[details=Spoiler]-I agree with you on the Civil War scene feeling forced. I get tensions rising, but ooooh man, c’mon. It would have felt fresh if Marvel wasn’t so heavy on forcing hero vs. hero all the time and that the Civil War 2 arc wrapped up recently and the movie is still in the general audience’s consciousness.
-Dug Ryu in this which is crazy because normally I’m so so on him in games. It’s usually in different forms of media like comics/manga and anime that I like him. I think having him do more than talk about how the fight is all there is added to that. Him forging a friendship with Banner is a nice touch and their team up was friggin’ sick. Monster Hunter girl is a qt, I liked her too.
-Yeah, I’m not used to Spider-man looking so jacked, his shoulders looked huge. They kept calling him kid, so I’m hoping that he’s closer to being around a young adult rather than his early hs days like in Homecoming, or else, he’s one jacked youngin’.
-It was really nice to see Modok in this and having a brief, but notable role in this.
-I didn’t think Morrigan looked that bad, but then again, after they fixed Chun I’ve just bell-curved everything to being “needs work still, everything needs more work, but at least I’m not drowning in my eyeblood anymore.” I think it’s my weakness for accents, but I did like Morrigan’s voice overall
-I liked Thanos not being dependent on Infinity Gems this time around. Seeing him stomp around was cool.
-The “we’re awesome guys” line reminds me of an issue. They missed a lot of opportunities for Dante being fun and witty. I felt like there should have been a better line instead of “nah” when Cap says he took a hell of a risk with the soul stone. Him and Tony should have been golden.
-Jedah vs Dante was awesome, I really also liked that we got to see his Devil Trigger form in the cinematic. I always wanted to see these two interact, and was happy with the result.
-In my own write up, I forgot to talk about the post credits scene. I get that Thanos, with advanced tech knowledge and experience in handling cosmic forces could find a way to utilize the SNH for his own purposes, but it’s kinda weird and off-putting, and the fact he was gonna use a hadouken is odd. I’d prefer to have him use his own move charged with SNH, but I guess that’s more immediately recognizable and workable for a “I’m about to throw down, but first, here’s a speech and a suspenseful fade to black”. Dude definitely would fulfill the conditions for being infused with the SNH. I think he really oversold how powerful it is though. Uh…what gods has it beaten? His whole final line read there was pretty cool though.
-About your point for the DLC characters, I was hoping for a Venom cameo or even reference with all the talk about symbiotes.
-Also, the world isn’t barren, why were all the city scenes so devoid of life. I’m just trying to understand the greater state of the world here. A million are dead from convergence shenanigans, not billions. What are the normal people doing outside of being in the background for arcade mode stages?[/details]
I mean…story wasn’t terrible…just relatively boring. If Thanos wasn’t involved there wasn’t much reason to give much of a shit, he was the only one with any semblance of a character arc.
Like maybe 6.5 out of 10. I think for the casual person who prolly won’t play a lot of competitive stuff or online its enough to keep them occupied and add some value to the game. I was fully expecting it to suck after SF5 story and demo run through. But, actually the visuals are pretty decent and while some lines are lame the dialogue is mostly decent. A lot of one liners, some of which can make you chuckle and few homages to everyones background. I can see where people are deriding it as fanfiction-y cause it definitely has the feel to it in some places.
One thing that always bugged me about Japanese Voice Acted games is that dialogue always has random ass awkward pauses that really kills the flow of storytelling. SF5 has a TON of these and unfortunately there are a couple scenes in MvCI that has this too. It makes it feel like the VA director recorded everyone seperately and it was all pasted together.
Otherwise, I don’t think it amazing but, I also don’t think it was a disaster/failure. Hopefully Capcom/Marvel listen to feedback on the story and look to improve/build on it cause I think conceptually, a story mode in MvC has a lot of potential. They just need to execute a lot better.
The story was ok. Not as terrible as the internet will lead you to believe. Def better than tekken’s story for sure. I’m a huge fan of marvel and capcom and seeing some of the mashups was really cool.
Should of had more boss fights though, like fighter the elder dragon would have been dope af.
REALLY not liking the “start during the first major battle” thing. Did the convergence make it as if the two universes always existed together? Just makes the whole story confusing when this is supposed to be a reboot, and one of the most important things about reboots is creating a new/updated origin story. It feels like they skipped it because they wanted to focus more on the Ultron-Sigma part, but shoehorned in having to say everyone’s name in the first XGard scene.
That said, I do like how the narrative was split into a series of smaller conflicts. The quality varies (my favorite was the AIMbrella one tbh), but going from crazy cosmic shit to crazy science shit to crazy demon shit let each character shine within their own niche. Except Spencer, but fuck that guy.
As implied above, Spencer felt utterly pointless. I already hated the character, and this only reaffirms my belief that he should not have been in this game. That scene with him and Iron Man was a waste. For the amount of screen time he got, Nova struck me as pretty useless too. Dormammu and Firebrand didn’t make any sense, either. Are they working for Jedah? Did they just show up to fight their rivals? We barely got to see them!
Thanos absolutely stole the show. Not only did he prove to be canonically OP even without the stones, it seems like he could have just done everything himself if he wasn’t held back by the heroes and betrayed by scumbag Ultron-Sigma. Jedah was a major player too, and has more than earned his place in the VS series now.
As someone who was a pretty big Darkstalkers guy … wtf was up with Morrigan and Jedah? They are not anywhere near that friendly in VSav. Morrigan also got short-sold hard: unless this is supposed to be her around the time of Night Warriors/Darkstalkers 1, she should be around Jedah’s power level alone. Her father literally had to split her power into 3 parts (one of which was in Jedah’s hands during VSav) to keep her from breaking reality itself.
I am a huge fan of Dead Rising 1, so I’ll say they absolutely nailed Frank in this game. He seems out of his league, but that was the whole point of his character in Dead Rising 1. The straight-man reactions to Haggar and Thanos were gold. Also, he’s the only one resourceful enough to halt the symbiote lol.
Going into the last act, I’m really impressed with how they did Dante in this game. He not only retrieved the Soul Stone himself, but pulled one of the ballsiest stunts in the whole story with it. Definitely the MVP among the heroes.
The post-victory scene explaining what happens from here out and the after-credits scene lead me to believe that a follow-up story might be in the works. Thanos isn’t the type to just go quietly after (presumably) bodying Death/Jedah under the power of the Satsui No Hado. This in turn has me speculating as to what the next big story could be…
Spoiler
Plan A: We are getting X-Men vs Street Fighter Season 2 after all, and Akuma will be one of the centerpiece villains, as Thanos’ (possibly literal) right hand. This also opens up room for Bison/Magneto as lesser antagonists, which this story handled pretty well with MODOK and Meio.
Plan B: Thanos assembles a cross-universe “League of Evil” type deal to begin even greater plans. While I doubt Ultron, Sigma, and Jedah would be invited, you can still for sure have Firebrand and Dormammu there. Any of the MvC3 heralds of Galactus (Doom, Wesker, Akuma, Dormammu, Magneto, and Super Skrull) would also work. The last returning UMvC3 character I see fitting in here is Vergil, for obvious rivalries with Dante/Ghost Rider/Gamora, and MODOK after his teaser role in the story.
I’m glad more people are starting to participate in this thread.
I just had a random thought, in this, after the Jedah and Death plan begins, Thanos starts collecting the gems. I had the crazy idea that this was going to lead to modern MSH moved forward, but due to Ultron Sigma’s plan we got MvC moved to the first game of this rebooted world.
It’d be kinda interesting if, as @just5moreminutes speculated, this lead into an X-men vs SF for season two and then things slowly start to build. With the main threat over and people going their separate ways, it would be interesting to see smaller scale skirmishes that eventually lead into something crazy again.
Ever since I was a kid, I thought the idea of a Marvel and Capcom universe would be awesome. I tended to have it that the Marvel universe & Street Fighter were naturally occurring together in some offshoot alternate reality from the 616 rather than a cosmic meeting of the worlds, but there’s some real potential here and if I’m being honest, if UDON and Marvel teamed up to tell more tales of this merged universe in book form, I wouldn’t mind at all.
The story ended up being better than I expected. My only issue is there were some parts that dragged on way too long.
Other than that, I wish there were more boss battles.
[details=Spoiler]Grandmaster Meio went down way too easily even though they were making him out to be a pretty big threat. At the very least, he should’ve been the guy you fought after the drones. Thanos with the Satsui no Hado was something I was expecting when I saw Thanos’ win quote to Ryu way back. I like the fact that he took an interest in the power and mentioned its true capabilities. Probably one of my fav parts of the story. Most of us SF fans like it as nothing more than a forbidden power that turns the warrior into a bloodthirsty demon. In here, Thanos regards it as a power that “conquered gods”.
The Satsui no Hado is one of the more interesting powers in the Vs series. Back in MVC3, you had Doom taking an interest in the power based on his win quote to Akuma (“You will reveal to me the source of your power, or you will die.”), and now you have Thanos absorbing the power entirely. Both of the Marvel Super Heroes bosses can see the depths of the Satsui no Hado. Pretty cool.
One thing I can say for sure - Capcom definitely has learned from some of the mistakes they’ve made in the SFV story, and in MVCI the story is structured better, the scene direction is better, the scenes don’t cut or jump from one to another every five seconds, and the majority of the cast was given somewhat equal or at least enough screen time
There are still some issues with the Dumb moments in the story, for example [details=Spoiler]Why can Ultigma suddenly communicate through the infected?
Why are all of the heroes apparently vulnerable to the Sigma virus when Gamora is an alien, Iron Man is wearing a highly technological suit with built-in air filters, Ghost Rider isn’t even alive, and Morrigan is a succubus?[/details]
Then there’s somewhat lazy camera work to hide out some models
[details=Spoiler]like when Thanos was enraged and he just bodied zero, Ryu, Frank, Iron man,
And Gamora - then when she and Thanos were talking, no other character was in sight. Or like when Frank smashes some cars during the symbiote encounter and Spiderman is about to lose the symbiote - in the very next shot he’s back to normal, instead of showing the process how symbiote slowly crawls off his costume, similarly to Spiderman TAS or the movies[/details]
And of course few characters felt completely useless to the overall plot and/or saw next to no screen time. Like I mentioned before:
[details=Spoiler]- Spencer shouldn’t have even been there. When Strange, iron man, Arthur and Spencer arrive to help the heroes - Spencer is in the background blurred out. When Thor is about to fight Ultigma - Spencer is summoned like some lackey to his side. When Thanos breaks out - he doesn’t do shit. When the symbiote is encountered - Spencer tries to attack him only to get knocked back and disappear from the story until like the final scene, where again you can only see him in the background, blurred out
Dormammu and Firebrand appear for just one fight. Um, what was the point of that? Oh yeah Strange and Arthur have rivals. That’s why. I guess. Or they work for Jedah. Or both. Who knows, it’s not explained
Rocket Raccoon is there only to produce cringe worthy dialogue (like asking megaman if he takes batteries). Other than picking up the Power Stone from the Knowmoon generator he doesn’t do anything significant
Chris literally does nothing but point his gun at everybody and call names. I guess it’s a joke on how that’s all he does in Re5 cutscenes? But if that was his entire shtick then he shouldn’t even be in the story. Hell, remove him from the damn game
Nemesis is even more useless. In the classic RE titles he was super scary because this giant ass mutant approaches you and you feel helpless, though of course he is beatable. But in this story all that’s happened is he got suplexed by Haggar. Fucking amazing, bro. Remove him from the story and the game too, please
Zero, surprisingly, was also useless. He was only in the story to fight megaman and to get washed by Thanos. That’s it. You didn’t even really get to play him once in the story.
Grandmaster Meio, who is supposed to be one of the villains, felt also useless lmao. I guess he let Ultigma to infect the Knowmoon and get bodied by Gamora and Strider via just one hit?
And then even though guys like Haggar and Nova weren’t that prominent - Nova at least was featured in several cutscenes, had his fair share of a dialogue, and helped in the fight vs the Symbiote[/details]
So, like I said on the previous page, the story is definitely not without issues. It improved in some aspects compared to the SFV story, but it’s still not perfect. Actually comparably average to my surprise, even though there were apparently Marvel writers involved in it, whereas the SFV story was written by Capcom alone. I suppose it all came down to the budget, so it’s no wonder somebody like ArcSys and especially NRS produce story modes of a higher quality overall
I can’t comment on arcSys story modes, the last game I had it was just a movie I wasn’t interested in…
But we gotta stop this NRS story mode puff pieces. They are just as bad as SFV and infinite. I prefer the later because I’m just more interested in those universes but they are all equally pretty bad when it comes to video game story telling.
I really liked the Morrigan model, but her voice actor is Welsh, trying to do a Scottish accent, but ends up with a terrible Hollywood Irish accent most of the time.
Chun-Li was voiced by Ashly Burch. She also voiced Cassie Cage in MKX and Chloe in Life is Strange. She isn’t the issue. The voice direction in this game simply sucks.
Laura Bailey voices Black Widow in Avengers Assemble.
Since most of the Marvel (with the exception of a few) cast are voiced by the VA’s from their cartoons, I’m gonna assume she’ll be voicing Black Widow this time around.
Laura Bailey is probably on the VA strike just as hundreds of others, so Capcom is too poverty to hire her again. At least they’re in good relationship with Reuben so he reprised his role as Dante
The story was overall written poorly by somebody who didn’t have a sense of voice for all the characters, though I have a suspicion the person had to write around scenarios that were already mo-capped/animated. A lot of awkward timing and dialogue set-ups.
The one saving grace is this appears to be an actual origin story to a Marvel/Capcom universe with the ballsy decision to not resolve the merging. This means the story could continue in episode expansions incorporating DLC characters, or the next game could go from this new universe. You can even consider this a prequel to any past Vs game since none made an attempt to explain the crossover.
Interesting, didn’t know Ashely Burch replaced Laura Bailey, I tend to like her performances.
Take it from me, a voice director can have an incredible impact on the final product, I’ve thankfully worked with some great ones, but some of my pals have had a one off or two and it dramatically altered their experience and the final product.
I honestly am wondering if the VO strike is more to blame for Laura being out rather than the Black Widow theory. Though I don’t know if Capcom was one of the companies involved. I’m a Canuck, so I’ve not been keeping as much tabs on the strike lately as I should.
