Every so often, there comes a game that breaks the mold of the genre it belongs to. These games become almost legendary amongst gamers, and they literally redefine the gaming experience. Capcom Fighting Evolution is not one of those games. In fact, it’s quite obvious that CFE is what happens to the creators of these games several years later, when it’s obvious they’ve been running on fumes for a while. Capcom has long been displaced as the top purveyor of fighting games; people go to Sammy for two-dimensional ones, while Namco covers the 3D crowd. Capcom clearly made this game as a “last gasp” for their flagship games in the fighting genre. The amount of air in that gasp, though, could be much greater.
First off, Capcom has finally done away with any semblance of plot in this game. They never discuss why these different people, from a couple different dimensions, gather together to fight each other. They never make any pretense of a fighting contest, or to save dimensional barriers, or any of that. This game is happening because, basically, Capcom wants to cash in. They want to see what happens when Ryu fights Demitri, despite the fact that they’ve covered that ground more often than Germans have covered France. They try to make a show of collecting characters from previous games and give them different fighting styles, even though that’s happened previously in Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Capcom vs. SNK.
I used to think that companies should just step forth and admit that they were just out for money when they make games with poor excuses for stories. I formally apologize for each time I’ve ever said as much. This game is brazen of the fact that it’s just for people who want to throw Felicia against Alex. Or Urien against Karin. And it feels dirty; simultaneously lazy and greedy. I’ve accused companies of not caring before, but there was always a veneer of effort before. Not this time, and not anymore: Capcom wants your money, and they want you to like their greed.
So the concept is that five games’ warriors show up to fight: Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter 3, Darkstalkers, Street Fighter Alpha 3, and Red Earth (originally Warzard), the last of which has never been released in North America. Right off, they rip you off by only giving you four from each game (well, a bonus of Shin Akuma from SFA3 and Pyron from Darkstalkers). Seriously, that’s it. With half the cast of, say, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, the game is already short-charging you with what it provides. I seriously think, particularly since the game mostly uses the less-flashy versions of moves from the games, that they could have thrown in at least another couple dozen characters. If nothing else, I really wanted to see B. B. Hood appear in another game.
The battles are set up fairly simply. You play a best of 3 (or other odd number, if you mess with options) match, but you only use one of the two fighters you selected at the beginning. You get the option of switching characters to use only after the current round ends. Maybe I’m just silly like that, but I never liked other “tag team” games that don’t let you switch during a fight, or allow you to bring back someone who lost. It’s a brawl with multiple people; be willing to fight dirty and allow people to mix it up. Or if you must have one-on-one fighting, make someone who lost a previous round unable to come back. Choosing one of two any given round is the weakest way to do a tag team fighting game.
The game’s controls are, to be honest, maddening. Each character basically handles like the game that they are culled from. This apparently is to a major disadvantage for the Red Earth crew, since this game apparently was like molasses in the circuit board. Moreover, it means that radically different abilities are given and you have no option to change things around. Because air blocking didn’t exist in Street Fighter 2, Guile can’t do it. Because only Red Earth had Ultimate Guard moves (a precursor to Guilty Gear’s Faultless Defense), Jedah won’t have that option. Chain combos are beyond Chun Li (SF3 edition) because those are strictly for Darkstalkers alumnus.
This is, honestly, inexcusable. Unless you stick with characters from just one game, you constantly have to shift styles and how you control the game. And even then, you have to shift style a bit to compensate for how your foe fights on a fundamental level. It boggles my mind when I think that Capcom could have programmed each character to gain these abilities. If they could fit together six different styles (called “fighting grooves”) in Capcom vs. SNK 2, then they very well could have here. I probably would have chosen to fight SFA3 style (I loved Alpha Counters, but thrived with the Original Combo system, originally called A-ism), but the option would have been a refreshing change.
On the other hand, it is a refreshing look into why Red Earth never was brought across the Pacific Ocean. Namely, everything about it (beyond Ultimate Guard) stinks on ice. I’m talking “Jar Jar Binks” level of awful. The characters do hardly any damage (unless you power them up, opening them up to attack and requiring a level of super move energy), they move slower than dirt, and have generally useless moves. It’s like they decided to throw in four different Dan Hibikis, except with different fighting styles. Red Earth even manages to provide Kenji, the world’s lousiest ninja. When perhaps the worst character in the game is the ninja, then you know someone fouled up programming the game. On the bright side, when you see the computer use a Red Earth character, you know that you have a free victory that round.
There is one last side note to all of this – Ingrid, who is a schoolgirl-like character made just for this game. All things told, she’s not too bad of a character – a bit of a cross in all respects between Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Darkstalkers. And with that said, I really hate to see a decent character in a game wasted like this. She only appears to fight as an opponent if you fight really well, and she’s fairly well balanced (against the decent characters, anyhow). She should have either been saved for another Street Fighter Alpha game (to make a dynamic with Karin and Saukra) or for the next Darkstalkers game (as some sort of fairy or good witch).
To be honest, the graphics of the game might be the absolute worst part of the package. Yes, even including Red Earth’s inclusion. See, they didn’t bother reworking the characters for the new hardware. Capcom was really lazy, and just pulled all of the graphics, wholesale, from their previous games. This wasn’t so bad in some cases – Sakura, after all, was last seen in Marvel vs. Capcom 2, as was Ryu. Guy, last appearing in Street Fighter Alpha 3, could have used some touch-ups. “The Swan” level touch-ups, yes, but still could have been mostly preserved. But for the life of me, I don’t know why they reused Demitri’s sprites from the original Darkstalkers. His design always looked like it was hit with the ugly stick as is, and it looks even worse on a 128-bit system. Felicia similarly looks a bit grainy and messy, and I think Anarkis was only spared because he too was in MvC2. Not that the Red Earth crew is any prettier (Leo, the anthropomorphic lion, has a few chunky pixels in him too), but I think I lose against Demitri just because I’m distracted by the terrible graphics.
The game’s stills aren’t much better. Most of the backgrounds look like someone painted a bunch of Capcom characters onto a backdrop with watercolors. And then proceeded to leave the portraits out in the rain. Everything looks washed out, and that’s not good in a game sorely lacking in the eye candy department. I think I’ve seen Ken, Cody, Sagat, and J. Talbain in the backgrounds. But they could just be random smudges from someone’s careless thumb. Particularly compared to the backgrounds from some of the games these characters come from (Darkstalkers 3: Jedah’s Damnation featured the ne plus ultra of fighting game backgrounds, “Birth of God”), these backgrounds are pitiful.
Of course, part of the reason I’m frustrated by the small cast of characters is that they obviously didn’t pack the game with anything particularly memory-taxing. Seriously, how many 24-bit graphics from Darkstalkers could have been thrown on this game? How many times could they have fit Red Earth on the DVD (and how many times would it have still been terrible)? I probably could have dealt with a smaller cast of characters if we were talking about mind-blowing graphics and a highly customizable fighting system. But of course, neither appears in this game.
The sounds from the game are a bit mixed. The game mostly culls themes from the various games, so you get songs that range from Sakura’s peppy theme to Ryu’s more intense song to various levels of depressing mood music from Darkstalkers. It’s a very mixed bag, with only one serious dark spot (surprise of surprises, Red Earth). It does have some of the better songs from a fighting game that isn’t named Guilty Gear, but also a few really lousy ones. It’s an uneven effort that you’ll probably ignore more often than not, to be honest.
There are a few scraps here and there that could be salvaged. Said game would be an interesting amalgam of Capcom’s Versus games and Street Fighter Alpha, and that probably would be something to launch Capcom back into success with fighting games. However, that would require putting in the effort to clean up the graphics, the control, program many more options and characters, and throw out anything related to Red Earth. As things currently stand, Capcom Fighting Evolution is an absolute mess. If anything, it’s evolved into an appendix – present in the modern day, useless, and it can be safely removed.
