Traditionally, whenever I considered making a top games list, I would ask myself “how do I rank these multiplayer games which I’ve put hundreds or thousands of hours into, where my experience depended on how good I was, who I was playing with, and other community circumstances, rather than just the game itself?” I couldn’t come up with a good answer - I felt like I viewed those competitive titles just completely differently from anything single-player-focused at this point. Not as works of art (or entertainment), but as playing fields, the same way I never thought whether Basketball or Football is a better designed game, I just played whichever one I had the best opportunity to, and I tried my best at it. That’s kind of the thing - when you intentionally try to break the game to get the biggest advantage over your opponent, it’s hard to say whether the manner in which you’re able to do it is “good” or “bad”, I’m thinking in terms of “does it help me win”, not “do I enjoy this”.
The last part is especially crucial when it comes to fighting games in particular, because by design, there are periods of the game you will not enjoy. As the enemy scores a knockdown or otherwise locks you down in their flurry of offense, your gameplay is often limited to testing your reaction time and prediction ability, and if you succeed, then the reward will often be just the return to neutral state, not scoring any “victory points” or gaining any advantage, just denying the opponent theirs. I think Pat Miller put it right when he said that your goal as a fighting game player is to make the game as unpleasant to your opponent as possible, and it’s a tug-of-war where players try to snatch the fun away from one another. As such, your mileage will absolutely vary based on the pool of competitors available to you, your own talent, experience, and willingness to work at getting better.
But in recent years I’ve had plenty of opportunity to look for words to describe what I think makes one fighting game “better” than another, as titles such as Street Fighter V and DragonBall FighterZ have thoroughly disappointed me. It really didn’t feel like matter of personal preference at this point, but of design choices that, in my opinion, significantly reduced the gameplay complexity in crucial areas, allowing for less diversity of playstyles and focusing on just the superficial flair, when the genre’s history is full of titles that were able to achieve both. And one example of such is what I now realize has been my favorite game for many years now, 2011’s Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3.
In 2010 I was slowly getting into fighting game community, after over a decade of playing them without any understanding of their systems, one step ahead of button mashing at best. As I was learning what the hell a “framedata” is and practicing my first juggles in Tekken 6, I saw the reveal trailer of Marvel vs Capcom 3, and for some reason I was immediately hooked. In retrospect, it’s really weird as I certainly wouldn’t call myself a huge fan of either brand, I never played any of the previous games in the series and I had no particular affinity for fast-paced or chaotic titles at that point. One thing I sometimes consider is that I have a tiny amount of nostalgia for the fighting game, X-Men: Mutant Academy for PSX, but I genuinely don’t know whether I subconsciously linked the two in my head or not.
In retrospect, it’s really marvelous that this is the title I’ve learned my fighting game chops on, and I certainly wouldn’t recommend it to anyone. As I’ve mentioned, it’s really fast, as characters are able to cross the entire screen and start mounting offense in a blink of an eye. Just being able to perform special input motions quickly can give you a huge advantage in dealing with lots of different situations. You play with teams of three fighters each, and while you only directly control one character at a time, you can call in the others to jump in and perform an assist. Characters are often able to kill off of any stray hit, provided you are good enough at controlling them to do complex combos. There’s a lot of freedom in cancelling moves into one another, jumps, dashes, specials and supers, which gives both players a lot to think about at all times. Moreover, as a defender, you have access to a “pushblock”, a mechanic that allows you to shove your opponent away after any successful block, and utilizing it well is absolutely crucial to not letting the enemy run all over you. If you’ve never seen a MvC3 match, I bet your reaction to
something like this will be that of pure confusion - characters come in and out, screen is constantly flashing, there’s an incessant flurry of moves from both sides, and the camera is barely able to keep up with action.
But perhaps it were those very same elements that provided the crutches I needed to not get overwhelmed in the early stages of the game’s life. Once I got the hang of pushblocking, that meant I had an easy answer for “how to get the opponent off me”, something I’m still struggling with in almost every other fighting game I play. Because of the high level of control over characters, one reckless attack wouldn’t necessarily put me in such a disadvantage as in a more restrained title. The multitude of options and speed of the game meant it was generally harder for the opponent to predict what I’m going to do. And because of aforementioned difficulty of control and overall chaos, the game lent itself to a lot of scramble situations, where I could score myself an advantage thanks to instinct, or just a lucky guess. I’m sure learning the game nowadays against someone good would be really painful, but I was able to enjoy and learn from 100-game sets during which I didn’t get a single win, because it never felt like the game was completely outside of my control, there was always something I could’ve done differently, some new combination of moves and assists I could’ve tried.
It helps that this is one of the better fighting games in terms of appeasing people as impatient as me. The length of combos rarely gets overbearing, and the way the system works means there’s not a lot of repetition, and also the attack animations are just incredible, perhaps my favorite in the genre period - so even as I’m getting hit, I can’t help but appreciate how cool that combo looks (and sounds), something that, for me, rarely outweighs the frustration of not being able to control my character. A lot of props to the music department as well, I can’t think of many other fighting games with themes that get me as pumped to play, from the main menu, through the character select screen, then through almost all of the character themes, and down to the victory screen. After 9 years of playing, none of them have overstayed their welcome, I am as pumped as ever whenever I hear the synths in Nova’s theme, Magneto’s guitar or Taskmaster’s brass.
As for playing the game on a slightly higher level, it definitely offers speed and craziness that few other titles can match. Moreover, the variety in characters is pretty absurd, from stance-switching Amaterasu, leveling Frank West, Magneto flying all over the screen, Dante with never-ending arsenal of moves, his omnipotent brother Vergil, Phoenix Wright searching for clues and then pointing his finger at opponents to enter super-powered Turnabout Mode, Deadpool beating you with his lifebar, or Phoenix who upon defeat transforms into way stronger Dark Phoenix. All sorts of playstyles are allowed, from full-on zoning with Morrigan and Doctor Doom who will never let you get close if you don’t play well enough, relentless rushdown with Wolverine who’s attacks are almost impossible to react to, and more versatile playstyles offered by likes of Zero who seemingly has an answer for every situation. While I’ve already mentioned that combos will commonly empty the entire lifebar in one go, the game also has significant “chip damage”, meaning the amount of health you take away when the opponent blocks. That’s why characters like Morrigan can work so well, they don’t need to open you up and force to make a mistake, if you refuse to engage and work through the bullet hell she’s creating, then you’ll just die from a thousand small cuts instead.
The results aren’t always positive, mind you - between Morrigan, Zero, Vergil, Firebrand, X-23, Wolverine and Phoenix, the game has plenty of characters that are really, really good at “taking the fun away from the opponent”. Sometimes, the game truly feels broken. Design that allows the player to basically cover every single opponent option and guarantee a full team wipeout as long as they score the first hit. Infinites that allow you to kill even from openings that were supposed to limit your combo options (such as throws or assist hits), which also break that “combos are always satisfying to watch” rule. Balance that makes playing against Zero and Vergil feel really, really unfair. X-Factor, a power boost available to both player once per match that serves many functions, but crucially it allows for comebacks that feel really cheap and unearned, denying the opponent’s hard work from 90% of the match in just few seconds. On the other hand, game is able to boast a much larger variety of tournament-viable characters compared to likes of MvC2, with people winning major tournaments with what was considered to be bottom 3 characters as late as 7 years into the game’s lifespan - so it seems like the passage of time allowed the weaker members of the cast to “develop” and catch up, rather than the game narrowing to just a couple of characters that have such obvious advantages that playing anything else means you’re not really trying to win.
One thing worth adding is that asides from how captivating Marvel 3 is to play, it’s also pretty much the only game I enjoy watching. The design choices I brought up lend themselves to really good competition, thanks to the variety of playstyles, excitement provided by scrambles, seemingly never-ending well of new techniques to invent and showcase in tournaments, presentation that captures the feeling of hype better than any other game I’ve watched, and the ability to shift the momentum that can feel frustrating when you’re on the receiving end, but
gets the crowd absolutely wild. In terms of sports-like excitement, instilling the desire to improve and rewarding your efforts, no other game comes close to Marvel vs Capcom 3 for me. I now realize that there’s no way any other game was ever going to be my number one. Thank you for all the years, here’s to 9 more.
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