5/5 ★ – ShinyGBZ's review of Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes.

I can say a lot about Marvel VS Capcom 2, but it would honestly be much better for you to experience this game for yourself. This has been my most played video game recently. It's been that hope of mine after a long day to just come home and have this game waiting for me. It's been one of those games that you just pop on whenever you and your friends don't have anything better to do. It's been one of those games I could honestly see myself playing forever. I first started playing this game a couple of months ago now, when a new old-style arcade had opened up not too far from where I lived, and I was immediately blown away by the 28 character size roster this game had. Almost double the size of the previous game's roster, and you got to choose from 3 of them at once, similar to another game I picked up earlier that year, Dragon Ball FighterZ. I noticed a lot of similarities between the two, actually. The 3v3 Team based fighting style, the selectable assist types for each character, and the massive roster of characters to pick from. So me and a friend I took with me spend a good 4-5 hours just having an absolute blast with the game. I still remember the team I started playing with: Cyclops, Doctor Doom and Hulk. My team may be much different now, but I really enjoyed just how many characters there were to play as. While we were playing, we were constantly looking at move lists and guides for the game to help us get better at the game, and we started seeing characters not in our arcade cabinet, and we found out that this game had unlockable characters. A total of 28 more. This means that the grand total of selectable fighters in this game was 56: A roster size even bigger than FighterZ's! At this point I was sold. 56 entire characters, an incredibly unorthodox yet oddly fitting Groovy Jazz soundtrack complete with vocals, and my favorite characters from Capcom and Marvel alike, all in one game. It still floors me how this game came out in 2000. To me this game felt much newer than that, and I'm so incredibly lucky that the arcade that opened up managed to track one down. God bless the people at that arcade, man. Once me and my friend started learning about unlockable characters, and unlockable character color palettes, we asked the staff working there if they wanted to help us unlock everything, and I got to watch them go into the test menu of this game, input some extremely specific code, and go back out and see this game's oh-so iconic character select screen in it's entirety. It's an experience I haven't ever had with any other game, and I don't think I'll forget that moment. The 5 star rating I give this game is for the game itself and so much more. It's an outstanding game. and at this point a lot of people already know it. It's brought about with it some incredible memories for me, and I've only played this game for 4-5 months now! Imagine when this game first came out; Imagine what everybody when the game first came out felt like playing this game. 56 playable characters back in 2000 must have broke players' minds as it did mine. If you're at all into fighting games, and even if you're just a Capcom games fan or Marvel fan, there's something to enjoy about this game, whether it be the soundtrack, the vast amount of characters, the multiplayer aspect or even the single player campaign, as repetitive as it seems, the boss that you fight at the end is so fun to fight you're GOING to want to play through the single player campaign more than you think you will. Do yourself a huge favor and play this game, however possible it is for you, since this game is no longer sold. Fightcade and NullDCBear are outstanding emulators that have built-in rollback netcode, which means you'll be able to play with other people online with this game extremely well. You can try tracking down Sega Dreamcast versions out there in the wild or on Ebay, and a Sega Dreamcast console for that matter. Or, if you're as lucky as me, you can drive out to your nearest arcade, and see if it's there. And however you may encounter this game, I hope you're ready to be taken for a ride.