Believe it or not one of reasons was the music
Just as a prophet is never welcomed in his hometown, a new entry in an established fighting game franchise is never welcomed by fans… at least at first. It’s hard to believe it, but even the immortalized Marvel vs. Capcom 2 received a ton of hateful backlash when it first released back in February of 2000.
Some of you reading this weren’t even born at that time, but others may recall how slow the Marvel vs. Capcom community was to embrace the now iconic sequel to Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes. In a recent video Maximilian identifies a few reasons for the initial widespread rejection.
It’s no secret that a significant portion, likely the largest, of the allure for the highly anticipated Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Game Collection comes from the fact that it includes the beloved Marvel vs. Capcom 2.
This makes it all the harder to believe that people, Maximilian admits that he himself was an adamant participator in this crowd, widely rejected it upon release. This hard to swallow truth becomes even more unbelievable when Max lists the game’s jazzy musical themes as one of the components people were immediately turned off by.
From the Clock Tower stage to the Take You For A Ride character select theme, Marvel vs. Capcom 2’s soundtrack is one of the most highly regarded things about it. So how could such admired aspects not only not be appreciated, but stand as reason for rebuke?
In short the answer is that it wasn’t like what people were used to and therefore didn’t meet their established expectation for what an MvC entry should sound like.
This theme extends into gameplay, visuals, and the other reasons people didn’t like MvC2, but we’ll let Max do the bulk of the explaining in the full video below.