Speed Weed
Smash Master
So I've had this roster sitting in my drafts for a long time, but recently I finally got back to it and properly finished it. This was more or less borne from a small discussion that was had after a new translation of an old interview for the original game came out. It's also something I've given some thought before, and so I wanted to put my thoughts down on paper. The pitch is as follows: what if Fighters Megamix got a sequel on the Dreamcast?
For those unfamiliar, Fighters Megamix was a crossover fighter SEGA released for the Saturn, primarily taking from Virtua Fighter and Fighting Vipers but having plenty of guests from other SEGA games, mainly the ones created by their famous arcade division AM2. You may know it for a lot of the wacky secret characters it had, such as the Hornet car from Daytona. I'm doing this hypothetical as if, in 2001, as the Dreamcast was coming to a close, we got a big celebratory crossover fighter on it.
That said, this is still going to be a heavily limited roster. Don't go around expecting a full-on all-out SEGA fest with Sonic and NiGHTS and Phantasy Star and the like, that wouldn't make a lot of sense given how the game was made. I am expanding the game's scope, but in a bit of a different direction. This was something that was teased in interviews from the time, and I wanted to really expand on it - the pitch for this game is essentially "SEGA AM All-Stars", meaning that this is going to be a crossover between a bunch of characters from SEGA's arcade divisions. I think this is probably the best way to do a scope expansion after the original game's focus on AM2, and it leads to a lot of fun potential while still having a more limited pool.
The roster will be 37, slightly increasing from the original's 32. That may not seem like much of a jump up, but there are a lot of new characters joining in. Realistically this would probably have more OCs, variants, etc....like the original, but I don't know exactly what I'd do there and I thought this would be a more fun way to do things for me. The original game mainly focused on and took its gameplay from Virtua Fighter 2 and Fighting Vipers, and now that it's one generation later, the main focus will be on characters and mechanics from Virtua Fighter 3 and Fighting Vipers 2. As such, we can knock out most of the roster already:
Virtua Fighter 3
1. Akira Yuki
2. Pai Chan
3. Jacky Bryant
4. Sarah Bryant
5. Lau Chan
6. Wolf Hawkfield
7. Jeffry McWild
8. Kage-Maru
9. Shun Di
10. Lion Rafale
11. Aoi Umenokoji
12. Taka-Arashi
13. Dural
Fighting Vipers 2
14. Bahn
15. Honey
16. Grace
17. Raxel
18. Picky
19. Sanman
20. Tokio
21. Jane
22. Mahler
23. B. M.
24. Charlie
25. Emi
So that's the main course. As in the original game, there would be "VF" and "FV" modes that hew closer to their respective games' gameplay, and I'd also like to throw in an extra team battle feature based on VF3tb if possible. So now let's get to the rest of the roster! Starting with our last two veterans:
26. Janet Marshall (Virtua Cop)
27. Taro Yamada (Rent A Hero)
I opted to cut a lot of the anciliary stuff to make room for new picks, but I thought those would be good to keep around. Janet is just a neat character from a popular series, and Taro feels like a good one to keep given his cult status, distinctive design and the fact that his series was brought back for the Dreamcast. And now, onto the new stuff! Starting with:
28. Bruno Delinger (Dynamite Deka)
The first pick to represent the AM1 division, it's the dynamite cop himself! I love me some Dynamite Deka, and I think Bruno is just a really fun character to add to a SEGA crossover, especially in a combat context where he can swing around all those wacky props. It's also a popular series that was gaining plenty of attention at the time, and is a natural fit for a fighting game. I was thinking of mainly basing him off of the second game since that's the more recent one that got a Dreamcast port, but I also quite like the first one's aesthetics so who knows.
29. Johnny (The House of the Dead)
Now we're getting into less conventional territory. HotD is one of the biggest arcade franchises SEGA had put out since the first Megamix, and while there are various ways one could represent the series, I felt like just simply going for a zombie would be the most fun and fitting for a game like this. So I opted for Johnny, the axe-wielding zombie from the second game. He'd have a simple but fun moveset and I think just having a zombie walking around is a cool distinct visual for this game.
30. Bass (SEGA Bass Fishing)
That's right, *****. This is Fighters Megamix. Anything goes here. If it's got a model, it's good to go. So as one of the resident Wacky Picks, I am adding A Fish. Yes, we are somehow going to rig this to have a fighting game moveset where it just kinda flops around. It's gonna be great.
31. Temjin (Virtual-ON)
32. Fei-Yen (Virtual-ON)
Moving onto the AM3 branch, we have the only other series with more than one rep! Virtual-ON was stupidly popular with Japanese fans at the time, and I felt it appropriate to add the series' two faces as a representative for one of SEGA's banner arcade franchises for the latter half of the 90s. They're cool mechs!!!!!!
33. Li Huang (Decathlete)
This is one of my stranger choices. Another representative for AM3, she comes from Decathlete, a pretty popular Olympic sports arcade game SEGA made. I wanted a character that straddled that line of being more off-the-beaten-path but still kinda sensible, and I opted for her. I was considering someone from Crazy Taxi or 18 Wheeler, but I felt an athlete would be more fun in a fighting game than just "driver". She's got a really cute design and could be pretty fun.
34. Spike (SpikeOut)
And here comes someone representing the newest kids on the block, Toshihiro Nagoshi's Amusement Vision! SpikeOut made a mark as a really innovative title made by a brand new arcade team at SEGA, and Spike is a natural fit for a game like this, and also I'm just fond of this series. It'd be interesting to see him get in, as his series never actually got any Dreamcast port.
So that's that for the more "current" choices. The last couple fighters will be moreso reaching into SEGA's past, to find weird cool stuff that could be added to spice up the roster.
35. Mr. Hang-On
36. Mobo (Bonanza Bros)
So first up, we've got the biker from Hang-On. He is literally going to beat you up with the bike. That is his moveset. Jokes aside, I wanted to represent one of SEGA's big mid-80s legacy hits, and this idea won out. Bonanza Bros. is an interesting one - I was debating between several choices from that "late 80s action game" era. My other main choices were the Werebear from Altered Beast and the Bad Brothers from Golden Axe. These may seem like strange choices for those franchises, but I thought they fit this roster as weird kinda jokey picks with an odd amount of prominence in JP SEGA media. Ultimately though, I went with the Bonanza Bros, as they had the most distinctive look and I thought it'd be funny to see them throwing hands. Around this time, I also came across an official Segagaga artbook that for whatever reason had them on a list of notable SEGA characters, and I thought that was pretty funny. I could have done the detective incarnations from Tant-R but I feel like these are less well-defined.
And finally.....
37. Robo Pitcher
Yes. The Robo Pitcher. The old SEGA toy. We need at least one fighter who isn't even a living thing. This is actually a scrapped idea the devs had for the original game, and it's funny enough that I decided to bring it back. I also just think it has a neat place in history as basically SEGA's equivalent to the Ultra Hand, this old iconic toy they like to go back to and reference all the time.
So....that's it! I think my biggest regret was not adding a Last Bronx character, but I just couldn't find anywhere on the roster where they felt right. One character in an interesting case is Amigo, being a unique character from a recently successful arcade game, but I opted to exclude him as he's still technically from a console division. I also thought of adding the Derby Owners Club horse. Yeah. Fighters Megamix is cool
For those unfamiliar, Fighters Megamix was a crossover fighter SEGA released for the Saturn, primarily taking from Virtua Fighter and Fighting Vipers but having plenty of guests from other SEGA games, mainly the ones created by their famous arcade division AM2. You may know it for a lot of the wacky secret characters it had, such as the Hornet car from Daytona. I'm doing this hypothetical as if, in 2001, as the Dreamcast was coming to a close, we got a big celebratory crossover fighter on it.
That said, this is still going to be a heavily limited roster. Don't go around expecting a full-on all-out SEGA fest with Sonic and NiGHTS and Phantasy Star and the like, that wouldn't make a lot of sense given how the game was made. I am expanding the game's scope, but in a bit of a different direction. This was something that was teased in interviews from the time, and I wanted to really expand on it - the pitch for this game is essentially "SEGA AM All-Stars", meaning that this is going to be a crossover between a bunch of characters from SEGA's arcade divisions. I think this is probably the best way to do a scope expansion after the original game's focus on AM2, and it leads to a lot of fun potential while still having a more limited pool.
The roster will be 37, slightly increasing from the original's 32. That may not seem like much of a jump up, but there are a lot of new characters joining in. Realistically this would probably have more OCs, variants, etc....like the original, but I don't know exactly what I'd do there and I thought this would be a more fun way to do things for me. The original game mainly focused on and took its gameplay from Virtua Fighter 2 and Fighting Vipers, and now that it's one generation later, the main focus will be on characters and mechanics from Virtua Fighter 3 and Fighting Vipers 2. As such, we can knock out most of the roster already:
Virtua Fighter 3
1. Akira Yuki
2. Pai Chan
3. Jacky Bryant
4. Sarah Bryant
5. Lau Chan
6. Wolf Hawkfield
7. Jeffry McWild
8. Kage-Maru
9. Shun Di
10. Lion Rafale
11. Aoi Umenokoji
12. Taka-Arashi
13. Dural
Fighting Vipers 2
14. Bahn
15. Honey
16. Grace
17. Raxel
18. Picky
19. Sanman
20. Tokio
21. Jane
22. Mahler
23. B. M.
24. Charlie
25. Emi
So that's the main course. As in the original game, there would be "VF" and "FV" modes that hew closer to their respective games' gameplay, and I'd also like to throw in an extra team battle feature based on VF3tb if possible. So now let's get to the rest of the roster! Starting with our last two veterans:
26. Janet Marshall (Virtua Cop)
27. Taro Yamada (Rent A Hero)
I opted to cut a lot of the anciliary stuff to make room for new picks, but I thought those would be good to keep around. Janet is just a neat character from a popular series, and Taro feels like a good one to keep given his cult status, distinctive design and the fact that his series was brought back for the Dreamcast. And now, onto the new stuff! Starting with:
28. Bruno Delinger (Dynamite Deka)
The first pick to represent the AM1 division, it's the dynamite cop himself! I love me some Dynamite Deka, and I think Bruno is just a really fun character to add to a SEGA crossover, especially in a combat context where he can swing around all those wacky props. It's also a popular series that was gaining plenty of attention at the time, and is a natural fit for a fighting game. I was thinking of mainly basing him off of the second game since that's the more recent one that got a Dreamcast port, but I also quite like the first one's aesthetics so who knows.
29. Johnny (The House of the Dead)
Now we're getting into less conventional territory. HotD is one of the biggest arcade franchises SEGA had put out since the first Megamix, and while there are various ways one could represent the series, I felt like just simply going for a zombie would be the most fun and fitting for a game like this. So I opted for Johnny, the axe-wielding zombie from the second game. He'd have a simple but fun moveset and I think just having a zombie walking around is a cool distinct visual for this game.
30. Bass (SEGA Bass Fishing)
That's right, *****. This is Fighters Megamix. Anything goes here. If it's got a model, it's good to go. So as one of the resident Wacky Picks, I am adding A Fish. Yes, we are somehow going to rig this to have a fighting game moveset where it just kinda flops around. It's gonna be great.
31. Temjin (Virtual-ON)
32. Fei-Yen (Virtual-ON)
Moving onto the AM3 branch, we have the only other series with more than one rep! Virtual-ON was stupidly popular with Japanese fans at the time, and I felt it appropriate to add the series' two faces as a representative for one of SEGA's banner arcade franchises for the latter half of the 90s. They're cool mechs!!!!!!
33. Li Huang (Decathlete)
This is one of my stranger choices. Another representative for AM3, she comes from Decathlete, a pretty popular Olympic sports arcade game SEGA made. I wanted a character that straddled that line of being more off-the-beaten-path but still kinda sensible, and I opted for her. I was considering someone from Crazy Taxi or 18 Wheeler, but I felt an athlete would be more fun in a fighting game than just "driver". She's got a really cute design and could be pretty fun.
34. Spike (SpikeOut)
And here comes someone representing the newest kids on the block, Toshihiro Nagoshi's Amusement Vision! SpikeOut made a mark as a really innovative title made by a brand new arcade team at SEGA, and Spike is a natural fit for a game like this, and also I'm just fond of this series. It'd be interesting to see him get in, as his series never actually got any Dreamcast port.
So that's that for the more "current" choices. The last couple fighters will be moreso reaching into SEGA's past, to find weird cool stuff that could be added to spice up the roster.
35. Mr. Hang-On
36. Mobo (Bonanza Bros)
So first up, we've got the biker from Hang-On. He is literally going to beat you up with the bike. That is his moveset. Jokes aside, I wanted to represent one of SEGA's big mid-80s legacy hits, and this idea won out. Bonanza Bros. is an interesting one - I was debating between several choices from that "late 80s action game" era. My other main choices were the Werebear from Altered Beast and the Bad Brothers from Golden Axe. These may seem like strange choices for those franchises, but I thought they fit this roster as weird kinda jokey picks with an odd amount of prominence in JP SEGA media. Ultimately though, I went with the Bonanza Bros, as they had the most distinctive look and I thought it'd be funny to see them throwing hands. Around this time, I also came across an official Segagaga artbook that for whatever reason had them on a list of notable SEGA characters, and I thought that was pretty funny. I could have done the detective incarnations from Tant-R but I feel like these are less well-defined.
And finally.....
37. Robo Pitcher
Yes. The Robo Pitcher. The old SEGA toy. We need at least one fighter who isn't even a living thing. This is actually a scrapped idea the devs had for the original game, and it's funny enough that I decided to bring it back. I also just think it has a neat place in history as basically SEGA's equivalent to the Ultra Hand, this old iconic toy they like to go back to and reference all the time.
So....that's it! I think my biggest regret was not adding a Last Bronx character, but I just couldn't find anywhere on the roster where they felt right. One character in an interesting case is Amigo, being a unique character from a recently successful arcade game, but I opted to exclude him as he's still technically from a console division. I also thought of adding the Derby Owners Club horse. Yeah. Fighters Megamix is cool
