Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3: The Beauty

Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 is a beautiful, complex, deep game. I'm sure this has been said hundreds of times before and the scene has been thinning out, but I think now we are actually seeing some of the best days of the game now, even though the game has been out for several years.

The most brilliant thing to me about the game is it is exactly as deep as you want it to be. This can be true of pretty much all games, but the basic combos are very, very low execution in Marvel. Nearly every character has the magic sequence combo: LMHS xx Sj.MMHS OTG Super. This combo can be pretty much mashed out with every character with a few exceptions that have a variation of this combo. Even more basic than this, command normals are pretty great with a lot of characters. If you and a friend are absolute beginners for fighting games, you can instantly do pretty cool attacks with H and a direction.

On the deep end of the spectrum, the game is a complete sandbox for combos. There are definitely optimal combos, but if you are having trouble with a combo you see in a video or would rather use a different assist you can probably come up with a combo that works. I have seen so many combo videos for this game and I can assure you there are near limitless possibilities in this game. At tournaments, you will see a lot of top-tier teams being utilized still, but you can see many teams that are utilizing really creative strategies with the mid-low tier characters.

This brings me to my next point: I think that we are actually seeing some of the best days of UMVC3 at a tournament level right now. There are a lot of people who have probably been playing for years with unconventional teams that are NOW placing top 8. We still see plenty of Morrigan-Doom and Zero May Cry type teams, but now we are seeing much more than that. In the last year, I have seen Deadpool teams, Phoenix Wright teams, Jill teams, Morrigan's that don't rely on Astral Vision, Resident Evil teams...the list goes on. There is just so much creativity that is now working in the game. This could be a result of some of the top players moving on to SFV and other games but I don't really care. I am just happy to see so much creativity in this game that, at one point, looked like it was going to be all Zeros, Morrigans, and Vergils. Like I mentioned earlier, this game has been out for several years and we are now seeing such a burst of creativity actually winning in the game. It's beautiful.

This whole article is really just a love letter to a game I just find endlessly fascinating. It's not my favorite fighting game of all time, I just love it like I love all fighting games. I think it will continue to be played at tournaments and be a consistent highlight, but I want to make sure of it by spreading the word that it is still very, very exciting.

Ultimate Marvel Vs Capcom 3 Combos for Beginners

 This article is meant to explain how combos in UMVC3 work. I've had the game for like 10 months or so and I have been able to do combos since day 1 but there were a ton that I couldn't do up until a few weeks ago. Now, all of a sudden, I can pull off tons of combos that I couldn't before and most of it was because of a few nifty little things I learned about how UMVC3. This was all information I gained from playing the game and through tutorials but there is absolutely NO WHERE that I read this exact info. For 8 months I was doing UMVC3 combos having no clue why they were working and, as a result, my execution sucked ass. Therefore, I'd like to share this with everyone. Hopefully this will help some beginners.

The key to a ton of combos in UMVC3 is understanding hitstun. A previous article I have written explains all of this and I won't re-explain it here so flip back through if you are still not understanding. Equally as important is how chains and cancels and auto-teching work. Teching is when a character is released from a comboable state or pops off the ground. In most games, you have to press something to tech at the earliest moment. In UMVC3, the game does it for you at the earliest moment. Thus we call it autoteching.

If you've played UMVC3, you know that as soon as you pick up the controller you make some crazy shit happen. The most basic combo in the game is easy to pull of because it is just LMHS j.MMHS OTG Super or something incredibly close to that for most characters. This works because starting from L (Light attack) you can chain to M (Medium) and then to H (Heavy) and then finally S (Special or Launcher.) This works in the air too. You can pretty much mash these as fast as you can, usually, and the combo will work. The game can feel like its just a spastic mess of button mashing and some explosions and lazers. Tons of normals are special cancellable too. So you can press M and then Quarter Circle Forward L, for example, and a special will come out immediately after M.

So you've figured all of this stuff out from reading and you are trying to up your game. You want to pull off some combos you saw on the Shoryuken.com forums or on some combo video. They tell you exactly what to do but the opponent autotechs before you can pull off a certain action. What the fuck happened?

If you are running into the problems I was having, the key is hitstun as I said before. All attacks when they connect, cause hitstun. H attacks, jumping S attacks, Unique Moves, and Specials tend to cause the most hitstun. This isn't a rule, but it is generally true. That is why it is usually only possible to connect an S launcher after a LMH chain, and it will not connect if you only do LM. Many H attacks and Unique Moves do multiple hits and are special cancelable. This is where I was getting really hung up.

In an effort to try to special cancel and press buttons really fucking fast I noticed that my combos would drop especially after H attacks, particularly multi-hitting H attacks. This is because often times the H attacks are special cancelable throughout the entire attack. So the first hit in the attack is special cancelable too. The first hit or early hits from multi-hitting attacks, however, have almost no hitstun. They have do just enough hitstun to allow the latter parts of the attack to connect. Therefore, on many normal multi-hitting attacks and multi-hitting Unique Moves, you have to allow time for all of the hits to take place.

This rule is not always true and this post was pretty long winded for the actual info that was given, but this is the long and annoying journey I took to figure this damn game out. After you understand this aspect, the combos are much more relaxed, unless you are doing fly-unfly combos with Morrigan or box dash combos with C. Viper. In the future, I will try to post more info for all you beginners trying to play this game.