“A Travesty of the Fighting Genre”
For as long as there have been major moneymaking franchises, be it movies, comics, or games, people have often discussed which franchise would emerge triumphant if two were pitted against one other. Godzilla VS Mothra, DC VS Marvel, Aliens VS Predator, etc. Which brings us to Capcom’s VS series, of which Marvel VS Capcom is the third installment after X-Men VS Street Fighter and Marvel Super Heroes VS Street Fighter. This game, like its predecessors attempts to settle age-old questions like, “who would win in a fight between Zangief and…The Incredible Hulk?” It’s a pity, then, that the game produced for this undertaking is so uniformly awful that one cannot help but think that it was programmed by Capcom to mock and parody the whole fighting genre.
So once again we have our comic book heroes and villains from Marvel teaming up with Capcom’s mascots, however, as you might have guessed from the name, it’s not all Street Fighter on Capcom’s side this time. Instead we get characters from Capcom’s arcade past, like Captain Commando and Strider Hiryu, to more modern entries like Megaman and Morrigan from the offensively lame Darkstalkers series. And if you were worried, there are still the classic Street Fighter characters like Ryu (who now has the ability to change into Ken AND Akuma, thus causing Shoto-scrubs everywhere to squeal with glee), and Chun Li.
Graphically, MvC is impressive, with large, colorful backgrounds and detailed sprites that move with an acceptable degree of fluidity. Unfortunately, at the same time, I found the graphical style to be excessively loud, garish, and gaudy. What IS it with the Japanese and producing games with enough flickering and flashing to drive players into epileptic seizures, anyway? Capcom apparently believed that if they threw enough sprites and enough cheesy graphic effects onscreen at once that it would hide MvC’s flaws. But in an your average arcade, there of often dozens of loud, blaring machines each vying for your quarters, so I can forgive MvC for trying to draw attention to itself. However, much like Morrigan from Darkstalkers, it is a deceiver. It draws you in with its seductive looks, hiding the sinister fact that it is, in actuality, pure evil!
The gameplay, obviously, is identical to the previous games in the VS series. You choose two tag-team characters as usual, however, MvC adds the “helper” system where you can call out a character to briefly attack the opponent, the limitation being that certain helpers are more effective than others are, and you can only use a helper a certain number of times. Normally, your helper is selected randomly at the beginning of the match, however, Capcom decided to you to choose which helper by pushing certain buttons during the helper select. What’s the point of making it random if you can just hit a few buttons and always get the strongest helper? Just add it to the long list of illogical decisions that went into this game
Once you actually start fighting with your opponent, everything progresses pretty much as it did in previous VS games. Each character has a “Super Meter” which you can charge by pretty much doing anything. Once it reaches a certain level, you can unleashed a devastating super attack on your opponent, which if it connects will often take away 30-40% of their health or more. Given that it’s so easy to build up your super meter, chances are you’ll never be too far away from pulling out one of these weapons of mass destruction.
Which, of course, brings us to “The Problem.”
The problem is that is ridiculously easy to chain these super attacks into combos. In games like Street Fighter Alpha, for example, this was tricky to do, because supers like Ryu’s Shinkuu Hadouken required two QCF motions and a punch. In MvC, however, such a move only requires one QCF motion and two punches. Once you learn how to tag a super onto a combo starting with a dashing low weak kick, something requiring only a few minutes of practice, suddenly all of the skills and talents you have learned from other fighting games go out the window, because MvC requires almost no skill. There’s no skill in timing, because everything’s in chain combos, and you never have to think about what combo to use, because you’ll always want the most damaging. The game quickly becomes a tiresome turtle fest, since in the Touch of Death game of MvC, leaving yourself open for the slightest seconds can have catastrophic results. But alas, you cannot turtle forever, as your opponent might eventually hit you with a jump-in attack (at almost no risk to himself, thanks to MvC’s unlimited air blocking), or you’ll mis-time your push-block, and then all you can do is sigh dejectedly as the screen flashes wildly and half your health drains away. Unlike Killer Instinct, the only other game I can think of with such ridiculous over-emphasis on combos, there’s no “Combo Breaker” system to prevent combo-ing-into-super from happening again and again. That’s right, you heard me, MvC’s “fighting engine” (a term I use most loosely) is one-upped by Killer Instinct. Congratulations, Capcom. I won’t even get into the travesty of MvC’s “Infinite Combos” which are something that should have been taken care of back when the game was in beta.
Tell me, since when did fighting games stop being about, you know, actually fighting, and start being about filling the screens with projectiles and supers so powerful that they kill you and the guy playing Super Puzzle Fighter on the machine next to you? With its absurd overuse of projectiles (Megaman’s for example, requiring only a strong punch to do his repeatedly), and the ridiculous-looking super jumps, MvC becomes like a 2D, sprite-based version of Unreal Tournament, minus everything that made that game fun. MvC encourages cheap tactics and button mashing, a flaw made worse by the horribly unbalanced characters. Once you become “good” at this game, you will rarely want to choose anyone but Strider, Wolverine, or Chun Li.
I cannot in good conscience recommend anyone sink their hard-earned quarters into this machine. Marvel VS Capcom is the arcade equivalent of fast food; it does not so much satisfy you as it fills you up with a bland, artificial mass. Don’t be fooled by the flashy graphics, for there are far better machines for you to play.