Battle Chess and Pokemon Video Games Crossover

Super Smash Bros Brawl was the first to welcome characters from outside the Nintendo canon, like Sonic the Hedgehog and Solid Snake.

The roster has expanded with every iteration, bringing in characters from series like Pikmin and more obscure bits of Nintendo history like the Ice Climbers or swordsmen from Fire Emblem. The first game featured characters from Mario, The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, Donkey Kong, F-Zero, Pokemon, Kirby, and Earthbound. Super Smash Bros was Nintendo's opportunity to bring in many of its disparate franchises under one roof. The latter crossover was meant to come with its own sister game with Tekken at the helm, but given the recent silence it's uncertain if that will ever happen. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars, and Street Fighter X Tekken. Not just a success in its own right, MvC has been the blueprint for similar crossovers with other video game series, like SNK vs. Capcom essentially brought together the mechanics from 1994's X-Men: Children of the Atom and mixed some Street Fighter characters in, and the two worked beautifully together. At the time of its release, Capcom was riding high with the success of Street Fighter and its many iterations, and Marvel was in the midst of a comic renaissance with an explosion of popularity for the X-Men led by Wolverine. One of the earliest fighting game crossovers, Marvel vs Capcom has turned into a juggernaut (har!) in the gaming industry. Its late release means it was also an early example of a cross-gen game, having first appeared on NES and Gameboy and then coming later the same year to Super NES and Genesis. The Dark Queen is the main antagonist, and the titular Toads ask Billy and Jimmy for a hand dealing with her. The game was based more on Rare's Battletoads, as it was the more recent hit, and that focus is reflected in the plot. Joining them up was a little odd-Double Dragon was always slightly more grounded-but the mechanics were so similar the crossover potential was hard to argue. Double Dragon had been retrieving kidnapped girlfriends for years by this point, and Battletoads capitalized on the 'anthropomorphic martial arts animals' craze kicked off by the Ninja Turtles. Perhaps the first notable video game crossover came from two well-known beat-em-up franchises. Our review is forthcoming, but in the meantime, the English gentleman and fumbling lawyer got us thinking about some of the other notable crossovers that have graced gaming history. Ace Attorney finally reaches our shores this week, after a lengthy period of availability in Japan.

Battle Chess and Pokemon Video Games Crossover