Mascots are common place in the video game industry. Creating an attractive star character can be a pretty important aspect when selling a successful game. For Capcom, character design seems to have more emphasis than anything else. Mascots like Mario and Sonic weren't just cool characters, but represented good, quality games (well, to their own extents anyways). Capcom's mascots, or rather mascot (we know which one), only fool people into poor games.
There is no denying the power of the mascot. Their sole purpose is for recognition and recognition equals more customers and more customers equals more money to feed the corporate fatasses. Even the economically retarded like me can understand these basic business principles. Key example: Joe Camel. Joe Camel, in all of his smoothness, drove up Camel cigarette sales to teenagers by 8000%. That's right, three zeros. He was able to save Camel cigarettes from their old man perception just by being a hip teenage figure. Here are my citations, Wikipedia nerds: 1, 2.
Capcom was well aware of a mascot's potential. You can see early on that they were trying to come up with a character that could strike gold with such individuals as Son Son, Momotaro (from Pirate Ship Higemaru), and Arthur (Ghost 'n Goblins). Even though these characters never really caught on, they became part of the Capcom niche, like the "Yashichi" pinwheel item. Japan and hardcore nerd gamers love that kind of shit. They'll go out of their way to collect every game that has a damn pinwheel in it just so they can yell "IT'S THE YASHICHI-CHAN ^.^ !!!" every time it pops on the screen.
It wasn't until the mid-80's when Capcom really scored a mascot, who first appeared on the back of NES boxes and inside instruction manuals under the name "Captain Commando". Captain Commando had the 80's appeal, perhaps a little too 80's at first since he went through a make-over when it came time to starring in his self-titled Final Fight knock-off in 1991, but nevertheless did garner some attention. He was even reworked to be the player in the NES conversion of Section Z and, of course, made several appearances throughout the Crapcom universe. Unfortunately Captain Commando lived a short span as an official mascot after that blue bastard Mega Man became famous in 1987.
Yes, that son of bitch Mega Man. The "man" that I wish never existed. The man that symbolizes everything that makes Capcom suck. And most importantly, the man that makes Capcom the most money. His design was perfect from the get go: take the immensely successful Astro Boy character and modernize his suit so he doesn't look old fashioned. It didn't matter how awful his game would be, people already knew they liked the cutesy, yet slick, robo character with an arm cannon. Sure Samus was kind of cool and had a gun arm too, but Samus lacked facial appearance, giving her a more obscured personality, opposed to Mega Man's shining face.
It was all too perfect and Mega Man paid off. He has more games than you can count hairs on a dog and is bar none Capcom's most recognizable figure. Of course he's not Capcom's only recognizable figure. For reasons beyond me, Ryu of Street Fighter fame falls into this category. Ryu is the most generic looking fighting game character of all time; he's just an average Joe wearing a karate suit. You could walk into a dojo and pick out any guy wearing the standard white gi and label him as a Ryu cosplayer. It amazes me because the rest of the cast in Street Fighter II generally had pretty decent and original character designs. What amazes me even more is how hilariously dumb the character designs got into the Street Fighter Alpha series and more so into the Street Fighter III series, but that's for another chapter.
Capcom puts so much concern into character design and appeal that they make sure they are targeting the right audience depending on what console they are working with. Just put some thought into the games Capcom has made for the span of systems out there:
NES - Mega Man series. Very fitting for a 1987 NES game.
SNES - Mega Man X series. Natural follow up from the NES platform.
Playstation - Resident Evil series. A mature game for the more maturely perceived 32-bit system.
Playstation 2 - Onimusha and Devil May Cry series. Too grown-up for Gamecube, too Eastern for Xbox.
Xbox - Steel Batallion. Big controller and big machines, what more could an Xbox meathead ask for?
Gamecube - Viewtiful Joe. Colorful and humerous, a perfect match for Gamecube. Even followed Nintendo's own footsteps by making it cel shaded like the previously released Zelda: Wind Waker game.
Xbox 360 - Dead Rising. Americans like this kind of stuff, put her on the 360!
Playstation 3 - Meh, I guess they figured it wasn't worth risking a PS3 exclusive. "Throw the 360 games here too, guys!"
Wii - Zack & Wiki. Non-violent family entertainment, need I say more?
Obviously not all of these games featured fully fleshed out characters, but I'd say most do. Resident Evil characters have spanned into non-RE games, Dante from Devil May Cry is on every emo's dark MySpace page, Viewtiful Joe is all about Joe, Zack and super-monkey-ball-wannabe sidekick Wiki are what you'd expect from a Saturday morning cartoon, and Frank West of Dead Rising is the typical 360 hardass. The point I'm getting at is that Capcom needs the right representative for whatever platform they decide to work on. At the same time, this also builds up Capcom's niche universe, making games like Marvel vs Capcom 2 inevitable for them to make so they can cram all of their knick knacks into one disaster. In other words, they're complete whores.
You might be asking, "Well doesn't every company target a specific audience?". Generally, yes to certain degrees. The problem with Capcom though is that their only concern is safe profit. A good company takes risks, Capcom does not. Activision took a risk by creating the first platformer, Nintendo took a risk by releasing a console soon after the crash, and Squaresoft took a risk by bringing Final Fantasy VII to Playstation. Companies like those took risks for the cause of intuition; Capcom only goes where money is bound to happen. When Capcom makes a new IP, they first look at what's selling well, follow that path, and get straight to character design. If it's a success, expect a lot more from it in the very near future. If not, time for a new Mega Man.
The only risks Capcom has ever taken were in their earlier days because they had nothing to expand from. This is where the next chapter of Crapcom will come in, "Volume III: The Rise". We will continue from where we left off at the end of Volume I and see Capcom's vile roots really start to grow. Until then, don't let Capcom's mascot appeal fool you! Because you'll not only be buying up their games, but also their action figures, their movies, their toilet seat covers, and whatever else Capcom can make a nickel off of -- hey, wait, nickel... like their "Nickel City" arcade chain!
- Keranu Monday, February 16th, 2009 4:44am USA Central Time.