As excitement continues to swell for the relatively recently announced Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection the mighty JM Crofts has come out with a fresh Marvel vs. Capcom 2 tier list in which he orders each and every one of the game’s 56 characters.
Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is nearly a quarter century old and thus from a significantly different time during which fervor for certain Marvel characters (along with Marvel itself) was not as widespread as it is today. Fighting game balancing practices were also widely unrefined compared to modern approaches, and the pairing of these two truths makes for a tier list that conspicuously breaks some rules that developers of an MvC game in 2024 would likely have to follow.
To be fair, a more modern Marvel title likely wouldn’t have the same roster as MvC2 given how many characters have flared up in popularity thanks to recent blockbuster films and some of the shows Disney has been trying to make work.
That said, Wolverine has consistently been one of the absolute most popular figures of the last few decades, and that remains especially true today as Deadpool and Wolverine smashes box office records here in a time where super hero fatigue (amongst other factors) has handicapped the genre in general.
There are definitely new strategies emerging as fighting game developers now might hold a particularly popular character to release them later as DLC, or welcome in familiar faces from popular culture as guest fighters as we’ve seen prominently in Mortal Kombat.
One of the things that struck us as Crofts assembled his list was his exceptionally low placement of Wolverine. Sure, this is just one person’s opinion, but he tends to know what he’s talking about when it comes to MvC2 and his opinions on Wolverine don’t deviate heavily from those of the wider community.
There are two versions of Wolvy (standard and Boneclaw, which differ only slightly in ability) and both are in the bottom 10 of fairly large roster. This got me thinking, in the context of the aforementioned modern strategies, would developers ever allow Wolverine to be this low in a modern MvC title?
Yes, they didn’t even include him in 2017’s Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, but there was a ton of red tape in that instance and Infinite’s resounding failure is almost certainly in large part due to the lack of figures like Wolverine. Yes, Capcom hasn’t made Ryu better than around mid tier in either Street Fighter 5 or Street Fighter 6, but Ryu isn’t on Wolverine’s level.
I’d suspect if a modern MvC were to drop, we’d see a direct effort by developers to keep currently underscored characters like Venom, Spider-Man, and Wolverine at least on the top half of the tier charts.
What do you think, though? Fighting game history is filled with examples that run contrary to this train of thinking, but would that be the case in 2024 or 2025? Share your thoughts in the comments, and check out JM Croft’s latest MvC2 tier list via the visual and his full video embedded below.
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