~ Estimated Reading Time: 8 min ~
Played through all of this in a single session, sitting alongside a friend who happened to be particularly into Marvel. And I'll be honest: I didn't recognize any of these guys!! I was anti-social as a teenager, and didn't attend a single theater showing of a Marvel movie. To this day, the only one I've seen was uhhh....I thiiink the second Thor movie? (nooooope, i lied. i also saw guardians of the galaxy) Let alone have I read any of the comics. So this friend, who happened to be obsessed with the original material, had the welcomed opportunity to yap about the grandiose plot outlines of the golden age comics for basically the whole time, providing a documentary-backdrop to all the beautiful pixel art deposited on my screen. It was a fun, but most of all refreshing night - spent well over a smooth, casual tone.
But, it also got me thinking...for how long have beat-em-ups had this reputation as crowd-pleaser, easy-listening experiences? And for how long have I recognized that doesn't need to be the case? And uhh...maybe this is my real issue; why does it feel like this is the only form in which the genre is allowed to exist?
Don't get me wrong when I say all this, I would say as a follow-up to Tribute Games' previous release - Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge - this has only grown alongside my taste. It's a bit slower, feels a bit less fluid - but that lends it a methodical edge, meaning I have to move with intention. It retains those juggle-oriented, anime fighter combos - but this time around, I'm overextending much more often. A lot of the flavourful core of Cosmic Invasion comes down to that balancing act of picking off one enemy in the air, as the others jump at you from below like sharks. And that Marvel VS Capcom 2-worshipping tag team system is flourishing; every character is missing some fundamental tool, but two opposite characters can be put together to complete the puzzle of play. I can even say I felt the difficulty on Campaign Mode was well-considered; walking a fine line of easiness but surely engaging. The AIM corps are multifaceted goons, putting horizontal projectiles on screen that are constantly forcing you to engage with the Z axis. There is no doubt in my mind that this game, for someone who is more experienced with the genre, feels significantly less repetitive.
Shredder's Revenge, in retrospect - despite that initial allure of a perfect evening accompanied by three other friends - doesn't take long before it's crushed under the weight of an emerging playstyle. If that initial joy sparks your curiosity, urging you to look deeper, try the other modes, then it very well may damage your opinion on the game. Its Taunt button grants you a full bar of Special each time you used it, in combination with a lack of time limit - an arcade-era nuance deliberately chopped off - means that it's optimal to taunt after you clear every wave of enemies, so you can clean-sweep through the next. You can fish for a second, and trivialize a whole room. This is gone in Cosmic Invasion, because it was probably a nightmare to design around the valley between those who notice this, and those who don't. We're slowly cutting at the fat, getting to the center of what actually makes the classics fun. The all-too-common mechanic of being able to revive your team-mates by holding a button in front of their corpse for a few seconds has been removed, cuz, well, as nice as co-operative play feels...it kinda sucks. Or at least draws things out. Giving yourself access to near-infinite revival tactics lets you get away with sloppier play, which slows down the pace of the whole game in the long-run. Making us die, and then try even a liiittle harder to live the next time 'round is fun!
(Last second side note: funnily enough, in a completely unrelated genre; nuclear throne's friend-revive was replaced in its 100th update 2 days ago...)
A good tone-setter for exactly where we're at is Run-time.
Some of you may be seriously asking: "is it that serious that beat-em-ups maintain their arcade game roots?". It's not mandatory, but we had a good thing going! Looking at Final Fight, for example, its Special Attacks make the intent clear. Specials in that game cost not a secondary meter, but directly use your health as the resource - rewarding you with an invincible get-off-me move. Texturally similar to a Shoryuken, but more directly comparable to a Bomb in Touhou, you bet on your own loss in order to minimize losses. Many of their dynamics are symbiotically tied to the impermanence of a Run: in which you are trying to hold onto as much as you can, while risking losing all that progress. When the economy of your actions is defined by your health bar, and your punishment for losing health is to die...death must carry a certain gravitas. Reviving infinitely through continues, at the very least, hampers that weight. The developers have clearly noticed this; Both Shredder's and MCI choose to make Specials use a separate resource from health in the infinitely-respawning Campaign, while enabling the old-style of health-spending-specials on Arcade Mode specifically.
But, arcade games - with their loop of restarting from the beginning - demand both time and energy from their players, exponentially to the length of a single completion. It's why the genre thrived so much when we barely knew how to make video games that were longer than thirty minutes, and why they feel incompatible with our standards for Content and Quantity of now. When you flip the switch from that raw timesink of re-attempts, to something with checkpoints every ten minutes, that experience suddenly inverses from something that can take you months to a single night. I've seen the reviews; on every modern beat-em-up, and I mean every single one: someone is yelling "this is too short"!
I could say something snarky, like..."yeah, if you only play it once", but unfortunately is it more complicated than that. As developers, you have to choose which audience you want to work with, and undeniably, the truth is that they're landing on an unsatisfying compromise to both sides. From my perspective, they've instead raised the average length to one of which Arcade runs are no longer comfortable. Beating Shredder's Revenge takes about two and a half hours - I don't know if many of us even have the free time to play that long without save points.
But you really can have your cake, and eat it too. I found it funny how utterly simple, how "why didn't they think of this sooner" Cosmic Invasion's solution to all this is. They just split the three-hour campaign into multiple routes, and you only play through part of it on an individual Arcade Run. The purists must be looking at me crazy for praising such a low bar (especially when Fight'N Rage already had that idea in 2017). But we're here, and they did in fact create something that can accessibly be played by both parties. Cool! 🙂
So, our standards are getting higher. There is nothing here that is getting worse. So where my goal-post has moved is: are these games doing enough to make people passionate? It'd be cute if we could blame the average player for choosing not to play these games beyond their initial evening stroll through Campaign Mode, and then complaining that there "isn't enough content" when they haven't seen it all. But I don't know if we're properly demonstrating that these mechanics have more to them!
All of Marvel Cosmic Invasion's most grueling challenges are its boss-fights. In Streets of Rage: when a Boss summons their goons, they're a resource, because throwing enemies into other enemies knocks them down. And like Yin and Yang - the Boss Fight-half of the game makes you think about what you can apply to the other half. Now you're thinking about throwing goons into more goons all-game-long. In Cosmic Invasion, bosses barely spawn smaller enemies, and when they do, they often have shields that prevent them from being stunned. You can't even grab, combo, or use overly committal moves for the majority of their fights. The fundamentals are literally not present within any level's climax.
But if the bosses took effect of your entire toolkit...not only would it be more intuitive, the bosses wuoldnt be so fucking ANNOYINHG AHHHHH WHY DO THEY HAVE LIKE 5 SUPERARMOR HEALTH BARS??/? DAMAGE SPONGES DIDNT EVEN WORL IKE THAT IN THE 90S would be more fun! When the player is fully informed on what they're doing - on how to get the most out of a game's systems - they will become naturally inclined in finding the fun in everything.
It's so easy for me to imagine a world in which those breezy first playthroughs feel punctuated by a contagious enthusiasm that - y'see all of this? This is just the beginning. And then, even a measly hour can soar with value. Even those uninterested in the deeper layers will find themselves more satisfied, knowing there is a richer experience out there that they're purposefully opting out of. It's been...how many years? Five, since Streets of Rage 4 made catering to that taste look easy. Haven't seen anything live up to that.
I dunno...I really shouldn't be complaining too much, 'cuz this is a pretty good game. I just keep thinking: why is the genre in a sales golden-age, yet the amount of freaks for it not visibly increasing? And I have been playing through Hard Mode and all the custom settings, despite lacking incentive to. And I'm seeing some of that depth! The nuances of its predecessors have been sanded down with time, but there's definitely some juice left at the bottom of the bottle no one's drank yet. And while I don't mind the existence of a casual game, it's more like we're obfuscating a larger range of appeals it very well could have. So my memories become less of ones of a game, and more like I'm staring at some retro-themed accessory to the social experience. Like a keychain or something. I want this genre to be more than the side of a millennial water bottle.