Mar­vel vs. Cap­com 2 a new age of frustration

I have a polar­iz­ing rela­tion­ship with Mar­vel vs. Cap­com 2. While it’s revered as one of the great­est games of all time, and I spent a lot of time play­ing it, I don’t love it as much as I once did. There are rea­sons for my trans­ac­tion­al love for the Cap­com stal­wart, and there are rea­sons why it’s tak­en this long for Gam­ing Insur­rec­tion to engage.

Mar­vel vs. Cap­com 2 rounds up every­one who was present in the Ver­sus uni­verse, adds a few new faces and throws them togeth­er to cre­ate a mashup of epic pro­por­tions. Vet­er­ans such as Mag­ne­to, Dr. Doom, M. Bison, Ryu and Chun-Li join new­com­ers such as Ruby Heart, Cable and Amin­go. The rag­tag mot­ley crew join forces to take on new vil­lain Abyss, whose main goal is world dom­i­na­tion through decay. The sto­ry is engag­ing enough to jus­ti­fy the col­lid­ing of the respec­tive uni­vers­es but not too deep to jus­ti­fy any sort of lore research.

The mashup, how­ev­er, is what is most impor­tant. The meld­ing of realms and reunion of the pre­vi­ous games’ ros­ter brings togeth­er 56 char­ac­ters to make three-char­ac­ter teams. The over­pow­ered gods of pre­vi­ous out­ings return to set up shop in the upper ech­e­lon of the game’s tiers, and the joke char­ac­ters and non-essen­tials also return for the ride. 

All of this is wrapped up in a futur­is­tic seri­ous-look­ing bow, com­plete with a seri­ous announc­er that lacks com­ic book trap­pings. The back­grounds are mod­eled well and are an impres­sive leap from the pre­vi­ous hand-drawn entries. The sound­track is also OK. I’m not one of the legions that appar­ent­ly hat­ed the sound­track back in the day, and it’s fine now. The smooth jazz has always fit the action, and I nev­er saw what the prob­lem was with it. Jazz has always been a part of the Ver­sus series expe­ri­ence, and it did­n’t seem dif­fer­ent this time around than any of the oth­er games in the series. I’ve always felt the response to the sound­track was overblown and sil­ly. Focus on the more impor­tant things that are wrong with the game.

And here’s where I want to put that focus and explore why it’s the source of my ire and apa­thy with MvC2. For a game that touts 56 char­ac­ters, in hind­sight, only 10 are viable tour­na­ment options. Yes, tour­na­ments have been played with the low tier char­ac­ters, but his­tor­i­cal­ly, the major tour­na­ments of the day have always fea­tured teams that have the Mar­vel 2 gods involved. You’re going to see a Cable, Storm, Sen­tinel, Mag­ne­to or Iron Man in the top 3. You’re going to see the same assists anchor­ing those teams as well. That’s a prob­lem. With that many char­ac­ters avail­able, the same hand­ful of names should not be dom­i­nat­ing. There should be vari­ety. This has been a prob­lem in the Mar­vel 2 tour­na­ment scene since the first six months post release when every­one fig­ured out the ini­tial tech and real­ized Tiger Knee Hyper Viper Beam and Fly­/Un-fly com­bos were the way to vic­to­ry. And, yes, I real­ize it’s been 25 years since the game was released, new tech still pops up that makes char­ac­ters look bet­ter than they ever did, and ambas­sadors such as Justin Wong use dif­fer­ent teams to high­light this dis­par­i­ty. But it was a mas­sive prob­lem back in the day and ruined the expe­ri­ence for me going forward.

Mar­vel vs. Cap­com 2 gets near­ly every­thing right: Evolved game­play with assists, clean­er visu­als and a gigan­tic ros­ter with famil­iar faces and cool addi­tions. How­ev­er, that near­ly is what breaks the game for me. I can’t rec­on­cile my nos­tal­gia for the game and the time spent trav­el­ing, meet­ing new peo­ple, the gift of Ruby Heart and lov­ing the Ver­sus series with the absolute fool­ish­ness that is the game­play. This is the point of the Ver­sus ride where I get off.