In its heyday, the Marvel Vs. Capcom crossover fighting franchise was omnipresent. Every arcade–a concept that’s also a relic of a time long passed–had walls lined with MvC machines, and each one was surrounded by players dropping quarters into X-Men Vs. Street Fighter, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2, and others. It’s a bygone era, and for a while, fans believed that their beloved crossover franchise was as lost to time as the arcades of old.
Marvel Vs. Capcom Fighting Collection, however, brings together all six of those era-defining fighting games–along with the historic brawler that started the core partnership between Marvel and Capcom–in a new era. Thankfully, this package presents each game in a way that celebrates that storied past while also injecting new life into them with modern features, creating a collection that’s up to the task of reintroducing these classics to a new age of players.
The meat of the collection is in the fighting games. Each of the six fighting games in this collection are the arcade version–no console ports to be found. This is of course the right call, as each title represents the purest form, running mostly as it was intended back in the 1990s–save for a few frame-rate issues that pop up from time to time. However, it also exposes which of these games are showing their age, and which can still stand with the modern fighters of today.