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Why Phoenix Wright Was Cut From Tatsunoko vs. Capcom

This article is over 15 years old and may contain outdated information
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Capcom’s original ace attorney should have been a playable fighter in Tatsunoko vs. Capcom, but there was an “objection” to his appearance due to some hilarious balance issues.

Sure, Tatsunoko vs. Capcom has some neat characters: Ryu, Karas, Gatchaman, all the usual suspects. But Capcom’s over-the-top crossover fighter, which hits Stateside this fall, has some seriously disappointing absences as well. Samurai Pizza Cats aside, one of the most glaring omissions has got to be Phoenix Wright, a character who has proved to be one of Capcom’s finest and most successful in recent years.

Well, it turns out that Phoenix was originally planned to be in the game. He’d been designed and everything, but some decidedly bizarre issues cropped up when the issue of localization came up. Turns out that Capcom designed Phoenix to only have a single move: He’d yell out his signature “Objection!” and point a finger, sending out the word to, literally, attack his opponent.

“However, ‘objection’ in Japanese is ‘igiari’ – it’s four characters, whereas ‘objection’ becomes ten,” producer Ryota Niitsuma told NGamer. “When we localize, the balance of the game gets destroyed because the move becomes bigger. There’d be no way of avoiding it! We had to remove [Phoenix] for these reasons. In the future, it is one of our aims to get him in.”

So he got cut because he uses a gigantic screen-filling word that would be completely unbeatable? Couldn’t they have just shrunk down the size of the word or something? And really, a game with a gigantic golden lighter who can do infinite combos doesn’t have to really worry about balance.

[Via GoNintendo]

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