Many kids such as I who rented Capcom Fighting Evolution/Jam back on the PS2 (or Xbox maybe) went into that hodgepodge of a fighter with full knowledge of most of the cast, we obviously knew who all the Street Fighter characters were and we knew about Darkstalkers even if we were flabbergasted at the lack of Morrigan and her infamous sprite, but what's this? Red Earth? Never heard of her.

It was perplexing, but kind of rad how there was a lion-headed warrior, a ninja with a bazooka, a nautilus person, and a goddamned tyrannosaurus dragon that was just completely out of our line of sight this whole time. You can't really blame us though, the game seems like it barely had an arcade release outside of Japan and was never ported, which I assume would be because the ship kind of sailed at that point prior to the Dreamcast being released, and I doubt the PS1 was going to handle this beast. It's a shame, because the character designs really made me want to play it, and during that period MAME was a pain in the ass to use (it kind of still is). My interest in Red Earth kind of wavered for a while even when arcade emulation became much more tolerable and user-friendly over the years, but at long last someone out there heard my call from 2004. It was Capcom Fighting Collection featuring the first ever re-release of Red Earth and a port to consoles. Thank you very much Capcom, many companies could learn a thing from you with these fantastic collections aside from that time you split the Mega Man X Legacy Collection and gave it 500 frames of input lag, but hey, we'll forgive and forget. I'm still waitin' on X9 ya jerks, I bought three copies of that shit.

Red Earth plays like a fighter, but it's more like a one on one beat'em up with versus mode tacked on. Pretty apparent considering there's as many playable characters as there are pieces in a standard sized Kit Kat bar. It features a leveling system similar to Capcom's other arcade games King of Dragons or perhaps Shadow over Mystara where you gain experience over the course of your battles and gain new moves, resistances and equipment as you play. I can kinda see where they were going with this, since it was a tactic to get players to revisit the cabinet every so often with their passwords for the characters they've been using. These days if you're playing on the collection you're probably better off heading into the extra menu and setting the machine to leave you at max level so you have all your moves, otherwise you might feel a tad limited against the giant boss characters. Who by the by? Look gorgeous here, I was already familiar with all of them due to adding them to my MUGEN roster a lot, lol. They're a fantastic addition, my favorite was probably Ravange/Secmeto. Not counting Nool/Hydron since I already used them in CFE. It's a shame the boss characters were unplayable, but you know for sure they would've been playable in the versus mode of a hypothetical Dreamcast release.

As a competitive game it has little footing, but as mentioned the game obviously wasn't balanced around that. I am a bit disappointed though that they didn't attempt to add some kind of Dramatic Battle co-op to the main mode so you could team up with your buddy and level up along with them. I guess it would've been too cumbersome for the hardware, but it would've been a great addition and would've made Data East's Avengers in Galactic Storm jealous. It's not exactly replacing Third Strike at every major, but I just think this is really cool, I'm always the world's biggest sucker when it comes to Fantasy settings. Was great to finally play it almost 20 years later.

Maybe one day we can see Tessa, Leo or even Hauzer again on a playable roster some day, I have an inkling of hope for it. Would love to see it. If I won the lottery I'd pay Capcom to make Capcom Fighting Evo: The Good Edition, they're sitting on too many good characters to bother with Tony Stark.