There Has Never Been a True Marvel vs. Capcom 3 Successor
Or: Dragon Ball FighterZ and Marvel 3 Are Wildly Different Games
When I started work on my video about cursed design problems in versus games, it was originally going to be very different. Instead of the video it became, it was going to be about how versus games have strayed away from the formula we saw really crystalize in the Marvel vs. Capcom games. I still wanted to talk about it, so here it is!
My History With Marvel vs. Capcom 3
I’m someone who played fighting games as a kid in the 90s… extremely badly. I enjoyed playing arcade mode in Street Fighter II Turbo and Killer Instinct on my SNES in my bedroom (hooked up to my own personal 13” Toshiba CRT TV). I had no idea there was a community of people who played these games competitively.
Marvel vs. Capcom 3 was the first game where it all came together for me. It came out at the right time and place—I had free time, I had a local scene, and I loved the game. From when the game came out in 2011 until I moved at the end of 2016, Marvel 3 was the thing I did in my free time—I loved it. I entered locals, helped my buddy start a weekly that he ran out of his apartment, and managed to get out of pools at EVO one year.
Even before I moved away from my scene though, it was pretty evident the game had lost some momentum—sooner or later there will be players and viewers who want to move on to something new. The game’s awful netcode was also a major factor in its decline. A game with good rollback netcode can pretty easily maintain an active playerbase online. If you can play good matches with anybody on your continent, you can all be pretty spread out, and there doesn’t need to be that many of you. But without good netcode, if the scene shrinks to the point where you can’t consistently get offline play where you live, the game is functionally dead (for you personally at least). People in a few areas had the player density to keep the game going, but in lots of places, it disappeared. People did figure out how to play online using Parsec instead of using the netcode built into the game. It’s an improvement, but it’s still a far cry from proper rollback netcode.
If I could’ve kept playing Marvel 3 forever, I probably would have, but I moved, and the game was gone (for me). I did still love fighting games, so the search was on for something else to play. I picked up Guilty Gear Xrd, but it never quite filled the Marvel-shaped hole in my heart.
Fast forward a bit to mid-2017. We had three games on the horizon all vying to be a successor to Marvel 3:
Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite (released September 19, 2017)
Dragon Ball FighterZ (released January 26, 2018)
BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle (released June 5, 2018)
MvC:I and Cross Tag Battle both faded away pretty quickly (for reasons beyond the scope of this post), and DBFZ quickly stood alone as the post popular versus game from that era.
At a glance, DBFZ is very similar to Marvel 3. You pick a team of three characters, and then you pick one of three available assists for each character. The three characters share a common resource (super meter). Both games have various ways to tag in other members of your team with different risks and costs. Some damage that characters take can be recovered if you tag them out and let them heal.
DBFZ clearly patterned itself closely after Marvel 3, but it never really felt the same to me. This isn’t a slight to the game—I’ve played DBFZ relatively consistently since it came out (I wouldn’t be playing it if I hated it!), but as somebody who wanted more Marvel 3, DBFZ was (in many ways) not that. It was something that I think I struggled to wrap my head around and articulate for a while, but it’s been at the back of my mind every time I’ve booted up DBFZ.
A few things got me thinking about this again recently. Marvel 3 was brought back for EVO 2023 as a throwback title (having not been at EVO since 2017). It beat DBFZ’s entrant numbers pretty handily:
And of course we are lucky to have dedicated communities who have been keeping the game alive this whole time (shout outs to Tong!)
Around this same time, a player made a post on the Marvel 3 Subreddit titled, “I’m a DBFZ player considering getting into MvC3.” The years of random thoughts about how the two games differed crystalized in my mind, and I typed out a big list of how the games were in many ways almost exact opposites. I thought it’d be fun to expand on those thoughts a bit and put them somewhere easier to find than a random Reddit comment.
Difference 1: Assists
Assists are the defining characteristic of games like Marvel 3 and DBFZ. They play the single biggest role in why the unit of play is a team, rather than three separate characters you cycle through playing. It’s why Marvel 3 and DBFZ are fundamentally different from The King of Fighters. Because the unit of play is your entire team, and changing a single assist or swapping out a character can wildly change the dynamic of your team, assist-based fighting games let you “customize” your character (i.e., your team), since there are thousands of possible character/assist/team order combinations which are all meaningfully different (I made a whole video about this!)
If assists are the defining characteristic of both Marvel 3 and DBFZ, the differences in how assists work in each game will help start to explain how the games differ as a whole.
In some ways, assists in DBFZ are stronger than assists in Marvel 3. In Marvel 3, you can’t call assists when your point character is doing a special move or if you super jump, while DBFZ lets you do both of these things. Calling an assist in Marvel 3 locks out your other assist for a short duration, but DBFZ doesn’t have this restriction (you can call both assists at the same time if you want). Also, compared with Marvel 3, DBFZ assists also tend to cause more block stun and a ton more hit stun. Turning a stray assist hit into a combo in Marvel 3 can be challenging, but in DBFZ, it’s pretty easy.
Despite all of that, I’d argue that if you look at the strengths and weaknesses of assists in the two games and compare them, assists are both stronger and much more important in Marvel 3. The primary reason for this is assist cooldown, which dictates how often you can call your assists.
In Marvel 3, after you call an assist, both assists are locked out for a bit. The lockout for the assist you didn’t call always ends 30 frames before the lockout for the assist you did call (so you can call your assists slightly more often if you alternate between your two assists). The lockout time varies a bit from assist to assist, but it ranges from around 2.5 seconds for quicker assists, and 3.5 seconds for slower ones. It varies from assist to assist in DBFZ also, but regular assists have a cooldown closer to 8 seconds (for the quickest recovering assists).
DBFZ also has a bunch of restrictions on when the cooldown timer will even begin to start counting down. If your assist is involved in a combo, your assist cooldown timer doesn’t start ticking until after the combo is over. If your assist is used in a blockstring, it won’t begin recovering until after you have deliberately left a significant gap in your blockstring.
In Marvel 3, you can call assists way more often than in DBFZ. However, it comes with the meaningful downside: it is much easier to attack and kill assists in Marvel 3. Assists are so strong that you need to use them to play the game at a remotely competitive level, but because they are so vulnerable, a poor assist call can cost you a character (or two). You can base your entire strategy around fighting your opponent’s assist instead of their point character, which is cool as hell and mostly absent from DBFZ.
Difference 2: Zoning
Zoning in DBFZ sort of exists. Lots of characters have very quick low commitment projectiles with their ki blasts. You can spend a bar of super meter to turn any stray hit into a combo, so any random ki blast can become an easy confirm into a combo, and you can turn that combo into continued offense/pressure. On the flip side, characters have universal tools to deal with projectiles. Super dash goes through ki blasts completely, and while the character throwing the ki blast can anti-air the superdash if they’re ready for it, the existence of super dash is a strong deterrent to throwing ki blasts at certain ranges.
Some projectiles (like beams) cannot be superdashed through, but these tend to be very committal, so the character who avoided the beam can often punish the opposing character. Additionally, while it costs a bar, vanish allows you to instantly teleport behind the opposing character and hit them, so as long as you have meter, you always have a way to bypass zoning.
Finally, chip damage in DBFZ does not matter. You can block projectiles until the clock runs out. I tested it with Goku Black’s beam, and to actually do a character lifebar’s worth a chip damage, it was around 155 blocked beams. Also, all chip damage is recoverable, so you can tag the character out and heal completely. You can’t die from chip damage, so even after 155 blocked beams, they still have to hit you to actually kill you.
Zoning in Marvel 3 is good. Really fucking good. There aren’t any universal mechanics like super dash or vanish which can bypass zoning, so you have to deal with it the old fashioned way. You have to either punch through with your own projectiles or slowly work your way in. If you haven’t seen it, watch the Curleh Mustache 2 grand finals. There is no equivalent to this in DBFZ.
Characters like Morrigan can almost completely fill the screen with projectiles. Characters like Magneto have extremely quick low risk projectiles with his beam and magnetic blast. Because you can call assists much more frequently in Marvel 3, on top of whatever your point character is doing, your assist can also constantly be controlling the screen.
Chip damage in Marvel 3 is substantial. Instead of 155 beams in DBFZ, you can take out the average character's health bar with ~18 blocked beams. In other words, chip damage in Marvel 3 is an order of magnitude higher than it is in DBFZ. Unlike DBFZ, some chip damage is permanent damage which cannot be recovered, and you can also die to chip damage. Magneto with Doom beam assist can chip out an average health character in ~20 seconds if they just stand there. Doing the same with Goku chucking beams backed with two beams assists in DBFZ took me three minutes and twenty seconds.
Difference 3: Character Mobility
Character mobility options in DBFZ are near-universal. Every character can run, air dash backward and forward, super jump, and double jump. Every character’s run speed, air dash, super jump, and double jump are the same. There are a few exceptions, like SS4 Gogeta with a double air dash or Zamasu with flight, but for the most part, the entire cast relies on the same set of universal mobility tools.
Character mobility varies wildly in Marvel 3, where there is arguably more variety in its air dash options across the cast than the entirety of mobility variety in DBFZ. Some characters can wall jump. Some characters can double jump. A few characters can triple jump. Some characters can fly. Some characters have teleports that all function in different ways. Arthur can’t dash at all. MODOK can’t normal jump. Some characters have unique movement options (like Spencer grappling hook or Spider-Man web glide). Some characters can float. Almost no two characters navigate the screen in the exact same way. Characters feel much more distinct when compared with the relative homogeneity of DBFZ movement options.
Difference 4: Verticality
This kind of goes together with the character mobility differences, but Marvel 3 is a much more vertical game than DBFZ.
For most of a DBFZ match, you can generally see the ground. There are rare exceptions like if someone drops a superdash combo at the top of the screen after a 2H or something, but most of the game takes place in a vertical space that’s pretty similar to most 1v1 2D fighting games.
In Marvel 3, the screen is as tall as it is wide—you can spend a lot of the match as far vertically from your opponent as you are horizontally. 10 seconds could pass without you seeing the ground.
The verticality makes assists more interesting as well. DBFZ and Marvel 3 both have vertical beam assists (UI Goku rising heat and Dante jam session), but in DBFZ, the verticality of the UI Goku’s assist just matters a lot less because you’re probably not that far off the ground in the first place. In comparison, jam session creating a vertical wall that reaches the top of the screen matters a lot in Marvel 3 because your opponent might be miles above you. More of the screen matters in Marvel 3, which means there is a greater variety of space to control, and that matters for both point and assist characters.
Difference 5: Defensive Options, Pressure, and Mix-ups
DBFZ’s unique defensive mechanic is reflect. If you time it correctly, you’ll stop your opponent’s attack and push them back. If they committed to another move, that move might now whiff completely, allowing you to land a hit of your own. Reflect is risky though. You’ll often have to reflect as a read (rather than a reaction), and a missed reflect is very punishable if your opponent is ready for it.
Marvel 3’s push block (officially called advancing guard) seems similar at a glance. Push block gets you some breathing room, just like reflect does in DBFZ. The details matter though. You activate push block when you are already blocking a move (rather than guessing when your opponent will do a move like with reflect). Reflect is a high risk/high reward defensive option to call out and possibly punish a high commitment move. Push block is a low risk/low reward mechanic that pushes the game back to neutral, preventing hours-long pressure sequences or blockstrings.
You can’t talk about defense in a bubble, and in terms of pressure and mix-ups, DBFZ and Marvel 3 feel diametrically opposed. In DBFZ, it’s relatively easy to put your opponent into blockstun. Plenty of moves jail into vanish, so if you can get your opponent to block your beam at full screen, you get a guaranteed vanish and now you’re +2 at point blank range. While you can get next to your opponent and start a blockstring with relative ease, mix-ups are generally weak without specific blockstun assists to force an actual 50/50. It can be hard to shake the feeling that DBFZ is just the players just taking turns blocking and dealing with reactable offense.
In Marvel 3, it’s relatively hard to get your opponent to hold a grounded blockstring. The strength of push block (and chicken blocking) make it hard to keep any kind of sustained pressure. It’s not that hard to slip away and reset to neutral. However, mix-ups can be truly absurd when you do manage to earn one. Throws are one frame and can lead to a dead character. If a player gets stuck blocking Amaterasu cold star assist on the ground, god herself is not blocking Magneto tap dancing on her head.
DBFZ is a game where it’s easy to find pressure, and that pressure can go on for a while, but mix-ups are weak. Marvel 3 is a game where it’s difficult to find pressure or force mix-ups, but the reward is enormous when you do.
Difference 6: Losing at Character Select
I touch on this the Cursed Design Problems video, but I’ll briefly talk about it here. I think the synergies that make your characters cohere together as a team are what makes versus games truly special. If you can pick any random three characters and it works alright, it probably means synergies just don’t matter all that much. DBFZ letting any random three characters work as a team does mean that people can just pick their favorite characters (and it’s understandable that the devs want to give people this freedom), but I feel like some magic is lost here.
Let me give a goofy example from Marvel 3. I made up a team of Hawkeye/Rocket Raccoon/Morrigan. The plan was to zone with Hawkeye while calling Morrigan dark harmonizer assist to build meter. Then as soon as I got two meters and was under any kind of threat, I would super with Hawkeye and DHC into Rocket’s mad hopper super. Hawkeye super is very hard to challenge, and then mad hopper sits there as a trap for ages that you can just park your character on top of. Finally, I’d raw tag Hawkeye back in, and have him hang out and zone on top of the trap while calling Morrigan assist to hopefully do the same thing again. This didn’t turn out to be a particularly amazing team, but the theory of the team was cool and it was fun to mess around with. I never found anything that quite felt like that in DBFZ. In Marvel 3, theorycrafting was almost as much as actually playing the game.
Difference 7: Confirms and Combos
This is a minor point, but I liked the difficulty of hit confirms in Marvel 3. Some were really easy of course, like Doom foot dive or Haggar pipe, but there were confirms that were kind of hard, but doable enough that they were absolutely worth going for while being absolutely droppable. Watching RayRay turning stray hits into proper combos is amazing. In DBFZ, you can just always fall back on, “I’m not sure what to do here, guess I’ll vanish,” and boom, your combo continues.
Marvel 3 also feels like you need to optimize combos reasonably well to play the game at a high level—combos need to lead to a kill. Combos that kill a healthy average HP character might be reasonably droppable, so you often have important decision points of whether you should transition to an easier combo if the full combo won’t be necessary (if the opposing character is close to death anyway).
Between lower execution requirements and the smaller difference between decent and truly optimal combos, this sort of thing just doesn’t come up in DBFZ nearly as much. It feels like I usually need two touches to kill a character, and it often doesn’t much matter if I do an optimized combo or a day 1 bnb.
Difference 8: Tagging and Resource Management
In Marvel 3, meter management is crucial. Raw tagging to swap characters is wildly risky, so the most common way to safely tag is via DHC, which costs two meters. Having meter on deck for a safe DHC is critical. In DBFZ, there are other reliable ways to tag characters, so safe DHCs don’t really matter much.
You can also spend meter in Marvel 3 for utility in interesting ways. Whether Spencer has a bar (and therefore has access to bionic arm) changes the match completely. The same goes for Dormammu sitting on bar for chaotic flame, or Doom/Amaterasu sitting on two bars for a THC. Meter dictates the match in a lot of cases. In DBFZ, this feels less important, and meter use for utility mostly exists in the form of EX moves (apparently these are called powered-up specials?) and vanish. Supers are mostly for damage after you’ve already landed a combo.
Closing Thoughts
As I got further down in the list, I probably sounded increasingly less evenhanded and more antagonistic toward DBFZ. Ultimately, the point I’m trying to make is that DBFZ are very different once you get past surface level stuff.
I think that I could do a version of this for most other post-Marvel 3 versus games (DBFZ just happens to be the one that I’m the most familiar with). I’m sure that Marvel 2 vets could just as easily break down why Marvel 3 was not a proper successor to Marvel 2. Everybody is chasing their own white whale.