Today’s Fighting Game Story Modes are Simply the Best

Have you downloaded the free Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite demo that was announced during Sony's E3 press conference? If you've not, you really should.

It's gloriously, hilariously ridiculous. It features, as the title implies, characters from the Capcom catalogue duking it out against robot drones and corrupted Viking dudes, side-by-side with a wealth of familiar Marvel faces—and just a few who've not had their time to shine yet in the Cinematic Universe. Fireballs and flying hammers, lances and rocket launchers—the spectacle on show here is incessant. And it's all so, so silly.

I'm a casual when it comes to fighting games, exclusively in it for shits and giggles, so the nuances of the actual playing of this thing, its frame-precise mechanical ins and outs, are largely lost on me. But I totally appreciate that, perhaps because this is the game's story mode only, and an incentive-to-buy demo, it's possible to have characters pull off amazing moves with simple inputs—a sweep of the stick and a couple of buttons pressed simultaneously and, boom, 29-hit combo.

And I massively appreciate just how bananas recent fighting game story modes have been— Infinite looking like it's going to be right up there with the tidal wave of what-the-y'know-whatever-just-go-with-it emotions that flowed out of the DC-branded Injustice 2, with its morally questionable superheroes perpetually caught up in exaggerated antics. And it's got on-brand recent precedent, too, what with Street Fighter V's retrofitted "A Shadow Falls" plotline pulling no punches in its ludicrousness.

Black Moons this, Bison's Psycho Power that, and a handful of magic chess pieces—V took the oftentimes campy, sometimes honorable motivations of Street Fighter characters' past quests, played out as they were in linear arcade mode campaigns, and accelerated them into an over-portioned buffet of absurdity. It worked for some, less so others.

I found it agreeably asinine, and it had me playing more of V than I otherwise might've, had my time with it been exclusively spent having my arse handed to me online. The same relationship is probably true of Tekken 7 though, hands up, my complete lack of prior experience with Bandai Namco's series is keeping its said-to-be-very-silly-indeed story mode at an arm's length, just for now. (I've played through a couple of encounters, and pressed a button to initiate the infamous volcano tossing, but look, there are a lot of games out. I'll get back to it, eventually.)

That's how I'm looking at Infinite. I know that if I took the fight to other players, real-life humans with quicker reflexes and more comprehensive knowledge of movesets, the thrill of seeing Mega Man battling alongside Captain America would fade, fast—about as fast as my virtual teeth got spilled over the floor of combat.

But in story mode, I get a whistle-stop tour of both Marvel's finest and Capcom's own array of cherished avatars, picking up each pair before putting them down again for some other collaboration of butt-kicking coolness. Fights finished in heartbeats—onto the next, via another surreal cutscene where a special police officer from the Resident Evil series is trying to break a supervillain superbeing out of a supernatural prison.

In the demo, you take control of no fewer than ten separate characters, sometimes more than one at once. There are also cameos from others you don't get to play as, like Hawkeye, Strider Hiryu and Iron Man. The entire thing lasts around 25 minutes, and a good 40% of it comprises histrionic cutscenes. It bolts ahead at a breathless pace, moving from Captain Marvel getting her energy bursts on in the company of Chun-Li's spinning bird kicks to Rocket Raccoon summoning his barky buddy Groot to batter his opponent's digital brains out. Brilliant.

It tosses the game's big-bad into the fray immediately—a two-evils-are-better-than-one amalgamation of Marvel's Ultron and Mega Man's arch enemy Sigma, called (saddest drumroll ever) Ultron Sigma—and wraps with him… it(?)… utterly owning Thor. But, that's supposed to happen.

Don't sweat it, it's story mode. And despite who appears to be the game's main antagonist exhibiting just how dangerous he is, everyone makes it out of there, courtesy of a convenient Doctor Strange-summoned portal. Again: onto the next.

Except, all you proceed onto is a pre-order screen. There's no more on the prisoner that Chris Redfield and company are charged with cracking out of an underground slammer—although we see enough to know who he is. Spoiler: it's this guy. All that's left to do is go around again—to either refine your skills with the likes of Dante, Captain America, Nathan Spencer or Sir Arthur, or to watch, again, as explosive interactive melodrama dances across your TV screen. Really, who needs soap operas, these days, when modern fighting games are so deliriously, intoxicatingly extravagant?

Trash-talk Mike on Twitter.