Marvel vs Capcom 3 (vanilla) - Archived Review

Originally published March, 2011.

A solid decade has passed since the forces of Marvel and Capcom collided in a fighting game. Since then, the expectations of gameplay as well as presentation have certainly changed a great deal in the genre and now the third installment is hoping to capitalize on the revitalized fighting game enthusiasm. But is the game as good as the many fans hoped it would be? Was it worth the wait?

Story

There’s a very thin layer of story to this game that tries to build some context as to why the two sides are fighting each other. There is no tournament or anything like that. It is simply some of the villains from both sides seek more power, a rift in the universe is torn open and the worlds flood into each other. At first, everyone is an enemy, until they find an overall threat and combine together to stop it. A very brief synopsis, but that’s the story in a nutshell.

Every character in the game has a profile and an ending specific to each one that can be unlocked by beating Arcade Mode. However, with 35+ characters, that task seems a little daunting as each character ending is based on who gets the last hit on the final boss. It’s a nice reward for the profiles just to see how the guys at Capcom and Marvel rank their characters, but this isn’t a task to tackle in one night. But story isn’t what most people care about when it comes to playing fighting games anyway.

Mechanics

If you can recall the style of the last game a decade ago, Marvel Vs Capcom 2 was not an easy beast to tame. It was already overwhelming enough deciding on an effective team of three from the 50+ character roster, let alone mastering the very touchy controls. Using assist characters in an effective way, entering special move commands, tagging out, and air juggling all got mushed together in a big mess on the button pad. Perhaps the only easy thing to do (surprisingly) was the triple special attack with the press of a single button.

That level of simplicity seems to be what the developers for 3 kept in mind while designing the game. The biggest improvement 3 brings to the table is making the game easy to pick up and play. The face buttons are set up similar to games like Blazblue and Guilty Gear where there are three main attack buttons (low, medium, heavy) and a special attack. The special attack for this game is a lift attack, also similar to Guilty Gear, which allows players to take their opponent to the sky and continue a combo in the air. In addition to these main attacks are the assist buttons. On a controller they are the bumper buttons that basically allow players to call in their characters from off-screen for an assist attack or, if held down, tag in to replace a character.

Much like the previous title, MVC 3 has players choose a team of three before the match starts. With each character they have three different assist attacks to choose from and whatever is chosen determines what types of attacks they will do during a match. For instance: Spider-Man has a projectile attack, a swinging attack, and an uppercut attack. If you want him to focus on opponents rushing in from the air you might choose the swing or uppercut so, if need be, the tap of the Assist Button will bring him in at the opportune time. Likewise, his projectile can stop and hold opponents in their tracks so this can be useful in rushing in and catching people off guard, or extending a combo. It’s all a matter of choice. These are all special moves that normally require an input on the d-pad or fight stick, but are instead mapped to one button, making the use of assist characters that much more appealing and easy.

Super moves are also simple to do. Games like Blazblue require some significant d-pad rotations or Super Street Fighter IV requires two inputs of the same motion, yet MVC3 only requires one. All it takes to do the average super move is the quarter-circle motion (rotating the thumb from the down position to the forward position) and two of the attack buttons (doesn’t matter which). It was done with the intention of keeping the action in the game as fast paced as possible. This makes it significantly easier to pull off a big move in the middle of a combo without destroying your thumbs in the process.

This does not automatically make the game better, it simply makes it more accessible to the general public. Many times a MVC 2 arcade cabinet would remain empty for lengthy periods of time till someone who didn’t know the complexities of the game would play for a few minutes before giving up. While with 3, plenty of average Joes can play the game and pull off lengthy combos without even trying.

Players can’t simply button-mash to win, however. Someone who practices a set team on a regular basis, knows the strengths and weaknesses, as well as the legitimate combos is going to wipe the floor with any challenger. But the simplicity of the mechanics makes the game more suitable for a group of friends in the living room—like Super Street Fighter IV, but with more speed.

Gameplay

Right off the bat, anyone who played the previous game will notice the significantly smaller roster. 35+ characters is nothing to scoff at, but add another 20 and it’ll be closer to what it once was. However, this doesn’t sacrifice quality of choice by any means. The overall feeling from playing with all the characters is a greater sense of balance within the smaller selection. Not balance that every character is so tightly woven that there is a constant game of Rock-Paper-Scissors being played for every frame like Street Fighter: Third Strike. There are still characters that are top tier in terms of accessibility and combo length (a couple infinite combos), but it seems like the developers really wanted a variety to the selection with the reduction of clones and characters that obviously overpowered the competition.

The previous game may have had a bigger roster, but when it came to what people chose it was down to 10 possible characters or less because so many of them lacked the priority or move list to compete with those top 10. Here, Dante of Devil May Cry may be extremely versatile and powerful, but even his vitality can be quickly diminished by a well-placed combo from strong characters like X-23 or Ammaterasu that have rather low health. Even particular characters require a type of team strategy to use properly. Some are most useful as an assist character like Dormamu who has devastating projectiles that can zone opponents easily. And some are the trump card of the team like Pheonix; she is strong with her projectiles but can take only a few hits before being eliminated. However, if you manage to change her into Dark Pheonix during the match, suddenly the strongest character of the game is on your team. Relying on one character is not a safe strategy, but having an ace up the sleeve is a good way to trip up the competition.

And that’s what sets this game apart from other fighting games is the strategy involved. There’s always a strategy needed when facing an opponent in any fighting game, but with MVC3 there is so much to look for in the teams. The depth to the gameplay requires you become more involved. Fighting Sagat in SSFIV evokes its own strategies on how to handle that type of opponent, but with two more characters per team, the extra variable makes you consider who and how to attack with whom.

Even with this strategy in mind, the simplified controls keep the game fun without being overwhelming. One of the advantages that MVC3 and SSFIV will always have over games like Blazblue is that the moves are straightforward pull off. Combos are simple and there isn’t so much precision required. So not as much training is needed in order to simply win a match with style. If training is what you want to do though, there are options.

The game has usual modes including the usual training mode as well as the mission mode that has become more common in fighting games as of late. Mission mode is simply a series of moves stacked together to make a combo for the player to attempt at recreating. However, for whatever reason, the developers didn’t include an “example mode” for the missions. This is also true in SSFIV where a series of inputs are presented, but the sense of timing and conditions are unclear. The solution is a simple video that plays an example of what needs to be done. Blazblue got it right in the last installment, so why is this type of thing still happening? Either negligence or laziness.

The online fighting system uses practically the same net code as Super Street Fighter IV. This basically means that whatever online experience you have with SSFIV connection-wise, you’ll be having a similar experience with MVC3. Personal experience has never born much fruit online with Street Fighter’s net code, but others say it’s one of the best, so perhaps your online experience will be better.

As if the programmers knew that internet slowdown would kill a game like this, they added a little tweak to the training mode. In preparation for lag, you can actually adjust the settings in training mode to simulate what a match would be like at 0-5 bars. It doesn’t exactly evoke much confidence in the online experience, but for the dedicated enough it’s probably useful.

Back onto the subject of balance, the game ebbs and flows. It’s definitely much more balanced than the previous installment, but far from as objective as some other fighting games out there. In fact, it plays that fault as a strength in some ways. Unlike in Street Fighter where the number of hits a player can successfully pull of is limited, in MVC3, combos can go on for lengthy periods of time, sometimes to the point that a character with full health can die from a single combo. And despite it being relatively easy to start a combo that can go on for ages, there really aren’t enough safeguards against the typical assault, like you’d find in Blazblue with a Barrier Block or Barrier Burst. It’s less Street Fighter III: Third Strike more Melty Blood (cult favorite 2D fighting game). Yet, it is still fun to play. Because it forces players to be more cautious with their strategies, knowing that the smallest mistake could quickly mean death for their team.

It’s the broken style that actually makes the game faster, more chaotic, and exciting. There are characters with distinct advantages over others, but it seems like the game will escape the fate of the previous installment with more than a top 10 list. Characters like Arthur from Ghosts and Goblins or Viewtiful Joe seem like throw away units at first, but the short stature and move list work well against the competition. And characters like Dormamu are extremely slow, likely to get annihilated by the rush characters, but can stack the damage high with some simple (cheap) tactics.

What it really comes down to is finding the team that fits your playstyle. And whether or not you will actually enjoy the game depends on the amount of patience you have for losing very quickly. If you’re willing to laugh it off and try again, then by all means give it a shot, but sore losers be warned. Capcom made an announcement prior to the release of this game and hasn’t brought it up since—possibly as a method of tricking the suckers—about how their online multiplayer would handle rage-quitters. No one wants to wait to get into a match then have a sore loser end it prematurely simply because the match wasn’t going their way. Well the game keeps track of how many times that happens with your account and whose fault it was for the match ending. As that number adds up, so do the chances for being set up with others who play that way. So, in the end, rage-quitters will play rage-quitters and there will never be a completed match. Want to avoid this fate of an eternity of incomplete matches? Stick it out and suck it up!

Presentation

There have been some outcries against the presentation of the game, more to do with the visual presentation than the audio department. With the push towards 3-D graphics, 2-D sprites have become a thing of the past, as far as Capcom is concerned. And while I don’t personally agree with that—Blazblue is a perfect example of two-dimensional sprites that look and move really well—MVC3’s graphics are pretty impressive.

It’s actually using the same stunning engine that Resident Evil 5 runs on. The characters aren’t gritty and rough like those in RE5, but there are plenty of shadows to behold. Mainly, the presentation could use more light on the characters themselves. The colors are vibrant and deep, but in terms of the contrast, there are a lot of dark shadows that help make the game look more dynamic at the cost of covering up the details in the dark. That’s the main complaint when it comes to physical presentation, but overall a small one.

But even with this flaw, it was obviously intentional. The whole aesthetic of the game is toward comic books. When selecting characters, the team looks like the cover of a comic book with a barcode in the bottom corner. Even the main screen has the characters looks like they were printed on a traditional comic book printer with spots on their skin.

Everything else about the way the game looks is fantastic. The special moves are flashy, the combos are flashy, everything is either going to make your eyes bleed or give you a seizure but you’ll be stunned at the very least by how crazy everything gets on the screen. Keeping with the comic book style, a character’s special move will tear open the background like a rip in a comic book that has a galaxy burning behind it. This game will light up a living room without any difficulty; and you’ll enjoy lighting things up with a triple attack super combo, because when the entire team gets on the screen a vortex opens up behind them as they blast into the opponents, you know this game looks good.

Sound design is top notch as well. All the moves have particular sound effects that are especially appropriate. Dante is an example of a character that requires a plethora of sounds with his wide array of weapons: flame swords, lighting guitar, rocket launcher, energy gauntlets, the retribution sword, and his pistols Ebony and Ivory. All ring through clear and will give you a rush with a superior sound system.

The voice acting is also good. Dante has his joker personality from Devil May Cry 3 with all the “yahoos!” to toss around during a match. Insults specific to certain characters are thrown down at the start of some matches that add a little flavor. Though it doesn’t have the dramatic and exciting intros of Blazblue or King of Fighters, having Captain America say to Mega-Man’s buddy “You’re name’s Zero? Hope you don’t fight like one,” is a nice touch. It’s also pretty cool to have the characters shout out the names of their allies as they tag out if only for the sake of hearing the Hulk screw up everyone’s name in some way. And you can always change the language you want the Capcom characters (Marvel are English only) to speak to Japanese if the voice-acting doesn’t meet your standards. But with voice acting pros like Jennifer Hale (Bastila from KOTOR) to do the voices of Pheonix and X-23, it’s hard not to appreciate the effort in presentation.

Finally there is the music. A big step up from the past, though still nothing truly remarkable. The songs are relatively forgettable, save the few exceptions that are remixes of the horrible character select song from MVC2. Nothing truly stands out about the music except for when certain characters make their entrance. Occasionally, if the match isn’t going well for you, switching to another character will cause their theme song to start playing. Such as Ammaterasu with the distinct Japanese style of music or Dante’s hard rock mix from DMC3. It’s a nice little touch.

Conclusion

Marvel Vs Capcom 3 is for the gamers who want a new wild fighting game to have fun with. It’s for gamers who want a new type of mash-up experience to see some new Capcom characters take on some classic and new Marvel characters. If you’re competitive at all though, be prepared to train and stick it out for the long haul because the game is easy to play, difficult to master. The new additions to the roster and the various wild cards make the experience feel new, while the returning veterans help the game feel familiar. Though it may not be the sequel many people were expecting after a decade long wait, it is currently one of the best fighting games you can find for the home console today.