FRIDAY NIGHT FUBEEP MEMES!
I SAID FUNKIN!
MY FATHER IS DYING PLEASE STOP BEATBOXING
beatboxing noise
ILL RIP YOUR NUTS OFF!
BEEP BOP BOP
NEXT TIME IM ARGUING IM DOING THAT!
ALRIGHT EVERYONE GET OUT
EXCEPT YOU YOU STAY
DUDE SKID AND PUMP
THEY CAN FREAKIN MOVE IN

Man, this spin-off isn't nearly as good as anyone says. When I played Ishin, the only other game I had left in the series to play was Kurohyou 2 and I had gotten the Platinum trophies for 0, K1/K2, 3-7, Judgment, Lost Judgment, and FotNS: LP so I was quite versed on the series. Playing Ishin was by far the longest slot the series has ever put me through and I didn't even go for the Platinum (yet). The story is boring and uninteresting since it's entirely focused on politics and an uninteresting relationship between Ryoma and his fiance. The combat, while interesting and varied, is heavily unbalanced and some styles just aren't nearly as good as others, plus if you don't grind enough you'll hit a wall since later bosses rely on you being stronger than them. The substories and friendships are the most tedious they've ever been in the series with no substantial rewards for doing any of them. It makes me sad that this is the game people want instead of Kenzan which is a significantly better overall package in every way

UPDATE: 6/28/2022
I've finally finished the Platinum Trophy for the game and I've reverted my score of 2.5/5 stars. The plat process is one of the most frustrating and tedious things I've ever gone through and I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy. This game sucks and is in the bottom three of all RGG games.

this game fucks and cums. i couldn't think of a good way to start this review so i just decided to go with that. there's no subtle way to go about this: third strike is a game with a shitload of style and swagger, and it rules for being such a remarkably and uniquely presented game.

in terms of changes, it doesn't necessarily feel like a lot was edited to III's formula going from second impact to third strike. the 5 characters added round out the cast to a solid 19, and there's a lot of winners here (i ADORE twelve, love gayboy remy, and this entry made me become a makoto main). i think any potential issues i had with the past two entries' cast were a tad overblown, but still, it's great to have these additions and get a fuller and more fleshed out roster. this fighting game has the best ratio of characters that i want to main relative to the cast size; you're telling me i want to use 25% of the cast? you must've done something right in the design stage. characters here are visually appealing, aesthetically distinct, and fun to play as.

there's really something to be said for the fact that even though this roster isn't quite as big as say alpha 3's, it feels brimming with creativity and personality. maybe quality is in fact more important than quantity when it comes to these casts. we only have 4 returning SF characters here, the other 15 are all distinct characters that feel very well-defined. on a gameplay level, a lot of these new characters buck established SF archetypes too. sure, remy has similar specials to guile, but he's got much lankier normals and a much taller sprite, so he plays fairly distinctly from guile. nothing here feels recycled or reused, and in that sense, this is probably the most innovative SF game and maybe even fighting game of its time.

visually, i'm saying nothing new when i tell you that this game is eye candy. the animations, much like in the past two games, are extremely detailed and add personality to these characters in small yet important ways. but i think of all the left turns the street fighter series could've taken, the soundtrack of third strike is one i'm nearly positive most wouldn't have anticipated. III's OST gets completely overhauled here and goes in a direction that fuses hip-hop, drum and bass, and house. and it works incredibly well, in one of those ways where it feels like a natural progression of both fighting games and street fighter. i don't give a shit what dunkey says, the rapping in this game is great and there's not a single misstep in this OST. this genuinely might have taken the spot of my favorite fighting game OST of all time, but that's something i'll have to marinate on.

before i played this game at home, i played this game in the arcade, both growing up and as an adult. it captured my attention in a way that very few fighting games ever have, and, sitting down to analyze it, it's clear to see why. there are so many fine touches and refinements here that all cascade into a joyous experience. when i played this game for several hours at the arcade, i was playing it because it was providing a delight on a visual, aural, and visceral level. there's an argument to be made that if you only ever play one fighting game in your life, it should be this one, and it's a very convincing one.

to disparage 3rd strike is often blasphemy in fighting game circles. for many, this is the ur-fighting game, a dizzying concoction of tight and expressionist mechanics, gorgeous spritework, and a dnb soundtrack that is absolutely fuego. it even has that little fundamental spice that all premier fighting games must aspire to possess: a disregard for balance. most modern titles would never dare nerf a character so significantly purely for thematic purposes, but then again, no modern title would ever think to include characters like twelve or chun-li (edit: this is a patent lie. tekken 7 season 3 had both leroy and fahkumram.)

still, what makes this game fascinating years on has little to do with any of its individual elements. fundamentally, it's the mood. it's a game that feels as though it was made on the verge of something great and unknown, and is one of those rare few titles i'll posit encapsulates a certain je ne sais quois, a snapshot of a particular zeitgeist heading into a new millennium. sure, you can point to the more overt references and stylings - strong WWF influence, character select rap, yang, yun, and q are maybe the most 90s characters ever designed, the illuminati as an antagonistic force and its seemingly benevolent villain - but more importantly, it's a composite of characters who are just wandering, trying to find themselves in some instances or seeking mastery in others. there's no pressing tournament to attend to, and even the machinations of the literal illuminati are vestigial, with its plotting mostly centered around biblical rivalry between tyrants. street fighter 3 was originally just about a new generation - itself neatly characterized as 'of its time' - but 3rd strike flips the script. rather than establishing new legends, this game is about characters unsure about what the future entails, about what their next move should be, about what it even means to continue fighting - they waver, they fail, they practice, they move on. even though these ideas are reflected in little moments (chun-li teaching children to put up their dukes, elena reflecting on her journey and her future with a pen pal, alex losing to ryu but refusing to back down),even just aesthetically this theme is completely overpowering - its what imbues 3rd strike with a kind of melancholic ambience, but also what fuels the players' determination to prove themselves.

even better, to this day, this is still the only street fighter that is aesthetically unique to itself. street fighter 2 features worldly caricatures, alpha often feels like it lacks confidence or that it's missing something, 4 is nostalgic pageantry, and 5 is a slipshod mess of meaningless platitudes with no direction. this is the closest capcom ever got to imbuing their flagship franchise with unique stylings; it's something that actually has character and personality comparable to an SNK title. this, probably more than the joy of hitting a parry, setting up aegis reflectors, or getting in my opponent's head, is probably what keeps me coming back. fight for the future, so what's it gonna be, the third strike y'all it's street fighter 3

There's no safer statement out there than "Marvel vs Capcom Infinite was a disappointment" but for me at least it's not for the same reason you may come to expect.

The PR nightmares attached to the game leads to people pointing out the more obvious flaws of it. Never mind that the game is clearly a rush-job by Capcom and looks ugly as sin with character models clearly ripped from UMVC3 without the care put into the lighting/shading to mask any of the shortcomings those models got away with. Never mind that licensing shenanigans caused the game to miss characters from the X-Men or Fantastic4 franchise such as Wolverine, Dr.Doom, Magneto, Storm, or Sentinel, characters that were in the series since its inception. Never mind that the game's bizarre and nonsensical story mode was the most focused thing on its marketing which is a very strange thing to advertise such a mediocre mode. Never mind that Dragon Ball FighterZ came out just a few months after this game causing the game's player base to hemorrhage as fighting game players migrated to a seemingly more quality product. Never mind the fact that the DLC characters were obviously finished already and featured in the story mode but were locked behind a paywall so Capcom can milk out as much money as they can without developing many assets to create new fighters from the ground up. All of these are bad enough, but my main issue with the game stems from a design choice that was intentional from the start:

Why remove a 3rd teammate and assists?

The whole spirit of Marvel vs Capcom not only asked the player to learn a set of characters but put those characters together to create a coherent strategy. Take for example Phoenix from Marvel 3, she was an incredibly weak character with the lowest health in the game. But if the player were to die with 5 bars of super meter she would turn into Dark Phoenix, the strongest character in the whole roster. Combined with X-Factor, that game's comeback mechanic, she could wipe out entire teams. Teams that utilized Phoenix would create team compositions that required building 5 bars of super meter for Phoenix, creating teams that were defensive and conservative in spending super meter. Meanwhile, the opponent would try to either wipe out the team as fast as they could or snap-in Phoenix to kill her early, effectively decimating the win condition. It created matches that were tense and fast-paced, to both watch and play with or against.

This idea of strategy was hammered home with assists, the mechanic where you can call out a teammate to do a specific move. These assists can determine what kind of strategy the player can create which opened the door to a lot of decision-making. Take for example Captain Commando from Marvel 2. He by himself was an incredibly mediocre character that struggled to fend off the strongest characters in that game, but people used him because he had arguably the strongest assist in the game, this giant invincible shockwave that dealt a lot of damage and pops opponents in the air, leading to air combos. It was tantalizing to use, but then you'd be stuck using a character that was considered bad when your other two died, leading to a choice of choosing a bad character with a powerful assist, or a stronger character with a similar but weaker assist compared to Captain Commandos. This idea even shows up in Marvel 3 with Dante, who is a stronger character compared to Marvel 2 Captain Commando but is considered one of if not the hardest character to learn in the game due to his lengthy combo game and tight execution. However, Dante had Jam Session, an assist that creates an enormous wall that can stuff approaches and lead to combos if successfully landed. It's one of the best assists in the game, but if you want it without having a useless teammate, you had to put in the work to learn Dante and form a team around him. This is what defines Marvel vs Capcom for me, a fighting game that's not just about execution, but strategy and decision-making, and it's what made me fall in love with the series and invest a stupid amount of time in it.

The problem with MvC:I is that it decides to have a 2-man team set up right from the get-go. This feels heavily restrictive compared to the three-man team set-up of the older games since you can't exactly form something dramatically coherent with just two characters. What was supposed to replace the 3rd teammate is the infinity stone system, where you can choose one infinity stone to give your teammate a move or a timed super ability, but this isn't really choosing a strategy to commit to but more so choosing a power-up and therefore feels less engaging as a result. It's no longer about creating a team with a playstyle to commit to, but choosing the two characters you like to play as with the skill that looks the more useful.

To compensate for this two-team setup, the game gives the characters more moves to use and longer health bars as a result, with a pretty flexible combo system, as well as the ability to tag in a teammate mid-combo, which is what replaces assists, devolving the game into landing extremely long combos while doing pitiful damage. I get it, landing big flashy combos are awesome, but combos aren't just what makes Marvel vs Capcom the game it is. When you make every character into combo-heavy beat sticks, you are left with a roster that feels homogenized than the highly distinct roster of Marvel 2 and 3. You are left with matches that not only go on for long but look the same even if there are different characters on the screen, which I feel is a big step-down from how Marvel 2 and 3 handled things.

The issue with fighting games that remove options to cater to a different audience is that you are going to alienate a large portion of the audience that has stuck playing the game you've created for years. If you remove mechanics people loved and made your game distinct without adding something new that feels like a net positive, people are not going to migrate to your next entry. It's why we see the Smash Melee community still strong as it is because the other entries nearly don't have the same depth as that game does. It's why we see Marvel 3 players return to that game in the form of Parsec tournaments because they see that game as superior, and what made that game superior to this one is that it actually feels like a Marvel vs Capcom game.

For as many problems I have with Dragon Ball FIghterZ, I can at least acknowledge why so many Marvel players gravitated towards that game, not just because of the Dragon Ball license, but it's actually a team game. There are distinct characters with different team layouts and assists and you get to build whatever you want. While I think that game too can have a same feeling playing roster, I can at least say it's more engaging to play than a game afraid of its identity.

I don't have a lot of respect for Marvel vs Capcom Infinite because it represents the very worst kind of Capcom fighting game. A poor rush job game that failed to iterate on past entries and opts into doing something new that ends up making the game less interesting as a result. Unfortunately for Capcom, people are tired of fighting games that aren't fun to play, and it's why people have turned to a developer like ArcSys for their fighting game fix. Before Capcom could have gotten away with this since they were the king of the fighting game genre, but more effort needs to be put in place if they wish to compete with their newfound competition.

As for me, I'll sit back and play more Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, Capcom should go back and play it too.