Battle On

So I’ve been doing a lot of research this past week and I managed to “narrow” down the roster of characters I plan to include in the illustration.

The Capcom side will include characters from the Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, Rival Schools, Saturday Night Slam Masters, Red Earth, Onimusha, Star Gladiator, Power Stone, Final Fight, Tech Romancer, Cyberbots, and Sengoku Basara franchises. Capcom characters that appeared in games like Marvel vs. Capcom and Tatsunoko vs. Capcom will be included. I won’t be including characters from Capcom games based on existing properties like JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure and Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple. Those characters, along with ones coming from Marvel and Tatsunoko were clearly not created or commissioned by Capcom. There are some gray areas such as the characters Arika created for the Street Fighter EX series. Theses characters will be included.

The SNK side will include characters from the King of Fighters, Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, Last Blade, Samurai Shodown, Ninja Master’s, Aggressors of Dark Kombat, Savage Reign, World Heroes, King of the Monsters, 3 Count Bout, Buriki One, Rage of the Dragons, and Fighter’s History franchises. The criteria for characters owned by SNK are even murkier than Capcom’s. This is due to SNK’s rocky financial and licensing history with other companies. Years ago, I wasn’t sure whether to include ADK properties like World Heroes. Since that time, SNK bought ADK’s intellectual properties, solving that problem. UPL created 3 Count Bout but the company is no longer in business. I feel those characters make a nice counterpoint to Capcom’s Saturday Night Slam Masters characters. I’m including Noise Factory’s Rage of the Dragons as a counterpoint to Capcom’s Final Fight characters. I won’t be including the Power Instinct characters since that franchise began and still has strong connections with Atlus.

Over thinking which characters properly belong to which companies was one of the reasons that I originally quit working on this project. I’ve decided to include the characters I feel properly represent both companies. Plus, I’m the one that’s drawing this. I include who I want to include. The important thing is that all selectable characters from each of these games will be represented in the illustration. They will be accompanied by other characters that have important associations with the selectable characters. That roster alone amounts to over 650 characters! I’ll also be including non-fighting game characters from both companies just to add some more flavor and spice to this jam-packed soup. Now I just have to decide what versions of these characters to use.