Ultimate Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 (Playstation 3/XBox 360, 2011)

 

Here's the back half of MVC3. The finished version. Seriously though, two game releases in one year, with one being an incomplete version of the other? MVC2 was definitely the high point of this series. This here is probably the second highest point, and an effort to capitalize on the popularity surge of the MCU. Either way, MVC2 was the pinnacle, they let it languish a while, and then they brought it back to make some money. It is what it is.

All in all this was a really fun series to do, so I regret nothin'. Two left. Also, right now this game is $4.99 on PSN. Why the hell are things still .99? We got rid of pennies so retailers would stop inconveniencing people with the deceptive pricing of putting a .99 at the end of everything. Apparently none of them got the memo. Regardless, this game normally goes for five times as much as it's on sale for right now, so that's a steal.

New intro, and it's pretty sick, with some animated stills of mid-fight moments. Would love to see a Street Fighter 7 that kinda looks like this in the future. Hopefully they have Kenny Omega as a playable character.

Oh, quick note.

Will Ospreay over here is a generational talent. He's only 33 so he's got a lot more to go, too. Kenny is 43, and might not have much time left. While Ospreay vs. MJF would be a tremendous main event for All In, and the biggest face vs heel contest they can muster, I'm gonna join the growing internet movement for them to give us Ospreay/Kenny for the title in the main event instead. Ospreay and MJF both have a lot of All Ins in their future if they stay healthy.

All of that said, if they're doing MJF/Ospreay, then next year's All In HAS to be Omega/Ospreay. That might actually be better; Ospreay is pretty much guaranteed to win the title this year at Wembley Stadium and AEW has had too many world title switches this year already. Having Ospreay/Omega next year at Jaguars Stadium would be a lot more open in terms of "either guy can win". It could cap off Ospreay having a year-long title reign, or it could be the end point of a second (and likely final) Kenny Omega title reign that happens between now and then. However, that would be boxing them in a bit on what can happen in the next year. When you have ascendant folks like Kevin Knight and Kyle Fletcher, and potential climb-to-the-main-eventers like Xavier Woods on the way...anything can happen really.

Anyway, I just wanted to post that picture, as I've become quite the fan of Young Will. He's like if Shawn Michaels and Bret Hart did the Fusion Dance in 1996 and also had Kofi Kingston's athleticism.

Back to the game, Galactus is the villain, and it's literally the same story as MVC3.

Morrigan is here, writhing about in the air, doing Morrigan things.

They still do that thing where characters are in shadow until you select them, and I still don't like it. What was the point of this? How'd it go on for multiple games?

NEW CHARACTERS ADDED THAT WEREN'T IN MVC3:

Marvel

Rocket Raccoon

Nova

Doctor Strange

Ghost Rider

Hawkeye

Iron Fist

Capcom

Firebrand

Frank West

Nemesis (RE)

Phoenix Wright

Strider Hiryu

Vergil

Didn't realize Strider got dropped from the last one. Raccoon is probably the most welcome newcomer here, though Vergil joining Dante is pretty cool.

Here's Chun-Li, looking ridiculously feminine with her waist to hip ratio. I'll see more of her when I do more Street Fighter related stuff, and for these I'm mostly looking at Marvel characters. Like...

...Jean Grey, another absolute goddess of a character. Not so much the inflated boobs, but everything else is pretty sweet.

"Tell it like it ish! Thosh are shum big floppy fun bagsh!"

We also have Wolverine, finally getting some airtime from me, and Strider Hiryu, that magnificent sword-swinging bastard. Yeah, they're both in this picture. They're in the back.

Here's Nicholas Cage's Ghost Rider! There's also a new version of the Ghouls n' Ghosts background where it's...in greyscale and has less going on in the background. Rad!

Haggar has grey hair now. Wish I could remember if this was the case in MVC3. Thing is, I didn't do enough with either to really know what all of the differences are, besides that there are some new characters.

Phoenix here can throw pretty sick-looking fireballs that look more like small suns. Use Fierce Punch instead, and...

...they become big fireballs that look more like a giant sun. She's all about the suns.

If this were canon, Mayor Mike here wouldn't have much of a chance against Phoenix. Half of the fights in this game so far would make zero sense in-universe, haw.

Strider swings into action, and his thing is having awesome blade-streaks.

The multi-character supers return from the previous game. They seem to be pretty much the same across the board.

Wolverine dishes out claw swipes!

Zero is worth noting, as his laser sword attacks look nicer than ever. Here is about to beat the absolute hell out of Tron Bonne! If Capcom isn't gonna give us the connective game where Zero goes online and obliterates the original series cast, then I'll do it myself.

WHAM!

ZAPOW!

"Shum times, ya just gotta shlap a lady!"

Wolverine and Phoenix battle it out!

No, this isn't Wolverine and Phoenix. It's Logan and Jean.

Jean is like "sorry, I'm with Cyclops, so we cannae ever be"

Yeah? I don't see Clops around here anywhere. He wasn't important enough to include in a game with forty-eight characters.

Ryu can know hurl multiple Hadokens in rapid succession, and they look more like legit fireballs in this. They're all wavy and not controlled-looking. I prefer the classic fireball look.

The fun stops here, as we run into Shuma-Gorath: The Destroyer. He has killed many in my previous playthroughs. Actually, nobody has seen ol' Clops since he fought this cretin.

First, I have to defeat Shuma-Gorath's secretary, Dormammu. I finally figure out how to do Zero's rising fire slash from Mega Man X4. I knew the rising fire slash was in this somewhere.

Wolverine takes on the destroyer of worlds. Get him, Wolverine!

Wolverine finally ends the long path of death that Shuma-Gorath has cut through this series...by smacking him so hard, his mama felt it.

With that menace out of the way, here we see Deadpool's unnecessarily-sexy slide animation. There's some kind of riot taking place, and some nutcases have torn down the local statue of Former Mayor Haggar. Now some crazy woman is sitting on his face!

Stop sitting on Haggar's face!

Galactus is really into this "Ultimate Nullifier" thing. Not sure why he's just telling everyone what the one thing he's afraid of is.

As in MVC3, the final battle is against shadow versions of evil characters and then Galactus himself. This whole fight is MUCH harder than it was in MVC3 for some reason.

Zero dishes out the somersault-slash, which was always overpowered in the X series.

Phoenix fires Suns at him. However...this fight is ridiculous now. His attacks knock you way back and by the time you're back in attack range he's knocking you back again. Sometimes I can consistently dodge his moves, other times he just lands everything.

Lose the fight, and he CONSUMES EARTH.

Well, forget Apocalypse and Abyss and all those other losers. Galactus is the REAL big bad of this series. That's it for this game.

The latest drama in the world of gaming is that the main character of Stellar Blade 2 looks like a ten year old (or so I've been told). Yeah, in some of the shots, from some angles, she does look like a small child, even though she's an ostensibly adult character in a skin-tight outfit. Adding to the confusion, in other shots she looks like an adult, so two people can be looking at pictures of this character and have entirely different ideas of what she looks like. Then they argue about whether it's awesome or the worst thing ever. Like that gold/blue dress, or political figure here.

I could rant about this Stellar Blade 2 thing for a while. Why change from Eve? Especially to someone with basically the same name, who looks similar? What's the point here? In any case, she does indeed look like a kid in a lot of these shots and it's pretty damn weird. Weirder still to see so many people acting like she doesn't and that it's totally fine. The Stellar series is about playing dress-up with hot female characters when you aren't beating up monsters. It's the core premise of the series. It isn't a series conducive to having a main character who looks about 11.

I get the complaints about this. At the same time, I've also been informed that she's just Korean, and Korean women look super young. It's just the normal look there. Evie's model is like 20. And in a lot of the footage of the game, she does look like an adult. So it's probably just a few specific camera angles that make her look too-young. You can also change her cosmetic appearance, and with long hair she suddenly looks more like a college student. So yeah, all things considered, it'll probably be fine and not too weird.

She should probably go bowling with Laufey, who people think looks like a 40 year old alcoholic in the still frames going around (and in GoW Ragnarok she had a young face, so not sure what the deal is here). In all likelihood both characters are fine and it's just certain angles / still frames that are making them look different. Least I hope so. Players will spend most of both games looking at their backs anyway. As a woman I used to date would say, women's backs are awesome.

Well, back to UMVC3. I guess since everyone is dead a few times over, I can run the game again with some more characters.

Here's Morrigan, who has an awesome front.

Since these games have gotten all sexy with the superhero outfits, it's time. That's right, it's time to finally have Firestar in a game.

Come on, game devs. Next Marvel fighting game needs Firestar. Incidentally this looks a lot like that Phoenix picture earlier. She has the same insanely feminine and goddess-like physique as Phoenix, only with a normal-sized chest. Can the world handle TWO redheads in one game?

Morrigan meanwhile feels good being bad.

Her win animation is the same as MVC3, the hair toss followed by... is this outfit painted-on?

...followed by her having a seat in the air. She wants to do all the work. That's right, all of it.

...this game must cause teenage boys to lose their damn minds.

Here's Storm...I mean...Damn, Storm. The women in this game are out of control. MY hormones are going bonkers at this point.

Much like Morrigan, Storm can hover around in the air, which is super-useful for pleasuring them.

Storm powers up to unleash a super, looking like Undine Rising From The Waters if it went Super Saiyan 2.

Finally settle on a character I want to beat the game with. Galactus is so tough that I only have one big win in me. Jill Valentine...doesn't particularly look like Jill from the RE series. Where's the blue tube top and black miniskirt? Where's the tied white shirt for a belt?

Seems like there's something wrong with Jill, she's laying around while Morrigan does Morrigan things.

Dante is here for the "Jill Sandwich" he thought they were making, and so far, it's just weird.

Alright, now she's up, at least. Question is, would the "Jill Sandwich" referenced in the RE series be...

A) Jill sandwiched between two other fine people, as seen here

or

B) Two Jills sandwiching someone

.....I don't know.

Jill has a great moveset, with fast, snappy attacks and elegant somersaulting kicks.

We also have Dante here to unleash Hell with his sword swings. What's Phoenix Wright doing over there?

Getting BLASTED in the neussen, that's what! We've never SEEN neussen-devastation on this scale before!

Now we've got Dante vs. Vergil! Most notable move of Vergil is the downward energy slash. Looks like a Moonlight Greatsword.

Jill with a Liu Kang Flying Kick!

What's Jill doing sitting on Strider Hiryu's face?

"Front side nose grind" says Tony Hawk when reached for comment.

Now Jill is riding Deadpool's face! No! You'll kill him!

This time, I finally managed to eke out a win over Galactus by switching characters constantly to take advantage of the out-of-combat regeneration factor. Even still, I took a major beating.

Lots of faces got sat on en route to saving the Earth from Galactus. Many good men were sacrificed at this altar.

Jill's ending has her teaming up with... BLADE? to fight the bad guys. And that's about it. Why wasn't he in the game, if they could feature him?

Never found out why Jill was acting so weird. She definitely seemed to be under some sort of Wesker mind control. This must be from one of the RE games that I haven't played. This dropped during the huge gap in time between RE5 and RE6 so...yeah, I don't know. Which reminds me, good call remaking Code Veronica first. It was trapped on old systems before, and most people considered it a main-series RE game in everything except name (it was between RE3 and RE4). RE5 is also probably worth a remake so we can get HD Sheva, but Code Veronica was definitely the one to do first. Not sure what I'd do with RE6. It's a huge game that would take up a lot of developer time and nobody actually liked the original RE6. Then again, these remakes have been basically completely new games. RE7 onward is what I consider the "modern era" of RE where it uses first-person and so forth. 

After that paltry ending, we get credits. Jill's standing here looking like a goddess while Chris bids us adieu. That Viper woman over there looks like she's about to call the manager on Chris for something. Arthur is just happy to be here, and Magneto looks like he's weighing whether or not to fling Arthur as far as he can.

Wait a minute..in the background...Shuma-Gorath lurks. Does he live? My God, is he still around??

No, that whole thing is over with, Wolverine killed him. No more Shuma-Gorath. He now lays at the bottom of the ocean, worshipped by Sahagin, as they await the time they will inherit the surface world.

Next up: MVC Infinite. The final game in the series. Surprised at how few of these got made post-2000.

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