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Curated playlist

Video games set in Japan

  • Capcom vs. SNK: Millennium Fight 2000Leon S. Kennedy and Mega Man were meant to be playable in Capcom vs. SNK. Both were cut to keep a fighting-game roster.
  • Street Fighter Alpha 2Street Fighter Alpha 2 was Japan's top arcade game of 1996. It arrived less than a year after the first Alpha.
  • Ultra Street Fighter IIUltra Street Fighter II lets you throw Ryu's Hadouken by holding a Joy-Con in each hand.
  • Hyper Street Fighter IIHyper Street Fighter II, released by Capcom in 2003 for the PlayStation 2, contains only 17 unique characters. Yet those fighters appear in 65 different versions, each one carried over from an earlier arcade game. That number turns a…
  • Super Street Fighter II TurboIn Japan, no arcade game earned more in 1994 than Super Street Fighter II Turbo. Capcom built it for arcade cabinets as the fifth installment in the Street Fighter II sub-series, following Super Street Fighter II from 1993. Oddly, it did…
  • Street Fighter Alpha 3Thirty-nine fighters. That is how large the playable cast of Street Fighter Alpha 3 grew on its biggest portable edition. The game itself began in 1998 as a Capcom arcade title. It was the third and final installment of the Street Fighter…
  • Street Fighter EX2Street Fighter EX2 let players chain basic and special moves into Excel Combos.
  • X-Men: Children of the Atom (video game)Capcom's X-Men arcade game hides Akuma because its Marvel contract required a Street Fighter character.
  • Tomb Raider (2013 video game)In November 2010, Square Enix filed a trademark for a slogan, "A Survivor is Born," to promote a new Tomb Raider game. That game arrived in 2013 from the developer Crystal Dynamics, and it did not simply continue Lara Croft's story. It…
  • Capcom vs. SNK 2Capcom vs. SNK 2 may be the first game with online play between rival consoles. This worked only in Japan.
  • Street Fighter AlphaStreet Fighter Alpha was built for two different arcade boards at once. Capcom had leftover stocks of both.
  • Street FighterStreet Fighter player Daigo Umehara parried 15 hits in a row with one pixel of health left in 2004.
  • Ace AttorneyAce Attorney is a Capcom adventure series in which the hero wins by catching a witness in a lie. In its fictional courts, a trial lasts three days at most. Verdicts usually come back guilty, and the cases the games follow are rare…
  • Street Fighter IIIStreet Fighter III stayed hand-drawn while rivals moved to 3D. Capcom built a new arcade board for its 2D art.
  • Street Fighter III: 3rd StrikeStreet Fighter III: 3rd Strike sold modestly in 1999, yet IGN later named it the greatest fighting game ever made.
  • Persona 3Persona 3 asks its player to press a gun-shaped device against their own head and fire. The device is called an Evoker, and the shot summons a Persona, a physical form of the shooter's psyche. Atlus developed this role-playing game, which…
  • Call of Duty: Black Ops IICall of Duty: Black Ops II took in more than $500 million in the first 24 hours after it went on sale. That figure made the 2012 first-person shooter the largest entertainment launch of all time. The record stood until Grand Theft Auto V…
  • Snatcher (video game)Snatcher's story was cut from five acts to two by memory limits. Hideo Kojima's 1988 game ends on a cliffhanger.
  • Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two WorldsLegal disputes kept Marvel vs. Capcom silent for close to ten years. Capcom won back the Marvel license in 2008.
  • Street Fighter X TekkenStreet Fighter X Tekken shipped with 12 paid characters already on the disc. Capcom said it locked them to save space.
  • Super Street Fighter IISuper Street Fighter II let eight players compete in one tournament across four linked arcade cabinets.
  • Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3The 2011 Tohoku earthquake led Capcom to make Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3. Planned add-ons became a separate game.
  • Sekiro: Shadows Die TwiceIn Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, you win by breaking an enemy's balance, not draining health. Then one killing blow lands.
  • Pokémon Red, Blue, and YellowPokémon Red, Blue, and Yellow began as a pitch that Nintendo's own staff could not make sense of. In 1990, the game developer Satoshi Tajiri described his concept to them, and the response was skepticism. They judged his ideas too…
  • Street Fighter IIStreet Fighter II's combos began as a bug that the team chose to keep. It appeared in the car-smashing bonus stage.
  • Silent Hill fSilent Hill f's first ending reveals the town's horrors were induced by red capsules.
  • Persona 4Persona 4 is a 2008 role-playing game from the Japanese developer Atlus, and it opens on a puzzle that sounds like a ghost story. In a small rural town, bodies are found dangling from television antennas, and no one can say what killed…
  • Call of Duty: World at WarCall of Duty: World at War had sold 15.7 million copies by November 2013. That total belongs to a World War II shooter made by the studio Treyarch and released in 2008 for PlayStation 3, Windows, Xbox 360, and Wii. Its campaign sent…
  • The Exit 8The Exit 8 is a 2023 indie game that asks the player to do almost nothing but walk down one passageway in a Japanese metro station. Its creator works under the name Kotake Create, and is also known as Kotakenotokeke. By August 2025 the…
  • Street Fighter 6Street Fighter 6 sold more than one million units within five days of going on sale. Capcom both developed and published the 2023 fighting game, and it counts as the seventh main entry in the Street Fighter franchise. That early number…
  • Assassin's Creed ShadowsAssassin's Creed Shadows is the fourteenth major game in Ubisoft's Assassin's Creed series, released in 2025 as the follow-up to Assassin's Creed Mirage. It sends players to 16th-century Japan, near the end of the Sengoku period, and hands…

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