Game 1:
Star Trek: The Rediscovered Country (1992)
Playable:
Kirk, Spock, McCoy, Scott, Uhura, Chekov, Sulu, Savik
Non-Playable:
Sybok, Gorn, General Chang, Khan
The first game in our series borrows a lot from Street Fighter II’s recent success. 8 playable characters and 4 non playable boss characters. Similarly making Sybok and Spock having similar playstyles (dubbed “vulcans” by the fans as the style would be used again for Tuvok in the series) as the traditional capcom pallette swap. Despite Next Generation being on for 5 years and only 2 years to the final season, like much star trek merchandise this would choose to focus on the original series even using general chang from the 1991 movie The Undiscovered Country.
This arcade features a simple plot, the enterprise crew trains in a series of one on ones (which for some reason Sulu brings a sword to use during), then a crisis happens leading to the boss fights that show Khan trying to launch an attack on the federation with General Chang the disgraced Klingon, Spock’s Brother Sybok, and the creatively named Gorn “Gorn”.
Game 2
Star Trek: Time Nexus (1993)
Playable characters:
Kirk, Spock, Sulu, McCoy
Picard, Riker, Worf, Data
Sisko, Jadzia Dax, Odo, Miles O’Brien
Non-Playable (secretly unlockable):
Gul Dukat, Lore, Locutus, Khan
Final Boss:
Assimilated Khan
The second game in the series tried to address the fan complaint of no Next Generation characters and even brought in some from the Deep Space Nine series. Not only that, but a special annoyingly complex button combo in the arcade allowed players to play as the four boss characters hidden on the character select screen.
The plot was bare bones, Khan found/devised a time travel device and recruited the enemies of the enterprise from different time periods to help him against their three captains.
This was panned as bad localization and translation on Capcom’s part because Deep Space Nine was not featuring the enterprise, Sisko was not yet a captain, and was in the same time period as next generation. A decade later, fans would learn the Capcom team was given very little information about the series during design, mostly working from the action figure designs, and fudged a lot of it from there. However that did not explain why the Capcom team never acknowledged Picard and Locutus were the same person in the game which was just bad localization/plotwork on a licensed game.
While this game boasted 12-16 playable characters, fans still complained that one of the boss characters, Lore, was still a palette swap and the reuse of Khan for the final boss. Though actually playing as Khan went over pretty well. Similarly one new character’s moveset seemed to be tweaks on the fighting style of a removed character: O’Brien fought a lot like Scott (moveset would be noted as ‘engineers’).
Game 3: Star Trek: The Federation Tournament (1996)
Playable Characters:
Picard, Riker, Worf, Data, Geordi, Dr. Crusher, Troi, Guinan
Sisko, Odo, Kira, Quark
Janeway, Tuvok, Kes, B’Lana Torres
Non-Playable (Secret Unlockable):
Sela, Gul Dukat, Assimilated Khan, Borg Queen
Secret Unlockable:
Kirk, Spock, General Chang, Lore
Final Boss:
Q
This game was meant to come out in 1995 as a send off to Next Generation but was delayed to use the Borg Queen from 1996’s movie First Contact.
Capcom continued the practices of the earlier games, Tuvok was given a modified version of the Spock/Sybok moveset. Voyager characters were added based on design and not on actual character use, so Kes found herself in the spotlight in these early season days. While it boasted the vast majority of the TNG crew as a farewell to that series, it became apparent non-captain human characters in this franchise can get movesets by occupation, as Geordi inherited a modified version of Scott/O’Brien’s and Crusher inherited a modified version of McCoy’s.
Similar to previous games, fighting styles on new characters rarely took actual fiction into account, and Torres was given a moveset similar to General Chang. As their movesets were reused, while they were not boss characters or encounterable as enemies in the arcade mode, if the player unlocked secret characters, they’d find they could also play as four secret non-boss characters. And Q gave the series its first multi-form boss.
Star Trek vs Street Fighter (1997)
Kirk, Picard, Sisko, Janeway, Spock, Riker, Worf, Data, Borg Queen, Gul Dukat,, and Khan
vs
Ryu, Ken, Chun Li, Guile, Blanka, Dhalsim, E Honda, Zangief, Balrog, Vega, Sagat, M Bison
final Boss:
Akuma The Borg
after dealing with trekkies complaints about the plot errors of the first three games, Capcom just decided to mimic the success of the prior year’s x-men vs street fighter and made a vs game.
after fans complained about akuma the borg being too similar to cyber akuma, capcom did not renew the star trek license.
