YMMV / Marvel vs. Capcom

Index:

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Audience-Alienating Era: Origins and Infinite. The former receiving relatively low sales and the latter being a disappointment to fans (around the same time as SFV’s troubled launch). Infinite was even passed over in EVO for more exciting titles like Dragon Ball FighterZ and Injustice 2. The announcement of Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, which was made by Arc System Works instead of Capcom, years after Infinite's release, was ultimately the final blow for the series.
Awesome Art: Each game tends to feature beautiful artwork in the menus, manuals, and cover art. This was most apparent with the opening movies for 3 and the trailers for Infinite, where the visuals significantly improved after the switch to 3D.
Common Knowledge:
- Many believe that the Marvel vs. Capcom games are Fake Crossovers, but on the contrary, Marvel acknowledged the continuity of these crossovers (alongside X-Men: Children of the Atom and Marvel Super Heroes) enough to assign them to their own official Marvel universe called "Earth-30847."
- One of the most commonly cited pieces of evidence for the Spider-Man X Morrigan pairing is a win quote from Spider-Man should the two be paired together, with Spider-Man hoping that Mary Jane won't be mad that he'll be late, implying that he's cheating on her with Morrigan. This is actually one of Spider-Man's generic victory quotes, regardless of who he's paired up with; specialized win quotes wouldn't be a thing until the third game, and those were tailored toward the victor's defeated opponents, not their teammates.
Complete Monster (Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite): Ultron, upon fusing with Sigma, begins seeking the Infinity Stones to remake both the Marvel and Capcom universes to his liking. Attacking Xgard, Ultron-Sigma uses the Sigma Virus to enslave its people, parading them in front of Thor before infecting him and forcing him to fight his friends while Ultron gloats. He also schemes with Grandmaster Meio to drop a virus-loaded bomb on Earth to infect all living things on the planet. When Dante tricks him with the Soul Stone, Ultron Omega attempts to slowly drain him of his life. Desiring nothing less than the extinction of all souls, Ultron is loathed by every hero and almost every villain.
Crack Pairing: Spider-Man and Morrigan, thanks to one of the win quotes in the original Marvel vs. Capcom and one of the cutscene pictures in 2's arcade ending. It doesn't help that Peter canonically has attracted bad girls and, in the years since 2, lost his marriage to Mary Jane with Marvel utterly tapdancing around the idea of reuniting them, especially with the inclusion of Paul. The pairing eventually exploded in popularity with the announcement of Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection Arcade Classics, with promotional artwork making this something an Creator-Acknowledged Meme with both characters facing off against each other, not helped by Morrigan's seductive pose. Generally speaking, the fandom wholeheartedly accepted the pairing in several ways, although there has been a surge of content after the collection's announcement depicting both as Platonic Life-Partners eagerly reuniting after the 7 years since Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Hyper Roll, one of Roll's Hyper Combos in which she turns into larger and more powerful Badass Adorable robot (being a reference to Aphrodite A from Mazinger Z), is very popular among Mega Man fans, despite only appearing in the first two games. Many fans still make fanart of her. Infact, some fans have never played any of the MVC games in which she appears, but are fully aware of her existence.
Fan Nickname: Strider Hiryu's actual name is Hiryu. That said, most just call him Strider.
Fandom Rivalry/Friendly Fandoms:
- With Mortal Kombat vs DC/Injustice due to the shared fanbase between Mortal Kombat/Street Fighter and the two comic companies.
- With Super Smash Bros. especially after Mega Man, Ryu, and Ken were made playable in that series.
- More recently Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, as many see the game as the unofficial continuation of the Marvel tag team fighting series.
Franchise Original Sin: Many complaints people had with Infinite echo things that the series had been doing from the beginning.
- One point of criticism regards Marvel's side of the roster almost exclusively focusing on characters from the Marvel Cinematic Universe, with only three characters who weren't part of it.^note Mainstream popularity and adaptations have always been one of the primary deciding factors in which Marvel characters are included, such as the (in)famous huge number of mutants in earlier games owing to the popularity of X-Men: The Animated Series, and even MvC3 including several characters because they had planned MCU projects in the works at the time. Where this was accepted previously was that earlier games still included at least some obscure and more adventurous choices that would only be recognizable to hardcore comic fans, like Shuma Gorath and Marrow; conversely, Infinite went out of its way to eschew almost anyone who wasn't an MCU staple.
- Legal issues, as were responsible for the exclusion of non-MCU characters, are also nothing new to the series: Iron Man's video game rights belonged to another company when the series started, so after a showing in the original Marvel Super Heroes he had to sit out Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter entirely and be replaced with War Machine for Marvel vs. Capcom. Marvel has always owned the video game rights to the characters that were excluded from Infinite, however - their exclusion came down entirely due to corporate pettiness over the unrelated film rights.
- Another frequent complaint regarded the game's "laziness", with the base roster almost entirely consisting of characters from MvC3 with only five newcomers. Marvel vs. Capcom has been built on reusing as much as possible from the beginning - even Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter was basically a reskin of the preceding X-Men vs. Street Fighter with only a few additions to the cast. Earlier games had the advantage that quality spritework takes a long time to start looking dated, letting them get away with reusing them for several games^note. Infinite had three things going against it: first was the bad luck of following on from MvC3, which introduced far more new characters than was standard for the series (21 of 38 characters in the base roster and 11 of the 12 added in Ultimate were new); second was that it reused 3D models without accounting for the different lighting engine and textures, resulting in the veterans looking noticeably worse than the newcomers they vastly outnumbered; and third was the later announcement of DLC characters including several more new characters, giving players the impression Capcom had deliberately withheld adding too many new characters to the base roster so they could charge extra for them later.
- The DLC itself received criticism for including four Marvel characters but only two Capcom ones, leaving the roster permanently skewed in Marvel's favor. The precedent of equal representation only started in MvC2; before then, every game would have one or two more Capcom characters than Marvel ones. Infinite, again, mostly had the bad luck that players were already annoyed at Marvel's constant meddling, so any potential show of favoritism towards them would be met with similar hostility. Earlier games also arranged their character select screens to make the imbalance less obvious, whereas the design of Infinite's character select makes the imbalance impossible to ignore.
Gateway Series: Those who are fans of Marvel Comics are likely to be introduced to Capcom characters in the games and vice versa.
Germans Love David Hasselhoff: A mixture of this and Values Dissonance when it comes to analyzing the popularity of the Marvel Vs series in the United States compared to Japan. In the U.S., Marvel Vs. is held up as one of the "pillar games" of the Fighting Game Community, with 2 and 3 specifically maintaining engaging competitive scene years after their release. In Japan, while the series is liked, it's viewed more-so as a "Kusoge Game", an unbalanced game that while having an active scene isn't treated as a "serious" competitive game.
Magnificent Bastard (Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite): Jedah Dohma, the "Dark Messiah," masterminded the entire convergence of the Marvel and Capcom universes by convincing Lady Death herself to unite them for the sake of "equilibrium." Unfettered in his noble intentions of offering salvation, Jedah became worthy of wielding the Soul Stone and uses it to create a symbiote. Also convincing the likes of Dormmamu and Firebrand to his side, such an alliance pays dividends when Morrigan and Ghost Rider lead a charge in taking his Infinity Stone and destroying his symbiote, allowing him to escape unscathed. Although defeated, the worlds remain merged in addition to his biggest obstacle, Ultron-Sigma, being removed from the playing field, leaving the ever-ambitious Demon Lord none the worst for wear.
Polished Port: The Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics for PlayStation 4/5, Xbox One / Series X&S, Nintendo Switch and PC not only has all of the Marvel Vs. entries including X-Men: Children of the Atom, but also includes Capcom's first collaboration game with Marvel, The Punisher (Capcom). At worst, minor visual or audio oddities occur in their emulation, but otherwise they're all an Arcade-Perfect Port, including the never-before distributed arcade version of Marvel vs. Capcom 2 that wasn't even exactly the same as the Sega Dreamcast port. Combine this with the option to remove the excess screen flashing, all of the bonus characters selectable in the menus, an EX Mode for the first Marvel vs. Capcom to loosely recreate the original PlayStation 1 version's secret mode of selecting two of the same character, modern rollback netcode that can pretty much feel like local home play combined with some of the best input delay you'll ever see for the games on an HD console, and the fans have a great release to carry the series legacy while newcomers have the perfect entry point. All of this, plus an Art Gallery with tons of high-quality versions of the legendary artwork and even various development documents and concepts, right down to some of the coffee stains. About the only things these ports lack are console-exclusive content, and the HD presentation and widescreen of the Origins collection from 2012, but the rest of the games in the collection make up for it on sheer volume of content.
Porting Disaster: The early Marvel vs. Capcom games were usually ported to the PlayStation 1 and Sega Saturn, the former not having enough RAM for an arcade-perfect port. X-Men vs. Street Fighter and Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter in particular were stripped of their tag-team mechanics as a result (though they tried making up for it with Cross Over Mode, and the second character could still appear for assists). The Saturn ports manage to avert this via the 4MB RAM cartridge, which allowed ports that were at least closer to the arcade version, and the Dreamcast port of Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes is the first one to avert this trope by being almost arcade perfect right out of the box. That said, the original PlayStation version of MVC1 did come with a few gameplay quirks which made it stand out from a mechanical standpoint to compensate for the lack of proper tag mechanics. The biggest one by far was allowing players to cancel into a Hyper Combo from nearly anything, including specials (being able to cancel from specials into supers was not properly introduced in the series until Marvel vs. Capcom 3 did so nearly a full decade after) and other Hyper Combos (making it mechanically similar to Delayed Hyper Combos introduced in MVC2).
Seinfeld Is Unfunny: One of the most beloved fighting franchises in the world, with the games from the early 90s to the early 00s still having an impact on fighting games today; but by the mid 20s you can feel how long in the tooth even Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is, when modern games for decades have expanded on what the classic series did right and avoided what it did wrong.
Spiritual Successor:
- The Punisher, X-Men: Mutant Apocalypse, and Marvel Super Heroes: War of the Gems all served as the beginning of the relationship between Marvel and Capcom. These three titles predated Marvel vs. Capcom and are often bundled with the MVC titles in arcade machines.
- MVC was the first major crossover fighter. It predates other heavy hitters in the genre like Smash Bros., Mortal Kombat vs. DC, and Street Fighter X Tekken.
- Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls appears to pick up where Infinite left off; however, this time it exclusively features Marvel fighters and is developed by Arc System Works rather than Capcom.
Unintentional Period Piece: The rosters of the pre-MVC3 games are something of a time-capsule of 90s-era Marvel. This occurred during a time where X-Men was at the height of its popularity and before The Avengers had really taken off in the mid-to-late 2000s. This is reflected by the X-Men completely dominating the rosters. Psylocke, in particular, was something of a mainstay throughout the majority of these games. While she still maintains popularity, to modern eyes, it would seem strange that she made more appearances than other popular Marvel characters. There was however, outrage at her complete absence from 3 and Infinite. Most interestingly enough, Thor was never included in any of the rosters before 3 despite being one of the major founding members of the Avengers and was only a background character in Marvel Super Heroes and an Assist Character in Clash of Super Heroes
Win Back the Crowd: The early 2020s revived interest in the series that seemed dead after the failure of Infinite. 2022 saw the re-release of the games through Arcade1Up machines and 2024 saw a compilation ported to major consoles.

YMMV / Marvel vs. Capcom 2 Following

Marvel vs. Capcom

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