Collection essentials #455: Marvel vs. Capcom (DC)

It started with Capcom making a couple 2D fighting games featuring Marvel characters, in each of which they included a secret Capcom guest character. Then they made a tag-team fighting game called X-Men vs. Street Fighter, featuring a roster consisting of characters from those two groups from the two companies. For the next installment, they went beyond just X-Men and made Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter, bringing non-X-Men like Spider-Man and Hulk into the fray. And now, Capcom would bring the scope on their end beyond Street Fighter for “Marvel vs. Capcom”, and a variety of characters from Capcom’s rich history would be present such as Mega Man, Strider Hiryu and Morrigan from Darkstalkers.

Marvel vs. Capcom still very much resembles the previous installments in terms of both graphics and gameplay basics. You can see my post about X-Men vs. Street Fighter for more info on how gameplay works.

What’s different about Marvel vs. Capcom? Well, “assist” attacks are done differently now. In the previous installment, you could call on your non-active fighter to jump in and perform a move. In this game you can’t call your partner, but instead, you are assigned a non-playable character from either Marvel or Capcom lore who can come in and perform an assist attack. There are a whole bunch of them, and this was a neat way for a whole lot of characters to be represented without having to go through the long process of making them all playable fighters. A difference here, though, is that you are limited to how many times you can call on your assist character each fight. The amount of uses depends on which character it is. Normally the assist character is chosen randomly, but each one has a hidden command input a player can hold down before a match to get exactly the one they want. 

The other major gameplay addition is the “Duo Team Attack”. The previous games allowed players to spend two levels of hyper combo meter to have both their characters pull off one of their hyper combos (super duper special moves) at the same time. This game has that, but also has another crazy thing you can activate when you have two or more meters full, that being to call upon BOTH your characters to come on the field and fight at the same time, with the player’s button inputs controlling both of them. Both fighters will be on the field for several seconds, and during this time they can perform as many hyper combos as possible, which is delightfully chaotic and powerful.

This game is also VERY stylish, and it really adds to the experience. The music is excellent and gets you amped up. Representation from the different games and worlds is very good, with stages based on the places these characters come from and nice remixes of music from past games. The sound effects and background changes when characters perform hyper combos are super cool.

This Dreamcast port of the original arcade game also adds a neat four-player mode. Sure, in previous games you could just quickly pass the controller to a friend when tagging out. But now, you can have four controllers hooked up and have each player assigned to one, so you don’t need to controller-swap in the middle of a fight when tagging out. Cool! There’s also an unlockable mode that lets you play as the final boss against a gauntlet of opponents, which is a great bonus.

In terms of my personal experience, Marvel vs. Capcom is a highly nostalgia game for me, and one of the top arcade games from my youth. I never knew about X-Men vs. Street Fighter or Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter the first few years they were out. So when I walked into an arcade and saw Marvel vs. Capcom for the first time, my mind was blown! A fighting game with Ryu, Chun Li, Mega Man, Spider-Man, Wolverine, Hulk, etc., all playable?? Crossovers were not as common back then as they are now, so this was pretty mind-blowing for me when I was (I believe) nine years old. And the game was so STYLISH! I was immediately enthralled by it, though I had no idea how to play it properly. I stunk at it, but that didn’t stop me from enjoying it. 

The arcade where I first played this game was Fun-O-Rama in York, Maine, right in the spot where my family would go on vacation every year. And I played it pretty much every time I was there for the next few years. It was one of the fancy larger-size cabinets, too, which gave players a little more room to stand apart, with a screen that was bigger than normal and a little further away than on the average cabinet.

Fun-O-Rama is still in business today, and last I checked, that very same Marvel vs. Capcom cabinet is still there...although perhaps it shouldn’t be. For MANY years the controls have not worked right; for example, the joystick for player 2 cannot register a left input, so it really is not even properly playable. On top of that, the game’s original monitor must have broken, because it was replaced with a smaller generic widescreen aftermarket monitor, and it looks kinda crappy. It’s sad that it’s in such poor shape with the owners seemingly unwilling to properly maintain it, but it is kinda cool that the same cabinet (last I checked) is still there to this day.

Not surprisingly, Marvel vs. Capcom was one of the first Dreamcast games I sought out once I had the console. I believe I got it on vacation in 2003 at a mall GameStop somewhere, and that’s the same copy you see in the photo. 

One thing you could point to as a drawback to this game is that the playable character roster perhaps could have and should have been bigger. It has roughly the same amount of fighters as the previous two games, meaning that a lot of fighters from those games were dropped in favor of new ones. Of course, Capcom would address that in the next installment, as you’ll find out in my next post. 

And an issue with this port in particular is that, if you’re using a standard Dreamcast controller, you must use the d-pad and cannot use the joystick for movement. Umm….WHY?? That makes no sense to me at all. Of course, using an arcade joystick controller is ideal, but those are bulky and pricey and not as easy to find.

Still, Marvel vs. Capcom is a special game to me, and this wonderful Dreamcast port is a quintessential essential. Recently the game got ported to modern platforms as part of “Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics”, so go check it out!