More new characters in Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom

[TomGuycott]

Why don't they make SECRET unlockable characters anymore?
Nobody gets the feeling of going to the character select screen and finding a new person there out of nowhere.

Ugh, I could have shortened this all to "It's all about promotion".

These days unlockable characters end up being pretty crappy choices anyway. Two examples that I can think of off the top of my head are Super Smash Bros Brawl and Soul Calibur IV.

In Brawl's case, almost all of their newly added characters were used to promote the game. Lots of new characters were starters and lots of old characters were unlockables. Granted, said old characters were unlockables in the Smash games they originated in, but seriously, I think only Lucario, ROB and Wolf were unlockables.

In SC IV's case, the characters I'm kinda criticizing are the Star Wars characters. Honest to god, besides the boss character, I can't remember any of the new characters added in SC IV... Were there any? I honestly don't remember. And I don't count those anime chicks, they're just skins on pre-existing characters.

I forgot exactly where I was going with this, but I do remember that I wanted to make this point: fighting game franchises these days push all their characters, unlockable or not, right in the promotional limelight to try and sell their product. In Brawl's case, if they just announced an original starting lineup with say 3 more characters, lots of people might be skeptical about buying it because it doesn't seem to bring that much new to the table.

In SC IV's case, while spontaneously fighting Yoda or Vader without knowing they'd be in it would be a serious WTF moment of shock, the whole point of their inclusion I guess was to kind of cater to Star Wars fans and cross-promote Force Unleashed, I think.