Marvel Vs Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics (PlayStation 4)

A selection of 7 iconic crossover fighting games return in Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics, including the first console port of The Punisher’s original arcade version. All of your favourite Marvel and Capcom characters collide, complete with rollback netcode for smooth online matches alongside some sneak peeks at the games development. The collection released digitally for PC, Switch and PS4 on 12^th September with a physical release coming in November while an Xbox release is planned for 2025.

The collection features 7 titles: The Punisher, X-Men: Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes, X-Men Vs Street Fighter, Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter, Marvel vs Capcom: Clash Of Super Heroes and Marvel vs Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes.

The Punisher is both the earliest game featured in the collection and the outlier as it is not a fighting game, instead being a side scrolling beat-em-up. This is the first time that the original unchanged arcade edition of the game has had a release outside of arcades. The game is a fantastic beat em up that gives you the choice of playing as Nick Fury or The Punisher himself as you fight your way through the games stages in search of Kingpin. With plenty of weapons to pick up alongside some great visuals, the game is a lot of fun and definitely worth playing, even if the bulk of the collection is targeted more towards fighting game fans.  

The first fighting game in the collection is X-Men: Children of the Atom. As you might expect, the game lets you select between 10 characters from the X-Men franchise, with a few secret characters to uncover aswell. The game is a lot of fun and introduces a lot of the aspects of the later games in the collection like the ability to super jump to gain additional height alongside the game being generally fast paced. The games art is fantastic, with great sprites for the cast and really sets the basis for the series of Marvel licenced fighting games to grow, introducing a lot of the gameplay aspects that the series became known for.

After the success of Children of the Atom, Marvel Super Heroes released, which has a more varied roster of Marvel characters. The game also includes infinity stones, which each give a special effect in battle, with some characters having unique abilities when combined with certain stones. The roster this time around is great, with a variety of different playstyles and different iconic characters alongside a few lesser known picks like Blackheart. I personally think that this is one of the more underrated titles in the collection and is a great game that’s definitely worth a look.

The first crossover fighting game in the collection is X-Men vs Street Fighter which as the name suggests, pits all your favourite characters from X-Men and Street Fighter against each other. This is also the first of the games to be a tag fighter, meaning that you choose two characters to fight with that you can swap between during combat. The size of the roster jumps significantly from the earlier titles here, to better suit the 2v2 structure of the game, with 17 characters to choose from split between the two franchises. The street fighter characters in particular were given more over the top abilities to bring them more in line with the X-Men cast, such as giving Ryu a hadouken that filled the entire screen at once. These changes became staples in the Marvel vs Capcom series, bringing a more fast paced style than your typical Street Fighter characters which is a joy to play.

Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter is similar to X-Men vs Street Fighter, with a more varied cast of characters from wider Marvel properties, alongside the introduction of the assist mechanic that became a staple of the wider Marvel vs Capcom series, allowing your backup character to use a move while not in combat, adding a huge amount of possibilities to the game. However, despite this feature being great, I personally preferred the way X-Men vs Street Fighter plays, with the game feeling almost identical mechanically, but flowed better originally in my opinion, with X-Men being a better fit than some of the chosen characters for this game.

The Marvel vs Capcom brand officially gets underway with Marvel vs Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes, no longer limiting the Capcom side of things to just Street Fighter and bringing in characters like Morrigan and Mega Man. Branching out to more Capcom properties was a great move, bringing the rosters variety up massively and letting all sorts of characters clash in ways that they otherwise wouldn’t have been able to. For the most part, I feel this game is a step up from the previous crossover fighters Capcom released, outside of the ability to choose your assist character, which feels like a step back as you are assigned a random character to be your assist, meaning that you can wind up with a character that you dislike or doesn’t fit your playstyle. Besides this small setback, the game is fantastic with some great visuals and music to go with the already smooth gameplay.

Last but certainly not least comes Marvel vs Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes, likely the most iconic game featured in the collection. This game takes everything good from its predecessors and tunes it up into an incredibly fun title. The game makes the shift from 2v2 to 3v3, with a huge roster of 56 characters with everyone from Iron Man or Ryu to more niche characters like Marrow and Anakaris. This makes for a great roster with everyone surely being able to find a character they gel with. Having said that, the game does have a fairly defined meta already, so you’ll likely see a lot of certain characters when playing other players, but that doesn’t mean they’re the only characters worth playing. The presentation of this game also is an improvement over other games, with backgrounds using 3D visuals alongside a fantastic soundtrack. The character sprites, while not all of them are unique to this game, look great in the games 2.5D style and the chaos the series has been known for is in full force in Marvel Vs Capcom 2, improving on the assist system by allowing each character to have one of three selectable assists. The game is arguably the most difficult to play “well” out of the games in the collection, with a lot going on at once, but the game is a joy to play at a casual level and is my personal favourite of the games featured in the collection.

Outside of the games, this collection features a few extra bits of content, mostly contained in the Museum section. This section gives you a look into the development of the games, along with some of the promotional materials like posters you’d find in arcades. Looking at design documents for the game can be fascinating, getting a glimpse into the development of the game and seeing the characters movesets being designed is a great addition to the overall package. Alongside the artwork, the soundtracks of the game are available in a jukebox style section of the museum. The other main additional piece of content comes in that all games feature online multiplayer with rollback netcode which makes playing matches online incredibly smooth and I haven’t encountered any issues with it, making the games far more accessible now that they’re available on modern consoles with great online functionality.

Overall, Marvel vs Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics is a stellar package filled with some fantastic games with the addition of great online. The extra content is also definitely worth a look for fans of the genre, with some great insights into the development.