I thought that people would be interested in this information that Niitsuma provided since December on some characters that were considered for the game and the thought process on why some made it.
Gill, Fou-Lu, Female Capcom characters for UMVC3
Loki too abstract, Vision too powerful, etc
Marvel newcomers and others
Doctor Octopus
Wanted Juggernaut but he wasn't a high priority on Marvel's list
https://www.eventhubs.com/news/2011/oct/23/ryota-niitsuma-says-we-wanted-juggernaut-umvc3/
MARVEL:
Doctor Octopus
Blade
Spider-Woman
Psylocke
Spiral
Multiple Man
Cloak & Dagger
Black Widow
The Hood
Ms Marvel (Carol Danvers)
Kingpin
Mystique
Loki
Vision
Silver Surfer
Green Goblin
Juggernaut
CAPCOM:
Gill (Street Fighter III)
Fou-Lu (Breath of Fire IV)
Katt (Breath of Fire II)
SonSon
Mai-Ling (Red Earth)
Arieta (Cyberbots)
Ingrid (Capcom Fighting Evolution)
Rouge (Power Stone)
Tessa (Red Earth)
Anita (Darkstalkers)
Nina (Breath of Fire 1)
Gene
X
Soki (Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams)
Samanosuke Akechi (Onimusha: Warlords)
Demitri Maximoff (Darkstalkers)
Gene, X, Green Goblin, and Silver Surfer were from articles years ago. I decided to add them just because.
Gill, Fou-Lu, Female Capcom characters for UMVC3
Note that in a later tweet he says that Firebrand was pushed for over Nina.Ryota Niitsuma: Our character count got reduced in the middle of developing Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, so there were some characters that got forcibly cut.
Also, no matter how hard we tried, we just couldn't come to any agreements regarding female characters, so we ended up having no new girls in the roster...
Gill: He was in the running to the very end, but we ended up replacing him with Nemesis. Our reasons were that he felt like an unnatural fit with Marvel vs. Capcom 3's game speed, and that we probably had too many Street Fighter characters already.
Fou-Lu: He definitely had domestic popularity, and there was a lot of cool stuff to use for him, like his energy sword, his monster servants, shape-changing and dragon form, but due to the level of work we had to put into him and that we thought nobody abroad would recognize him, we ended up dropping him.
From here, let's move in to female characters.
Katt, Sonson and Mai-Ling: We wanted to have a female staff user, but they ended up losing out in priority.
Arieta: She would end up giving us trouble with the game's age rating.
Rouge: Same reason as above.
Tessa: I really pushed for her. I wanted to have her rival the Impact Palm loops of Dr. Strange...
A grown up Anita: Our staff really went too far with this. There's no character like that even in Darkstalkers... She's just a kid!
Ingrid: You again?!
All in all, we had over 150 female characters in consideration for the game, but none of them ended up being realized...
One character who actually remained until our very last cuts was Nina. By the way, she was based on her Breath of Fire 1 design. I personally like her Breath of Fire 3 design the best, and we were even thinking about having a super where she brought out all the other Ninas, kind of like Mega Man's Final Smash in Super Smash Bros. Wii U.
UMVC3 Capcom Newcomers
Phoenix Wright: He was the most requested character after we released Marvel vs. Capcom 3, and he's a really popular character, so we wanted to take him on as a challenge. His lines were supervised by Mr. Taku from Honke D.
I vividly remember feeling "Wow, this is totally what Phoenix Wright would say!", with warm emotion inside me.
Continue below to hear about the other Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, except for Firebrand, who has been detailed by Niitsuma in the past.
Strider Hiryu: He was also very requested right after Marvel vs. Capcom 3. A lot of people felt "He IS Marvel vs. Capcom"!
Frank West: We actually started making him for the original Marvel vs. Capcom 3. With our know-how from Tatsunoko vs. Capcom's development, we thought we made him really fun in Ultimate.
Vergil: When we gathered data from our fans in Japan, he was way more requested than we ever expected. The decider for us was when we were at Tokyo Game Show, and we have several Vergil cosplayers come up to us and say "Put Vergil in, please!"
Nemesis T-Type: We decided on the concept of having a unorthodox character to add. Actually, he wasn't our first choice, but ended up replacing our earlier candidate somewhere down the line...
As stated before Nemesis replaced Gill.
Loki too abstract, Vision too powerful, etc
Black Widow: She felt like she'd be too similar to our other gun/weapon based fighters.
The Hood: Same as above.
Miss Marvel: It was difficult to make her stick out next to her competing candidates like She-Hulk and Storm.
Kingpin: We really spent a lot of time deciding between him and M.O.D.O.K., but ended up going the other way simply because he seemed like he'd be more fun.
Mystique: Having a character who's main gimmick is changing their appearance is difficult in a fighting game.
Loki: "His speciality is to deceive his opponent's through magical illusions". Uhh, I dunno, for a fighting game... ?
The Vision: His abilities are just way too powerful, haha.
Marvel newcomers and others
Nova: Even in the vanilla version of MvC3, Marvel were pushing very hard for us to include him, and told us "he HAS to be in the next one".
Ghost Rider: Well, he really is very popular and famous. We also figured we'd just use his bike in one of his supers, which made him much easier to implement.
Dr. Strange: He was pushed very strongly from Marvel's side. We also thought he'd be fun to make, since there's a lot of moveset potential with "magic" as a base.
Rocket Raccoon: We were actually consideirng Squirrel Girl at the time, but when he was brought up it turned out we had way more raccoon fans than squirrel fans at the office, so we went with him.
Continue below to hear about some who did not end up making it into the game, and why.
Blade: There was just too much similarity with Dante...
Spider-Woman: Her flight and electrical powers felt a bit too similar to Trish...
Psylocke: She's very recognizable and has a good design, and it did occur to us that it'd be fun having her and Strider Hiryu go at it, but I guess she just ended up falling short compared to the others.
Spiral: She was in a previous title, but the 6 arms with swords and various magic attacks led to this actual quote from the development room: "This is way too much of a hassle, please, let's not".
Cloak & Dagger: They're visually interesting and sure leave an impact, and it's even more cool because they kind of feel like a Stand User and Stand from JoJo's Bizarre Adventure! But, the backside of that is that with such an action-packed game, including assists, it'd get too hectic with them. And an actual quote was "The game won't be able to support 2 characters in 1 like this!"
Multiple Man: I told you, the game can't do it!!
Doctor Octopus
Onimusha charactersSpeaking of characters that didn't make the cut, the biggest one of all was a certain enemy of Spider-Man's who has a bunch of arms coming out of his back.
He wasn't just a candidate, we worked on him for a very long time. He even has character art and a theme song we had to cut from the game.
Few more things
Ryu, Chun-Li, Akuma got instantly added (ofc). C. Viper was added because she was in SF4. Chris, Jill, Wesker: all in RE5, so obvious choices
Dante and Ammy made it in, worked out really well
Gene: kinda overlapped with Frank, not as popular, etc, so they ended up only using Frank/Frank took his spot
Onimusha series: wanted Soki, but he was a bit weak so they went for the original onimusha protag, but ran into rights issues, got dropped for a variety of reasons
Demetri: Comes up every time, but I think you guys know why Demetri can't be added (lol)"
Wanted Juggernaut but he wasn't a high priority on Marvel's list
https://www.eventhubs.com/news/2011/oct/23/ryota-niitsuma-says-we-wanted-juggernaut-umvc3/
MARVEL:
Doctor Octopus
Blade
Spider-Woman
Psylocke
Spiral
Multiple Man
Cloak & Dagger
Black Widow
The Hood
Ms Marvel (Carol Danvers)
Kingpin
Mystique
Loki
Vision
Silver Surfer
Green Goblin
Juggernaut
CAPCOM:
Gill (Street Fighter III)
Fou-Lu (Breath of Fire IV)
Katt (Breath of Fire II)
SonSon
Mai-Ling (Red Earth)
Arieta (Cyberbots)
Ingrid (Capcom Fighting Evolution)
Rouge (Power Stone)
Tessa (Red Earth)
Anita (Darkstalkers)
Nina (Breath of Fire 1)
Gene
X
Soki (Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams)
Samanosuke Akechi (Onimusha: Warlords)
Demitri Maximoff (Darkstalkers)
Gene, X, Green Goblin, and Silver Surfer were from articles years ago. I decided to add them just because.