None of the powerstone characters showing up in any of the vs games.
No Amy in V
No Akuma in EX2
No Geese in XII
No Falcon (PS) in Capcom VS
No Birdie in SF
No Mewtwo in Brawl
No May Lee in XII
No Armor King in 3
No Zasalamel in V
No shit. I love the characters in Powerstone, They could have made an amazing return in UMvC3 but no, completely ignored.
Same for the Warzard/Red Earth characters.
The more I think about it I really want a second Capcom Fighting Evolution, One that’s more balanced and a bigger roster.
No Amingo in MVC3 
KOF XIII
Oswald- I remember SNK said in an interview they wanted him in but they didn’t have time.
Adelheid- I don’t know why, I guess they wanted him to take a helpful but secondary role in the story.
Team Garou from KOF XI- Not story important despite being awesome.
Team Orochi- Dead.
Yamazaki- Not story important anymore, really popular and he has worked with Geese before, they could have thrown him but decided not to.
USA Sports Team- They aren’t story important in the slightest and only exist in the minds of people who like KOF 98 since no one likes 94 Kappa.
No Gambit or Bison in Mahvel 3. Like, c’mon capcom.
Because the X23 comic was such an epic success
right?
I hated fighting him in CvS2, so I was glad that motherfucker stayed home for XIII. 
I second Remy. Seriously, he’d be an amazing character in SF4.
IMO that book was one of their best written books in years. I mean, it even made vampire Jubilee a likeable character.
I was really surprised when Bison wasn’t in MvC3, imagine the Bison/Wesker interactions.
To me, the single most stand-out example in fighting game history is Taka-Arashi (the sumo wrestler) from Virtua Fighter. He is the one and only character ever to be dropped from the VF series’ roster, a series that has often added new characters but has otherwise (i.e. other than Arashi) never removed any old ones.
His history of appearances is as follows:[details=Spoiler]
NO - VF1
NO - VF2
YES - VF3 (debut)
YES - VF3tb
NO - VF4 (removed)
NO - VF4E
NO - VF4FT
NO - VF5
YES - VF5R (return)
YES - VF5FS[/details]
If I’m remembering this correctly: In an interview circa VF5R, the developers explained that Taka was omitted from VF4 essentially because he is too big. Apparently midway through development, they realized that they’d have to re-work nearly all of the game’s throw animations to make them look right against him, which would have been too large an investment of time and resources, and so they left him out. (I can’t remember what they said had changed for VF5, but it must’ve been something pretty fundamental about the way the animations work, because VF5 has larger size discrepancies between characters than VF4 did.)
I know I would main Bison no matter how bad they decided to make him. Yun also seems like he’d have some awesome looking combos in that game, but obviously that is a topic for another thread 
I don’t know much about VF but it seems this character has somewhat of a negative reputation, could you please tell me why?
Add in Seong Mi-na & Yun-seong and I’m with you. Xiba doesn’t count for either Kilik or Mi-na. Take away 2 of my 3 character styles (Mi-na/Yun-seong) strip down my other to just a shell of what it once was (Xianghua) and then see if I really want to pick up the game seriously at all.
Uhm, I dunno! I’m no VF player but I’d never heard that before.
KOF has a history of tumultuous lineup changes between games. The series embraces this change. Every time a new version comes out, there are no promises made, and all bets are off. When that’s the established precedent, I think the individual exclusions and omissions of particular characters all seem a little less eventful or surprising. (Of course we tend to have our favourites, though.)
I would venture a guess that these changes mostly stem from practical constraints and considerations such as hardware memory limitations or the cost of creating/updating assets.
The Tekken series has been like that at times, too, with their roster roulette, although the Tekken team arguably seems to make (more of) a point of trying to add some or most removed characters (or playstyle clones of them) back in later on.
Was SFA1 the first sequel in an established fighting game franchise to ditch most of its original cast all in one go? I’m curious about how well (or poorly) it was received in the arcades upon its release. I’m also curious about how Capcom felt that this affected the popularity of the game, because they sure didn’t seem afraid to do it all over again in SF3NG.
SF3: Fei Long and Sagat
SF Alpha 1+2 and SF EX series: Fei Long
SF4 2008 Arcade version: Fei Long
SFxTK (okay, not really a sequel): Fei Long and Feng Wei
CvS and SVC Chaos (no sequels either): Fei Long and Joe Higashi
CvS2: Fei Long and Ibuki
King of Fighters '96: Eiji Kisaragi
Tekken 3: Kazuya, Baek, Bruce
MvC3: Gambit, RE1 Jill
Any SF after “Street Fighter '89”: Haggar
USF4: Necro, Alex and Maki
Also Ibuki and Dudley not being in Vanilla SF4, but that was thankfully remedied with Super.
No Alex in Sf4 as the biggest dissapointment especially since he was supposeed to take over the franchise as the main character
other notable mentions go to Ruby Heart she was supposed to be the Vs series story crux / face and they ditch herafter one go
Kaz not being in T3 broke my heart but Jin grew on me then they made him all gay
You never really miss a character in Tekken because their style is always represented in the form of new blood, then they bring back the original character and flesh them both out to be two completely different characters. Namco is the only series that does this, and I think its really fucking smart. The ultimate kudos to team Namco.
Really? From the outside looking in it always seemed like they used the same characters over and over give or take a few different faces.
I’m just so bored with most of the cast if they would venture out enough to include more of their extensive SNK roster they could open up the interests of different communities. Better yet keep the entire cast of 13 and build on top of that, cant go wrong.
Really…
Oswald
Chizuru
Whip
K9999
Angel
blah
Tessa getting Megaman’d in Capcom fighters too. 1 damn appearance in another game then poof. WTF
I see where you are coming from but I disagree slightly.
I’ll admit that roster wise, KOF XIII is a very “safe” game but SNK also had a story to write and limited resources, so they weren’t going to include characters that had no reason to be there or weren’t that popular.
Though, what I like about SNK is that they’ll randomly through characters in for fun. Like Hayate in XI.
There’s a rumor going around that the next KOF is a dream match where all the characters in 13 are in and they’re expanding the roster from there.