Might miss the Sega/Capcom talk with how long this post turned out to be, but anyway.
It's not hard to find a good balance between JP picks and Western picks, although two things to consider is that for one, the Versus Capcom series does have a more bigger audience in the West, being the biggest reason why Tatsunoko vs Capcom came over to the West in the first place was because of the high interest and demand from Western audiences.
The second thing is that when Capcom makes a Versus game for a specific audience, they do take into question the more popular characters to the audience they are marketing to. When they were doing Tatsunoko vs Capcom originally, they were choosing characters more familiar to Japanese audiences, but when they brought TvC to the West and were making Marvel vs Capcom 3, they chose characters more familiar to Western audiences. It's the reason why Date Masamune from Sengoku Basara and Fou-Lu from Breath of Fire 4, despite being very popular with the creators, were ultimately not chosen for Marvel vs Capcom 3 due to their lack of appeal in the West.
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That said, characters having more appeal and more people familiar with them should not be a full reason to exclude lesser known characters as choices. There should be a bit of a higher priority towards more popular characters, but seeing the reactions to crossover rosters through out, I think there's a bigger audience of people who are quite open and ready to be surprised by characters they don't know about than there are people who are hyperfocused on their favorites only. Do those people who are open to more unknown characters still prioritise their favorites? Yes, but they aren't against characters who still look really cool and have very cool looking movesets.
And besides the characters themselves and their movesets, there's also their interactions with the other characters from the other side. Which is one of the biggest appeals of the crossover game is how characters from one franchise interacts with another character from another franchise. And boy, do Sega and Capcom have a ton of them that would fit very well.
Basically, if Sega and Capcom can make the characters great, their movesets fun and their interactions cool, more people overall would be pretty open to seeing characters they don't really know about. And the general appeal of those characters wouldn't stop them from being seen as cool picks compared to more "Western-appeal picks" or "Japanese-appeal picks". For the most part, they should try to at least get the obvious ones in, but still try to have a few surprise or fun picks in.
I've been thinking for some time about how to respond to the beginning of this post or dream1ng's post, and I think it'd be good for me to amend some of the stuff I said.
I think the gist of it is like.....if you asked someone to make a SEGA roster that balances both regions' appeal, it could totally be done. Provided they know their stuff, they could probably strike a good balance. Theoretically it's possible. But I think to me the big thing is.....it still feels
weird for me to imagine how that approach would
actually be taken were a game like this to officially happen, because we've no real precedent for how that would happen. As I've mentioned, we have so far never seen an official SEGA-adjacent thing that tries to reconcile both perspectives - the usual tradition has been stuff fully geared towards one crowd or another. The closest we've come is maybe PxZ2, but as I've mentioned, there wasn't much space for us to really see the full extent of that potential. So it still feels like this weird thing to think about, it still feels like a big question mark to see how it would actually be done. It's not a matter of "can it be done", because it can, it's moreso that we have no clue how an actual official dev team would handle this. That might seem like I'm splitting hairs but I do think that distinction can be important to make - a fan approach and an official approach can be very different - and I'm not even trying to gatekeep anyone's attempts by claiming they're "not accurate to how it would be done", these are moreso just.....musings. Stray thoughts I have sometimes. I'm moreso just.....curious to see how actual devs would handle this, considering how little precedent we really have - like, which characters do they prioritize? which characters would they consider on either side? Who would be "too Japanese" or "too western" to be considered? What concessions would have to be made? Again, I'm not trying to invalidate anyone who tries, I moreso just.....wonder. It's curiosity more than anything else.
It's funny you mention the Capcom vs. games' attempts in this regard, cause that was exactly what I was thinking about with the whole hypothetical of "JP devs trying to make a roster with international appeal". Like, that to me is the other big "reference point" I've been thinking about throughout this conversation in terms of that approach being taken and how it would be applied to SEGA. The things with them explicitly choosing/cutting characters based on worldwide appeal have been the go-to example in my head that have made me wonder how this would actually be done as opposed to my weeb-ass rosters. So good on you, because I've been thinking about that too.
On the last point, you mention how a character being fun and interesting could be able to overpower any regional blindspots, but I actually think that's precisely why the balanced approach can be so interesting. We think about it in terms of having characters that appeal to each region, but we can flip that to mean we also have characters less familiar to each region and that can serve as cool learning experiences. Like, think about it from the perspective of your average Western fan - you pick up the game, you recognize the likes of Sonic and Yakuza, and if you're older you'll probably know Streets of Rage, Golden Axe, Jet Set Radio, etc......but who's Sakura? Oh, she looks kind of cool actually. What's this giant beetle thing popping out as one of my assists? I wanna know what that's from. This probably applies less to Japanese fans because I can't imagine they'd add anyone who leans
too western, but that's the cool thing about this approach, and about crossovers in general, getting pulled in with the faces you know and then seeing all this other stuff you haven't heard of before.
This is gonna sound deranged, but I think a SEGA thing that could actually serve as a pretty good basis for a thing like this is actually.....the SEGA logo that plays before the Sonic movies. Like, the variety of the stuff shown and some of the deep cuts they make are actually kind of admirable, with a good mix of known faces and more obscure stuff. Like, it has a bunch of the well-known-in-the-West staples that fans can latch onto, but it also has plenty of room for the cool weird distinctly Japanese cuts that really add some flavor. Yes, you have Sonic, Monkey Ball, Jet Set Radio, NiGHTS, Streets of Rage.....but then also Sakura Wars, Dynamite Cop, Roommania, 7th Dragon, Guardian Heroes and the like. It feels like a really nice and well-rounded mix of stuff, and I think that might be the ideal approach for a game like this.
Thinking it over, I kind of want to try my hand at a "regionally-balanced" roster now. Seems like it'd be a fun exercise
