This Week in Retro: Marvel vs. Capcom 3 [2011] (Patreon)

February 15, 2011: Capcom finally learns to count to 3...again

by Diamond Feit

Does everyone know the expression "jump the shark?" It's a phrase made famous by a website in 1997 derived from a then-20-years-old episode of Happy Days and it is often misinterpreted. When a series "jumps the shark," that doesn't mean everything that follows is bad or that the end is near, it just means that the show/franchise/person's best days are behind them. For many years, fans argued that The Simpsons was so consistently good, it was a rare example of a serial work that never jumped. But with the show now in its 32nd season, we can all agree it jumped at some point to end up in the state it's in now (my money's still on the death of Maude Flanders).

Around this time last year, we celebrated in this column the 20th anniversary of Marvel vs. Capcom 2, and I declared it was "a clear signifier that the 2D boom of fighting games was on the way out." I also said it was a "jump the shark" moment for the series, even though I also acknowledged its many strengths and its lasting popularity to this day. How could a game so beloved be a shark-jumper? Because it would be 11 years before Capcom would make a sequel, a sequel which is now 10 years old this week: Marvel vs. Capcom 3. And while it's a solid game with a good reputation, it fails to reach the soaring heights of its predecessors.

Without recounting my own words too much, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 was released at the end of a very fruitful period of Capcom fighting game releases. Between the Street Fighter Alpha series, the Marvel series, the DarkStalkers series, and a few other miscellaneous games, the Osaka company had created dozens upon dozens of appealing characters for players to pit against one another. MvC2 featured a decent number of brand-new fighters, but it was largely built using pre-existing assets, which is why it was able to sport an absurdly-large roster of 56 characters.

Eleven years later, Capcom found itself riding high on the recent success of Street Fighter IV, a 2D game built with 3D models instead of bitmap sprites. All those 2D series mentioned above were dead and buried in 2011, so Capcom’s designers no longer had access to the company’s formerly prodigious library of art assets. This necessitated a smaller roster of characters than had appeared in MvC2, but Capcom did not phone it in: Marvel vs. Capcom 3 sports 38 playable characters (including two paid DLC additions), only four of whom are taken from Street Fighter IV.

Character choice makes crossover games exciting, and Marvel vs. Capcom 3 was brimming with exceptional choices. Past Vs. games had leaned too hard on Street Fighter, but that's not the case here; for the "home" team, Capcom made sure to include a variety of fighters drawn from the company's long history. Heroes from the 1980s like Arthur and Mike Haggar represented Capcom's arcade past alongside more recent console creations like Dante and Trish from Devil May Cry. I was pleased to see three DarkStalkers made the cut, even if Capcom looked at a series about monsters and only chose "babes" that likely sell a lot of merchandise. (Anakaris was in Marvel vs Capcom 2, dammit! I want my mummy.)

Speaking of sales, one of Capcom’s more glaring corporate choices was dedicating three character slots to Resident Evil stars: Namely, Jill Valentine, Chris Redfield, and Albert Wesker. Marvel vs. Capcom 3 came out just two years after Resident Evil 5, which at the time was the most successful game the company had ever published. As a fan of that series, I was excited to see them. And they had precedent, after all: Jill had previously appeared in Marvel vs. Capcom 2. At the same, as a fan of fighting games, I think including three human beings who look similar and all carry "realistic" guns excludes weirder, wilder candidates.

(Relatedly, I was hyped to learn that Rad Spencer from Bionic Commando would be joining the cast, though I felt deflated when I realized his character model would be based on his "gritty" 3D reboot from 2009. Anyone looking for his classic 8-bit appearance—or even his revamped look from Rearmed 2—had to pay for a DLC costume.)

The Marvel side offered plenty for fans to be thankful for. Aside from a few perennial selections like Spider-Man and Wolverine (who had been mainstays of the 2D games), Capcom elected to add a number of glorious lesser-known fighters like She-Hulk, Super Skrull, and Taskmaster. The most far-out choice had to be M.O.D.O.K., a supervillain who's more head than torso—the bizarre type of Marvel foe who may never make the transition to live action (but if he does, I sincerely hope John Hodgman gets the part).

Hands-down, however, the best addition to the cast turned out to be Deadpool. A full five years before his hit movie would make him a household name, Deadpool was an anti-hero fan-favorite who fit perfectly amongst fighting game characters—after all, he carries both guns and swords. Better still, his penchant for jokey dialogue and fourth-wall-breaking antics is on full display in Marvel vs. Capcom 3. For an air combo launcher attack, Deadpool can mimic Ryu's famous dragon punch (even saying "Shoryuken!" in the voice of the great Nolan North). As a super move, he can grab his own super meter from the bottom of the screen and use it like a club to bash his opponent.

After the previous two games made no attempt to offer any story or explanation as to why comic book characters would be fighting video game characters, Marvel vs. Capcom 3 actually comes up with a clever concept. The full title of the game is Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds because the Capcom and Marvel "worlds" are being threatened by the ultimate cosmic force of the Marvel universe: Galactus. This represented a major upgrade from Marvel vs. Capcom 2's final boss Abyss, a character Capcom invented for the game and who therefore carried zero weight with fans of either property.

Galactus, for those unfamiliar, is a giant man in a fantastic hat who devours planets whole. His size had to be scaled down somewhat to make the last battle more sensible, but nevertheless the player has only 60 seconds here to deal sufficient damage to a very tall man before he destroys Earth(s). Many of the previous Capcom Marvel games have used "beat up a giant" for their finale (a trend that goes all the way back to Apocalypse in X-Men vs. Street Fighter), but this one carries the extra stinger of a failure screen where the bad guy crushes all our hopes and dreams. Personally, I wish this scene could be skipped; it's not an easy fight, and by the third or fourth straight loss, I was sick of sitting through it. But maybe that's just me being famously bad at video games.

A revival of a dormant fighting game series, featuring a solid lineup of popular characters: That sounds like a ringing endorsement for Marvel vs. Capcom 3. At launch, that's precisely how we all felt… but then, just five months later, Capcom threw the game into the trash and announced that Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 would be out by year's end. Ultimate MvC3 was not a sequel, merely a new-and-improved version of the game with even more characters and features. Its existence overwrote the game we had just bought for full price. Even though I enjoyed MvC3, I felt like I had been had.

In an era where adding to and improving upon video games via downloadable upgrades was already an acceptable practice, why would Capcom hit the reset button and ask fans to pony up for the deluxe edition so soon? Officially, the story is that all the Ultimate additions were going to be sold online for Marvel vs Capcom 3, but once the 3/11 earthquake and tsunami happened, Capcom was forced to change gears and just release a new game instead. I might have believed that story... if Capcom hadn't just asked me the year before to buy Super Street Fighter IV after I had already purchased Street Fighter IV. Worse, they pledged that it would be the final version of the game, only to later release Ultra Street Fighter IV.

This has crossed over into a complaint about money, a factor that shouldn't detract from the experience of actually playing a video game, but I don't think I was alone in feeling exhausted by Capcom selling and reselling all these incremental adjustments to games I had already purchased. If Capcom wanted to go full King of Fighters and make annual releases, they could do that. Lord knows I have purchased far more NEO•GEO cartridges in my life than my meager income could have ever covered, but at least those games were new entries in a series, and each year's release had noticeable differences from the last. KOF 2000 is different than ’99, which in turn is different than ’98. Compared to the vanilla MVc3, Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is just the better game, and today it is the only one commercially available on modern platforms. After all, why would you bother with the non-Ultimate version?

Leaving aside financial concerns, I'm also still stubborn about the 2D-made-with-3D concept. Every character looks oddly dark; no one seems to be fully lit, leaving shadows everywhere that I'd rather not see. For a game that outwardly celebrates so much about comic books, I think Marvel vs Capcom 3 should lean into that by being bright and colorful—you know, like all the sprite-based games were. I don't think it's a technical problem, I think it's an art direction problem; Street Fighter IV also had heavy "brush strokes" on screen, but it was more stylized and a lot less...grim.

Marvel vs. Capcom 3 is a good game—it is!—but it cannot hold a candle to the madcap mayhem that was Marvel vs. Capcom 2. It's possible to enjoy MvC3 on its own merits, but only if you forget Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 exists. Of course, that's the only version I can play today (on my Vita, where it was a launch title), so that reality is difficult to forget—hence my lamentation about jumping over sharks and a general sense of disappointment when MvC3 comes to mind. But hey, even with its short lifespan, Marvel vs Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds will always have a better reputation than the fiasco that was Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite. 'Nuff said!

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan and is an active Twitter user.