Review - Marvel Vs. Capcom 3

It's finally the day after Valentine's Day! Oh yeah! Now I'm not just saying that because I never have a date, or because the prospect of being a twenty six year old man with nothing to offer a mate terrifies me to my very core. I'm saying this because it's finally Tuesday, February 15th: the release date of the long anticipated Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, a game that's been ten years in the making. Does it live up to expectations? For this rabid fan, it definitely does.

Now imagine that for a minute. Waiting a full decade to hold something that you love. Something that you didn't even know would ever be yours, something that you almost gave up hope on entirely. It almost sounds like a romance in it's own right. But finally it's here, and it's yours to hold in your arms. You'd be pretty freaking excited, right? Well so was I! I can honestly tell you that the simple adventure of going to my local Gamestop (haters gonna hate), opening up my special edition copy, watching the intro movie, and finally tearing into this monster is a joy that I haven't felt since the midnight release of Halo 2.


Not even Marvel Team-Up would dare write this.

The game is absolutely gorgeous. The comic book style that Capcom went with really makes the overall presentation shine. Comic book pages tear away when hyper combos are activated, hitsparks explode like a Chinese new year, and even the damn fonts look pretty. Iron Man's Proton Cannon is a beautiful sight to behold, even if you're the one on the receiving end. The fights are fast and fluid, with characters literally flying around the screen, smacking the crap out of each other. Tags are fast, assists come out of nowhere, and combos are sweet and satisfying.

The attention to character detail is astounding. All of the moves feel smooth, even the ones you may remember looking stiff in the previous games (like Iron Man's launcher). I didn't think I could be impressed by the purposely clunky Sentinel, but I am. This is the kind of game that's as exciting for spectators as it is for the competitors. I know I'm lauding over Iron Man a lot here, but seriously. His level 3, the aptly named "Iron Avenger" alone could sell you on the visuals. Characters have nice little touches, like Sentinel's moving parts and Mike Haggar's ability to swing a lead pipe and the fact that his spinning lariat is fully invincible but takes some red health to use (both throwbacks to Final Fight, the game that he comes from). Fighters will address each other by name while assisting, and there are even some special dialogues for guys who know each other, such as the X-Men referring to each other by their first names. Hulk's witty banter is worth noting as well, with such shouts as "METAL MANNN!" when calling Iron Man in for a team hyper combo.


Hulk Smash dat' azz.

On the Marvel side, Even the alternate colors are full of fan service. All of Iron Man's suits are previous armors that he's worn, Wolverine and Deadpool have their X-Force duds, and even Captain America gets some love with the mashup outfit that The Punisher wore for a short while. There even happens to be a Mango color for Sentinel, a shout out to the hardcore MVC2 players. A major annoyance for an X-23 fanboy like myself, however, is that while Deadpool has his hilarious "X-Men" duds, Laura didn't get her X-Force outfit. Nitpicking, I know, but my team of Logan, Wade, And Laura just doesn't feel the same without it (once one overlooks the fact that X23 and Deadpool weren't members at the same time). One of her alts even has the design, but in the wrong colors!


Personally, I'm not very fond of the Knicks.

With beams and fists flying all over the screen, some more casual players may go through a rough adjustment period, but this is Mahvel, baybay! This kind of frantic gameplay comes with the territory. A few hours spent in the game's trial mode should get you up to speed in no time.

The stages and music are all excellent for setting the tone, with stages like Metro City, the graveyard from Ghouls n' Ghosts, and the Daily Bugle. Characters all have remixes of their respective Vs. Series themes, and the newcomers' songs fit right in Wesker and Zero have songs that really hammer this home. The voice work is also beautifully done. Deadpool stays true to character by constantly breaking the fourth wall, and even if Wolverine yelling "unacceptable!" often for no reason seems odd, it's more than made up for with Dr. Doom shouting "PLAZMA BEEEM!".

In closing, theres really nothing negative that i can say from my experiences with this game. That may be because I happen to love Marvel comics, Capcom games, Fighting games, and cheese fondue, but even somebody who isn't as positively biased as myself will more than likely still enjoy this game immensely. Check it out. I doubt you'll be disappointed, and oh boy, just wait until you make it to the final boss, Galactus!


Only Shotokan Karate would give me pause.

Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 Character Wishlist

If you are reading this, chances are fairly high that you've already had the chance to read my write up of Marvel Vs. Capcom 3. If not, it's posted right above this. Are you blind? What you are about to read is my opinions on the roster. More accurately, characters that I feel should have been included. More fanboy speculation after the jump! I've always wanted to say that.



The first thing I noticed upon getting to the character select screen was HOLY SHIT! ALBERT WESKER AND CHRIS REDFIELD! The second thing I noticed, however, is that the roster, well excellent in diversity and full of awesome newcomers, was Also full of some odd choices and omissions. Now, I appreciate the diverse choices that I have been given, and I must admit that there isn't a single character that I don't enjoy playing with. I also acknowledge that this isn't the same universe that it was ten years ago, for the Marvel side or the Capcom side. I am well aware of the fact that Plasma Sword and Cyberbots aren't relevant in this day and age.


Face it, nobody played as Silver Samurai anyway.

I'm not just one of those guys that is going to complain that this game doesn't have the whopping fifty-six characters on it's roster that it's previous title had. This is a new game, built from the ground up. There are beautiful new character models and animations, and balancing to be done. This isn't as simple as taking sprites from other games and using the groundwork that's already laid out. Thirty-eight playable characters is more than enough to please this fan, but I can still dream.

In my opinion Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom, that Wii exclusive game that was full of all those anime guys that nobody has ever heard of, featured a great roster on the Capcom side. Aside from the expected staples (boring ass Ryu and Chun-Li from Street Fighter), the roster was full of guys that hadn't been featured in a crossover fighting game before. Guys like Viewtiful Joe (Henshin tribute gone horribly wrong), Frank West (zombie slaying photojournalist from Dead Rising), Batsu (Rival Schools' main character, who also happens to be REALLY ANGRY all the time), Alex (the Street Fighter III grappler), and Soki (heavy swordsman from Onimusha).

This was refreshing, because Most of these guys are representing franchises that rarely get love from Capcom nowadays. They also kicked lots of ass. Now Viewtiful Joe made his way into Marvel Vs. Capcom 3, and I can do without Alex, as Mike Haggar is a much more appreciated grappler, but It's a crime that the other three that I mentioned didn't make the cut.

Apparently Frank was near completion before being pulled from Marvel 3, due to some technical mumbo jumbo about his hyper combos filling the screen with zombies and crashing the game. I'm not a developer or anything, but if the guy worked on the inferior Wii, why wouldn't he work here? Worst case scenario, retool the moves to include less summoning zombies and more smashing people over the head with 42 inch TVs. People love Frank, he's found cameos in much weirder games like Lost Planet, and with Dead Rising 2 and it's expansions still being hot, this really seems like a big miss. Hopefully we'll at least get Chuck Greene somewhere down the line. He could bring some very interesting gameplay with his use of combo weapons instead of a reliance on zombies.



While Marvel 3 and Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom certainly aren't the same game, they share a few obvious similarities. Batsu was one of the best characters in TvC and he probably would have been damn good in this one, especially considering Ryu was retooled the be a zoning character again with the removal of The Universal Air Dash. With his dive kicks and Tardy Counters, he could be the Shoto for people like me, who prefer insane rushdown techniques. It would be nice to get Some more love for Rival Schools at all, and with the inclusion of other old school throwbacks like Mike Haggar, now would be a great opportunity. Hell, Morrigan can represent Darkstalkers in every game under the damn sun even though that series lost relevance around 1998, so why not diversify?

Stylistically the guy would be at home here. Rival Schools had a host of strange fighters, but Batsu was more down to earth. His gameplay would be an asset to many teams, and truthfully I feel that he'd fill Akuma's slot a lot better. Akuma only makes it in because he was the first real crossover character, being a hidden fighter in X-Men: Children of the Atom.


I assure you, this isn't M.U.G.E.N.

Soki could he hit or miss with the gameplay, as we already have armored heavy hitters in Hulk and Sentinel, but really any representation of the Onimusha series would have been appreciated, such as Sammonouske, the hero of the original Onimusha. He could play an interesting game, with his three interchangeable swords giving him tools for multiple situations. There aren't enough characters with multiple stances outside of Soul Calibur in my book. I am well aware of the fact that most Onimusha characters are based on the likenesses of famous celebrities, making licensing difficult, but one must also take into account that this is the same company that found a loophole to get Spiderman into the game, and he's licensed to Activision right now.

The fact that this game completely lacks Megaman in any form us a crime. A crime punishable by the death penalty. Zero and Tron Bonne representing the series is nice, but they aren't the blue bomber. To add insult to injury, they both have blue alternate colors!


She's laughing at your small penis.

Capcom says they didn't include Megaman because he didn't bring anything interesting to the table, and they gave us Arthur to fill his niche. I'm all for Ghosts n' Goblins getting some much needed attention, but can you seriously look me in the eye and tell me that a guy who has ten games worth of special abilities to pull from can't have a worthwhile move set? It worked fine in the prior MVC games. What's so different now?

Hell, give us Megaman Trigger. His ability to switch his arms to all sorts of wacky things would have opened many doors for gameplay. It did in Tatsunoko Vs. Capcom, even if I never played as him! Give us Rockman.EXE! He's from a whole other world, with different rules. I refuse to believe that his multiple options for battle chips and style changes wouldn't give somebody on the dev team an idea. Fuck Megaman X, though. He's boring.


Sorry, X.

Other notable mentions on the Capcom side are Strider Hiryu and Ruby Heart. I know that people hate Ruby, but I can't help but think that her special moves would look amazing with Marvel 3's graphics. Plus, she was created specifically for the Vs. series, So you know that her play style would transition well. Strider is a fan favorite, with a bag of tricks deeper than Sam Walton's grave. If anyone deserves consideration for a DLC slot, it's definitely him. I doubt licensing would be an issue, considering after the longshot of including him in the original Marvel Vs. Capcom he found his way into Namco X Capcom, the ill fated Capcom Fighting All-Stars, and Strider 2, one of the most amazing Playstation games ever. And thanks to a guy named Cl0ckw0rk, he was also one of the few characters in Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 that could keep up with the more competitive teams that plagued the entire community for the past decade, proving that in a game with fifty six characters, it's sometimes good to pick from more than the same six that everyone else uses.

It's probably evident that I'm a huge Capcom fan, but I have some wants for the Marvel side as well. However most of these are purely from a fan's perspective, as the way I understand it, Marvel handpicked the characters from their stable that they felt would best promote the future of their story lines, with seldom deviations.

My major gripe with Marvel's side is the exclusion of Cyclops. In fact, he's one of the only characters that I was absolutely sure would have made it in. The guy is not only leader of the X-Men, but spokesman of the entire mutant race currently. How Marvel decided that Storm is more relevant as X-Men leader is amazing. It MUST have come down to appeasing the hardcore MSS (Magno, Storm, Sentinel) playing crowd from Marvel Vs. Capcom 2. Nerd rage!


Retroactively, this is more of a parting handshake.

After seeing some of the awesome tweaks and new tools that Spiderman has received in this game, I can't help but wonder what Venom would have gotten. Now I'm not talking about tossing Eddie Brock back into the suit, I'm thinking of using Mac Gargan. I loved the guy during Dark Reign, and think that his character's attitude and mannerisms would have lended itself beautifully to this game's style and animation. The voice work would have been astounding, too. To hell with Flash Thomson. The Punisher did that gimmick years ago... Twice.

Even though Norman Osborne isn't currently donning the mantle, I firmly believe that the Green Goblin would have been a great addition to this game, which currently lacks any sort of representation of Spiderman's rogues gallery. If Capcom tried hard, they really could have made the glider work. They put the work in for M.O.D.O.K. After all.

I haven't been following him in Marvel, so I don't know how relevant he would be, but I think Ghost Rider would be a fun guy to play as. Obviously he couldn't fight on his bike, but it could be used in his hyper combos, and he has plenty of other tools at his disposal, such as his chains and mastery of hellfire. The dreaded Penance Stare could be his level 3 and everything. He worked fine on foot in Marvel Ultimate Alliance, as well has his movie licensed God of War clone of a game, so it's not like fighting without his bike is out of character for him.

Lastly, goddamn Iron Fist! A martial artist with complete mastery over his inner chi seems like something that was created specifically for a fighting game to begin with! They even cocktease us by giving him a cameo in Ryu's ending!

In closing:

No joke, I almost got run over by a jeep full of bros blasting the halo theme that night.

Everyone should get it on the 370