Every Marvel vs Capcom Game Ranked

MvCI will forever be remembered as “The Game That Killed Marvel vs. Capcom”. In all honesty, it wasn’t because the gameplay was bad, and the technical performance was still buttery smooth. Really, the Infinity Stones did add an interesting layer to the action. However, the amount of changes made to the series formula and roster were already leaving a bad taste in people’s mouths. We’re doing 2v2 instead of 3v3 now? Uh, okay, I guess. Then, you look at the Marvel half of the roster and wonder where in the hell are any of the X-Men? Why is it only MCU characters? Oh, because Disney. As for the Capcom half, it was basically all of MvC3 with Jedah, X, Sigma, and Monster Hunter being the only new fighters. Then, you have the abysmal story mode with its scatterbrained plot and fan fiction-level writing. Look, “Infinite” can be a fun game when it wants to be, but it gets so caught up in all this other crap to shake things up that it’s insufferable to sit through.

Whereas “Infinite” was awful for being too ambitious, MvC3’s base version was…just okay. It was more MvC with an awesome roster and a fantastic art direction. By that merit, it was already a great game. What makes it all fall apart, though, is just how little there is to do. All we got was arcade, character missions, and standard online functionality. To be fair, most of us were getting this game to play with our friends anyways. However, when other fighting games like “Tekken” and “Mortal Kombat” were doing interesting things with their extra modes, well, where was the imagination here? Again, the initial iteration of MvC3 was not a bad game by any stretch of the imagination. We only wish it had a little more meat on its bones so we weren’t just doing the same six-fight-long arcade ladders for the hundredth time.

The game that started it all, and though it ranks at the bottom half of the list, “X-Men vs. Street Fighter” is still a great game to play. Does it play as well as later entries? That’s debatable. Really, the main reason you’d want to seek out “X-Men vs. Street Fighter” is for novelty. This was one of the first instances of bizarre crossovers in gaming, and while we had seen some oddities prior, this was the one where it was totally unexpected in concept and totally unexpected in quality. If there were any reasons to dock points for it, it would be the console ports. Only Japan got to experience the solid SEGA Saturn port while those of us in the West suffered from a butchered iteration on the PS1 that drastically altered the gameplay and visuals. So, for some of us, “X-Men vs. Street Fighter” is good, but not a game we’ll jump into when future titles would improve upon things later on.

“X-Men vs. Street Fighter” may have got the ball rolling on mashing two brands together, “Marvel vs. Street Fighter” got things rolling quicker by throwing in more Marvel heroes. The only major downside to the roster was that this expansion of heroes led to many of the X-Men getting pulled out in favor of Spider-Man, Hulk, and more. Unfortunately, for as cool as this change was, “Marvel vs. Street Fighter” suffered the same fate as its predecessor. Once again, Japan got to relish in a well-crafted port for the SEGA Saturn while us Westerners had to trudge through another languished PS1 port with heavily altered gameplay. We loved our PS1s, but man, how come “Tekken” was able to run just fine on these boxes but not MvC?

This was where MvC finally evolved into the franchise we know today. And we aren’t just saying that because of the name. See, prior to this installment, the previous games didn’t exactly function the way tag fighters do today. You had an assist mechanic, but you were really only able to fight as one character. Basically, you just got an extra attack to use. “Clash of Super Heroes” finally incorporated a system where you created a team of two heroes and could change between the two mid-fight. Not only that, but you could call in your tag partner to unleash devastating supers in unison, or as we know them now, “Hyper Combos”. If you want to explore the roots of MvC, this is definitely a great place to start, but it isn’t going to replace the two most loved entries in the franchise.

Now, this… THIS is MvC3! Where the base game failed, UMvC3 picked up and made things substantially better. For starters, the online functionality was greatly improved with fights going a lot smoother than they did on the base version of MvC3. Second, we got two new game modes in Heroes & Heralds, a strategy game where you use teams of characters to conquer areas, and Galactus Mode, which let us play the final boss for once. And to make the updated version even sweeter, Capcom threw in not just the two DLC characters from the original MvC3, but a whopping dozen new playable characters like Rocket Raccoon, Ghost Rider, Frank West, and Phoenix Wright! For a time, “Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3” was the best MvC game to play on modern consoles. But…a certain collection has changed things now.

There’s no denying that MvC2 is the best game in the entire franchise. If you’ve been following MojoPlays or even WatchMojo for a long time, you’ll know that we have put MvC2 on many lists regarding the best fighting games, and we often put it super high on those lists. Of course, we could spend so much time talking about the roster and the music and how those shaped the identity of the franchise. But the big reason why MvC2 is so widely loved by us and many, many others is because of how incredibly malleable it is in its mechanics. Even when you’re not using top-tier characters, there are hundreds of permutations of fighters for you to experiment and discover insane combos with. Many within the FGC like KhaosVision and Justin Wong are still finding crazy as hell setups and strings to dominate the scene, and it is stunning to watch. In other words, MvC2 is one of the ultimate onions of video games; no matter how many times you play it, there is a new layer of the game to discover, learn, and admire, and it is why, even after a trainwreck like MvCI, people were spending years demanding “Free MvC2”.

Tell us, have you been playing the new MvC collection? Hopefully none of you have gone against Justin “thewazzler” Wong yet. But let us know about your experience down in the comments below, and be sure to subscribe to MojoPlays for more great videos everyday!