A Beginner's Review
Me and fighting games have had a weird relationship. The fighting game genre is something that I love watching at a semi-professional level but when it comes to playing I am terrible at. This is coming from the man who sold and bought Street Fighter 4 3 times in 2 years. So of course, when MvC 3 was announced, I immediately got excited despite the fact that I have yet to win a match in MvC 2 (I can't bring myself to understand that game). So, like some of you I hope, I came into this game completely fresh and as a new player, was pleasantly surprised.
As the announcer stipulates at the character select screen, "All the heroes are here". MvC 3 takes all the characters you actually care about and puts them at your finger tip. No more 50+ characters to choose from (a quarter of those being so obscure that even Giant Bomb doesn't have much of info on them) making for a more manageable experience. Like in MvC 2, you must select three characters and their individual assists to make your team. You should probably start off by choosing characters that you like since all characters are nicely balanced (yes, even Sentinel) and try to have fun with them. The game makes all the moves easy to pull off, usually requiring you to pull off a quarter circle in one direction or the other. The timing in the moves is more forgiving than in past games and you can make cool stuff happen without to much frustration so good on Capcom for reaching out to a broader audience.
The moves may be simple to do but what Capcom forgot to include is any kind of tutorial. What is an advancing guard ? What is a snapback and a reversal ? Your answer lies in the instruction booklet (which is really well made with nice diagrams and graphs) an the internet. At no point does the game try to make you a better player or teach you things. It's as if there was a wall between easy difficulty where you can get away with mashing buttons and normal where inexperienced players come to die a lonely death. The game never tells you "hey, this is what your doing wrong" or "hey, use this with this character", just that you must use more skill. And thus starts the rage induced nightmare that hides on the outside of MvC 3. There are three "dimensions" to this game. The first is all the pretty lights and explosions that make you feel awesome, the second is a very tall mountain that must be climbed in one's underpants to uncover the third dimension, the one full of beautiful complexity and awesomeness.
This talk about dimensions brings us to the biggest and scariest part of MvC 2: the multiplayer. There, expert players await to slaughter you with their 100+ combos that will make you punch your TV. The game does its best to put you up against players that are at the same rank as you but it forgot one major problem. So that you don't feel like a complete loser, the game advances your rank even when you lose. This means that you'll be facing increasingly tough opponents despite the fact that you've been losing for 20 matches straight. This keeps with the game's whole hardcore mentality but personally, I would rather keep my Rookie rank and face players and have fun against players my rank than be put into a rank where I am constantly murdered.
Despite all this slightly negative talk, MvC 3b is still a really good game. Beginners should definitely give it a try and not be scared away by MvC 2. This game is more user friendly and you'll probably get your fun by trying out the different characters. Veteran players, of course, will learn how to dominate and reach a level that I probably never dreamed of. As for me, I'm just gonna have fun beating Modok over and over again.
One Word Review: Tough Love
Yann
