Eh.....I mean sure, both rosters have their exceptions, but let's not act like they're perfectly balanced all-encompassing rosters just for not being literally 100% only what their respective regions prefer. At the end of the day, SEGA Heroes is still very western and Project X Zone is still very Japanese. The former does include stuff like Yakuza, Valkyria Chronicles and Phantasy Star, but it still leans heavily towards appealing to Anglophone SEGA fans' nostalgia, with lots of love given to the Mega Drive in particular. The latter is interesting - you can tell that in the second game they had an international market in mind since they were releasing it worldwide from the outset, and the picks generally reflected that - with the likes of Streets of Rage and Shinobi appearing - but even then, it's not like they went fullhog into adding Comix Zone or whatever: all the characters they added were still at least somewhat well-known in Japan as well. And PxZ1 is just about the weebiest SEGA roster you'll find, with almost all the "classic" stuff that appears hailing from either the Saturn or the arcades, with the big exception to my recollection being Ulala who's practically a constant presence in Japanese SEGA media.
I guess the point I'm trying to make here is that that regional divide
is something that should be taken into consideration, and it's difficult to tell what direction a roster like this would actually take. Like, when I do my SEGA rosters, I tend to lean towards the Japanese side cause I think that's where the most interesting stuff lies, but sometimes I think to myself: what would a roster like this
actually look like? And the truth is I've got no clue, because we've never really gotten, like.....anything that answers that question. PxZ2 is maybe the closest we've gotten so far - made by Japanese devs but clearly with at least some international appeal taken into consideration - but it's also a game where SEGA has to share space with 2-going-on-3 other companies, so we don't even get to explore that angle that much. And I'm not even saying it can't be done - I do think there are
just enough classic SEGA franchises with appeal on both sides of the Pacific that you could maybe pull something off - just that it's a hell of a task to get right and no one's really stepped up to the plate with something that fully reconciles the two perspectives. And especially given that a Nintendo vs. SEGA would very likely be made in Japan, I oftentimes find myself wondering how people would react to some of the concessions that'd probably have to be made even if they tried. Like, for example, I'm thinking about a particular sect of characters that are super highly-requested for SEGA crossovers in the West - your Ristars, your Vectormen, stuff like that - that'd likely be immediately off the table because they have so little presence in Japan that they likely wouldn't be on the devs' radar at all, even in their attempts to make a more internationally-appealing roster. And I do wonder how people would feel about stuff like that, and how a roster like this would go over with people. Probably not
that bad, in all honesty, but I don't know. It's complicated. We've never really
gotten something like that to answer all these questions.
Though personally I'm an unashamed weeb-ass SEGA fan. Gimme all the weirdo arcade/Saturn stuff
