Re: Marvel VS Capcom Official Complete Works.66
Celena Holtzberg
Frank Tieri was responsible for a number of things. The over arching story where both worlds collide and Wesker and Dr.Doom team up to try and obtain the Cosmic power from Galactus (Comic sums that up with the Special Edition). He also wrote all the endings and dialogue as well as the taunts, win/lose phrases, quotes ect. Some exceptions is when it revolved around the Capcom characters he seeked assistance from Niitsuma the producer to help educate him on the backstory of each Capcom character.
Information present in the All About Capcom booklets regarding Street Fighter is quite funny, because many relevant things are touched upon. It outlines the experiences of the Street Fighter development team.
Substance being something that can only be given by story and plot seems kind of closed minded. After all, the depth in a good fighting game is the technical depth and/or competitive depth. Are those aspects of the game any less genuine or do they have any less substance? I think saying no is ignoring all the people who enjoy the games for those reasons and all the developers who spent hours upon hours working on a system that can last more than one playthrough.
I like the Ellen Degeneres simile ? but again, I really enjoyed the Morlun story arc and John Romita Jr. as always, did a top notch job with the art. I thought the Ezekiel character was a bit too gimicky, but other than that I thought it was solid. But then again, how long ago was that? That story must have been nearly ten years ago, maybe more. Obviously we have a difference in opinion here.
Your article is claiming that in order for Fighting games to have substance, you need to have a good story. I think you are completely missing the point with fighting games. Think of it as Pro-wrestling: Sure, you have all those wrestlers creating a story, but mostly, you are just there to see the action. Narrative is mostly a side-feature, since most of the time, fighting games are meant to be competitive for human players, and when you are playing a competitive game (Video games, board games or even sports), narrative is only secondary. If fighting games were meant for single-player or co-op, and had terrible narratives, than yes, there is no substance in fighting games.
All that said, I did enjoy your article. I agree that arcades did inspire the way fighting games developed. You want a game that allows for quick profit, and keeps them coming back for more, and the arcades allowed frequent quarter usage in fights both Player vs Game, and Player vs Player.
Fighting games definitely benefited with the way they evolved, but now they can be able to evolved towards a more meaty experience, while still maintaining all of the improvements gathered over the last two decades or so.
Well, actually there is a very deep story in street fighter, Capcom may have not been very public about the plot but they have been very careful about it, let me show you: -street-fighter/faqs/26094
This is a summary of all the official history related information that Capcom has released about Street Fighter (including the already mentioned All About Capcom fighting games 1987-2000) and as you can see is pretty big.
Then SF2 came out and it had a really good story. Similar to SF1, most characters participated because they were professional fighters, and there also were two characters with a more developed story: Guile and Chun Li (at this point it should be noted that even these story-driven characters had fighting related jobs: soldier and policewoman). It all made sense, we had some world criminal holding a tournament for fun and a couple of heroes trying to get him while the other fighters fought for their own simpler reasons. Problem appeared when, after finishing the game, Capcom realized the huge hit they had, and figured that they should give Ryu a greater role as the Japanese character. And so, after SF2, we got a vagabond fighting Hitler to save the world, lowering the bar of sense and opening the door to fortune tellers and schoolgirls. And body-switches. And the dark side of the Force. And an elite guard made of kidnapped underage girls.
I admit to being rather bitter about losses myself. A close one I could accept. Getting destroyed was another matter entirely. If I could be defeated that easily at something I thought I was good at, what did that say about my other abilities?
dunno you but i feel that some games like Guilty Gear and BlazBlue, hell even King of Fighters have good and deep stories
i think that its more a thing on how lazy is capcom in even trying to do some sort of background story for their chars