Marvel Vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds (Playstation 3/XBox 360, 2011)

 

This game took some work to get ahold of and a lot more work to get shots of. Sony REALLY didn't want people recording any clips of the PS3 for the new sensation Youtube. That would let people promote their games by showing off the gameplay!

This is the top-selling game in the series (though to be precise, the ultimate edition is, with this version in second place...if you combine the two on sales, "3" is even further ahead of the rest) and the one that launched with a wave of hype: This was the era of Avengers mania, with the MCU in full swing. Plus there was a decade since the last game for the legend of MVC2 to grow. That second game pretty much never stopped being a thing; I remember playing it a lot with friends in the late 2000's, even.

This one finally adds Thor, after all this time. They kinda had to at this point with him being one of the big four MCU heroes. Psylocke is still missing though. I think she's gone...or maybe she's one of the many characters they add for the ultimate edition. That version is practically a new game so I'm going to look at that too. With both of them released in 2011 (February and November, I believe) it seems to me like this version was just an incomplete version that they put out early to meet deadlines - deadlines which were probably hot and heavy at the time with MCU's movie schedule triggering spikes in consumer interest. Far as I can tell, Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 is the real MVC3.

This one has a full-on intro movie showing all of the characters battling it out over a cityscape. They're all just kinda doing whatever they were known for doing in life (Wesker is trying to steal a biohazard container) like some sort of purgatorio.

We get a sweet camera angle looking up at Morrigan's fine-ass 'bod. Many lucky fellas have seen Morrigan from this angle.

The devs seemed to like this angle in general because we get it again shortly afterwards:

This is X-23, seen from downstairs. She's an X-Men universe character I'm not familiar with.

X-23 (and her hot choker) gets rescued by Hulk, prompting Chris Redfield to realize maybe Hulk isn't a bad guy. Maybe Marvel and Capcom can get along. Maybe we can pack all this up and go home!

Chris looks just like Scott Adkins in this game. I mean, damn.

With in-the-know moviegoers clamoring to see more of this guy while Hollywood ignores him (he doesn't spend any time on sex islands I guess), it seems like a total no-brainer to cast him as the star of a Resident Evil movie franchise. Imagine having this guy to base a series around. Incredibly versatile actor, charismatic leading man, does his own stunts, makes every production he's involved in better.

Find accurate casting for Jill, then later Leon and Claire in the sequel, and you could do a bombastic series. ......Or they could just do a Resident Evil movie with an entirely new character nobody knows and leave out the existing big four characters. The kids will love it!

Great shot of the cast before the game starts. This has a little bit of that Street Fighter IV look, with heavy emphasis on light/shadow.

The roster is decently big, but not as big as MVC2. Inexplicably, the character portraits are blacked-out until you select them. I've never seen a fighting game black out the character portraits. It's kinda lame and doesn't make sense.

That isn't even the worst thing here, though. The worst thing is that there's an announcer doing a full speech over the character select, he says the same speech every time, and he just goes on and ON. So every time you go to the character select you get to listen to this guy blabbering on while you scroll through blacked-out character portraits.

Hopefully all of this gets fixed for Ultimate MVC3.

Once you pick out 3 characters, you get this rad comic book cover with your trio.

Zero is selectable, which is a must for me. Not sure where Megaman is, maybe he died between games. Captain Commando is gone too, I guess he died on the way back to his home planet.

Glad they kept the three-character teams from the previous game. Surprised they didn't keep escalating it further and give us four-character teams, though. Or they could be like the Stadium Stampede match at Double or Nothing '26 and have like eight guys on each team.

Another rad comic-ism is the font at the start of the fight. Sometimes you get this for super moves too.

We may not have Rogue or Psylocke, but we have Jean Grey in all her Phoenix glory. The stage visuals look about halfway between Street Fighter IV and V and the gameplay is just as chaotic as MVC2. Speaking of chaotic, there's a LOT going on in the backgrounds. I didn't even notice the legion of Servbots.

For some reason Jean/Phoenix seems to have a lot less HP than other characters. I don't know why. She just loses health insanely fast for some reason.

As our favorite redheaded X-Man powers up... the hell is Morrigan doing back there? Trying to make up for all the back-arching we're missing by not having Psylocke in the game?

Zero: "Look at my butt!"

Zero's alternate costumes can make for some very nice alternative colors. This is the Asgard level, with Yggdrasil in the background.

Anyone who has played Mega Man X4-X6 will know how accurate Zero's moveset is here. He's got his somersault spin-slash, along with lots of other laser sword moves. I couldn't figure out how to do Magma Dragoon's fire uppercut slash, which I'm guessing is in this because most of his other, less-awesome moves are.

Zero's super is his Giga Crush, the vertical lasers one. It's a bit different here compared to how it looks in the X series:

If I'm not careful, this game is gonna make me replay some Mega Mans. This is Zero's Giga Crash from, I believe, Mega Man X6, but his MVC3 super could also be him doing the charged version of Shining Hotarunicus' weapon from X5. It's been a while, not sure.

Here's the Hadangeki, a projectile slash that covers a LOT of screen real estate.

Shippuga is a dash-slash that hits multiple times and is super-satisfying to roll out.

Hold on a second. That's the sort of thing Megaman X would say in the later X games after he got all radicalized by social media echo chambers. ZERO doesn't normally talk like this, he isn't a douche. Rather than non-personing mavericks, he'd try to bring them to their senses and only fight if necessary. Well, maybe they're all douches by late-stage X series.

One of the stages is the first level of Ghouls n' Ghosts, complete with a Red Arremer lurking. The backgrounds of this game continue to be the main strong point for me here.

Super moves are bigger and badder than ever, and dishing them out with a few full super meters and all 3 characters standing results in some pretty sick mega-attacks. In this one, Zero charges up a Mega Buster blast while Morrigan and Phoenix have a back-arching contest. No wonder Zero is charging his Mega Buster.

Speaking of, win a fight with Morrigan and she tosses her hair before floating in the air in her signature pose:

Capcom really outdid themselves with Morrigan. Back in the day, the EGM Darkstalkers 3 advertisements really helped me and a lot of other young guys with puberty:

There wasn't much competition for sexy pictures in 2001-era EGMs, and there certainly wasn't anything sexy in Nintendo Power.

Quick look at the trophy list for this game, which consists of a lot of "win a match with 3 specific characters" trophies.

Wait a minute... "big 3"? The Avengers had four big guys. I had to look this up:

I guess they really threw Hulk under the bus. And he didn't even get a solo movie in the 2010's MCU pinnacle era.

Hulk is darker-green in this compared to the earlier games in the series. I liked the cartoon look more than this SF4 look, so Hulk is a lot less appealing to play as here. He was very appealing in the earlier games.

In the last game I really wanted to see a playable Arthur, and in this game we get it. He still hasn't gotten the knife, though. Firing lances through the air is a ton of fun.

Another character who was long overdue is Former Mayor Mike Haggar of Final Fight fame. He uses pro wrestling moves and is generally one of the best characters Capcom ever doled out. I definitely need to finish the game with Haggar.

Anyway back to Morrigan. Even her basic walking/levitating animation is sexy AF. Does she really need to show off this much hip? Someone could be killed!

Some "Big 3" action as I play as Thor for a bit. Chances are, these guys got played a LOT by gamers in 2011. This was their moment, thanks to Iron Man getting over with mainstream audiences and bringing his Marvel brothers along.

Thor swings Mjolnir, which seems oddly small. Maybe it was always small and just seemed bigger because it had so much impact in the movies. Fiercer attacks add electricity to the hammer swings, like an infusion in Dark Souls.

Wonder how many Skeptic's Spices Thor needed to use to bring down the Faith requirement to cast Sunlight Blade.

Here's MODOK, one of the weirdest Marvel characters. He's speechless as Morrigan stretches and arches all over the place. Nobody really knows how to deal with this insanely hot woman. Turns out she was Capcom's real nuclear option all along. Usually MODOK is the weirdest, most eye-catching character in any given room, but not today.

Morrigan has some competition from Storm, who has achieved a similar level of goddessitude in this installment.

Hadoken Watch: The Hadokens are still pretty big in this game. Looks more like a formless energy mass than a fireball though. We need to get back to the basics of a simple smaller Hadoken like it was in the 90's.

Dante is another now-playable character that I had to check out. Of all of Capcom's characters, he's probably the MOST suited to a fighting game. He switches between a pair of guns and a sword to dish out super-stylish moves.

Here's the sword. The original Devil May Cry, and DMC3, are two games that I'd really like to cover on here at some point (also the second one, as terrible as it is, since it's short and sandwiched between two great games). I probably won't get around to them though. There's just too much else on the list and too little time. The later games (the Mid DMC4, the solid DMC5, and the weird reboot) didn't really float my boat enough to want to talk about them, but the first three were HUGE, decade-defining games for me in the 2000s. Especially DMC3, which is one of the best action games I've ever played, concided with a really interesting month in my life, and hasn't been revisited by me since.

They did an Erdrick Trilogy thing there and had DMC3 be the prequel to the first two. While the first game is a great proof of concept and introduction to the character (and the second is a poorly-made B-Tier follow-up), the third game fully-realizes the concept, giving us the best weapons, the best villain, the best action. It's just peak gameplay on the PS2. It's really difficult though, at least at first, and the first 30% or so of the game is basically a wall to entry for new players. Get over that part and you're good for the rest.

One of my favorite moves in DMC3 was the somersaulting attack with the Ice Nunchaku. Well, that move is here, along with lots of his other moves. Most of the moves are from DMC3...I notice they pretty much ignored the more-current fourth game here, as I generally do. It's fine (and was possibly the first HD game I ever owned) but it's just bland compared to DMC3. That series is a trilogy to me and I'm fine with that.

Defeat enough foes, and the final battle is against Galactus and his minions. First you have to defeat two shadow-versions of villain characters, then Galactus himself descends. The shadow-versions were pretty much always Dormammu and Akuma for me, but it looks like Magneto, Bison, and probably others can be the opponents here as well.

As the fight goes on, the two shadows actually double up on your character, which is just straight unfair. When it comes down to it, I guess this is a 3-on-3, but yeah.

Defeat the two shadows and Galactus comes down. I think he's scaled down a bit for the purposes of even being fight-able.

Galactus Tangent: This guy is such a big deal that I think he should have been saved for the big bad of an entire phase of movies, not burned on that dumb-as-hell Fantastic Four: First Steps movie. Yeah that movie had the most nonsensical plot I've ever seen but that's a whole other tangent. Doctor Doom is big enough to be an Avengers-level villain, but after him we don't really have anywhere to go (which I assume is why they were delaying his arrival with Kang as a stopgap, originally). Galactus is pretty much it, unless they acquired the rights to Knull. Since Galactus got wasted (and TBH he's more of a force of nature than a villain) they'll need to keep Doom around as long as possible. Maybe bring Thanos back via multiverse shenanigans. I don't know.

Galactus attacks with a Cyclops-like Uncontrollable Eye Beam.

However all things considered this is one of the easier final bosses in the series. Jump and attack his weak points, like all of the other giant-sized final bosses. Considering this was easily the biggest "name" out of any of the MVC series villains, he should have been much tougher to take down. Maybe give him a few more life bars, or start with a fight against his feet and then go up to the torso and then the head.

Haggar's ending has him returning to the OVAL OFFICE.

That's right, Haggar is now THE PRESIDENT.

He is a simple man. He stands for the people, and BASHIN' HEADS when needed. Given his credentials of "fought off numerous Mad Gear Gang affiliates armed with pipes and bats" he soared to victory in a landslide.

The credits roll as the "And now, a word from the President" portion of "Damn It Feels Good To Be A Gangsta" plays.

Chris Redfield, looking not a day over Scott Adkins.

Scott Adkins to play Chris Redfield. Putting it out into the ether.

Morrigan, looking not a day over 400 and still as horny as a teenage boy.

Wolverine, THE BIG DOG. Maybe I'll finally get around to really playing as him in the next one.

Jean Grey showing off her hips.

Hips: Probably the greatest actual human superpower in real life. They can cast a spell on the majority of the population, and they can bear kids. In other words, without lady-hips, we would CEASE TO EXIST AS A SPECIES.

Iron Man, another character I should really fire up.

So for future posts, we have Wolverine, Iron Man, Dante...

...probably Morrigan again...

Morrigan's ending has her finding a secret bar for demons, devils, vampires, imps, and all kinds of other weirdoes. If there's one character in here worth a bone sesh, she'll find him.

Tickling Morrigan's Fancy is something we'd all be so lucky as to get to do.

Real quick, here's her victory pose animation.

Jesus Christ, Morrigan.

I also went back and got Zero's ending. He gets a lift back to Earth from the Silver Surfer, who I guess is fine with his slaying of Galactus.

This is a game that would actually be ideal to play on emulator. First of all you wouldn't need to get/play it on a PS3. Second, you'd be able to save state during the final battle and reload it a couple times to see the endings for all three characters you're playing as. As it is, you only see the ending for the one that strikes the final blow.

I was hoping Zero's ending would give us some insight into the world of him and Megaman X. It doesn't. Instead it's just this 4th-wall joke about how they went to the wrong world. Megaman Zero takes place a hundred years after the X series, so it's really the wrong time.

Not sure if this is them taking a jab at the Zero quadrilogy (which was long over by 2011) or what. It seems like they're kinda mocking it in a roundabout way but I'm not sure what the joke is. Most players could certainly tell the difference. The Zero series redesign doesn't even look like the same guy.

I'd like the Zero series if it wasn't so cowardly, changing X into "Copy X" because heavens forbid that Mega Man does anything wrong or has any nuance, everything must be black and white. Not sure why they took Obvious Dr. Wily and named him "Dr. Weil" though, that doesn't even make any logical sense.

Next up: Ultimate MVC3, because I was going to leave it at this one but this is clearly an incomplete game. UMVC3 is supposed to be really good, so I'm looking forward to that. It's a little pricey though, hopefully it's worth it.

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