As far as the competitive aspect of his life goes, Zangief in Street Fighter has had a pretty rough go of it over the years. Being a traditional grappler who is usually considered the basis for what the “grappler” archetype is, his fighting style revolves around a lot of struggle until he finds his opening, then he makes his opponents pay.
Due to his style being so extreme, Zangief usually finds himself on the weaker side of the tier list because any single buff in the wrong direction can quickly turn him into a nightmare. But there was a time where Capcom seemingly forgot to balance Zangief, and no, we’re not talking about Street Fighter 6 Season 2…
In a new video, prominent fighting game community content creator JMCrofts looked back at a time where Zangief was insanely good and pretty darn broken. The game is X-Men vs. Street Fighter, and this version of Gief can still be found in the recently released Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics.
Crofts begins by noting that XvSF Zangief might not seem all that great on the surface. He’s very slow, has potentially the worst dash in the game, and he can’t chain normal attacks into each other on the ground.
However, he has a strong Spinning Pile Driver to work with, and most importantly Zangief in X-Men vs. Street Fighter has some of the easiest infinite combos in the entire game.
If he lands his launcher just once, he can technically KO you fairly easily as long as the player does not drop the combo. Not only that, but there are alternative ways to set up his infinites outside of launcher including landing his air lariat.
Now, you might be thinking that having easy infinites doesn’t really mean much in X-Men vs. Street Fighter as every character could do the same in the original version of the game that was first released in arcades. But for some reason, even in the updated version that was also released in arcades and is currently what is playable in the MvC collection, Zangief retains his infinites while the rest of the cast had theirs largely removed.
JMCrofts questions why Zangief kept his easy infinites speculating that maybe Capcom simply forgot to remove them in the updated version or that perhaps they thought Gief was weak enough before to warrant keeping them.
Regardless, easy infinites Zangief is playable right now in the Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection’s iteration of X-Men vs. Street Fighter, and in JMCrofts’ video below, we also get to see him hop online to show just how unbalanced and powerful this iteration of Zangief truly was/is.