As someone who grew up with video games right at the turn of the century, my experience with the works of Capcom was very rooted in their home console video games. The arcade scene was dying, and the most I ever played was stuff like Marvel vs Capcom 2 and Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo. It was awesome to grow up along with series like Resident Evil, Devil May Cry, and a host of different Mega Man games, but I had missed out on a lot of their biggest arcade hits and especially a trove of different fighting games.

All that goes to say is that I have been really looking forward to Capcom Fighting Collection since it was announced back in February and continued to promote it afterward. While I’m sure a lot of people are interested purely from nostalgia and for having an official new way of playing these ten games, I was more in the camp of being excited to finally experience many of them. From the time I’ve spent with the collection on my Nintendo Switch, this feels like a fantastic celebration of the games included for older fans and newcomers alike.

As soon as you boot the game up you’re introduced to charming visuals and exclusive themes that evoke plenty of Hip-Hop nostalgia that just seems perfect for an arcade mood. The main menu features offline play, online play, the Museum, Fighter Awards (in-game achievements essentially), and options, of course. Before I dive into the gameplay, I do want to go over something that I personally really enjoy.

The Museum is filled with a bunch of content that I found very easy to geek out over. First is a gallery of over 500 illustrations between the ten games. It includes everything from key art of the characters, promotional materials, concept art, and even design documents for UI elements and character move lists. Accompanying the gallery is another section dedicated strictly to over 400 music tracks. Although the tracks stop playing as soon as you leave each game’s selection and you sadly can’t assign specific tracks as a menu theme as you can with The King of Fighters XV DJ Station mode, it’s still a wonderful addition.

The options menu here is more general. This is where you can select specific buttons to open an in-game menu, the start button, and what will act as inserting a coin/credit. That last one is great if you want to optionally emulate maximum nostalgia or force your friends to mash a button first before they can join.

Aside from changing the overall music levels and watching the credits, the most important option here will be choosing how much of an input delay you want for the online experience. I found the default setting to be a little too high and had a much better time after taking it down a couple of notches.

Before I talk about playing online specifically, I have to talk about what it’s like playing offline and in general. What is so great about this collection of titles isn’t just that it’s on current platforms for people to enjoy them without resorting to emulation or needing to dust off an old cartridge. There are a lot of additions that make each title feel a lot more rounded out and modern.

The first is that each game (except for one) has its own training mode. It has the basics you’d expect from a modern training mode like input display, attack data, and training dummy actions. I emphasize “basics” as the dummy actions are plain and recording moves feels pretty cumbersome. Considering that these are based on their arcade versions which of course didn’t have a training mode and that some of these have never even had a training mode on their console versions, I do have to admit this is a very awesome feature nonetheless.

Button remapping is also a nice if not already expected feature. One issue I have with it though is that it doesn’t feel very well designed. You must manually keep scrolling left and right until the function you want is shown and I think having a pop-out scrolling window would have been nicer. I assume they didn’t because it admittedly wouldn’t look very aesthetically pleasing and there are a lot of different things you can map to a button. This includes the very helpful feature of one-button special moves. Examples of this would be mapping entire motion inputs for a character’s specific special or EX moves.

There’s also the option of mapping entire special or EX moves to a button and using a directional input to differentiate them, such as pressing a button with Ryu to bring out a Hadoken or pressing that same button and forward to bring out a Shoryuken. With how much precision these older titles can require, I wouldn’t blame anybody for using these shortcuts and especially not those playing on a controller. For those worried about this acting as an unfair advantage, when it comes to online play it’s a search modifier for casual play and off in ranked.

Each title further has its own selection of settings that can be tweaked. The first set is all grouped up under game settings. Some of the more typical options for the player to modify consist of the A.I. difficulty, attack power, timer speed, and maximum rounds. The second set of options is called EX settings. Aside from changing whether each has a boot display (intro to start screen), this is also where you’ll set if you want to play in free play or with credits turned on. Many games have unique options here such as enabling secret characters. In online play, any secret characters are available by default.

In-game menus can be reached by pressing the start button at any time while you’re playing a game. That’s where you’ll find helpful things such as move lists for characters and the option to remap your controls. I’d also like to mention the great wallpaper arts and the filters you can use to emulate the old CRT arcade cabinets as they’re both a cute touch.

Speaking of, that’s the other big pull for this collection. Each game can be played online with rollback netcode. My experience online was overall pretty pleasant with a lot of great feeling matches. If you’re playing with the console in your hands then the experience may vary depending on the strength of your connection and such. However, I can attest that the worst matches I had were on wi-fi with me on the other side of the house and against what I assume to be people in Japan. They were still more playable than what recent games with delay-based netcode provided me.

It’s convenient to use too. Instead of online being separately run within each game, it’s all accessed from the main menu. You can choose which games to search online matches for all simultaneously with options to narrow it down to the Japanese and/or English versions that most titles have. As you’re waiting you can also play a game or browse the museum in the meanwhile.

With all of that out of the way, it’s time to talk about the games. What I first jumped into, because I have never had the pleasure of playing them before, was the Darkstalkers series. I’ve known about the characters from other Capcom games and there just hasn’t been a good chance before for me to try out the games they come from. They take up half of this collection with five confusingly named titles, of which the last two have never been released outside of Japan before, and come into this collection with only Japanese versions.

• Darkstalkers: The Night Warriors
• Night Warriors: Darkstalkers’ Revenge
• Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire
• Vampire Hunter 2: Darkstalkers’ Revenge
• Vampire Savior 2: The Lord of Vampire

Each has its standout differences and I had a great time playing through each. For example, the original’s draining special bar can lead to some interesting pacing. Vampire Savior: The Lord of Vampire introduced the Dark Force mechanic and overhauls the life gauge to something more like Killer Instinct along with regenerating health. The latter two mostly build off of the third title with some different characters and by treating some mechanics differently. They all cater to something different and it’s interesting to see how the series progressed over time.

Next is Hyper Street Fighter II: The Anniversary Edition. This version of the game was initially released to celebrate the 15th anniversary of the series and is similar to the much later released Ultra Street Fighter IV in that it has a feature that allows you to select character versions from previous Street Fighter II releases.

It makes the character roster feel a lot larger when you can pit Ryu from the original Street Fighter II against Chun-Li from Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Even if it overall feels more grounded when compared to later entries in the series, it is still certainly worth checking out this legendary classic.

I wanted to save the more unique games for last and the first among those is Cyberbots: Fullmetal Madness. There is a soft spot in my heart for mechas so I naturally gravitated towards this after playing through the Darkstalkers series. You first choose a pilot who just changes the story in an arcade run and then choose among 12 different mechas or variant armors. Each varies for having different legs/movements, arms, and weapons. I had a lot of fun learning how everything worked, and both the amazing animations and destructible environments helped a ton too.

Out of everything offered this one might feel the most different in controls as it’s divided between two different attacks, a boost, and a weapon. Every variant armor has a unique set of moves though and their legs make a big difference in their movement. Rounding it out is a host of gauges to keep an eye on including one for your boost, power, and arm damage. Neglecting that last one can lead to your primary arm falling off and having to rely on your secondary arm before you pick it up.

Red Earth is a very fun addition. Originally released solely in arcades, this marks the first time it’s been ported to consoles. Four characters may seem low for a fighting game and I’m positive you’ll run into plenty of mirror matches online, but there is more than just the versus mode.

Quest mode is for a single player to go through and has them level up their character while facing eight unique bosses. Leveling up can bring higher attack power or new moves to a character. Visually it may be my favorite amongst everything I played simply because of the breathtaking animations and art. If you like a challenge and want to marvel at some amazing art, this is a perfect game to discover.

I mentioned earlier that one game didn’t have a training mode and that’s because one of them isn’t a fighting game. Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo is a tile-matching puzzle game that features a mix of characters from Street Fighter and Darkstalkers.

This was one of the few games on here that I’ve played before, and between the chibi character sprites and how intense matches can get, it’s easy to remember why it was such a huge hit at arcades. I’m also very happy to say that it feels especially great to play on the go with a Nintendo Switch.

That leaves us with the final title. Super Gem Fighter Minimix takes the chibi designs of the previous puzzle game and places them in a charming fighting game. Despite the fact that it’s a very simple fighting game and only adds a couple more characters, it feels like a love letter to Capcom franchises with its stages and plentiful cameos from other Capcom characters. M. Bison gleefully skiing at a mountain resort is not something I thought I would see before and I’m a lot happier now that I have.

Basic flash combos for each character can also humorously change their costumes. Seeing Chun-Li turn into a shy schoolgirl giving a love letter one moment and then Jill from Resident Evil with a gun in the next is hilarious. Meanwhile seeing Felicia turn into her version of Mega Man with cat ears is one of the most adorable things I’ve ever seen. I can’t guarantee it will have a huge competitive following, but I’m a firm believer that the presentation element can do a lot for a fighting game and this game is sure to put a smile on your face.

I’ve talked a lot about what I like, however, there are a few issues I had. The first is that there aren’t any soft reset options. If you decide to check out what it’s like to play something with a faster game speed and then proceed to be wrecked by the CPU (as I did), there’s no quick way to return to the boot screen/character select. You either take your lumps until you get a continue screen or quit the game entirely. What kept this as a minor annoyance for me was that everything loads quickly and it doesn’t take that long to get back to that character select screen.

One of the features I was happy to hear would be included was being able to quick save and quick load. Plenty of arcade games were designed to take your quarters and credits so I certainly don’t see a problem with having a quick save at hand when the CPU spikes in difficulty. What I don’t like is that there is only room for one quick save at a time across the whole collection. Any attempts to create a new quick save under any game will overwrite the previous one.

The absolute biggest missed opportunity with this collection is that it doesn’t follow the trend that many modern fighting games have with crossplay. Marvel vs Capcom: Infinite and Street Fighter V both had crossplay to an extent, and the upcoming Street Fighter 6 will have it for every platform. Even though I’m not shocked it isn’t supported here, I had my fingers crossed for a surprise announcement before the game launched that at least some platforms would be able to play with others.

A drawback to compilations like this is that the overall package’s player base will sometimes be segmented. Being able to search for online matches with multiple games is more user-friendly and may alleviate the issue a bit, but majorities will form and some games may not maintain as much of the player base on a particular platform. Crossplay would do a lot to keep people interested and help support a healthy audience for each game. It’s my highly optimistic hope that Capcom considers it in the future.

I can’t deny that crossplay would be incredible and there are some small things that would elevate the experience more. That being said, whether it’s because they’ve never been ported outside of Japan or it’s been a long time since it was last ported, there are a lot of classic games in Capcom Fighting Collection that a lot of people haven’t played before, and I’ve had so much fun playing everything included. From the Darkstalkers series and its beloved gothic monsters to Red Earth which was once lost to time, this is a collection of games worth celebrating and worth checking out.

A Nintendo Switch review copy of Capcom Fighting Collection was provided by Capcom for this review.

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Capcom Fighting Collection

$39.99

8.5

Score

8.5/10

Pros

• 10 Classic Titles
• Rollback Netcode
• Training Modes
• The Museum Mode
• One-Button Special Moves

Cons

• No Crossplay
• Quick Save Limited to 1 Save
• No Soft Reset Options