Mascot Fighter

A particular form of Fighting Game.

The Mascot Fighter is rarely a series in and of itself, and is usually based off another game or anime series, or is a Massive Multiplayer Crossover.

Mascot Fighters are usually characterized by 2-D gameplay, even though the characters and graphics may be in 3-D. They are almost always four-player, and usually have multi-level playing fields. The action of a Mascot Fighter is usually fast-paced, and often chaotic. With four players, usually every man for himself, attacks can often come out of nowhere, so long Combos are usually discouraged, if even possible. Battles can be to the ahem "death", but more often than not, you can also win by knocking the enemy off the stage entirely. Items and Weapons that appear at random intervals and locations are also a big part of gameplay, and can often turn the tide of a battle. Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny will nearly always apply.

Note: Just because it's a crossover fighting game does not necessarily mean it's a Mascot Fighter. The distinction is in the gameplay (For an example, compare the mechanics of Smash Bros. to the Capcom Vs. series).

Examples of Mascot Fighter include:

Super Smash Bros. is pretty much the Trope Maker.
- There are also various fanmade Smash Bros. clones, the most notable example being the Super Smash Flash series for its inclusion of more third-party characters and anime characters. The second game fits the Mascot Fighter genre more closely than the first due to exactly replicating Smash Bros.' gameplay and physics.
Viewtiful Joe: Red Hot Rumble
Jump Super Stars, based on several manga series found in Shonen Jump, from Dragon Ball and One Piece to Yu-Gi-Oh! and Naruto.
- Battle Stadium D.O.N. is quite similar, albeit with a character selection limited to D''ragonBall, O''ne Piece and N''aruto
- Sunday x Magazine for the PSP has the same premise as JSS, but using characters from series published in Shogakukan's Shonen Sunday (like Inuyasha and Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple) and Kodansha's Shonen Magazine (like Mahou Sensei Negima and Fairy Tail), as well as Cyborg 009 (which ran in both magazines at different points in time), but plays in a more traditional way than JSS.
Guilty Gear: Dust Strikers & Guilty Gear: Isuka
Onimusha: Blade Warriors
Dream Mix TV World Fighters, which focused on characters from Konami, Hudson Soft, and Takara, from Solid Snake and Simon Belmont to Bomberman and Optimus Prime.
Castlevania Judgment does this with just Castlevania characters, including the aforementioned Simon Belmont.
Dissidia Final Fantasy
Neon Genesis Evangelion: Battle Orchestra obviously enough does this with the Evangelion mechas, Jet Alone, The Cameo from Gunbuster and various An gels.
Tales Of Versus for the Tales (series)
Digimon Rumble Arena, Digimon Battle Spirit and their sequels are this for the anime instalments of the Digimon franchise.
Capcom's Power Stone series is one of the rare examples of an original franchise of this genre.
The Naruto Ultimate Ninja series of games play like Mascot fighters.
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Smash Up. It's even helmed by one of the multiple developers of Super Smash Bros. Brawl to boot.
Shrek Super Slam.
Fullmetal Alchemist: Dream Carnival plays like one of these.
Godzilla: Destroy All Monsters Melee and its sequels/related games do this for the Toho Kaiju.
Although not a traditional 2D fighter, Wormux is a freeware Worms clone that pits teams of mascots from various open source projects against each other. The mascot teams include Tux, the gnu (GNU project), Konqi (KDE), Wilbur (GIMP), the SUSE lizard, Mozilla's Firefox and Thunderbird, the OpenOffice seagulls, the BSD daemon, and more.
The fangame Card Sagas Wars takes the concept of the Mascot Fighter to a new level. Now if only it were playable...
- The website says well over 800 cards, closer to 900, which is the number of characters that will appear in the game. However, there are still "only" 36 playable characters, many from completely unrelated video games. Unfortunately, not even the beta with 4 playable characters is available for download yet. Still, the videos on Youtube show that the game does exist, if only on the developers' computers.
The video game Marvel Super Hero Squad, based on the toy franchise and TV show, fits well in this sub-genre.
The Newgrounds Rumble (Seen here), which does this for the site Newgrounds, including characters such as Pico and Nene, the P-Bot, Salad Fingers, Hank from Madness Combat, the Tankman, the Alien Hominid and other characters who were featured on the site.
Two Tom and Jerry games: Fists of Furry and War of the Whiskers.
There was this doujin game based on Suzumiya Haruhi called Suzumiya Haruhi no Gekitou. It even had Konata Izumi and Akira Kogami as Guest Fighters.
Cartoon Network has two. The first, a game on their website called Titanic Kunfubot Offensive. The other, Cartoon Network: Punch Time Explosion, was released in North America to home systems on November 15th, 2011 - a Nintendo 3DS version was released earlier on June 2nd, 2011.
The Gundam vs. Series was originally a Mecha Game, but the action got more fast-paced as time went on to the point where the crossover games (Gundam Vs. Gundam, its Updated Rerelease Gundam Vs. Gundam Next Plus, and sequel Gundam Extreme Vs.) are effectively a hybrid Mecha Game/Mascot Fighter.
Nekketsu Kakutō Densetsu, predating Super Smash Bros., offered two-on-two battles in story mode and a four-player free-for-all battle mode environmental hazards, with the Kunio-Kun cast. The mechanics were loosely similar to River City Ransom--no insane Jump Physics, but there were stage hazards to spice the fighting up.
A Sony mascot fighter titled Play Station All Stars Battle Royale is being developed, including Nathan Drake, Sackboy, Kratos, and more. Sweet Tooth's model can be seen here.
Rag Doll Kung Fu Fists Of Plastic is another rare example of an original franchise with this type of gameplay.
Quite possibly the Ur Example: The Outfoxies, an obscure Japanese-only arcade game. Like Smash Bros, it's a 2D fighter where opponents are pitted against each other in environments full of stage hazards and weapons scattered about. It's even rumored that the team that worked on this game also did work on Smash Bros itself.