I’m shit at fighting games but keep buying them anyway. This one was a dumbly dumb purchase because although this ultimate version was released in 2016, it’s based on a 2011 game and unfortunately looks the part. The models, textures and effects are all pretty low resolution and look worse than even the other fighting games I’ve played a year or two ago. In addition, I found that I know only a small smattering of the Capcom characters and hence don’t really care about them.

At least there are a lot of characters in this game, including many Marvel characters that I didn’t think would be prominent enough to merit inclusion such as MODOK, Taskmaster and Nova. Also interesting is they include characters with body types that differ widely from the standard humanoid template. Amaterasu for example is literally and with other small characters like Rocket Raccoon is too short for many projectiles to hit. Other characters like the Sentinel are huge, extending their reach but also making them easier to hit. This diversity extends to the movesets and some of the Capcom characters have truly unusual and complicated mechanics. Frank West for example from the Dead Rising series starts out weak but can become more powerful by taking snapshots with his camera.

One reason why I bought this s because I was under the impression that this was a more casual fighting game than the main titles. While it’s true that each character’s moveset seems simpler than in other games and it’s easier to pull out special and super moves here, this is more than made up by the complexity of needing to control a team of three characters. In addition to choosing each member of the team, you must also choose their respective assist power and using those correctly at the right time is vital to getting out of tough spots. As a portion of lost health is regenerated while they’re benched, health management via tagging in and out is also important as is knowing which character does well against another character.

Compounding this difficulty is the fact is that this is a very fast paced game, at least by the standards of my old man reflexes. It’s also about rapidly tapping buttons to achieve ridiculous combo strings and the generously big meter means that you will see many hyper combo moves being used in any given match. Even more ridiculous is the X-Factor mechanic. It can only be used once per match and becomes more powerful as you lose more fighters. Once activated, it greatly increases the character’s damage and speed. It’s basically an I-win button provided you can actually land any hits. So yeah, this is not a casual friendly game at all.

For a single-player like myself, it’s also sad that this has no real story mode at all. There is a Heroes and Heralds mode which lets you collect cards granting a variety of special abilities and is a good excuse to engage in more fighting against the AI. But given my skills, I stop being able to make much headway once the AI switches to Hard and Very Hard difficulty levels and it’s not like I can adjust that in that mode. There are no real cinematics and ending the game in Arcade mode basically gives you a couple of old-fashioned splash screens with some story-telling text. One thing that I did get a kick out of was the crossover taunts between the characters. For example, if Ghost Rider is fighting Phoenix Wright, he’ll have a line about how many lawyers there are in hell whereas if he’s fighting Amaterasu, he’ll say that even gods must face judgment. Very neat.

Anyway I had very little reason to spend too much time on this. This game is too fast-paced and complex for me to enjoy and I really would prefer my fighting games to be prettier and have more bells and whistles than this. I suppose the competitive players got decent mileage out of it but I do question why it took them so long to come out with this when the original was released in 2011 and the next version Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite was released only a year later in 2017. I think I really should have bought the newer game instead.