Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 Review
Played on:
Xbox 360
Capcom's revival of fighting games back in the summer of 2009 was hugely successful. The release of Street Fighter IV brought on a new era in the fighting game community, and all of a sudden local tournaments and online lobbies were filling up with players that covered everything from green rookies to the grizzled veterans. But what might have been an even bigger triumph was Capcom publishing a sequel to Marvel vs. Capcom 2, one of the craziest fighting games that still managed to be balanced enough to still be played more than a decade after its release. MvC3 was a little light on the character roster for those who held it up to the standard of the previous game - only thirty-eight characters if you add in the DLC! - but when compared to nearly every other fighting game out there, the thousands of possible combinations of three-character teams made for plenty of depth.
Now, Capcom is releasing Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 with twelve new characters, additional stages, and few extra features for use in online play, all at a lower price of $40. They did this same kind of thing back with Super Street Fighter IV, and it wasn't a very popular move back then since players who bought the full game not nine months before then had to spend a full forty bucks just to keep up with the fighting game communities - local, national, and online. And this time, Capcom's asking gamers to spend forty bucks to keep up with the MvC3 community again, exactly nine months after the release date of the original. Sure, new players might feel like they're getting a deal, and hardcore Marvel players will always find the money in their budgets to buy these releases (even if they're not happy about it), but the many players in the middle, the ones who bought MvC3 and didn't play it non-stop for months, are going to feel ripped off once they learn that Capcom has done this again.
We probably should talk a little bit about the game itself rather than the decisions going into making and/or buying it. In Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3, you pick three characters from the stable of fifty and fight against an opposing team of three with a single "round" deciding who's winner. You've got one fighter out on the screen at all times, and you can tag in one of the others at almost any time, or hit an assist button to have one of your off-screen fighters jump in, do a single attack, and hop back out. There are massive super moves that can be chained together, ridiculous aerial combos, and wonderful character designs and animations nearly everywhere you look. The new fighters offer a wide range of styles and power levels, although I wonder if the vast amounts of finesse in the three-staged version of Capcom lawyer Phoenix Wright might be just a bit too nuanced for a game where you can go from full life to dead inside of one completely insane mega-combo.
For those who remember the original, the fighters have been rebalanced, with weaker characters becoming a little bit better, and the over-used and over-played characters being toned down a bit. The point isn't to try and get this absolute perfect balance like StarCraft or something, as the fighting game community does enjoy having "tiers", but to just even things out a little bit and develop a bit more diversity in the teams chosen for high-level play. A few changes here and there help things out, like the ability to hit X-Factor in mid-air or the additional moves given to some characters to round things out a bit. On the topic of overall balance, though, I won't even attempt this time around to theorize on which characters are more powerful or unbalanced. The interactions inside each three-fighter team make balance judgments vastly more difficult to make than with a conventional one-on-one fighting game. Only the community at large can really determine these things, and it will likely have to evolve over months of pro-level play.
In these games, any half-decent combo goes airborne before it gets to the tenth hit, so you'll need to develop a mastery of juggling and precision to play like pro - all at the game's ludicrous speed - and you'll be building these skill for months (if not years), assuming you've got the talent and determination to learn it. And even though each fight is only a single round, things can go very slowly, or they can be over very quickly - especially if you start catching two opposing characters inside one huge combo.
UMvC3 does include a mildly different presentation and the whole thing has been spruced up to look more like things come straight out of a comic book, but it seems to me like all of this could have worked as DLC the way that Capcom did with the Arcade Edition release of Super Street Fighter IV (where you could either buy the new retail game for $40 or spend $15 to "upgrade" the SSFIV disc to Arcade Edition). The new online features for spectating are nice but only barely keep up with other fighting games, and there isn't much else new in the online modes to play with. One thing I like is that the new characters are almost all entirely new to the MvC series, which I prefer over having Capcom bring back old favorites. Of course, at least two of these characters have to actually progress through moves in order to start hitting hard and doing damage, and I just don't see that being terribly viable in the slapstick, ridiculously fast-paced world of Marvel matches. I'll be watching the streams on the lookout good Phoenix Wright and Frank West players, though, and would love to be proved wrong on this.
The Heroes and Heralds mode adds wacky modifiers to matches, like invisibility or Street Fighter III parrying, but it's free day-one DLC and I wasn't able to see it; my gut feeling is that they'll be fun for a local living room match, but online play and tourney settings require a kind of uniformity in their rules that these modifiers can't offer. Going beyond that, the Mission mode is Capcom's return of a half-hearted attempt to teach you how to play, but as before, it mostly just puts ridiculous strings of moves in front of you and waits for you to figure out all the timing and positioning that it neglects to mention. The game doesn't tell you what you're doing wrong if you can't get a combo out just right, so it's a poor way to try and teach someone how to play. Overall, don't expect much in the way of features designed for casual players who are sick of getting destroyed online or don't have local tournaments going on nearby.
The single player game is the same barebones arcade-mode stuff you expect out of Capcom, and that's a shame because I could see a really fun, wacky single player experience coming out of a game like Marvel vs. Capcom 3, especially considering how much personality these characters have shown in other games or in the pages of Marvel comics. It'd be interesting to have constant character shuffles that help you learn how to move around the screen and set up the huge aerial combos you see on tournament streams over on Twitch.tv. After reviewing MvC3 back in February, I went to check out what the guys at Cross Counter were doing, and it was like they were playing a different game entirely - and I couldn't even see how, much less actually attempt, to turn my awful play into something closer to what they (and the guys they played against, like Combofiend or Fanatiq) were doing.
In some ways, buying any of the more recent fighting games as a newcomer to the genre is a very humbling experience. Offline, you might be a god against the AI and your friends, but get online or go to a tournament in a major city, and you'll be sliced and diced in a way that makes Dark Souls look like Ubisoft's protagonist-can't-die revival of Prince of Persia. That being said, if you can put together a solid team, learn the combos and chains, and work on defensive techniques against the most common characters your opponents will use, there is a ladder you can climb to get really good and really dig into a wonderful community full of awesome people. Just, don't expect Capcom to help you much, that's for sure.
I had thought that Capcom learned their lesson with these $40 enhanced re-releases after Super Street Fighter IV, and while I've heard that the earthquake in Japan kind of ruined the developers' intentions to release all of the content here in Ultimate as post-release, paid DLC for the original game, it's not like they could try to explain that on the back of the box and expect anyone to really care. Simply put, gamers are going to feel at least a little bit betrayed for this case of moving two steps forward, two steps back, and I highly recommend that in the future, Capcom never employ this selling strategy again. It's tough because Ultimate MvC3 is a great game and a solid improvement on the fundamentals in the original. Hardcore fighting fans can safely imagine the final score to be an 8 or even a 9, but for everyone else, I just can't continue to excuse any publisher for treating the majority of its customer base like this.
