This has meant watching a lot of match footage – always welcome, considering that MVC2, even today, has some of the most entertaining commentary in the FGC. MVC2 commentary is very honest, very laid back, laden with jokes and various noises in time with combos, because as much as commentators can and do make great observations about the game, there’s no pressure to be formal or “esports” in any regard – we’re just hanging out, playing this old-ass game that we’ve always played. There’s a culture.
The culture of the competitive MVC scene as a whole is fascinating and wonderful to me, mostly because of the way it takes the characters of these games as their own entities. You notice that MVC2 (and even UMVC3) commentators tend to talk about the characters in certain ways – my personal favourite is the way that they’ll pronounce “iron” in “Iron Man”, or refer to him as “Iron Guy”. And the way they talk about these characters signals an understanding of them that could only exist in MVC.
Like, all of the characters in MVC are characters from existing media properties – they’ve all got their own established personalities, behaviours and capabilities – and yet, when those characters appear in MVC, they get reinterpreted by the competitive scene as they find themselves in a new context, informed as much by mechanical design as by existing characterisation, to the point that MVC characters become wholly separate entities from those characters as they appear in their source material.
Ryu in UMVC3 is often affectionately referred to as “Regular Guy”, despite the fact that in Street Fighter he is decidedly not a Regular Guy and actually an insanely powerful fighter who can throw fire out of his hands, purely because of how limited his kit is in the context of UMVC3.
Iron Man in MVC2 has less to do with Iron Man at this point and more to do with DjChamploo and his very effective tutorial for the Iron Man Infinite.
Hell, when you’re talking about Magneto, you’re either talking about Magneto, Radical Mutant Separatist, or you’re talking about Magneto, Pringles Mascot – these are two different, mutually exclusive characters, and the latter exists purely due to the former’s reinterpretation as a MVC character.
I don’t have a point here, I just think it’s funny, and also really fucking cool