For one reason or another, I haven't been able to review this game properly despite owning it since January. Mainly, I never really felt compelled to play the game in a single-player capacity, much like every other fighting game I've ever played (save for Soul Calibur II, as I really wanted to unlock all the characters). Games like Super Smash Bros. Melee really turned me off from single-player fighting. That game was so tight, competitive and fun that playing something even a little bit less than that seemed sacrilege.
Tatsunoko vs. Capcom is no Super Smash Bros., but it's also just a really solid fighting game that is nearly peerless on the Wii. If you've ever picked up a Street Fighter game, TvC should seem instantly familiar. You've got high and low punches and kicks, something called a Baroque power and the ability to unleash powerful special attacks (wherein your character will take up almost the entirety of the screen in a flash of colour). And like the other games in the Vs. series, you can tag in and out your secondary character that you pick before the match begins.
The fighting is totally solid, if a little bit unremarkable. As someone who's only really dabbled in the genre, mostly playing Soul Calibur and Smash Bros. games, these super-balanced and probably super-competitive fighting games (at least at the higher level) aren't really for me. I mean, there have been people who have beaten me at Soul Calibur II with their eyes closed, so my acumen in the fighting genre isn't exactly up to snuff. I find the prospect of actually playing this game against someone who knows what they're doing very daunting.
For someone like me (or, potentially, someone like you), what TvC really boils down to is Capcom and Tatsunoko fan service. Capcom's fighters are well-known entities in the Western world. Characters like Mega Man, Frank West, Chun-Li and the giant robots from Lost Planet all make an appearance. Tatsunoko, on the other hand, is relatively unknown. Unless you're a big fan of old-school Japanese anime, a lot of the names, like Jun the Swan or Gatchaman might seem a little strange, but when people who I've shown the game to ask me "what's a Tatsunoko?" I generally just say "Speed Racer" and get it over with. Oddly, Speed nor any of his compatriots make an appearance in the game, which is maybe a little bit disappointing, except that all the rest of the Tatsunoko characters are very well-known in Japan, where this game was obviously being marketed most heavily.
The game is extremely, extremely Japanese. If I hadn't just picked up Sakura Wars for my Wii, this would hands down be the most stereotypically Japanese thing I would own. The game opens with a cinematic set to a hilarious J-Pop song (with, um, J-Rapping too!), announcing that the "Ultimate Battle will Commence!" The addition of giant robot battles to the Vs. series too makes this game incredibly over the top (not the Sylvester Stallone movie, just a figure of speech!), and special moves ignite a flurry of rainbows and colour explosions. Still, I absolutely commend Capcom for localizing the game. It would have been easy to leave this game overseas as a bit of a Japanese curio, but there's no denying that it's a quality game and one that fighting fans on the Wii have probably been clamoring for, as it's easily the second best fighting game on the system (Super Smash Bros. Brawl, of course, taking the top honours). And if the sales data is anything to go by, maybe more development companies will realize that there's an alternate path to achieving sales success on the Wii besides just pumping out shovelware, and that's to just simply make quality titles.
What to make of all this "brand vs. brand" game development, though? Should this be seen as anything more than just an expensive advertisement? I don't think so. That's perhaps an obvious side effect, but these games do plug directly into the pleasure centres of their fans. More importantly, though, I honestly believe that a game like this or Smash Bros. shows two companies emphatically diving into their (and videogaming's) history, and that's something that should be commended in this day and age. Too often, we're willing to progress in strange or wrongheaded ways, and these fighting games allow us to, if only momentarily, glance back at the past. That's something admirable, and if you're a fan of Capcom's history, especially as a fighting game maker, you owe it to yourself to pick this game up.