flash-hammer's Full Review: Marvel vs. Capcom 2 for Dreamcast
Possibly the most successful Capcom 2D fighter, hell fighter full-stop, since Streetfighter 2, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2: A New Age of Heroes, hereby referred to as MvC2 for the sake of brevity, was a game that was the sole reason a lot of gamers bought a Sega Dreamcast. After the success of Marvel Vs. Capcom, everyones favourite franchise milkers returned a few years later with what was possibly their biggest fighter ever. That's in terms of roster, scope, critical and financial success.
While it remains a 2D fighter in terms of graphics and engine, MvC2 is really quite far removed from the Streetfighter series of games in many ways. First of all, while Tag-Team 2D fighters had been done before, Capcom took a new step towards cramming as much into a fight as possible by making it 3-on-3, with players being able to swap between their three selected fighters at any point during the match. This meant that the game eschewed the familiar 3-Round format, and instead, the player fights until the entire team sees their health bar's completely emptied.
While this makes playing the game a lot more fast and furious than your average Streetfighter, it still works on the same basic principles of special moves being performed via D-Pad rotations or charging one direction and quickly tapping the other, but performing super moves is a little different to how it works in the standard SF games. While in those games, Super Moves were performed via double-d-pad motions, in the Versus games, they have always been performed via the single motion, but pressing all of the type of attack at once. For example, Ryu's hadouken is performed by performing a Quarter-Circle-Forward(QCF) and pressing a punch button. His Shinkuu Hadouken, his super move, is performed the same way, except both punch buttons have to be pressed.
Yes, you read that correct, both. You see, unlike the SF games, and all previous Versus games for that matter, MvC2 only uses 4 attack buttons(Strong and Light Punch and Kick), in a very SNK-esque manner. This means that the other two buttons, usually used for Medium strength attacks, 'call in' your non-active partners to perform a one-off attack on your enemy, much like the helpers in the first game.
The game boasts, when everyone is unlocked, an unprecedented roster of 56 characters from the Marvel Universe and Capcom's many games. The game takes in every character to appear as a playable fighter in a previous Versus series game, apart from the Japan-only Norimaru and the pallette swap bonus fighters of the prequel, as well as numerous new additions to the series, as well as some characters created from scratch.
The expansive roster is both the game's coolest and worst point. While it's awesome to see Capcom including obscure characters such as Hayato from Star Gladiator and Jill Valentine from Resident Evil, was there really any point in putting in lame new characters such as a female pirate named Ruby Heart and a cactus in a sombrero named Amingo? while the latter is pretty amusing, personally I would rather have seen Capcom incorporate some of it's more legendary characters. Where are the Final Fight gang? Arthur from Ghosts N' Goblins appeared as a helper in the first game, why didn't they put him in here?
The work on the Marvel side is equally frustrating. The major new introduction is the game-breaking Cable, but more on that later, with the other most notable addition, for the wrong reason, being Marrow, a very obscure X-Men character. When your game is missing Blade, Nightcrawler, any of the Fantastic Four or Thor, you put in Marrow. How many of you have even heard of Marrow? she is slightly better known that Shuma Gorath.
There are other detracting points from the cast. First of all, you start the game with over half of them requiring unlocking. "great! it will add replay value right?" wrong. While I've complete the arcade modes of every Capcom fighter I've ever played with every character, this game expects you to play through it multiple times to unlock points for characters. Had they done this in any other 2D fighter of theirs, I wouldn't have complained, but this game doesn't have endings. While I know a lot of gamers don't pay attention to them, a lot of gamers don't pay attention to hygeine, it doesn't mean all of us should do without, especially if we have to complete the game numerous times to unlock the roster.
As this would indicate, MvC2 is lacking in a story. The last boss is a shape-shifter named Abyss, that is comically easy to defeat.
And then, when you unlock them, you realise that other hilarious corners were cost. Iron Man and War Machine, who was already Capcom's laziest attempt at a new character ever, are basically identical. Shall we count how many fighters follow the standard Shotokan formula?(fireball and dragon-punch special moves) well there are the obvious ones like Ryu, Ken, Akuma and Dan, as well as Morrigan, Cable, Captain America, Spiderman...hell I can't be bothered. The fact that there are two almost identical versions of Wolverine one with bone-claws, one adamantium sickens me. They didn't even put one of them in his old, cool red and yellow outfit.
Speaking of Cable, that brings up the game's other hilarious point. It's possibley the most imbalanced fighting game ever. Out of the 56 characters, only about 6 of them are actually any use, Cable being the most famous, especially due to the fact you can chain three of his Hyper-Viper-Beams together.
You see, also unlike the Streetfighter games, MvC2 features some incredibly OTT combo moves, with the number of hits going well into double figures on most occasions. While this opens doors for people who want to learn phenomenally large combos, it also makes the game incredibly easy to play for people who have no skill, by simply picking a team with Cable, they can spam away with HVBx3 and win easily.
This really hinders the enjoyment I got out of the game, knowing that while it can be fun with all of these characters, the fact that even a moron can beat you if he picks the right characters really defeats the game. While I can still have somewhat fun fights with my friends, because we don't tend to play using any high level tiers or anything, it's still a bit crappy when my friend who really sucks at the game haphazardly picks a team of Cable, Wolverine and Iron Man and basically cheap-kills everything before him.
Controlling the game actually works pretty well on a standard Dreamcast controller, given that it only requires 4 face buttons. However, I know a lot of people don't like using the analogue stick, and the DC's D-Pad is lethal, so a good arcade stick is probably recommended.
Graphically is another aspect in which the game promises much, but ultimately falters. It has some nice 3D rendered backgrounds, although most of them are of non-descript places like caves and icebergs. You are trying to tell me that in all of Marvel Comics and the Capcom franchises, they couldn't come up with a better stage than a friggin iceberg?
What makes this nice rendering job stick out even worse is the sprites. While the ones created for the game look ok, the game is really a hodgepodge of sprites from various games, especially on the Capcom side. We have sprites from the Streetfighter Alpha games, previous Versus series games, and most hilariously of all, the same Morrigan sprite from Darkstalkers. Naturally several of these clash, not only with each other, but with the quality backgrounds, creating a pretty disjointed look to the entire game.
Sonically is easily the game's worst aspect. Almost so bad it's hilarious. First of all we have the music. Oh dear god where to begin. You know all the cool theme tunes of Capcom fighters of the past? the ones that stuck in your head for years? the soundtrack for MvC2 is nothing like those. Instead we have some bizarre lounge-music. Funny enough right? oh no, it gets better, bizarre lounge music...complete with banal lyrics. Seriously, try not to laugh as the game declares it's "gonna take you for a ride", followed by some brass going off.
The character voices when they shout their battle cries are ok, but dear god this announcer is abominable. He sounds far too excited, although granted he isn't Capcom's worst. Streetfighter Alpha 3 made me look for a silencing option more quickly, and the game would be superseded in sonic hilarity by Capcom Vs. SNK 2 upon it's release.
When all is said and done, my review isn't going to even put a dent in the worldwide popularity of Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, but the fact is that I can't bring myself to love a game that becomes so labourious to play. While it may be about the only fighting game to still have an arcade following, as well as the largest roster I've ever seen on a fighter, the game really lacks a lot of the soul and charm of a Streetfighter related game. Even the prequels had this going for them.
While I accept that this is still a fairly solid, and even moderately enjoyable game on 2-Player, I can't really say I enjoyed the game all that much, hence it's pretty low score. I will still recommend the game, basically to fans of the Capcom and Marvel universes, mainly because they might get a kick out of seeing so many of their heroes in the one game.
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