I'll agree on some of those, owl, but calling VF a copy of Street Fighter is straight-up idiot. That's like calling Gran Turismo a copy of Outrun.
I don't think it's a copy - I
said it's not - but it's clear Sega was copying Capcom's notes there. Street Fighter II was studied. Lessons were learned. Some things they wanted to do the same, some things they made a point of doing different. You can say it just belonged to the same genre - but at the time, Street Fighter II
was the genre. It's hard to think of a defining characteristic that SFII introduced - gameplay-wise - that didn't transfer to VF, the lone exception I can think of being projectile attacks. And it's pretty specific ideas and innovations that were cribbed, not just superficial details or broad concepts. The fact that we take it for granted now - in part because VF helped disseminate and generic-ify this stuff - doesn't obscure the reality. All this being said, 'copy' is an impolite way of saying it and is better reserved for more obvious examples so ...
The rest of your list I'll concede, but I would say a dozen or so games over the course of hundreds qualifies as rare.
Well, I was thinking in terms of 'rare in comparison to other major publishers', in which case I'd say they were over par. A ton of their best-known stuff was heavily influenced by the success stories of the time frame in which they were introduced. Stand out exceptions would be rail shooters, which they pretty well owned.
Forget I mentioned JSR, that was just embarrassing.
