Although not a fighting game itself, it’s been hard for anyone in the gaming sphere to ignore the gigantic success of the last few months that has been NetEase’s Marvel Rivals.
Essentially a Overwatch clone but with Marvel characters, the title has taken the general gaming public by storm with massive player numbers and lots of content being released even early on in the game’s lifespan. But what does that have to do with fighting games? Well, potentially, a lot.
Anyone who’s been around the competitive fighting game scene is very well aware of the massive impact the Marvel vs. Capcom series has had on it, especially in North America. Starting as early as X-Men vs. Street Fighter back in 1996, the fighting game community’s original heyday back in the arcades lines up perfectly with some great times for Marvel Comics in the public consciousness back in the 1990s where the X-Men were running rampant everywhere from your TV to the magazine stands and eventually in 2000 all the way to the movie theaters.
Of course, since then Marvel has only become a bigger and bigger brand after the gigantic success of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (although said success has recently cooled off somewhat). Fighting games have also made strides and may have reached a new golden age once more as the genre has many new titles out and returning, as well as seeing strong continued sales for flagship franchises like Capcom’s own Street Fighter.
On top of that, the recently released Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics has been reported to be “selling exactly as planned” and also been seeen hitting the top 20 in US game sales charts during its release, showing that even a collection of these past titles was strong enough to pique consumer attention in a notable way.
So why is there no new Marvel vs. Capcom game to take advantage of both of these situations? Well, the most obvious answer would be that they tried that back in 2017 with Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite and things didn’t go so well, although the recent fan-made mod Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite & Beyond has reignited interest in the title after many years of relative dormancy.
With these facts outlined, let’s have a look at some of the issues Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite faced and how these may well be non-factors moving forward if they were to move forward with a new fighting game, whether it ended up involving Capcom or not.
Let’s be honest, the main thing holding Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite back in a lot of people’s eyes were the lacking roster. Not only was it much smaller than the preceding Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3’s roster of 50, it was also smaller than vanilla Marvel vs. Capcom 3’s roster of 36 playable fighters, with Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite landing at only 30 selectable characters, despite seeming to reuse many of the assets from its predecessor.
Even then, the roster size wasn’t the real issue — it was the roster selection. Capcom’s side was generally not too bad, with many of the most beloved and expected characters returning and even adding sorely missed ones like a Mega Man hero in X along with the big bad from the Mega Man X series Sigma.
The Marvel side however… With a heavy focus on current properties to push the Marvel Cinematic Universe, there was also a massive shift away from what actually made the Marvel vs. Capcom series in its beginning — the X-Men.
At the time, Marvel (or rather, their parent company Disney) did not have the movie rights to the X-Men or the Fantastic Four so any characters related to them were promptly ignored and kept off of the roster, much to the chagrin of many fans who had grown up with X-Men vs. Street Fighter or Marvel vs. Capcom 2 which was stuffed to the brim with mutant combatants.
Adding to this disaster, there’s that quote that everyone keeps bringing up today even 8 years later about how characters are basically just functions which simply served to pour more fuel on the fire.
Today, the situation is very different. After Disney’s acquisition of Fox, the X-Men rights entirely belong to Marvel as well as any rights to the Fantastic Four. The only rights that really matter which Marvel aren’t fully owners of for cinematic purposes are Spider-Man, and even there they have a beneficial deal with Sony which gives them a strong incentive to continue promoting the character and his universe, with three Spider-Man related characters playable in Marvel Rivals — Spider-Man himself, Venom and Peni Parker.
As for the X-Men, there’s lots of them in Marvel Rivals and most of the old Marvel vs. Capcom favorites (except Sentinel) are accounted for with Magneto, Wolverine, Storm and Psylocke all participating in the roster.
While the roster choices for Marvel vs. Cacpom: Infinite hurt it a lot and felt like a misguided attempt at leaning in too hard on the movies, this doesn’t seem to be any kind of concern anymore for Marvel games. Where character rights are concerned there aren’t any issues and looking at Marvel Rivals, it also seems like they aren’t too beholden to the Cinematic Universe iterations of the characters either, which is something I’ll delve into on my next point.
I know a lot of people are likely to say “who cares about the music in a fighting game”, but honestly… A lot of people do. We’ve seen it time and time again with newer releases and it’s a large part of why many modern fighting games incorporate the soundtracks from older titles just in case you aren’t vibing with their new sounds.
While it was far from the main sticking point in Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite due to its plethora of other problems and PR disasters, the music was definitely an area where very few people voiced favorable opinions. After the Marvel vs. Capcom 3 soundtrack received massive praise from most players, in comparison Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite didn’t do much for most.
One main criticism was that they moved entirely away from classic themes for returning Marvel characters. Fighters like Captain America, Iron Man and Spider-Man who had been around for a long time in the series had their beloved themes entirely removed in favor of ambient music which was seemingly meant to relate to the more cinematic vibe of the Avengers movie themes… That just aren’t very pronounced in the way that video game music usually is.
In general, the music was just lacking personality. The Capcom side also felt like a step down from what we’d seen in Marvel vs. Capcom 3, but it was at least based on the same themes we knew and loved from our characters. The Marvel music just felt foreign and lacking.
With this latest Marvel game release, namely Marvel Rivals, the music is actually one of the points that really stays in your head after you play. The melodies aren’t lengthy, don’t exactly stay as entire themes, but there are memorable musical arrangements that definitely enhance the action on the screen.
Of course my personal enjoyment of the music in Marvel Rivals is entirely subjective, but the main point is that it’s there to enhance the action rather than serve as a dull backdrop. Put short, it’s video game music. In a video game, that’s what you want.
The fact that Marvel seem to have eased off in a big way from their seeming insistence that everything be tied deeply to their movie franchise is a very positive step for any future game projects from them, fighting games included.
Whether it be the smaller roster, reused assets or just general low quality visuals compared to other projects, one thing was clear — Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite’s budget was either smaller than it should have been or allocated in areas that didn’t shine.
There were eternal memes on several character reveals including Dante, Spencer and Chun-Li (which was thankfully fixed before release, but still left a very bad mark on the game’s reputation) and overall, the game just did not have a very polished vibe as a result.
On the contrary, Marvel’s current game projects whether you love them or hate them, have a lot of polish applied to them. Marvel Rivals is obviously the most recent example but you can also look at other Marvel games we’ve seen recently such as Insomniac Games’ Spider-Man titles or games like Marvel Snap.
There’s a coherent vision to the game and it’s clear that budget has been properly allocated to make sure that the game actually appeals to players beyond just having Marvel characters, which leads directly in to my next point…
Directly correlated to the budget and the coherent vision I mentioned is the consistent art style. Marvel Rivals shows a clear intention in its art style and even if all the characters might not look like your favorite version of the comic book characters, they very much feel like comic book characters first.
This is exactly how Marvel vs. Capcom games used to feel and which the fan-made mod Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite & Beyond strove to restore to Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite as a whole. The consistent feeling of a comic book game was sorely missing from the original product, but this newest project Marvel Rivals has that in spades.
It’s clear that whoever’s in charge of games at Marvel right now, or at the very least whoever set the green light for Marvel Rivals, has a proper understanding of what people want from their comic book games aesthetically and a good art style goes a very long way. In fact, a large reason why we remember the old Marvel vs. Capcom games so fondly is because of how good the original X-Men vs. Street Fighter and Marvel Super Heroes fighting games looked.
A good art style doesn’t necessarily require a high budget, but it certainly doesn’t hurt a project either. The fact that Marvel seem to have gotten less stingy with their money for video game purposes would suggest that they not only care, or at the least hire people who care, about the products but that they also give them proper funds to work with to bring their artistic vision to light.
Now this one is a bit more controversial and might end up rubbing people the wrong way if it does end up happening, but the dreaded “games as a service” that we keep hearing about is a reality and it’s not likely to go away any time soon.
While this isn’t a format that’s been well-tested in the fighting game space yet (the only notable example being MultiVersus which is unfortunately shutting down after its 5th season), it is something we’re going to see more of as the upcoming League of Legends-based 2XKO seems to be aimed at a similar distribution model.
Indeed, having free games where you pay for cosmetics and ongoing content isn’t necessarily something fighting gamers have vibed with so far, but that’s unlikely to stop companies from trying it and seeing if they can make it work. Given its success in other genres, it may well be possible to do so.
Even paid games like Street Fighter 6 and Tekken 8 have incorporated parts of this method by having Battle Passes available to players in order to unlock extra content in the game, so it’s definitely not as far-fetched as some might imagine it to be.
Given that Marvel Rivals achieved its great success while using this very model, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see Marvel push for more of it, whether they decide to collaborate with Capcom again or go their own way with NetEase or some other partner for a fully Marvel-owned stab at a fighting game.
Whatever the case, Marvel Comics approach to gaming seems to have changed significantly since the early days of the Disney acquisition and for Marvel fans? That’s honestly a very good thing. For fighting game fans? Well, that remains to be seen. But there could very well be something interesting in the pipeline to be revealed within the next few years.
