I don’t know whether or not to applaud the diehard fans of Marvel vs Capcom 2 for their nine-year support of the game’s competitive scene. Even in the face of other fighting game franchises getting revamped sequels and the birth of newer, more modern games like Blazblue, they still stood by their old hag; the aging, moldy jazz saxophonist that is Marvel vs Capcom 2. Maybe they’re just really huge Halle Berry fans to the point where they always have to use Storm regardless of the actress’s actual involvement in the role. Maybe they’ve clung to the hope that if they keep depositing quarters in arcade machines and investing in the numerous ports released over the years, that Capcom will heed their cries and create a Marvel vs Capcom 3. Maybe they’re legit insane and like the soundtrack. Who knows.
But in any event, Backbone Entertainment is at it again. After making last year’s affectionate labour of love in Street Fighter 2 HD Remix, they give us the neglected and jealous older brother in Marvel vs Capcom 2. This resentful sibling tries hard to mimic the adorable innocence of a his infant brother with a few new features, but he can’t quite earn the awe of parents everywhere the way the newborn baby’s cutting-edge HD graphics can. That is to say, there are a few new graphical options, such as a filter that seems to serve one purpose and one purpose only; make the Colossus sprite not look so antiquated and ancient. There also exists an option to use portions on an HD screen that would otherwise be filled with a black void to display background parts of the stage. But certain in-game elements didn’t quite adapt to the change. Well it’s either that, or Jin is in command of a giant, levitating, robotic hand.
And there’s still that awful, dreadful, abominable, alarming, appalling, atrocious, distressing, ghastly, godawful, hideous, horrendous, icky, rotten, shameful, shuddersome, tragic, distaining jazz music from the original game. Thank you thesaurus.com. I still can’t wrap my mind around it; what the frig compelled Capcom to include this generic lounge soundtrack in their rabid-paced superhero fighting game? But, this being a next generation system, you can replace the music with something more appropriate on your hard drive. Like, say, any other song than the ones included.
As for the original game, Marvel vs Capcom 2 is a 56-character, 3 on 3 fighting game fiesta. It’s the kind of game Midway was trying to lambast with last year’s Mortal Kombat vs DC Universe, and well…their asses got bankrupt. Unlike in past ports, there’s no strenuous grinding to unlock the entire roster, as the entire cast of characters is available from the start. In any given fight, you control one fighter and unleash his or her giant super laser attacks and unbreakable air combos, but are free to tag in your partners at any time like a wrestling match. (Because you see, professional wrestling has influenced the entire world in one way or another.) Or, you can press one or two other buttons to summon one of your partners for a quickie cheap shot behind the referee’s back like the villain tag team you are. (Screw Cable, the Hart Foundation would easily have been top-tier in this game.) Somewhere between the 25-foot jumps and the super special attacks with 6 characters on screen at once firing multiple death laser beams, it’ll dawn on you that this is a pretty damned frantic fighting game.
What little presence of a story amounts to “there’s a big evil guy called Abyss who walks around the world being all evil-like. The ever-friendly pirate Ruby Heart sails her boat across the galaxies to assemble a group of the best Marvel and Capcom heroes to stop Abyss from being evil.” A group that includes Shuma Gorath, but a group nonetheless. Arcade mode consists of a series of battles against randomly-generated teams of opponents, followed by an epic, 3-stage battle with the television screen-filling monster Abyss. In, say, a Tekken game, Abyss would present a dire challenge to even the most legendary martial artist with his lava pit attacks and lunges with his giant maw. But in a game where just about any character can fire screen-filling lasers that Dr Evil would deem death-ray-worthy, this gargantuan final boss is rather pathetic. So the Arcade mode is insignificant, existing only because fighting games need Arcade modes to appease the gods.
Skimming over the character roster, one gets the idea that Capcom just stopped giving a damn about consistency or balance and just threw in the game whoever the hell they wanted to. Any fighter that ever appeared in a Versus game dating all the way to X-Men: Children of the Atom is here, short of Apocalypse. (And wouldn’t Apoc have been something?) Also included are some logical additions (Cable and more Darkstalkers characters) illogical additions (Marrow? Wolverine with bone claws? Was Capcom going through some kind of human anatomy fascination stage during development?) and downright baffling additions (I still don’t know what an Amingo is. I’m still not quite sure what a SonSon is, and I played the original SonSon game.) Marvel vs Capcom 2 excels in its high dicking-around potential. Want to goof off with friends as you pit an all-Avengers Team against SonSon, Jin and Captain Commando’s group of obscure Capcom characters? Go ahead.
What you can’t do is take your Ambiguous Alliance and pit them against dedicated MvC2 players in a competitive environment. I’ve always felt that tournament players spent a lot more time studying and analyzing this game more than Capcom developers spent creating it. As a result, only a handful of characters can compete in a serious environment; these are usually the ones with ungodly speed, flight capabilities and ridiculously long air combos. I knew Storm and Magneto were powerful mutants, but they really shouldn’t be taking out Captain America or the Hulk in a battle of straight fisticuffs, and yet here they are lunging headfirst into an unbreakable combo of death against the mightiest of deities. It takes a great deal of dexterity and skill to play as the lightning fast Sentinel (I’m baffled too) so I won’t discredit a high-level player’s skill. But I never quite understood why people still play this game at a high-competitive level after nine years. A lot has happened in nine years; new fighting games, new consoles, new women in your life (assuming these Marvel players lust for the female touch, but you never know.) But that so many people are still into this game means that there’s a certain appeal to being a greater master of the Storm/Magneto/Sentinel team than anyone else, so I guess I’ll stop embarrassing myself and leave it at that.
Fortunately, the deal-maker in this particular port of Marvel vs Capcom 2 is the included online play. Insofar as I can tell, there’s no lag when playing online but perhaps my eyes aren’t as sharp as some of the more devoted followers of Magneto’s cause. But it is what it is, and you can either play quickie Ranked matches or set up a lobby and take turns fighting the winner with up to six people involved. And there seems to be a variety of people playing too, from your mutant-hating Sentinel supporters to casual fools like me that just want to goof around with a Wolverine/Wolverine team. The most flattering message I’ve ever gotten was when some random stranger on Xbox Live sent me a message saying that I ruin the game with my attack spamming. Thank you, whoever you are, and learn to block.
When I look at the package as a whole, Marvel vs Capcom 2 is more than worth 1200 points. Even if the game shows its age in some shameful ways and I’d rather have seen Backbone make some kind of attempt to at least fix the balancing issues. But perhaps this game is simply beyond any kind of help, that perhaps making Cable not fire gunshots with a mere heavy punch or any other tampering will cause a rip in the space/time continuum. So not barring any lost hopes of this game getting a similar treatment to that of Street Fighter 2 HD, Marvel vs Capcom 2 is a solid piece of deranged fighting game glory.
4 stars
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