Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics review: The whole shebang

I didn’t care a ton about Marvel back in the day, but as a kid I loved Mega Man. I have a core memory, being at a theme park, and stepping into an arcade for the first time. It’s all a blur, except for the moment I zeroed in on a cabinet displaying the biggest, most elaborate, and colorful sprite of Mega Man I had ever seen. I didn’t even play the game, but that image is burned into my mind. Years later I actually learned what Marvel vs. Capcom was, though at the time it was overshadowed by the likes of Mega Man Legends. I’m nothing else if not consistent! But Marvel vs. Capcom’s visual style, to this day, remains iconic to me. 

Disney delivered?

Regardless of what piece of Marvel’s 90s bankruptcy history appeals to you the most, Capcom’s latest collection offers a time capsule packed tight with one of the biggest chunks you can get in a single package. Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics contains the entirety of Capcom’s licensed Marvel library, ending with the one everyone has been yearning for of course, but going all the way back to 1993’s The Punisher, which isn’t even a fighting game! This is the whole deal in one set, with everything possible crammed into what feels like a final act of defiance (and future-proofing to the extent it can be) against barriers caused by console/hardware generations and licensing expiration dates.

A set like this could not have seemed less likely. We’re in a world that witnessed an ugly truth, that these games in all their glory were only possible due to Marvel’s desperate IP-slinging at the time. When Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite landed at a time when Marvel had all the power, the whole thing backfired tremendously. A niche video game seemed beneath the Hollywood-driven IP monolith, and as far as anyone could tell the bridge was burned. But here we are, at a time when Marvel is still huge, but perhaps not as huge as it was during the MCU’s peak. Of course there’s no way to see behind the curtain and definitively assign details to a timeline, but that’s how it all looked on the outside. For the fans, Marvel vs. Capcom 2 was stuck on Xbox 360 hard drives and those expensive Arcade 1Up gimmicks, and the hunger was evolving into frustration.

Diving into history headfirst

There are a whopping seven games in this collection. While it’s probably fair to say most players will stick to one or two for their general playtime and online challenges, it’s great to have the whole set for a few reasons. For one, it’s awesome to be able to go through and see how this series evolved from game to game. You can track the iteration of the sprites, the visual style, gameplay hooks, and more all the way up to the climax of sorts with MvC 2. Being able to play each one so easily, even shuffling through them in online lobbies, is a boon for folks out there with an interest in connecting those dots first hand.

Second, it makes the museum content so much more complete and fulfilling. As I indicated just recently in my review here for Castlevania Dominus Collection, Capcom has been a pioneer in making art galleries cool again. And that’s exemplified here, with each game having its own set of high resolution art, concept drawings, advertisements, arcade control display gimmicks (I don’t know what those are called, sorry), and even design documents. It’s radical being able to flip through some of the hand-written origins of absurdly complex fighting game mechanics. Even if you might not be able to read them! There could always be more, but it’s probably unreasonable to expect Capcom to include the entirety of its materials for legal reasons and whatnot. Anyway, the museum is always my favorite place to start with these collections, and Capcom once again made it worthwhile.

Menus and stuff

One aspect I wish could be better is the user experience outside of playing the games. Intuition tells me it’s unavoidable, but it’s always a pain figuring out where I have to go to access which function of play, such as training mode or multiplayer. In a dedicated fighting game that stuff is simple to access, but here I have to do eyeball exercises to find each piece. Playing The Punisher with a friend was perhaps the peak of this particular annoyance, as I had to start creating a lobby to find the option in a menu with no hints or direction otherwise. But once you get over that hump everything works great, and some of the nerdier stuff like screen filters are some of the best work Capcom has done yet. Being able to preview the full game screen from within the window to see how each option works at the push of a button rules. CRT sickos are eating well these days.

When it comes to preserving history, this is about as good as it can get from an official source. Between backwards compatibility and being on a platform like Steam, there are fewer ways that even a licensing deal expiration can get in the way of playing this collection in the coming years. And in the meantime, having these games on current platforms makes them more playable than ever, although not having cross-platform play is a big bummer. And for even deeper diving and appreciation, the museum content is as top-notch as we’ve come to expect from Capcom’s recent slate of classic collections. “When’s Marvel?” finally has a suitable answer.

Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics is available now for the PC, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 4 and 5. Xbox versions are coming at a later date. A code was provided by the publisher for this review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.