In theory, this could have worked. Get a bunch of characters together from a bunch of Capcom games, have them fight to the death, and pull off a move that Super Smash Bros. beat them to the punch with. However, in practice, the game is annoyingly sparse in its coverage of its own history, and is presented quite poorly. CFE presents you with a roster of over 20 characters from 5 games, minus unlockable characters. Unfortunately, this means that each game has had 4 fighters from their rather large rosters selected, and not every one is one you would have liked to see in there. The Darkstalkers and Street Fighter 2 lineups are especially poor; who in the world wanted to see Bison instead of, say, Cammy or Dhalsim? Who in the world thought Urien would be a good Street Fighter 3 representative? You may disagree with me on those two points, but the fact of the matter is, any Capcom fan will find at least 3 things wrong with the roster. Oh, and the Red Earth characters are bland, basic, and one of them takes up a full half of the screen, in both directions. The gameplay isn't terribly BAD, but it's definitely nothing revolutionary. Characters have super meters, but each super meter is dictated by the game they come from, along with corresponding abilities. As such, the SF3 characters have Super Arts meters, with varying charges and the like, except that you don't pick one Super Art to use beforehand; you can use all of them. The Street Fighter 2 characters get the rudimentary super meter introduced in Street Fighter 2, and so on and so forth. Since all the super meters are recycled, it never feels like anything truly unique, and the fact that the game lacks an ingame movelist makes the game infinitely frustrating for those, like myself, who don't like getting up to look at a movelist on GameFAQs during a match. The other new quirk is the fact that you select two characters, but this is only so you have a choice between them between each match. While this sounds nice, and it really could have been, the fact that you are not required to use a character, combined with the fact that it's just 2, makes it a lot less strategic than it could have been. A best of 3 match with four fighters to choose from would have been a much more strategic idea. The graphics in this game are wretched. As usual, the sprites from DarkStalkers have AGAIN been directly ripped from that game, which is getting more and more outdated (Anarkis being the exception, but even he's just a rip from MvC2). Some of the characters look WORSE than in previous incarnations; it feels like some of their sprites were blown up excessively, and look terribly pixelated as a result. The menus are nothing special, but the high-res quality of them against the terribly low-res characters is really jarring. The character art for the menus isn't really all that great, either. The music is a step up from MvC2, but for the sole reason that they eschewed putting in terrible vocals. The music still has no discernable melody a lot of the time, is never really coherent nor of a style that relates to the country you're fighting in, and overall feels like even more of a rush job than MvC2's music. This game is pretty freaking bad. What could have been an opportunity for Capcom to put together a bunch of their own fighters instead of their own and someone else's, instead turns into a sampler platter of Capcom fighting games that ultimately will easily turn off even the most rabid Capcom fan.
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Imagine this: Street Fighter’s II’s Ryu Ina fist cuffs with Street Fighter II’s Chun-LI. How about Darkstalker’s Felicia vs. Street Fighter Alpha’s Rose? Or how about the character’s of Red Earth VS. Ingrid, the newest 2... Read Full Review
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