I would imagine the easy thing to do online would be to go "ZOMG! Capcom published GTA & God of War!?!?!?!?!"... but that'd be lazy, boring, & very clickbait-y. So, instead, I dug a bit deeper & found a selection of games that Capcom Japan published that really are a bit off kilter, even for that division, though some of them actually wound up having some importance, in the long run.
When Capcom got its start it was mainly an arcade game company, and ports of its games to consoles & even computers in both Japan & abroad were initially developed & published by third-parties, like Micronics, Data East, Activision, ASCII, & Elite Systems. Eventually it started doing console ports in-house in Japan, started self-publishing on consoles, & its international divisions would start publishing for computers in regions like Europe & North America. However, Capcom Japan was still notably against publishing for PC, instead relying mostly on ASCII until the late 80s, when the partnership ended & Capcom Japan left PC publishing entirely for a few years. Things would finally change in 1992 when Capcom Japan started self-publishing for hardware like the Sharp X68000 & later FM Towns, while working with SystemSoft to publish on the NEC PC-98, which finally brings us to the first entry for this B-List: The PC-98 version of Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon.
Developed by Westwood Associates, which would later be known for Dune II, The Legend of Kyrandia, & Command & Conquer, the original Eye of the Beholder from 1991 was a first-person dungeon crawler released by SSI on PC (MS-DOS, Amiga, & even PC-98 in Japan), SNES, & Sega CD based on Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, the updated version of the iconic tabletop RPG game, & has since gone on to be an iconic game when it comes to adaptations of D&D. Naturally, this was followed up in 1992 with Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon, which added in outdoor environments to explore & even stronger RPG elements; a third entry, Assault on Myth Drannor, would come out in 1993, but wasn't developed by Westwood. Unlike the first game, Legend of Darkmoon wouldn't see any console ports, instead being exclusive to PC, with Japan receiving ports to the FM Towns & PC-98, but while Pony Canyon handled the PC-98 release of the first game, & Arrow Micro-Techs/AMT handled the FM Towns release of the sequel (with development by Cybelle), it was Capcom Japan that handled the PC-98 release of this second entry, which came out on November 3, 1993. To my knowledge this is the literal only time Capcom ever published anything on the PC-98 (again, SystemSoft was handling releases on that computer for Capcom before this point), but there's likely a very good reason for that.
You see, just a few months later Capcom would release a beat 'em up in Japanese arcades called Dungeons & Dragons: Tower of Doom in early 1994, which combined Capcom's talent at making engaging brawlers with D&D's mechanics, the end result of which is still considered excellent. This would then be followed up two years later with 1996's Dungeons & Dragons: Shadow over Mystara, which would wind up being Capcom's penultimate arcade brawler & is still considered by many to be one of the greatest games in the entire genre. Therefore, it's more than likely that Capcom Japan publishing the PC-98 version of Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon was simply part of the licensing agreement made between Capcom & TSR, which also included Capcom being the publisher for the SNES port of Eye of the Beholder I in 1994. Still, it's kind of wild to think that the first thing to come out of Capcom's D&D deal was the company's one & only self-published PC-98 game.
Shoot 'em ups have been a part of Capcom's DNA since the very beginning, as the first game Capcom ever made was Vulgus back in 1984. Therefore, on the one hand, this isn't exactly a shocking game to see Capcom publish, at least from a genre perspective. However, it is a bit of an oddball when you consider its pedigree. Founded in 1990, British development studio Team17 would first make a name for itself with the 1991 Amiga game Alien Breed, a top-down corridor shooter heavily inspired by the Alien movie franchise. One of Team17's next notable titles would then be 1992's Project X, a horizontal shooter for the Amiga inspired by Konami's Gradius & its two spin-offs, Salamander & Parodius. Project X was very successful & highly praised over in Europe, but in the end Team17 decided to instead focus more on sequels to Alien Breed, & other works, instead of continuing with another shooter. However, after the success of Worms in 1995, & likely seeing diminishing returns with later Alien Breed games, Team17 decided to finally make a sequel to Project X, though this time deciding to make it the studio's very first console exclusive.
Released in November of 1996 over in Europe, X2: No Relief was a direct sequel to Project X, though now instead of taking on an army of rogue droids (as in the first game) you now take on an invading alien army. This was during Team17's partnership with Ocean Software, which is what allowed Worms to be released on so many platforms, and it was Ocean that published X2 over in Europe. There were plans for X2 to also be given a North American release with help from Acclaim, along with a port of the Sega Saturn, but neither wound up ever happening. The cancellation was done rather late, though, resulting in both Electronic Gaming Monthly & GamePro actually publishing reviews for X2 on the PS1, where they each scored it as around average, with both outlets praising the game's visuals but knocking it for its high difficulty, with sections where getting hit looked to be impossible to avoid. As for why Capcom wound up being the publisher for X2 over in Japan, giving it its only NTSC-compatible release on August 21, 1997, I really can't think of any good reason. While Capcom Japan did publish some Western-developed PS1 games in the 90s it was usually part of a larger working relationship, like for Test Drive or Tomb Raider, and when it comes to X2: No Relief this would wind up being the only Team17/Ocean game that Capcom would publish in Japan.
Maybe this was intended to be the start of a larger Japanese publishing deal between Capcom & Ocean, and since by the time X2 came out in Japan Ocean had been acquired by Infogrames maybe that deal simply transitioned to being one between Capcom & Infogrames. Regardless, the idea that Capcom once published a "Euro-shooter" as a Japan-exclusive is a bit weird, considering its own history in the genre, but from here on out let's just focus on titles that were actually produced (if not also developed) by Capcom Japan.
Video games based on anime & manga are nothing strange to Capcom, though it's admittedly something that the company has more dabbled in on occasion than really ever really made a focal point. Titles like Tenchi wo Kurau, Dokaben, Fate, Gundam, Area 88, & JoJo's Bizarre Adventure have all been given the Capcom game treatment at one point or another, and Capcom's even indulged in "media mix" co-productions that involve anime and/or manga, like Gaist Crusher & Strider; hell, Capcom even once made an entire Vs. Series game where it crossed over with Tatsunoko! However, in 2002 Capcom tried doing something... different. The studio teamed up with TMS to produce two PS2 games based on iconic anime that TMS produced decades prior, with the end result being the June 20, 2002 release of two games under label of The Anime Super Remix: One for Tomorrow's Joe 2, and the other for Star of the Giants.
Yes, Capcom actually developed games based on two of the most iconic & influential sports anime/manga ever made, both of which were co-created by the legendary (& controversial, in real life) late author Ikki Kajiwara. However, The Anime Super Remix: Tomorrow's Joe 2 & The Anime Super Remix: Star of the Giants are absolutely nothing like what you'd expect, both from their respective series as well as from Capcom itself. By this point Joe was no stranger to video game adaptations, having received games released in arcades as well as both PC & console, the most infamous being 1991's Legend of Success Joe for the Neo Geo by Wave Corporation & the most recent before Capcom's game being... a typing tutor for the PS2 by Sunsoft one year prior. Meanwhile, Star of the Giants had literally never received a video game adaptation before Capcom's game. Therefore, one would assume that Capcom had developed a boxing game & baseball game... right? No, not at all, because The Anime Super Remix games were literally nothing more than mini-game collections, where successful completion of each mini-game would reward you with short clips from their respective anime, as well as database entries for the characters & events of their respective stories. Really, this entire series (of which these two games were the only ones, so they likely both bombed) just sounds more like an excuse to take advantage of the PS2's higher-quality FMV playback options, since both games were released on DVDs.
To be perfectly honesty, I have nothing against mini-game collections as a genre, and when executed well they can actually kind of work as adaptations of iconic anime and/or manga. In fact, The Anime Super Remix is very similar to what Sunrise Interactive did for its PS2 game adaptation of Team Astro, which I reviewed back in 2013 & wound up enjoying. However, it's just the combination of two utterly iconic sports anime with a video game company that was more than capable of creating fun, arcade-style games based on their respective sports that makes The Anime Super Remix come off as so confounding; Sunrise Interactive, sure... but Capcom? This is also not helped by the simple fact that Star of the Giants still has never received a proper video game adaptation to this very day, as any other video games based on the series that came out (all for the PS2, mind you) were literally just digital adaptations of its pachinko & pachislot machines. Is it really that impossible to make an actual baseball game based on Star of the Giants?
OK, now here's a truly offbeat & oddball game from Capcom Japan, but unlike the prior three entries this one is 100% a Capcom original, through & through. Throughout the company's existence there have definitely been some offbeat & weird game concepts from Capcom, like Quiz Nanairo Dreams (a fusion of quiz game & dating sim), Steel Battalion (a full-on mech sim requiring a custom 40-button controller with foot pedals... or the Xbox 360 Kinect), Ace Attorney (an adventure game/visual novel with parodical court trial sequences), or even the Vs. Series (where Capcom crosses over with companies like Marvel or Tatsunoko). However, on June 7, 2007 Capcom would release the Japan-exclusive Nintendo DS game Kabu Trader Shun... which was all about the stock market, because the word "kabu" is literally the Japanese term for "stocks". Now, to be fair, there apparently were more than a few stock trading games released for the DS, so it's entirely possible that Capcom felt that releasing its own take on the concept made sense at the time, especially since both Konami & Bandai Namco had previously released their own stock trading games for the handheld.
Kabu Trader Shun was the brainchild of Yukio Ando, who previously was a designer, planner, & scenario writer for games like Haunting Ground, Onimusha 4, & the Breath of Fire series, & had experience in the stock market, while the production itself was handled by Inti Creates, which had already become a regular partner of Capcom's via the Mega Man Zero series. To help make the game more than just a straightforward game about stock trading adventure elements were implemented, where you could explore, talk to characters, & buy items at a trading shop, while a story was written starring Shun Aiba, the son of a legendary stock trader who suddenly disappeared five years prior. The trading side of things was also spiced up by giving players specific objectives at points, like only profiting via short selling or taking a profit a certain number of times before your opponent does. In all fairness, Kabu Trader Shun was actually given some hype leading up to its release, with many comparisons to the Ace Attorney series being made, & even scoring a 30 out of 40 over at Famitsu. Unfortunately, though, the game was a notorious bomb, only selling a reported 25,116 copies by the end of 2007, and (as mentioned) it never left Japan, likely because the idea of a stock trading game was considered way too unappealing anywhere else.
Still, one should at least give some credit to Capcom for trying something out of the box with Kabu Trader Shun, and it does look as though an earnest effort was made in trying to make stock trading interesting to a more general public. However, not every out-there idea can be the next Ace Attorney.
On the surface this game really doesn't make much sense to be included on a list like this. After all, Capcom has published many Japan-exclusive games for a variety of hardware, so a PSP-exclusive that only came out in Japan isn't really worth of a "Wait... WHAT!?!" reaction, at least immediately. However, the more you learn about this game the more bizarre it comes off, especially in relation to Capcom. Released only in Japan on July 15, 2010, Last Ranker is a rare RPG from Capcom that isn't part of its iconic Breath of Fire series, and managed to attract an interesting staff behind it. The director was Kazuya Niinou, previously best known for directing the original Trauma Center game for Atlus, though this time he wanted to create an RPG inspired by his love of shonen action manga tournament arcs, as well make something that would befit Capcom's history of fighting games. The story was written by Kazushige Nojima, best known for his work on the Final Fantasy & Kingdom Hearts series, both of which he continues to work on to this day, in some fashion. Visual & character designs came from Shin Nagasawa (best known for his work on the Pokémon TCG) & Tatsuya Yoshikawa (from Breath of Fire), with Last Ranker actually being one of Yoshikawa's last works for Capcom before going freelance. The music was by the legendary Yoko Shimomura, marking her first Capcom game since 1993, and she admitted to using the nostalgic feeling of reuniting with her old employer when it came to certain tracks. Finally, this would be the first & only Capcom game that was developed by Imageepoch, which Niinou was a senior director for, the studio that essentially burned bright for about a decade with titles like the Luminous Arc series, Sands of Destruction, the 7th Dragon series, Fate/Extra, Time & Eternity, & Arc Rise Fantasia (look, it burned bright, but not always strongly) before dying suddenly in 2015 when founder & CEO Ryoei Mikage essentially disappeared without a trace once the studio started finding itself in debt.
Really, with a staff like that it sounds as though Last Ranker was a big deal, and from all reports it seemingly kind of was upon its release, scoring well with critics & even selling over 100,000 copies by the end of 2010. It even received two novellas written by Nojima, two drama CDs, & two different manga adaptations, one adapting a part of the game's story, and another being a spin-off starring a member of the supporting cast. Meanwhile, the game itself differed from most RPGs by giving the player a party of one, main character Zig, with the goal being to raise Zig's rank as a soldier of Bazalta with the goal of having Zig eventually topple the Seven Knights, Bazalta's strongest warriors, & achieve the rank of "Last Ranker", all while also dealing with Evinos, an alien race that wishes to destroy everything, the rebel forces of Anti-Bazalta, & the corrupt Seven Knights themselves. Yet, despite all of that, Last Ranker never saw release outside of Japan, with the closest thing to an explanation coming from NIS America's Haru Akenaga stating that the PSP simply didn't sell as well outside of Japan. And, to be fair, a literal half of Capcom's entire PSP output (16/32) never saw release outside of Japan, though when compared to stuff like Sengoku Basara, Finder Love, Fate/Tiger Colosseum, & a Gundam Seed game Last Ranker still feels like a bit of an odd title to not localize. To be fair, this entry is included more due to the fact that it was developed by Imageepoch & was a Japan-exclusive, despite having a rather notable staff behind it, and from all indications is a rather solid & enjoyable RPG that does some things just a bit differently from the norm; there is a fan translation, but it's only a partial one.
While this B-List started with an RPG, the genre has always been one that Capcom hasn't really focused too much on, especially when it comes to more "traditional" examples. However, Capcom does have one "traditional" RPG series, and that's Breath of Fire. Debuting back in 1993 over in Japan on the Super Famicom, the main hook across the various games in the BoF series was that the main character (always named Ryu) could transform into a dragon (hence the name), though the games otherwise tended to be traditional turn-based RPGs otherwise. While Capcom was initially hesitant about publishing the series in English, instead letting SquareSoft handle the very first game in 1994, the remaining four games were self-published on the SNES, PS1, & PS2 between 1995 & 2003, with III & IV often being cited as the best overall entries, both in terms of story & gameplay. Meanwhile V: Dragon Quarter would become a bit a franchise killer, due to its highly experimental gameplay loop where players were actively encouraged to get Game Overs & "Restoring" from the beginning, which carried over all accumulated items, equipment, and skills, while new story sequences could now be seen.
Or, at least, that's how things look to be outside of Japan, because on February 24, 2016 Capcom revived its RPG series with Breath of Fire 6: Hakuryu no Shugosha-tachi/Guardians of the White Dragon, which only ever saw release in Japan. While there was still both a Ryu & Nina, as per tradition (& they were even voiced by Kappei Yamaguchi & Kyoko Hikami, just as in BoF III to V), players instead controlled a customizable avatar who was Ryu's brother/sister who live in a massive desert world that's come under the control of the evil Insidia Empire, and the story revolved around defeating the Empire & discovering the secrets of the ancient Dragon Clans. In terms of gameplay BoF 6 was more of an action-RPG... with microtransactions, because rather than being a console game BoF 6 was instead a free-to-play mobile game meant for smartphones & tablets; an iOS version would come out later that July. Unfortunately, while there was some initial excitement for it upon launch, it was quickly hit with tons of poor reviews, and not simply because it was a mobile game (from all reports it just wasn't a good game, in general), with whatever player base it had managed to get early on shrinking quickly. In the end, Breath of Fire 6's servers were shut down September 27, 2017, barely 1.5 years after the game had launched, with all players getting refunded for any remaining unused in-game currency they had purchased.
Since then the Breath of Fire series has been relegated to the occasional piece of artwork or cameo in others games, plus the first two games getting added to Nintendo Switch Online's Nintendo Classics service, though most recently GOG did re-release the 2003 PC port of Breath of Fire IV via an updated version compatible with modern PC hardware & controllers. That being said, though, this is the only entry to have previously received a PC port, so who knows if anything else can be done beyond that.
Finally, as a bonus, let's go over that one time Capcom decided to try its hand at releasing a home console! Yes, you heard that right, Capcom literally became a first-party video game company for a few years in the mid-90s... well, at least sort of. Originally introduced in 1988, the Capcom Play System (a.k.a. the CP System, or simply CPS) was a new arcade system board that was made up of three boards, with the lower two boards housing the main CPS hardware itself, while the small daughterboard at the very top housed the actual game ROM & data, with the idea being that arcade operators could simply swap daughterboards to swap out games. Easily swappable arcade games were by now means a new thing, but the CPS was plagued by bootlegging, the most notorious of which being what's now known as Street Fighter II: Rainbow Edition. In late 1992 Capcom debuted the CPS Dash, which enclosed the boards inside a plastic case, utilized QSound (which would play a big part in Capcom's audio for the next decade or so), and featured "suicide batteries" in an apparent attempt at preventing bootlegging; the CPS Dash would only last up through 1993 across five games.
Late 1993 would see the debut of the CPS-II, which would become even more successful than the CPS-I & define Capcom for the rest of the decade, so much so that it would even outlive its own successor, 1996's CPS-III. During this time, though, major competitor SNK debuted the Neo Geo in 1990, a cartridge-based arcade board which had both a variant meant for arcade cabinets (the MVS) & a proper console variant (the AES), the latter which eventually became available to people at home to buy, though it was expensive. Seemingly seeing the Neo Geo AES as a threat, Capcom decided to offer its own home version of the CPS-I, resulting in the CPS Changer. Released only in Japan in late 1994 at the price of 39,800 yen (which included Street Fighter II Turbo as a pack-in), the entire product was shockingly basic from Capcom. The "console" was, in reality, just a basic SuperGun that actually could play most arcade PCBs that used the JAMMA standard (the only thing preventing users was the casing itself), while the arcade stick controllers were literally just the Super Famicom version of the Capcom Power Stick Fighter controller that was sold in both Japan & North America, right down to the CPS Changer "console" itself having Super Famicom/SNES controller ports on it; this also meant that any Super Famicom/SNES controller could be used with the CPS Changer.
In the end, only 11 games ever came out for the CPS Changer, with the only real "exclusive" being a backported version of Street Fighter Alpha that acted as the final release in 1995, which featured reduced animation, fewer on-screen colors, & downsampled audio with slightly remixed music, to account for the lack of QSound. From all indications, the CPS Changer was an abject failure for Capcom Japan, though the remixed music for SFA1 has since been offered as an option for some re-releases of the CPS-II original, so it hasn't been wholly ignored since.
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Like any company in the video game business, Capcom Japan will occasionally try something different from what they'd normally publish. Sometimes it's to act as the start of a larger overall partnership, like Eye of the Beholder II's PC-98 port was. Sometimes it's to give Japanese audiences a different type of experience they'd otherwise be familiar with, like with X2: No Relief. Other times it may look to be an attempt at trying something off the beaten path, like The Anime Super Remix games or Kabu Trader Shun were. Then in other times it's an attempt at doing something new with something familiar, as Last Ranker was. Finally... sometimes it's just a bad idea, like Breath of Fire 6 was. Still, the simple fact that Capcom Japan was willing to take these risks, try something different out, & go against the grain should be commended to some extent, because it's something that you wish you could see more from the major publishers in video gaming, nowadays.
Eye of the Beholder II: The Legend of Darkmoon © 1991, 1993 SSI © 1991, 1993 TSR
X2: No Relief © 1997 Team 17 © 1997 Ocean Software
The Anime Super Remix: Ashita no Joe 2 © Asao Takamori·Tetsuya Chiba/Kodansha·TMS © Capcom Co., Ltd. 2002
The Anime Super Remix: Star of the Giants © Ikki Kajiwara·Noboru Kawasaki/Kodansha·TMS © Capcom Co., Ltd. 2002
Kabu Trader Shun © Capcom Co., Ltd. 2007
Last Ranker © Capcom Co., Ltd. 2010
Breath of Fire 6: Hakuryu no Shugosha-tachi © Capcom Co., Ltd.
CPS Changer © Capcom Co., Ltd.
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