Phoenix Wright, Ghouls 'n Ghosts Originally Planned for Tatsunoko VS Capcom

Tekkaman Blade and more made the cut for Ultimate All-Stars.

Tatsunoko Vs Capcom Ultimate All-Stars saw release a couple of weeks back, but Capcom still appears to be making the promotional rounds. The latest site to take up the game is Dengeki Online, which posted an interview yesterday with producer Ryota Nizuma (Capcom), planner Mr. Bancho (Eighting) and producer Ryota Igawa (Eighting).

The three provided a sneak peak at the early stages of Tatsunoko VS Capcom's development when Capcom was considered character options. Apparently, characters from a few other major Capcom franchises were up for consideration early-on, but didn't make the cut.

Three characters in particular are mentioned in the interview. First up, Ingrid, an original character from the Capcom Fighting Jam (Evolution) PlayStation 2 fighter. Ingrid was actually made into a test model for the game -- the first Capcom character test model, actually. Back during the start of development, the staff wanted to put make something from a Capcom franchise, and they selected Ingrid. According to Igawa, the staff placed Ingrid's model in one of Eighting's other game projects, PS2's Shijou Saikyou no Danshi Kenichi, just as a test.

Phoenix Wright was also under consideration. Although it doesn't seem that he got all the way to test form, Nizuma revealed that the staff was considering moves and so-forth for the character. They even received permission from key Ace Attorney series personnel, including Minae Matsukawa and Shuu Takumi.

The problem with Wright, according to Nizuma, is that while the character has a gesture where his arms move, in his original game environment, he never moves from the waist down. They considered attaching tires to his desk and making the whole thing move as a single character but this was tossed under consideration for collision issues.

Asked if these two could make the cut in the event of a Tatsunoko sequel, Nizuma said that it's something they'd definitely like to do.

Nizuma also mentioned that the original Tatsunoko plan called for Arthur from Ghouls 'n Ghosts. He was to appear along with his very own stage.

Outside of this character trivia, the three explained what appears to be somewhat of a deficiency about Tatsunoko VS Capcom UAS. The original Tatsunoko VS Capcom included mini games for each character. UAS includes just one mini game, an overhead vertical shooter.

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Nizuma explained that this was his decision. Localizing all the mini games for international markets would have taken too much time, so they decided to expand PTX's mini game from the original Tatsunoko VS Capcom into the UAS shooting game.

In its original form, the new shooting game had just PTX as a playable character. Midway through development, Nizuma suggested including other characters -- or possibly the entire cast. Eighting said that putting in all characters would be impossible, and thus we ended up with four selectable characters.