Fighting games are the perfect place for a crossover — because everybody knows there’s no better possible crossover than having our favorite characters fighting it out till the point of near death.
Most crossovers and guest appearances in fighting games rock because, on top of giving us wild interactions, they fill us with hope that different companies can work together to make magic. Still, some can’t help but make you wonder “What the hell were they thinking?” — even when they’re hilarious. This list is about those.
10. The weird Mega Man in Street Fighter x Tekken
Long story short, instead of bringing the version of Mega Man that we all know and love to SFxT, Capcom brought an infamous version of Mega Man that up until that point existed only on a comically ugly US box cover art. He looks awkward, moves awkwardly, and is just too old. Isn’t Mega Man supposed to look just like a kid? This looks like a guy who spent his teens and most of his adult life working on his cosplay suit and only felt it was completed when his midlife crisis kicked in.
Were the devs secretly conspiring against Tekken? Maybe, but this is Capcom, a company that hasn’t shied away from making quick bucks from DLC content, putting effort into bringing a dearly unloved design a reality. I believe Capcom deserves the highest possible praise for this one.
The only reason “bad cover art Mega Man” doesn’t get a higher place on the list is that Capcom was in on the joke when they came up with this brilliant monstrosity.
9. Yoda/Vader in Soul Calibur IV
Having characters from Sci-fi stories in fantasy worlds will always strike me as odd. I know that the fact that they wield swords makes them look like worthy additions to a sword-fighting game roster, but are they? Like, either Kilik is getting his staff and then himself cut in half, one second into the match, or the lightsabers will just look useless and stupid.
So, unless you get Vader fighting Yoda, every match featuring these characters will look weird. Weirder still was how players had to wait three full months to have these characters facing each other off, as they were originally timed exclusives for different consoles.
8. A Battletoad in Killer Instinct
I get that Battletoads is a very challenging title, but that doesn’t make it an M-rated game. You and I know damn well we’ve had our butts kicked in online games by kids whose heads would blow up in terror if they were to see The Ring‘s opening scene. Kidnapping a poor toad-of-battle and dropping it in a game with actual violence in it is just weird(ly hilarious).
It also doesn’t help that Rash, the toad in question, got an edgy makeover. Rash will forever be a nice little toad who’s only guilty of having poor driving skills. It’ll never feel okay to witness him getting impaled by hundreds of ice spikes — even though it all happens off-camera.
7. Spawn in Soul Calibur 2
Todd McFarlane’s Spawn is one of the coolest and weirdest characters in comic book history. I know nothing will ever kill my appreciation for the character, because I saw the Spawn movie and the only dire effect it had on my mental health was making me actually kind of enjoy it. Spawn’s inclusion in Soul Calibur 2, however, feels very out of place.
Despite his grim gothic look, Spawn is a modern character who lives in the modern day. He can’t help but feel like a weird alien in that colorful medieval fantasy setting. I know I’m making big claims since this is the series that features Voldo, but you know in your heart that this is true.
6. Solid Snake in Super Smash Bros.
For the longest time, I couldn’t point out what was weird about Solid Snake being featured in the roster of Smash. The Super Smash Bros. series is only serious about bringing players some good fun, and the Metal Gear Solid series cannot help but feel bonkers — even at its most attemptedly serious.
What’s wrong? I believe that the year 2023 brought the realization that it’s just weird to see a realistic depiction of an adult man from a series whose insights actually predicted, among other things, the dredge that social media would be for humankind, just shooting missiles at the likes of Jigglypuff and Pikachu. That’s it, Snake in Super Smash Bros. was just Palworld in a time when I still wasn’t ready for it.
5. Omni-Man/ Homelander in Mortal Kombat 1
This one is weird even if you forget that Omni-Man and Homelander are way stronger than any of the characters in the MK universe — a universe that features actual deities in it. They were both introduced in the game alongside Peacemaker, who actually makes sense because he does Kombat while being an actual Mortal.
The strangest thing for me here is that Omni-Man and Homelander are riffs on Superman, who more or less exists in the MK universe because of the Injustice series. Just make a fighting game whose entire roster is composed of Superman-inspired characters, then let me destroy them all with Goku.
4. Negan in Tekken 7
Negan is a popular character from the Walking Dead TV show, which means that either TWD takes place in the Tekken universe, or Negan came through a portal and should be using his time to raise awareness about world-ending zombie outbreaks in different universes.
Also, for a tournament dubbed King of Iron Fist, they seemingly allow every fighter to bring up to two swords, one gun, and a knife to a knucklefight. Aside from Yoshimitsu, a guy I assume is too weird and scary for a security guard to confront regarding the use of his sword before the fight, characters like Noctis, Master Raven, and more brought their own accoutrement to the bout. Then comes Negan, with a barbed wire-wrapped baseball bat likely covered in contagious goo. It feels a bit far, even by Tekken standards.
3. A Car in Fighter’s Megamix
The coolest thing about Fighter’s Megamix is that even though that’s what the name would lead you to believe, it’s not just a fighting game crossover. Fighter’s Megamix had the half-nice, half-utterly irresponsible idea of inviting many characters from non-fighting games into the ring. One of these characters is, and I kid you not, Hornet, a car from Daytona USA. And no, it doesn’t just very easily run over their poor rivals — this is an anthropomorphic car, a quasi-transformer, that walks on two wheels and uses the other two for punching.
FM was the original video game crossover event, and even though it never managed to reach the heights of the Smash series, it was never second to it when it came to wackiness. Case in point, the car isn’t even the weirdest character in the game.
2. A palm tree in Fighters Megamix
Yeah, it turns out that having a fighting car in the game wasn’t weird enough, so the developers at AM2 included a secret character that’s just the palm tree from the company’s logo.
It’s absolutely bonkers, yeah, but it’s also ahead of its time as it totally seems to have predicted the bizarre custom characters that would end up invading the online matches of Soul Calibur.
1. Fred Durst in Fight Club
Remember how you had to clear Tekken 2‘s arcade once with every character, then with Kazuya, to unlock the Devil as a playable character? Well, in Fight Club, an astounding success in the art of missing the point, you just need to clear the game once to unlock an even darker entity: Fred Durst.
Fred is not even an inanimate object or a corporate logo. I do believe Mr. Durst is human, but I still cannot look at him in this game as anything other than the most bizarre guest appearance in video game history. He doesn’t even speak or have a storyline — he’s just there.
Yes, I know Fred Durst is famous for singing about breaking stuff, but did you ever catch him during the act — oh, maybe he just doesn’t talk about it. Well played, Fred. Enjoy your deserved renaissance.
