Time Extend
How a chaotic clash of heroes became fighting games’ finest spectator sport
A few more rounds with Ultimate
Marvel Vs Capcom 3, fighting gaming’s greatest spectator sport
Superheroes are broken. It’s why Hollywood’s current obsession with the caped and costumed hasn’t fully crossed over into games: they need balance. While we like our power fantasies too, they must always come with some kind of threat. It’s why Batman, who draws his power from his bank account but remains vulnerable to bullets, works well in games, while Superman, who fears nothing on Earth, does not. Short of giving every roaming thug Kryptonite knuckledusters, there’s not a lot you can do. Superman’s absence from Ultimate
Marvel Vs Capcom 3’ s colossal roster is a matter of ownership, not logistics, but had he belonged to Marvel, then this might be one of the few games that could reasonably offer him a home. It is a game that revels in the unworkable and the absurd, taking some of the most powerful superheroes in comicbook history and pitting them against the great and good of the Capcom universe, buffing the less powerful to give them a fighting chance against the godlike.
There are 50 characters in all (including the two DLC fighters), from which you pick a team of three. That equates to almost 120,000 possible teams even before you factor in assists, which let you summon a partner from offscreen to deliver a single, cooldown-controlled move. Each fighter has three assists to choose from, too, meaning the game’s character-select screen really offers some three million possibilities.
Whichever you pick will be capable of truly ridiculous things. This is a superhero riot of hundred-hit combos, a screen-filling mess of neon plasma fireworks, and a recipe for disaster. An entire studio could spend years tweaking its data values in an endless, fruitless search for perfect balance. In the four years since its release, Ultimate Marvel
Vs Capcom 3 has been patched three times, the most recent of which still came less than six months after launch. It is a game beset by problems, but few have ever been fixed, and no more ever will be. Capcom’s Marvel licence expired in 2013.
Capcom’s Yoshinori Ono once said that he liked putting the odd overpowered character in his games, because doing so fosters a strong community spirit, calling back to the essence of the Japanese arcade as players come together to devise counterstrategies to even the odds. Ono was not referring to Marvel (as fans shorten the unwieldy full title) but Super Street Fighter
IV: Arcade Edition, and specifically two characters. Yun and Yang would later be patched into a more reasonable state, but not until Ono had been proven right: by the patch, the two weren’t as dominant as they had been at the start anyway. Marvel’s more powerful characters have followed a similar trajectory: they have dominated, fallen back as players have worked out how to deal with them, then risen again as the counters are themselves countered. On it goes until something else is found in those millions of permutations, and the dance begins anew.
The first dance was led by Phoenix, who looked down on the rest of the cast from the summit of the tier list thanks to her two forms. The first isn’t much of a problem, really – perfectly capable in the right hands, certainly, but she has the lowest health pool in the game and is no match for the roster’s upper echelons. But if you kill her, and she has a full stock of five Hyper meters, she resurrects in dramatically more powerful form, screaming, “I can’t control it!” Players certainly can; amid the resulting chaos, a Dark Phoenix can take out entire teams in seconds. There were calls for a patch, naturally, but since the handful of tweaks that came in the transition from vanilla Marvel Vs Capcom 3 to Ultimate, Phoenix has stayed unchanged.
A fight against a Phoenix team is unlike any other in Marvel. The max-meter requirement for her resurrection is central, with the Phoenix player building towards a full stock as quickly as they can with their other two characters. Across the screen, meanwhile, their opponent must dispatch Phoenix herself as quickly as possible, certainly before that Hyper meter fills, and ideally without killing her teammates first.
Phoenix doesn’t just come back from the dead, you see. She also has her X-Factor – a game-wide comeback mechanic, available once per round – which boosts movement speed and damage output while restoring recently lost health. It can, by itself, turn an entire match on its head. In Phoenix’s hands, it’s more powerful still, since its
restorative powers negate her second form’s biggest, perhaps only, problem: as soon as she resurrects, her health bar refills then slowly begins to drain away. The weaker your team, the longer the duration of X-Factor; when you’re down to your last character, it’ll last twice as long as it would if you’d activated it with all three still alive. Phoenix is the perfect ‘anchor’ character, kept offscreen until her team is down, then coming in to annihilate the opposition.
So the Phoenix team player is essentially using a team of just two characters with no resources, while setting up a comeback should they need it. Their foe, meanwhile, must be aggressive, spending resources to get Phoenix out of the match. Their best option is the Snapback, a move that pings an opponent off the screen and forcibly tags in one of their teammates. Should that fail, they could launch an all-out assault and kill everyone before Phoenix has her meters. Or they could just take their chances against the game’s most powerful fighter.
A Phoenix match is Marvel at its most broken and also its finest, a spectacle of see-sawing momentum, tension giving way to explosion over and over again for 99 enthralling seconds. Across the years, the odds have evened out, players coming together to compose an unofficial strategy guide devoted to a single character who in any other game would have been patched into irrelevance. Phoenix teams won the Evo tournament – fighting games’ biggest stage – in both 2011 and 2012, the first two years of Marvel’s life. But they haven’t won since.
Phoenix faded from prominence not only because the community had learned to cope with her, but also, you suspect, because of the loud chorus of boos that greeted her selection on a tournament stage. No matter – another threat, albeit of a very different kind, was right around the corner.
They call it Morridoom, and it’s still effective. Darkstalkers’ Morrigan has a Ryu-style horizontal fireball, Soul Fist, that can be thrown while grounded or in the air. One of her Hyper Combos, Astral Vision, spawns a clone at the opposite end of the screen that mirrors her every move. Combine those abilities and you have the basis of a pretty tricky bullet-hell shooter. Add in Doctor Doom’s Hidden Missile, which makes a volley of rockets fall onto the opponent from above, and you create a nearimpossible one. Pioneered by New York player ‘ChrisG’, a Morridoom team has never passed the Evo test, but it’s a regular sight in the latter stages of just about every tournament. Like the Phoenix fight, it’s like nothing else in the game. It’s cheap, ridiculous and borderline unfair, but in a game that is never again to be updated, all players can do is learn to live with it.
It’s something Marvel players are very good at. Marvel Vs Capcom 2 remained popular on the competitive scene for a decade, and would have lasted even longer had a successor not appeared. It’s easy to
ITS SECRETS HAVE BEEN DISCOVERED NOT IN THE ARCADES OF AKIHABARA, BUT ON CONSOLES ACROSS AMERICA
see Marvel having a similar lifespan – even longer, perhaps, since a sequel appears unlikely. Despite having more star power than just about everything else on shelves, sales stood at just 1.2 million units worldwide by March of this year.
It isn’t hard to see why. To newcomers, it’s an illegible mess, a noisy, chaotic entry in a genre that, despite the complexity of high-level play, is often easy to understand: two characters, two depleting health bars, and a timer. Even to experienced fighting game players, Marvel can be hard to follow, but over time you learn to focus on the things that matter: the setup that lands the first hit of the 100-hit combo, the tricky mix-up that follows when the next character jumps into the fray, the risky but perfectly timed Hyper Combo or X-Factor activation that triggers a comeback. Street
Fighter IV remains the purist’s choice, but Marvel is fighting games’ true spectator sport, its spectacular chaos, unpredictable action and uneven odds whipping crowds into a frenzy. It is second only to SFIV on Evo finals day, and still takes top billing at many tournaments.
But only in the US. Japan, still the best nation in the world at fighting games, has never really taken to Marvel. Its secrets and trickery have been discovered not in the arcades of Akihabara, but on consoles across America. It is a thoroughly unusual fighting game for many reasons, but the biggest might just be that its competitive scene is dominated by the US. In Japan, it is part of the ‘kusoge’, or ‘shitty’ scene, a subculture that embraces the broken and the silly.
One of its members, ‘Kusoru’, turned up at a tournament in Atlanta in 2012 with a ridiculous team of Rocket Raccoon, Frank West and Viewtiful Joe that no one had ever seen, pulling faces at the camera and trolling his opponents on his way to first place. It was Marvel in microcosm, an unknown player showing off a ludicrous new tactic he’d found in a pool of three-million possibilities, wowing the crowds and sending an entire playerbase scurrying off to Training mode to work out how to counter it. If it is ever to be taken seriously on a worldwide scale, and sell the sort of numbers that the faces on its cover deserve,
Ultimate Marvel Vs Capcom 3 is in dire need of a couple of dozen patches. But those who love it wouldn’t have it any other way.