Marvel vs Capcom Infinite (2017)
Living up to Marvel Vs Capcom 2’s reputation was seemingly impossible. It was and still is held as the standard for fighting games for most people. So when MvC 3 came out it already was going to be a downer, and it was. The weird 3D cheap plastic look made the characters look fake and it just made the game look and feel like an inferior game compared to its predecessor. Then Infinite came along and really showed us how bad a fighting game can be.
I’m just going to cover the story mode as I can’t bring myself to actually play this game much more. Marvel Vs Capcom Infinite is so bad that they didn’t even want to call it a mainline numbered game. One of the biggest issues I have with how the game looks is the characters. Even before release it was known as a bad looking game, Chun-Li had such a distorted face that fans complained during the reveal trailer so much that Capcom delayed the game just to change her face. They should have delayed it even more because most every character looks weird and off putting. These aren’t good designs that you want to spend hours and hours looking at. They are ugly and have such terrible proportions to them that it appears like Rob Liefield from the 90’s was brought forward in time to design all the characters. Captain America looks especially bad, as he has the torso of his 90’s Rob Liefield counterpart (You know the one, with the pecks that are about 5 times the size of his head) and with a tiny head and ears sticking straight out making him look like a monkey more than a man.
In fact, all the characters have super large muscle massed bodies and very itty bitty tiny heads. Mike Haggar is especially awful as well, seriously just look up the character model. Who designed these characters? The Bayonetta team?! I barely wanted to look at the screen the entire time playing because it’s just such a bad looking game.
The gameplay itself felt ok, but I had such a hard time with how the characters moved across the screen. So many times I would have issue closing the gap between my enemy on screen. The dash goes about ¼ of the screen and then stops. Which had most of my inputs being pressing forward. The other, and main issue I had with the game was the blocking.
I admit I’m not a good fighting game player. I am way too impatient to learn moves, counters and all the other nuances to get really good at fighting games, but I’ve been able to hold my own in a story mode. Button mashing is the way I play with the few small basic combos as the exception. So when I loaded up MvCI, I was baffled by how terrible I seemed to be in one of the early fights, and this is because of the AI, which is one of the most infuriating AI’s that I’ve ever played against.
Around 95% of all my moves would be instantly blocked by the AI opponent. Even special moves that should be hard to block…. like I can actually count on one hand how many special moves I actually landed throughout all of the story mode. I was livid. Including that there is no chip damage as well (chip damage being where even if you block you are still taking damage, just smaller amounts). Every move would be blocked and no damage would be dealt, and then the AI would counter with a 30 second barrage of unbreakable combos instantly. So many times I would use my special and in the middle of my special being blocked the AI would use theirs and overpower mine. It started seeming extremely unfair.
All that being said, most of the game itself wasn’t very hard, but I got stuck on a fight with Hulk. He just decimated me in several seconds flat. No matter how hard I tried, no matter how many times I hit him, I was barely whittle down his health. Somehow he would counter with about 5 attacks and it would take my health away fully. After about 20 retries, I accepted that I wasn’t having any fun with this game but wanted to see it to the end, so I took the advice of the game over screen and let the game knock down the difficulty by one notch. The game didn’t feel any different at all, but I was able to beat Hulk finally and just continue the story.
The story itself felt weird and disjointed. Like it was mainly an afterthought. My main issue is that it skips back and forth through the timeline and never really establishes why anyone is doing anything, who any of these characters are, and why they know the other characters. It’s the equivalent of coming into a joke on the punchline trope. Most of these characters look so awkward standing next to each other. Nova and Captain Marvel hanging out with Mega Man and Arthur just look wrong, and that feeling never goes away with time.
The character selection is a odd one for sure. Most of the characters are repeats from MvC3 and the new ones are just in service of the Marvel Movies. Did we really need Rocket Racoon or Gamora or Captain Marvel? They feel undeserved additions, like they get special treatment because they are in the movies. Sadly the Capcom side of things are even worse, Arthur and Firebrand, Frank West, Chris Redfield, Nemesis…. All these just don’t fit. I’m sorry but Frank West should not be in the final showdown between Thanos at the end of the game. A lot of these characters you literally see once and then they never show back up either, which just hammers home the “we don’t care” aspect of the story. I’m not even that amazing of a story creator but spending 5 minutes, I can come up with a much better and more cohesive storyline than what is found in this game.
Honestly I have nothing good to say about this game. The story is a mish-mash of all mashup fighting games you’ve seen a ton of times, like the devs played “Mortal Kombat Vs DC” and said “Hey, lets just do this story”, and then they crammed a half-assed Infinity Gauntlet retelling in as well. It just reeks of laziness. The character design is literally the worst I’ve ever seen, the gameplay could have been ok, but I was so angry by the overly frustrating AI that just block ever move, that I just didn’t care about anything the game was trying to do at that point. As a fighting game it seems cheap, and as a successor and sequel to the Marvel Vs Capcom franchise it’s a slap in the face. Avoid this game at all cost, it’s not worth it, even if it's free on Gamepass (How I played).