Collection essentials #342: X-Men vs. Street Fighter (Saturn)

Capcom obviously struck gold with Street Fighter II in the early ‘90s and set the standard for a new genre that was suddenly booming in popularity. And Capcom didn’t stop at making just Street Fighter, either. In 1994 they started a new series of Darkstalkers, and later in the same year they teamed up with Marvel to make a Street Fighter-style fighting game called X-Men: Children of the Atom. They even included their own villain Akuma from Street Fighter in that game as a secret character. And not long after that they would add a second Marvel fighting game, called “Marvel Super Heroes” which featured a variety of iconic superheroes from the Marvel universe and not just X-Men. Those two Marvel games were on Sega Saturn, but I don’t currently own them and they didn’t make my list.

Crossovers weren’t really a big thing yet, but the next step may have been obvious. What if Capcom included their own characters along with Marvel’s in one single fighting game?? This was an excellent idea, and so Capcom decided to start out with a selection of their Street Fighter characters along with some of the X-Men in a frantic new fighting game unlike anything that had been seen before. And the results were impressive!

X-Men vs. Street Fighter is clearly distinct from all fighting games before it, first and most obviously, because it is a tag-team fighter. When starting the game, you pick any two characters you want from the available cast of street fighters and X-Men. During the match, you may press the “Heavy punch” and “Heavy kick” buttons at the same time to tag out to your other character, who will enter with an attack (I think it’s always a charging kick). You are incentivized to do this, because after a character takes damage, they can heal some of it back up when they are tagged out. There is only one round this time instead of the match being a best-of-three. This tag system really spices up the typical gameplay of a fighting game! Another difference is that characters can jump SUPER high. You can do a regular jump like in a normal fighting game, but pressing “down” and then “up” instead sends your character way up in the air. So this game is more about aerial combat than most.

Another thing to notice if you’ve previously played old Street Fighter is that the special moves are now generally more over-the-top. Just looking at the size of Ryu’s “Hadouken” fireball makes this obvious (though strangely Ken’s is still the normal size). This game does have a “special meter” that you can spend to do powerful “Hyper combo” moves, and these are similarly bigger and more bombastic than in the Street Fighter games. And what’s extra cool is that when you have two meters to spend, you can have both of your characters perform a “Hyper combo” special move at the same time for extra devastation!

As you’ll see, Capcom made more od these crossover games with Marvel like this one, and so the biggest knock against X-Men vs. Street Fighter is that it’s inferior to the games that came after it. This game is a little more unbalanced than normal, and some characters have “infinite” combos that are impossible for the opponent to escape if done correctly. Another strange flaw is that the single-player mode is surprisingly too easy, which is unusual for an arcade fighter.

I was first acquainted with the later crossover games that Capcom made and I missed out on X-Men vs. Street Fighter when it first came out. But I was still glad to go back and experience the Saturn version once I had the console. There’s still enough appeal to make it worth trying out, especially if there are certain characters in this game you like that didn’t make the cut in certain later games. Speaking of those, stay tuned for next time when I talk about this game’s successor.