The Art of the Crossover Roster

It's not a popularity contest

When it comes to crossovers in video games the most common tend to be fighting games, with racing and other sports in second and third place for frequency. What these have in common is that they allow for large rosters of playable characters, which makes sense when the characters are a large part of the appeal. Having grown up with crossovers like Smash Bros I’ve come to develop strong opinions on how these rosters should be designed.

The most important part of a crossover is its scope, by which I mean what exactly is being crossed over. Capcom vs Marvel for example has it right in the title, you’re going to see characters from Capcom and Marvel duke it out, while you shouldn’t expect Spider-Man to be showing up in Capcom vs SNK.

Obvious you’d expect Spider-Man and Wolverine in a Marvel vs Capcom game, with Ryu and at least one Mega Man protagonist on team Capcom. But to me where these crossovers get interesting is their limits. Marvel and Capcom both have a massive roster of characters, so once you get the obvious inclusions done with, there’s a lot of space to include more minor characters.

Those lesser known characters help add an element of surprise and spice to the game. You know to expect and what to expect from popular characters. But did you expect to see that weird NES peripheral nobody seems to remember fondly in Smash Bros or know immediately to watch out for his spin attack that stops projectiles in their tracks?

For me a large part of the appeal of a crossover is getting to encounter those characters I may not already know. I barely knew most of the fighters in Super Smash Bros Melee or Brawl when I first played them, and I loved them off their appearance in Smash alone. How can you not find Mr Game & Watch’s 2d style charming? Meta Knight and Pit were such memorable parts of Brawl’s reveal trailer to me precisely because that was my introduction to them.

Unexpected oddball picks can also lead to rather inventive design. In an interview this is what Ryota Niitsuma, director for Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, had to say regarding a certain member of the game’s cast.

Shuma-Gorath. Why's he reappearing?

So, Shuma-Gorath...he looks interesting, he's all tentacles. It was more our creative curiosity. We wanted to see what he'd be like in a 3D model. Marvel...weren't so keen [laughs]. It was the only character that we pushed Marvel on, that is of Marvel's characters. I'm not foreseeing a Shuma-Gorath movie any time soon, but I'm sure he'll be loved once he's included.

-Full interview this is from can be found here

[With a line up consisting mainly of costumed humans, Shuma-Gorath immediately stands out on the Marvel side of the roster for his appearances in Marvel vs Capcom.]

When crossover games have an incredibly broad scope, their rosters have a risk of being less creative as there’s even more ultra popular characters they have to fit in, where the deep cut picks make way for absurd combination of popular characters, which by definition means the roster lacks a certain cohesion to it.

Super Smash Bros Ultimate has my least favorite selection of new fighters in the series for that reason. I’m always deeply annoyed at statements that Smash has ‘evolved beyond’ being about Nintendo, because being about Nintendo is what makes it interesting in the first place, what makes it Smash Bros. Ultimate lost part of the series identity with the focus on popular headline making fighters over exploring different Nintendo games.

You do not get the likes of Captain Falcon, Mr Game & Watch, Ice Climbers, Pit, R.O.B, Little Mac, or the Duck Hunt Dog in a crossover about video games in general. All of those characters contribute to Smash as a series celebrating the full scope of Nintendo’s library, even the weird and forgotten. You lose that when it becomes about mashing random popular video game characters together on account of them being popular with no other connective tissue.

For a non video game example of this, take the short ‘Once Upon a Studio,’ made to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Disney. It features characters from every part of the studio’s history, not just the big hits with Disneyland attractions. Dan Abraham, one of the directors, dropped this quote in an interview about it.

…to this day, you'll see Stitch, and you'll see Ariel, and you'll see the Beast and that, but there's somebody out there that loves Johnny Appleseed. And there's somebody that loves Gurgi and Chicken Little, and they don't get to see those guys very much. So we wanted everybody to see their pals because that's what this was. It's a family reunion that hopefully you want to go to.

-Full interview can be found here.

This is what big crossovers are about to me. It’s about both your favorite character and somebody else’s favorite, the familiar and unfamiliar. You lose that if you’re scrambling to include every last thing that’s decently popular, which can easily happen if you lose sight of your scope and go from being about one company to an entire creative medium.

And for an example of a crossover that started off with too broad of a scope, we have Multiversus, where the theme is ‘anything owned by Warner Brothers.’ When you have the sort of range where Lord of the Rings is on the list of currently untapped sources of characters, you know the net was cast a little too far.

Yet even with its broad scope Multiversus has shown some inventiveness in its roster. When the open beta launched it featured a character made specifically for the game, Reindog. And alongside pre-release announcements of big name characters like the Joker, they also slipped in a Banana Guard from Adventure Time.

While there are plenty of characters I’d like to see in Multiversus (I wrote a post that featured my pitch for how Frodo Baggins could play), what I want most are characters from some forgotten movie or cartoon I never heard of before, characters people haven’t seen in a long time.

Of course when you have a chance to gather genre defining characters together, it makes sense to take that chance. I just hope that Multiversus is able to continue to create spaces for the weird selections in between the iconic characters.

Thankfully there are examples of crossovers purposefully using popular characters to allow for less popular ones to appear. Disney Villainous for example is a board game (which I’ve previously written about) where you play as different Disney villains competing to fulfill their objective first, with plenty of expansions adding more villains to the game.

What I like about the design of the Villainous expansions is how characters are spaced out. The usual format is to have at least one of the expected popular villains and one villain who is less popular but still has their fans. So the Despicable Plots expansion features Gaston on the box to draw people in, with Lady Tremaine and the Horned King paired with him. Meanwhile Scar headlining the Evil Comes Prepared expansion allows Yzma and Ratigan to debut alongside him.

Thanks to this Disney Villainous has a good line up of characters. You have your usual suspects for any Disney villain gathering, and then there’s Prince John and the Queen of Hearts. If you’re sick of Maleficent hogging the spotlight in Disney villain gatherings you can just not play as her and run Madam Mim vs The Evil Queen from Sleeping Beauty.

Beyond the matter of popularity, there’s also what the characters represent for the overall theme of the crossover. What eras of Disney does the Disney crossover take from the most, how many characters whose film rights weren’t owned by Disney when the game was made are on Marvel’s half of the roster in a Marvel vs Capcom game?

Again, Smash Bros does this well in my opinion. The Duck Hunt dog isn’t just representing Duck Hunt, he’s representing the NES Zapper accessory and other games that used it. The Wii Fit Trainer and Miis serve as symbols for the various casual games that Nintendo came out with for the Wii as a whole. They’re representatives of two very different moments in time for Nintendo appearing side by side.

It is that element that can make crossovers special as a celebration, when focused on something with a long and varied history. For example a Star Wars fighting game would have an especially interesting roster if it was about the entire franchise, by which I mean all movies, tv shows, games, books, and so on are on the table, even Legends.

If I was picking the roster for such a game, then after getting the obvious main trilogy characters I’d have at least one of Kyle Katarn or Mara Jade since they are some of the more popular decanonized Legends characters. There would also be at least one representative of the High Republic books and the Jedi Survivor games. Ahsoka and Mando/The Mandalorian/Din are also shoo-ins for a Star Wars roster not limited to movies, and Cassian Andor would represent a rather distinct branch of Star Wars.

For something like Star Wars where fans tend to have their own corners for the most part on account of the large amount of Star Wars material there is, something like that could serve as a nice family gathering of the distinct parts. That’s just one hypothetical example, but it illustrates the point.

While I’ve mainly discussed fighting games here, the same applies to all sorts of crossover games. A crossover should go beyond the surface level, it should take its time to map out the full scope of what can be included and where it can do something distinctive and unique with what it includes. Crossovers are a space where even the neglected and forgotten can have their moment in the sun, and that’s why I love them.

Optional response prompts: What are some of your favorite crossover games? What’s a crossover you’d like to see? Any niche characters you hope to see in a game like Smash or Multiversus?