Marvel vs Capcom 2/Getting Started

Getting the game

Marvel vs Capcom 2 has seen many releases. Preppy's excellent "How to Get and Play MvC2" article explains a lot of the details, but here's a summary in order of ease of access of the many versions out there:

• Marvel Vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: The official way to play MVC2 and any other Marvel Vs. Capcom titles. It adds a number of new goodies, most notably a training mode. Available for PC, Switch, Xbox One and Playstation 4, (which should work on Switch 2, Playstation 5 and Xbox Series). Newest and primary official way to play the game. If you don't want to cough up the cash, well...
• Fightcade 2: Fightcade is a helpful front-end to a few key emulators, including Flycast. You must add in Fightcade JSON so that Fightcade knows where to download ROMs from. It is important to note that as of June 2024, Fightcade updated the Flycast build used for games, including this one, so it may perform better now than in the past.
• Flycast GGPO: A new and popular way to play is emulating the NAOMI Arcade version on Flycast Dojo's GGPO test releases for rollback netcode (or just delay-based netcode also provided by Dojo). A guide to setting up Flycast Dojo's GGPO support is on Mizuumi.
• NullDC BEAR re-implements Flycast's GGPO support & offers alternative delay-based netplay using the older, discontinued NullDC emulator.
• PSN/XBLA ports: Great ports with native GGPO and widescreen support. These were delisted in December of 2013, but the PS3 version remains accessible through unofficial means. Consult's Preppy's article for a guide.
• RPCS3: Uses RPCS3, a PS3 emulator, and RPCN, it's PSN equivalent, to run the PSN port of the game online with rollback.
• Dreamcast/NAOMI: The best way to play the original release is through the Dreamcast home port or a NAOMI arcade board.
  • If you do manage to find a NAOMI arcade board Hagure has detailed how to configure settings for the best gameplay and unlock characters.
  • If you are using a Dreamcast, it's easiest to start with a version using Jed's hack to unlock all characters. If you don't have that, you can download a fully unlocked Save file and transfer that to your VMU. If you can't do that, your best option is to simply leave your Dreamcast running all the time in Training Mode and then exit and redeem the points every few hours and overnight until you're done.
• Xbox and PS2: These are largely inferior home ports owing to hardware limitations. You can emulate or play on real hardware but they're not representative of Marvel 2's de-facto gameplay. That said, they do offer some small advantages over the arcade and Dreamcast versions, such as having an in-game move list, so if you are willing to accept the shortcomings of these versions, they're still playable- they are simply not optimal.
  • The Xbox 360 is backwards compatible with the Xbox port of the game, but it has some issues with sprites glitching out if played in this way.

For more information check out the Versions page.