This Week in Retro: Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 (Patreon)

February 24, 2000: The Vs. Series Jumps the Shark with Marvel vs Capcom 2

by Diamond Feit

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is one of the biggest, most beloved fighting games of all time. 

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 stands today as a clear signifier that the 2D boom of fighting games was on the way out in 2000, when it was released. 

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is a work of art that should be in a museum, or at the very least perpetually available on all platforms. 

Marvel vs Capcom 2 is a mess. 

All of these statements can be true, for Marvel vs. Capcom 2 contains multitudes. Of Everything.

Rolling from the success of Street Fighter II, Capcom spent the rest of the 1990s making lots of 2D fighting games. The same year as the "last" arcade version of Street Fighter II came out (Super Street Fighter II Turbo, 1994) Capcom also released DarkStalkers and X-Men: Children of the Atom, the latter of which starred licensed characters from Marvel Comics. X-Men: CotA was still a 1-on-1 fighting game, but the characters were capable of leaping high into the air, punching and kicking their opponents as they went, opening the door to incredibly long juggle combos. X-Men was quickly followed by Marvel Super Heroes (1995), which drew inspiration from the then-recent Infinity Gauntlet storyline (maybe you've heard of it?). Mainly, though, it served as an excuse for a random assortment of Marvel characters to fight each other—and I do mean random.

As the Capcom library of characters grew, the directive was clear: Let them fight. One year later, everything came together in X-Men vs. Street Fighter (1996) as X-Men characters fought against the newly-redesigned anime-style Street Fighter II characters from the Street Fighter Alpha series. Super jumping and air combos were now the bedrock of the series, but X-Men vs. Street Fighter added a crucial new feature: Tag-team combat. All battles were 2-on-2, and players could switch characters at any time with an option to summon both characters for dual super moves. I can still remember telling anyone who would listen to me that it was the most amazing game I played all year.

Turnaround was fast: Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter (note the departure from just "X-Men") came out in 1997 and added a new feature called Variable Assist, allowing players not simply to switch characters at any time, but to summon their partner onscreen for a (predetermined) attack before leaping away. The next year saw the very first Marvel vs. Capcom game, completing the switch from "characters vs. characters" to "brand vs. brand." No longer bound by any semblance of continuity or team affiliations, Marvel vs. Capcom became a mini celebration of both companies' legacies. The Variable Assist was now a random character assigned to each player before a match. These characters ranged from reused assets from past Vs. games (e.g. Iceman) to newly created sprites of famous faces (e.g. Arthur from Ghosts ’n Goblins). Despite a relatively small roster of 15 playable characters, this grab-bag of support characters (20 in total) gave Marvel vs. Capcom the sensation it was bursting with life.

It would be a long two years of waiting for the sequel, but Marvel vs. Capcom 2 exploded into arcades on February 24, 2000. The ’90s were over; a new millennium had arrived, and Capcom went all-out in creating this ultimate chapter of the series. Fighting games, especially 2D games, were all about quantity of choices. Each game in a series should expand on what came before it, adding new characters and giving players a reason to study the newest version instead of sticking with what they already know. When The King of Fighters '98 launched with 51 playable characters, it was unheard of. Two years later, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 featured 56 characters, a near-complete collection of fighters from all the X-Men/Marvel games to date with an assortment of new Street Fighter, DarkStalkers, and other fighters thrown in for good measure. Even characters from 3D, games like Hayato Kanzaki and Jill Valentine, shed a dimension to join the fight—a true all-star cast.

In expanding the roster, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 dropped the dedicated support characters in favor of new 3-on-3 matches while still maintaining the fast-tag and joint super move options. Players now chose three characters apiece while also selecting a "type" for each which determined their behavior as an assist character. This meant that it was possible for six different characters to be on screen at the same time, all performing different actions, each with their own life meter. To call Marvel vs Capcom 2 "chaotic" is an understatement.

The expansion from two to three fighters per team was a costly decision, though, as compromises had to be made for Marvel vs. Capcom 2 to work. Up until this point, Capcom's fighting games had almost universally settled on the Street Fighter II six-button layout—three punches and three kicks—and almost all characters in the game came from a series using that control scheme. But to be able to summon two different teammates easily, two of the six buttons became dedicated swap buttons, leaving only four buttons for attacks. That doesn't sound like a huge difference (the Neo Geo had plenty of fighting games and only used four buttons, sometimes fewer), but it meant that characters with established strategies and combos simply worked… differently. Medium attacks only became possible during combos because the only way to throw a medium was by pressing light attack twice, an inelegant solution to be sure.

The aesthetic choices in Marvel vs. Capcom 2 were also highly representative of the era, which is to say "shaky at best." As discussed in many Retronauts articles and podcasts, this was a time when 2D graphics were seen as fundamentally inferior to 3D graphics. So even as Marvel vs. Capcom 2 was celebrating the collective efforts of pixel artists from a dozen different games, the backgrounds were made entirely in 3D. Adding to the disconnect was the fact that these backgrounds had nothing to do with Marvel or Capcom. Earlier games in the series had used famous locations in the Marvel Universe or old Capcom games. Games that celebrate video games' past still do this today; look at the variety of stages in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate or even PlayStation All-Star Battle Royale. Yet Marvel vs. Capcom 2 gave us… a circus? A frozen clock tower? A spooky cave?

And then there’s the Marvel vs. Capcom 2 soundtrack, easily the most controversial element at the time... and even today. In GameFan magazine, which assigned review scores not just to games but to the individual elements of each game, I remember one editor rated the soundtrack not with a number but with an angry emoticon. Past games in the series had featured music based on or reminiscent of past musical themes from the original source material, or at very least maintained a furious beat that befit the foreground action. The soundtrack in Marvel vs. Capcom 2 seems tailor-made for people who thought the best music in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night was "I Am The Wind." It's… light jazz? With jaunty pianos, tooting horns, and even (apropos of nothing) voiced lyrics? The music isn’t bad, really, but like the fancy 3D backgrounds, it feels slapped onto the game from another project entirely. It's certainly not what I wanted to hear in 2000 when I was trying to pummel people with the Juggernaut.

Marvel vs. Capcom 2 would prove to be the last game in the series for an entire decade, and I wonder if Capcom didn't make the game cognizant of that fact. It was 2000, and the writing was on the wall: 2D was "dead" and arcades were on the decline as console sales skyrocketed. Home ports of arcade games were no longer deep compromises; a faithful adaptation of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 would appear on Japanese Dreamcasts barely a month after its arcade debut. I was still a huge arcade fan at the time, but I certainly put more hours that year playing 2D fighting games on my Dreamcast than on any arcade cabinet. Maybe those (admittedly high quality) 3D backgrounds and light music were meant to make the game more palatable to the masses who hadn't been pumping quarters into fighting games for nine straight years. Maybe I should have appreciated how much of the game was made for me (56 2D fighting game characters!)  instead of focusing on the parts of it that were not ("I Wanna Take You For A Ride!").

With 20 years of hindsight, Marvel vs Capcom 2 stands as a last-hurrah monument to Capcom's hard-fought decade of arcade dominance. I'm glad we live in a world where 2D and 3D fighters can coexist now, and I'm sad that we'll never see another collection of 2D fighters of this scale in one game again (outside of MUGEN). And even if Marvel and Capcom worked together to make a fighting game again, it's clear that the magic has withered. Without a glut of fighting games to act as a lead-in (and establish characters to beef up the roster), making a new Marvel vs Capcom game in 2020 would be like trying to release Avengers: Infinity War in 2007… or Justice League in 2017.