Why Does Marvel vs. Capcom 2 Have 56 Characters?

The roster is not 56 new characters. It is a merger. 28 fighters come from Marvel's side of Capcom's catalogue and 28 from Capcom's own: the X-Men and Avengers on one column, Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, and Mega Man on the other. Count the select screen and the symmetry is the story: by 2000, Capcom had spent six years drawing both universes, and this game simply refused to leave any of it behind.

The accumulation happened in public, one game at a time. X-Men: Children of the Atom (1994) drew the X-Men. Marvel Super Heroes (1995) widened the Marvel brief beyond the X-Men. X-Men vs. Street Fighter (1996) bolted the two catalogues together, Marvel Super Heroes vs. Street Fighter (1997) widened both, and Marvel vs. Capcom: Clash of Super Heroes (1998) folded in Darkstalkers and Mega Man. Each game left Capcom holding finished, animated, tournament tested characters. Marvel vs. Capcom 2 is where the warehouse opened: nearly the entire accumulated cast, carried forward, plus the newcomers the NAOMI hardware and the new 3D stages were built to show off.

Only three of the 56 were created for this game: Amingo, Ruby Heart, who had originally been envisioned for Darkstalkers, and SonSon, the granddaughter of the hero of Capcom's 1984 arcade game SonSon. The rest of the select screen is history, and that is precisely the appeal the box is selling.

One caution, in the Library's usual spirit. The sources opened for this page document the accumulation: the series history above, the roster's split, the three originals. They do not contain a Capcom statement saying, in so many words, that sprite reuse was the plan. The honest sentence is the arithmetic one: 56 was reachable because two six year catalogues met in one game, and Capcom has never fielded a roster this size in the series since. The production story sits on the history page.