Marvel vs Capcom History: Marvel vs Capcom 2 New Age of Heroes

Marvel vs Capcom History: Marvel vs Capcom 2 New Age of Heroes

Robert Lewis Knuckles III

“Take you for a Ride”

This time Capcom took us for a major ride with Marvel vs. Capcom 2. Marvel vs Capcom 2 was released in arcades in 2000 and a number of systems. It was released for the Dreamcast and later released on Playstation 2, Xbox and later ported to the Xbox 360 and PS3.

Capcom went really went huge with this game. The character roster is huge featuring 56 characters. It brings back everyone from all the versus game including X-Men Children of The Atom. Spinal, Silver Samurai, Psylocke, Sentinel and more return and have new moves. Now majority of characters from the Marvel side are reused character sprites. The only new character sprites from the Marvel side are Cable from the X-Men who has tons of weapons and Marrow another character from the X-Men. Now for some odd reason Capcom added another Wolverine that has bone claws. I never understood that.

Now the Capcom side I would say is a lot more interesting than the Capcom side due to the fact that there are more new character sprites. It was really cool to see Jill from the Resident Evil series turn into a 2D fighter. She has the ability to call out zombies, dogs, crows and even has a hyper combo to call out the Tyrant. It was also cool seeing Hayato from the 3D fighting game Plasma sword and turn into 2D fighter was really cool to see. Capcom also made two original characters for this game Ruby Heart who’s a treasure hunter and plays as one of the leading characters alongside Cable. Amingo a Mexican Cactus is another new Capcom original character who’s a lot of fun to use. Street Fighter favorite Guile makes his versus series game debut and he plays completely different from his Street Fighter gameplay and he’s actually one of my favorite characters to use in this game.

What really surprised with Marvel vs Capcom 2 is the fact that it's three on three tag team battles. Also when players pick a character they can choose their assist type. It can be a projectile, anti-air, expansion type or more. Players have to choose wisely though because some assist work a lot better than others. Just like in Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter characters can come in for an assist whether it's to surprise the opponent or set up their opponent for combo opportunities. Now players do have to be careful when calling their partner for an assist because they can get caught in a combo and there’s a new feature called snapback an attack that when it hits it forcibly bring in your opponent's partner and it completely gets rid of the red health and your character won’t be able to regain their health back  and it can sometimes kill them.

The gameplay in Marvel vs Capcom 2 is a six button layout like the previous games but two of those buttons are the assist and the rest of the buttons are light punch, hard punch, light kick and hard kick. The gameplay is also a lot faster than the previous games and making it more crazy are the assist. They come in super fast and a lot of players like to use it for protection.

The super meter upgraded as well in this game is the super meter. Players can build their meter up to five gauges. There’s the new feature called the delayed Hyper Combo. A player can perform a Hyper Combo and can bring in their next partner to perform their hyper combo and can later bring in their last partner to perform their Hyper Combo. This of course can only be used if you have at least three gauges of Super Meter. The player can also use variable combinations that brings in the entire team to perform their Hyper Combo all at the same time and it's probably one of the coolest things to see especially when finishing off your opponent.

The boss in Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is named Abyss. He has three forms each are annoying but are less annoying than the last bosses.

In the end Marvel vs Capcom 2 is arguably my favorite fighting game ever. I love the huge roster now people can make the argument that the two Wolverines and Iron Man and War Machine were kind of pointless but during that those times we were happy and surprised to see 56 characters. The three on three battles were crazy hectic and the soundtrack is pretty good. It has a smooth jazz theme to it that surprisingly fits. This game is a lot of fun and I definitely prefer this game to anyone that loves fighting games. One of the only grips I have are the God  characters; Magneto, Storm, Cable, Sentinel and others. They are extremely cheap and annoying but that doesn’t stop me from loving this game. Many people arguably say that this is the best fighting game ever during that time and it's hard to disagree.