and vice-versa. However, Boktai 3 was never released outside Japan due to the low sales of the first two installments and all connectivity with the game was removed for the overseas versions of Battle Network 6. Likewise, Konami choose not to keep the Mega Man Star Force connectivity with Lunar Knights, the overseas version of Boktai DS.

Metal Gear Solid Peace Walker features a Monster Hunter area among its ludicrous amount of Product Placement. Yeah, you get to hunt down monsters as Big Boss. With guns.

Level 5:
Level 5 announced a crossover of their and Capcom's brain-teasing adventure series, entitled Professor Layton VS. Gyakuten Saiban. It'll feature a combination of puzzles and trials as Phoenix Wright and Maya team up with Professor Layton and Luke in investigating a medieval-esque setting. The keyword to this game is Witch Trial, as the characters solve the mystery of a girl who is accused of being a witch, and the motives of the Story Teller, the main villian of the game. Shu Takumi, the original creator of the Ace Attorney series, is writing the script for the new title. It's set to be released on the Nintendo 3DS handheld.

They really do accept all challengers. Unless they come from Mortal Kombat. -

Tropes:

 * Badass: Given the source material, this was inevitable. Just about everyone fits into this trope (and some characters represent a multitude of badassery, whether it be their clothes, their angst, or being bereft of any discernible superpowers), almost to the point that you could argue that this series is one big Crossover Of Badass.
 * Bootstrapped Theme: This is a recurring element for the Capcom side. For instance, characters like Ryu, Batsu, and Alex have their home stage themes as their background music, even though in their original games the background music are not tied to them but to the stages. Another example is Mega Man Trigger/Volnutt receiving the theme that accompanied the Flutter vs. Gesselschaft Boss Battle in MML1 which followed him from NxC into Tatsunoko vs. Capcom (Tron herself would later get this theme for herself in Marvel vs. Capcom 3).
 * The Marvel heroes also get this treatment. The two most prominent examples are Spider-Man and Captain America, who have re-used the same theme since their initial debut in Marvel Super Heroes.
 * The Cameo: If a particular character isn't a playable fighter, there's a high chance that they'll instead be found on the sidelines or (if they're lucky) as an Assist Character.
 * Cool Versus Awesome: The whole point behind these series. The most beloved characters in the videogame history clashing it out between each other, and with comicbook and anime superheroes and villains.
 * Counter Attack: Pretty much a staple thing in this game. In some Marvel vs. Capcom 3 some super attacks are counters as well!
 * Fake Crossover: Don't expect the events of these games to ever be referenced in any of these anime/game's main series.
 * Fan Service: Of both the sexual and non-sexual variety, but we'll leave the former for another time. The sheer amount of references, nods, and throwaway gags to each company's individual mythos is staggering, to the extent of having a page dedicated for that here. Something is going to appeal to you.
 * Go-Karting with Bowser/Enemy Mine: You'll often see team-ups between characters who are mortal enemies in their own series. Penny Arcade references this in this strip.
 * Massive Multiplayer Crossover: Naturally.
 * Name's the Same: Besides the Ryu and Ken subversion noted below, MOMO and Wonder Momo in Namco x Capcom, which is lampshaded in the ending.
 * In addition, this series has now brought two Mega Men, two Zeroes, and two Rolls, who now cross four different Mega Man sub-series. (MMX Zero's ending in TvC also tosses in a cameo from a third Mega Man.) Thankfully, there has been at most one version of each character from each game.
 * Hi Joe! Oh, um...which Joe exactly?
 * And the three Kings.
 * Power Creep, Power Seep: Kind of necessary, especially in the Marvel crossovers, where you have Ryu and Zangief taking on the likes of Thanos, Phoenix, and Shuma-Gorath.
 * Shout-Out: With an own page.
 * Superheroes: You'll see (most of) the best known ones from the West (Marvel) and the East (Tatsunoko). And Bravoman and Wonder Momo (Namco).
 * Super Move Portrait Attack
 * Switch-Out Move
 * Trope Overdosed/Troper Critical Mass/Wiki Magic: This whole page had to be divided into 14 different pages. And still counting...
 * Versus Title
 * Wolverine Publicity: One could say that's the whole point of this series with the non-Wolverine examples.
 * Expect Ryu and Chun-Li to be present in any crossover game.
 * To a much lesser extent you also have Ken Masters (who was absent in the first and third Marvel vs. Capcom, and Tatsunoko vs. Capcom), Zangief (who was replaced by Alex in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, by Hugo in SvC Chaos, and Haggar in Marvel vs. Capcom 3) and Morrigan (who was replaced by Demitri on SvC Chaos, a game which, unsurprisingly, wasn't developed by Capcom).
 * Let's not get started in the non-Capcom examples, especially the Trope Namer, who even has TWO versions of himself in MvC2.
 * Wrestler in All of Us: The only way to explain many, upon many, upon many, upon MANY of the specials and supers in this series.