Capcom Fighting Evolution

Capcom Fighting Evolution (also known as Capcom Fighting Jam in Japan and Europe) is a fighting game made by Capcom. It uses characters from five Capcom games (Darkstalkers, Street Fighter Alpha, Street Fighter III, Street Fighter II and Red Earth aka War-Zard in Japan) and has a new original character plus two bosses.

It is normally considered by gamers as being one of the worst fighting games made by Capcom.

History
The story of this mess started with SNK, who after the massive success of Capcom vs. SNK 2, partner up with Capcom once again to create a third installment, this time in full 3D as the previous entries were made in pixel art. Unfortunately, around that time, the original SNK went bankrupt in October 2001 thanks to their incompetent owner at the time, and many employees left to work on different studios, some creating new ones liks Dimps, founded by Street Fighter co-creator Takashi Nishiyama.

Toyohisa Tanabe, who was the director of several fighting games at SNK, joined Capcom and began work on a new game called Capcom Fighting All-Stars, using the cancelled third entry as a basis, but as a Capcom-only crossover this time. The story would have been a mysterious man known as Death planting a deadly bomb called Laughter Sun on Metro City. The Mayor, Mike Haggar, contacted 9 fighters around the world to stop Death and disarm the bomb before its too late. Three codes are needed to disarm it, and that's were a group called, Code Holders come in. These are D.D., Rook and Ingrid, three characters created for the game as the names of the codes are Ogre, Fallen Angel and Isis.

Capcom sent the game on selected locations to test it, but it received negative feedback from players, and so it have to be developed further. In August 2003, however, it was canceled, no true reason was given, though the most citing factor was the unexepcted waning popularity of Arcades in the US, and many ex-SNK employees (including Tanabe) left Capcom as a result. A guest SNK character was set to be playable, and while it was not officialy confirmed, it was heavily hinted to be the KOF protagonist, Kyo Kusanagi, according to several interviews with Tanabe.

To make up for the cancellation, Yoshinori Ono (who was a sound engineer at the time) told the developers to hastily create a brand new game to take its place as the previous producer left the project halfway to completion, and the character of Ingrid has her backstory rewritten as a time travelling goddess, leading to the creation of Capcom Fighting Evolution.

Why It Sucks

 * 1) Lack of gameplay modes, except for Arcade and Versus.
 * 2) This is easily the laziest fighting game Capcom has ever produced. It rehashes sprites from Capcom vs SNK 2, Red Earth/War-Zard, Street Fighter Alpha 3, Darkstalkers 3 and Street Fighter 3 Third Strike, so much to the point of feeling like a MUGEN game, which is more noticeable if you compare the sprites of Darkstalkers and Red Earth (War-Zard in Japan) with the ones of the Street Fighter characters. Even Maximillan Dood called this game a retail MUGEN.
 * 3) *In fact, many characters are not scaled well, this specially noticeable in Pyron, who is smaller than Yun.
 * 4) Some iconic characters like Ken, Morrigan and Tessa were left out, appering as little more than cameos in endings or backgrounds.
 * 5) *About that many of the characters in the background are just copy pasted concept art and in low resolution making many stages look awful.
 * 6) Not only it is lazy but also extremely bland. This has nothing that makes it special in comparison to other fighters, besides the fact that it has characters from different games, but in terms of gameplay it has nothing.
 * 7) The fighting system is moronic, since every set of characters use the system from the game they came from instead of having one universal system or grooves designed for this game. This is not only stupid but it also makes the game really unbalanced by default.
 * 8) Pyron is a really easy final boss, he already wasn't a big deal in the Darkstalkers games, but here, he is just lame.
 * 9) Ryu is insanely overpowered, his damage output is ridiculous.
 * 10) The Street Fighter Alpha characters are really weak, despite having a decent amount of mechanics.
 * 11) Shin Akuma is a secret boss, but he is literally the same as in CVS 2., which shows another sign on how lazy the game is.
 * 12) Despite the rehash of sprites from Capcom vs SNK 2 some characters are missing moves from that game, for example Guile no longer has his Sonic Hurricane.
 * 13) Getting to fight Shin Akuma is really hard, as due to the inconsistent A.I., is really easy to lose a round.
 * 14) The commands for Shin Akuma's Raging Demon and Demitri's Midnight Bliss rarely work.
 * 15) Inconsistent AI with some characters the CPU tends to act extremely aggressive while with others they barely defend themselves, an example is Pyron against Ryu is easy and barely does anything, while against Sakura he becomes insanely annoying.
 * 16) The endings are just pictures done by UDON and that's it.
 * 17) Thanks to this game being a flop, Capcom stopped developing fighting games for four years until they made Street Fighter IV.

Redeeming Qualities

 * 1) This was the first appearance of the character Ingrid (a shame the other 3 original characters from Fighting All Stars weren't saved).
 * 2) The inclusion of Red Earth characters are great touches.
 * 3) The game can still be fun for a while.
 * 4) The concept is really good, just not the execution.
 * 5) The music is great.

Reception
Unsurprisely, Capcom Fighting Evolution received mixed reviews from critics, but was hugely panned by fighting game fans due to the characaters (save for Ingrid) being copy-and-pasted from previous games, just with cut down animation frames and Special Moves, fan-favorites such as Ken, Morrigan and others being relegated as backgrounds in stages or as cameos in the endings, multiple gameplays from other games that led to balance problems, and others. Ingrid has since became one of the most despised characters of all time for no unexplained reason other than being debuting in this game. Yoshinori Ono admited that it was a salvaged version of Capcom Fighting All-Stars after its cancelation. Thanks for its commercial failure, combined with the already struggling Fighting game genre in the 2000s, Capcom stopped developing them for 6 years, until Yoshinori Ono convinced his bosses (including Keiji Inafune) to revive Street Fighter with its 4th entry, which not only it was a commercial success and revived the franchise, but also ushered a renaissance for the genre as a whole. As a consenquence, however, Capcom never developed a crossover game with their own IPs ever again.

Trivia

 * A representation of 1987's Street Fighter was going to appear at some point during development. It would have Eagle, using his Capcom vs. SNK sprites, a redesigned Sagat in his pre-scar appearance, and Retsu, the only character with new sprites created for, but they were eventually cut due to time constraits and Sagat makes a cameo appearance in one of the stages instead.

Videos
pFtd98TmssQ Qu49rq5ePJA ZtWzxu2_id8