Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is hailed as one of the best fighting games of the era, according to reviews. I picked it up at the 20% off Discland sale.
I can say that the actual 1 on 1 fighting gameplay is superb. It's really fun to play.
However, I find the team attacks to be completely flawed. Basically, in order for a fighting game to be good, button-mashing should not be able to win over skill. For the regular gameplay, this is true. But for the team attacks, you can basically button mash the trigger buttons to win any battle.
For those who don't know, for every fight, you pick 3 characters. You fight one at a time, and after one dies, the next one comes in. The default controller setup has the trigger buttons mapped to team commands. You can swap players (which is a useful tactic, because health will slowly regenerate for the players not in use). But you can also call out attacks from your team members.
The problem is that all the offensive and defensive attacks you call out from your team members are invincible and devastating, and the damage zone takes up 3/4ths of the screen. And all you have to do is keep mashing the trigger buttons (along with +F, +B, etc) and your backup players will just keep coming out, unleash a gigantic special move that drains your opponents life, and you can repeat until whoever mashes fastest wins.
It was cool at first, when you figure out how to unleash this cool special move from your back-up player on your friend. But once it becomes clear that the only way to win a game is by button mashing the triggers, since attempting normal or skill moves is suicide, it looses it's appeal.
The solution was to go back to the controller menu and disable the team commands on the trigger buttons. So you can't button-mash devastating attacks over and over again anymore. After we did that, then the game became fun again.
But I'm just curiuos why nobody else seems to have reviewed this game (on any system) and complained about the poorly designed team attacks. It seems to be a big flaw to me. But at least it's a flaw that's easily corrected.
From a game mechanics point of view, they should have either made the team attack much harder to pull off, or made it less invincible and less devastating, or made some kind of power meter you have to fill from skill before you can use a team attack.
I can say that the actual 1 on 1 fighting gameplay is superb. It's really fun to play.
However, I find the team attacks to be completely flawed. Basically, in order for a fighting game to be good, button-mashing should not be able to win over skill. For the regular gameplay, this is true. But for the team attacks, you can basically button mash the trigger buttons to win any battle.
For those who don't know, for every fight, you pick 3 characters. You fight one at a time, and after one dies, the next one comes in. The default controller setup has the trigger buttons mapped to team commands. You can swap players (which is a useful tactic, because health will slowly regenerate for the players not in use). But you can also call out attacks from your team members.
The problem is that all the offensive and defensive attacks you call out from your team members are invincible and devastating, and the damage zone takes up 3/4ths of the screen. And all you have to do is keep mashing the trigger buttons (along with +F, +B, etc) and your backup players will just keep coming out, unleash a gigantic special move that drains your opponents life, and you can repeat until whoever mashes fastest wins.
It was cool at first, when you figure out how to unleash this cool special move from your back-up player on your friend. But once it becomes clear that the only way to win a game is by button mashing the triggers, since attempting normal or skill moves is suicide, it looses it's appeal.
The solution was to go back to the controller menu and disable the team commands on the trigger buttons. So you can't button-mash devastating attacks over and over again anymore. After we did that, then the game became fun again.
But I'm just curiuos why nobody else seems to have reviewed this game (on any system) and complained about the poorly designed team attacks. It seems to be a big flaw to me. But at least it's a flaw that's easily corrected.
From a game mechanics point of view, they should have either made the team attack much harder to pull off, or made it less invincible and less devastating, or made some kind of power meter you have to fill from skill before you can use a team attack.
