Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of (Almost) Everything Else

*sniff*sniff* Sorry, I'm just getting a little teary over what's likely to be my last 'Marvel vs. Capcom 3' article. Or at least the last one until 'Ultimate' comes out in a couple of months. So today, in memory of this occasion, I'm going to be nice to the game. Mostly. Sort of. Today we're going to examine a few things that either slipped the net on our earlier passes at the game or are minor enough to not warrant an entire article dedicated to them. Let's get the bad out of the way first. The 'bad' in this case being the 'Training' and 'Challenge' modes as both of them are seriously lacking when compared to their counterparts in other fighting games.

First up on our beatdown parade is the training mode. But wait! Before we get too far into this here's about the nicest thing I'm willing to put on record about the training mode: it's at least functional. Now that we've gotten that out of the way well here's everything else. Like most modern fighting games MvC3s training mode has a recording feature that allows the player to record(duh) a brief sequence of moves that the training dummy will then play back. Unlike most modern fighting games MvC3s recording function is very well hidden in the menu and button configuration options making it probably the most clunkily implemented recording function I've ever seen. It also doesn't allow for a long enough recording time. That's really the big one. It would also be nice to be able to pick whether you wanted to start on the player 1 or player 2 side. I also fail to see the need for the taunt button to function in training mode (except for Deadpool, the one character whose taunt is also an attack) as it makes it so that you have to have the reset function mapped to two buttons. On a more serious note the game could use a major overhaul to the controls/restrictions that one is able to place on the computer when you hand it control over the training dummy as currently the computer badly fails to replicate the way an actual human plays the game. Ummm, I think that's it for training mode.

Now! Onward to what I would only jokingly refer to (even though that's what it calls itself) as 'Challenge Mode'. The idea behind the 'Challenge Mode' is a noble one. Familiarize players with the character's move-sets, brief them on the game mechanics and then maybe hold their hand through a few basic combos. It's just unfortunate that it fails pretty badly at all of these aspects. Overall the game has 38 characters with 10 challenges apiece or 380 total challenges. Now out of that number we're going to eliminate on average 5 per character as the early “challenges” are just single moves or simple move canceling exercises. This will leaves us with 190 challenges that supposedly convey some benefit to the player. They sort of do. A friend of mine and I counted and between all the challenges for all the characters there are maybe 7 practical, can be used in competition combos. That's pretty bad. Pretty much every other fighting game I've played that had something approximating a 'Challenge Mode' managed to include, and this is my low end estimate, 3 useful combos per character. Now, I'm not advocating that a should game hold the players hand and spoon-feed them techniques but if you're already set on trying to go down that road then at least spoon-feed the players something of use.  

Disclaimer: I no longer play these teams.

Pictured: This is what saving time looks like children.

At last. Something useful. Something correctly implemented. Something that actually saves the player time. The character presets. Yes, MvC3 allows you from your otherwise worthless player profile to preset up to three different teams in order to save you time later at the actual character select screen. Why is this useful? Well, for those who don't know (and shame on you), MvC3 is a team based game (probably should have mentioned this earlier) in which both players pick 3 characters from a roster of 38. Then for each character they pick they also pick that character's assist, i.e. a move that they can be summoned, when not on the screen, to do. So that's 6 total selections per player to make. Having something in place to stream line that, especially as these presets are implemented, is a welcome design decision. That's it. That's the one non-gameplay design choice that MvC3 gets 100% right. It's not a particularly sexy design but it's certainly saved me and countless other players a boatload of time. See you all next week.