tl;dr
Why does Iron Man have the exact same moves in both MvC2 and MvC3? He is wearing a different and newer armor in MvC3 and his moveset should reflect that seeing as Armor upgrades are such a central part of the character.
Iron Man has always upgraded his armor throughout the comics and the movies have done a good job keeping that part of his story intact. This is something I have thought about before but after recently watching the new Iron Man 3 trailer
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5EjG-1U3wqA and seeing yet newer armor (omg!) I thought of this again and was hoping to get some kind official response.
As Tony has upgraded his suit in the comics they have gotten better in various ways such as new armaments, devices, mobility, ect. This has been a hallmark of his story and the movies have followed suit. My problem is that the games, specifically, the MvC series that Capcom has made, has largely ignored this aspect of Iron Man. An aspect that I would claim is one of the most defining features of Iron Man as a character because the various suit upgrades display Tony's most impressive characteristic -- his mind.
In MvC2 Iron Man is undoubtedly wearing the Modular Armor which was both popular and saw a lot of use in the 90s era comics.
Below is an image of the Iron Man sprite in MvC2 for comparison:
The top left sprite is a dead ringer for the Modular Armor and makes perfect sense being used when the game came out.
In MvC2 Iron Man had the following moves:
Unibeam (air ok)
Smart Bombs (controllable distance, air ok)
Repulsar Blast
Flight (Air ok)
Fast Forward to MvC3 and we see that Iron Man is wearing a new armor to reflect modern times. The armor he wear in MvC3 is almost certianly based off of the Mark VI armor used in Iron Man 2 and the first half of the Avengers. It's not sleek enough to be based off the Extremis armor and the helmet is wrong. Although what's funny is that the Mark VI itself was based off the Extremis armor and is part of the reason they used the triangular arc reactor for the suits chest. There are other reasons as well but my point here is to show how similar they are.
Here is Iron man in MvC3:
For comparison, here is Iron Man in the Mark VI armor:
Other than the fact that the Model shown in the movie is about 1000x more detailed (lol) they look quite similar.
Yet... In MvC3 series Iron Man has the following moves:
Unibeam (air ok)
Smart Bombs (air ok, can no longer control distance)
Repulsar Blast
Flight (Air ok)
Not only does Tony gain no new abilities....He actually loses an ability in MvC3!
My question is why did Capcom make this choice? Iron Man is clearly wearing a newer and more advanced armor in the MvC3 series and yet he largely has the exact same moveset.
I know that he gained the "upwards" hyper beam and a level 3 hyper move, but his basic move set, i.e. the moves you will use the most and that will win or lose you matches, have remained the same, actually worse as Iron Man can no longer control the distance of his Smart Bombs.
Why didn't Capcom take into account the history of the Character and upgrade more than the way that he looks? There are literally hundreds of things that could have been done to him. I am not talking about making him overpowered or top tier. I am talking about making him a more dynamic character to better reflect who he is. It would have gone a long way in not only showing that Capcom cares about these characters but that that you guys are aware of the things that are honestly pretty basic from a fans perspective.
I know that it's way too late to change anything now but I wanted to put this out there and see what Capcom has to say and if nothing else maybe, just maybe the next time Capcom does work on the character, in whatever capacity, fundamental things like this won't get overlooked.
