Collection essentials #343: Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter (Saturn)

Capcom wasn’t going to just stop at X-Men vs. Street Fighter. For a follow-up, how about getting a variety of Marvel icons in on the action rather than just limit the cast to X-Men?? And so, now fan favorites like Spider-Man, Hulk and Captain America get in on the action!!

MSHvSF has mostly the same tag-team mechanics as the first game, so I’m not gonna recap all that again. It does add a very significant feature, though, that being the “assist”. As long as both your characters are still alive, when you press the “Medium punch” and “Medium kick” buttons together, your character who’s currently tagged out will jump onto the battlefield and perform a specific special move before retreating. It adds some good spice to the gameplay and helps when you’re playing as a character who may have a specific shortcoming that can be helped by this attack. There’s a bit of risk to it, as the assisting character can take damage from enemy attacks, although while tagged out they will slowly recover. One nice touch I like is that, when finishing off a match with a hyper combo move, the announcer will enthusiastically shout the name of the move, as said name displays in large letters on the screen. So cool!

This game is notable for some odd but fun roster choices. There are two very obscure Marvel villains who make the cut, those being Blackheart and the one-eyed, tentacled Shuma-Gorath. It was Capcom’s choice to include them, as they liked the character designs. And so, oddly, these characters are probably more well-known for being in these Capcom fighting games than they are for their very few comic book appearances. In this Japanese version of the game, there’s a strange character named “Norimaro” who appears to be what is called a “joke character”. Norimaro is a short Japanese man with a camera who looks like a weakling and generally fights by throwing objects. He is based on real-life Japanese comedian Noritake Kinashi. He doesn’t really fit in at all, but it’s kind of funny that they chose to include a character like that. In Western release of the game, Norimaro was removed.

This game is better and more polished than XMvSF. The main thing I suppose you could criticize it for is that I guess the Street Fighter cast here could have had a more diverse selection. Five of the nine Street Fighters on offer here are “Shotokan” style fighters; in other words, Ryu and four other characters who play similarly to him. This game does have secret characters though, which is cool, and while they are often clones or near-clones of existing characters, one of them is basically a character who had been in XMvSF and got cut from the main roster.

I first got introduced to the later Capcom crossover games and was unaware of MSHvSF for a while. But I remember when I first discovered it in an arcade one day. It was easy to pick up since I had already played similar games, and I remember in particular liking Blackheart and Shuma Gorath due to their unique designs. Later on when I got a Sega Saturn, I picked up this copy and got many hours of fun out of it! It’s one of the best fighting games on a console loaded with them, and a definite essential. You can play this game and others on modern platforms by picking up “Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics” and I highly recommend it.