TvC producer Niitsuma-san recently blogged about the stories behind the four new characters that have been included in Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom: Ultimate All-Stars. You can check out his translated blog below for the full scoop!

Depending on which division you are in the company, there are people who take long holidays but unfortunately it seems like I can’t take days off X(

This time it was Neo_G or other staff’s turn to write their blog, but because my blog was about new characters and we just had new characters revealed, the R&D staff here told me: “Niitsuma-san, shouldn’t you be writing this time?”

So here I am writing one.

(I replied back: “THIS is one of the reasons why I can’t take any days off” and the staffs said: “well, you are the producer, don’t moan and just write one please” LOL)

So, new characters.

This is quite a long story… Hit the jump to read more about the story behind Tekkaman Blade, Frank West, Joe the Condor, and Zero.

As of now, we have Tekkaman Blade, Frank West, Joe the Condor, and Zero revealed this week, a total of 4 characters, and luckily/thankfully we are receiving very good feedback. (R&D staffs are very pleased about user reactions to the new characters too)

Out of the four, the most challenging one to make was Tekkaman Blade .

There were a lot of requests for this character, and although this was to be the most challenging to make it happen in the roster, we worked hard on it. Luckily, with a lot of help from Tatsunoko Productions, we were able to have discussions with Sotsu (license holder for Tekkaman Blade) and we did it.

Regarding his moves and the details, either Neo_G or I will talk about it in another blog, but personally I remember telling the guys in the team to be most careful about how we differentiate Tekkaman Blade from the old Tekkaman. And as I let the team work on it, the character presentation became very good, so I am very satisfied with how the character turned out.

To tell you the truth, the character isn’t really too strong. Of course, all this will be up the users who play the game to decide.

Next is Frank.

This character was confirmed at an early stage of the development. I’ve said this in many interviews: the craziness in Dead Rising and the flashy part of the VS. series was just a great match. As well as that, his awareness and popularity is very high, so I thought, what other character would you put in if you didn’t include him? Once we decided on this character, development went very smooth.

The only difficult part was dealing with the zombies, specifically, how to create them. If we make realistic zombies, the [game’s] rating would go up, so we were careful on the balance with the surroundings. As well as that, there was Jill who uses zombies from MvC2 so we tried not to put something similar.

Overall, it turned out to be great.

By the way, my big thanks to Tatsunoko Productions, which allowed us to do something very unusual, like putting a servbot head on the heroes’ head. You see, people don’t give permissions to do these things… Capcom is crazy to bring this idea up to show Tatsunoko….

And now, Joe the Condor .

This character wasn’t planned, this is something that was decided in short notice. If you already had a look at his gameplay movies, we chose him because we wanted something a little different from all the other stereotypical heroes.

Choosing a villain would be one option, but I wanted to keep the concept of heroes gathering up. The way this character was presented was very cool like a dark-hero – his kicks and he shoots while his opponent is tied up… we tried to differentiate it from other characters.

As well as that, the voice actor Mr Isao Sasaki ( en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isao_Sasaki ) was just great.

And lastly, Zero.

There was an opinion from R&D that they wanted to include another character from the Mega Man series so I talked to Inafune-san. We were most careful about not letting those hardcore fans down, so we had to make something good.

During the early stages of game design, this character was to be a character which would technically borrow some moves from other character datas, and not made from scratch, which meant that it wasn’t one of the higher priorities. But, as I mentioned above, it is something we had to do right, and as I rejected many of the team’s ideas, I kept on asking for something different, something that felt more like Zero – the guys said at the end: “Fine, you’re asking us to make it from scratch right!?”

But then Zero turned out to be very good quality work again.(Guys, sorry about what I said to you! But it’s great!)

The attack moves that they implemented are taken a lot from the original series, and it is very cool character in a fighting game.

Level 3 super is Dark Hold…? Good stuff guys!

So that’s about it for characters.

I also wanted to talk about those characters that couldn’t make it in the roster, but this one’s another long story, so I will keep that story for later.

Regarding gameplay movies, we got some good quality gameplay movies to show off what you can do many different things with the characters once you get well at it. That way we can show you simply how fun this game really is.

Geez, getting really long now.

Thanks for reading.

We hope to make more opportunities to have users have a go at it, so please look forward to those announcements.