I don’t typically make a habit of diving headlong into bloody great salt lakes like this. Everyone is usually so passionate and/or defensive of their own opinions, desires and preferences (which isn’t in and of itself a bad thing) that very little in the way of objective, constructive discussion can occur so there’s very seldom any point. In this case though, there are still some points that I feel deserve to be made and hopefully the majority of people have gotten the majority of their (to a greater or lesser degree understandable and justified) outrage and indignation out of their systems by now and will be more prone to reflection than kneejerk reaction. I will probably still Language! off a lot of people, but if I’m going to get my first ‘Disagree’s it might as well be for something that I genuinely consider to be worth saying. Also, the 3 or 4 people who have read any of my prior posts know that I tend to be … wordy. Well, this one is probably going to make them look like 2-line tweets. You have been warned.
First, let me get the obvious out of the way: Like most people, I think, AP3 was not the Advance Pack I wanted. It was, however, more or less the one I expected and it is the one I will accept. Let’s look at the characters again, based purely on their own strengths and weaknesses and not on any other criteria.
Angela, Elektra and Nick Fury: Not much to say on these three, really. In and of themselves they’re okay choices and I imagine Gaz will do some really cool things with them. Would I have preferred other characters instead? Sure, but the game isn’t just about me. Elektra and Fury have been mainstays in the comics for ages and have MCU and Netflix relevance, and they’ve been requested multiple times. As much or as vocally as other characters? Maybe, maybe not. But they HAVE been requested, there ARE people out there who want them ingame, anyone who says otherwise either hasn’t been paying attention or is being willfully ignorant. As for Angela, Marvel put forth the effort to get the rights so they must have some plans for her beyond what we’ve seen and yes, the poll was horribly broken but enough people put in enough time and effort to cheat her to victory that she clearly has a fanbase. These three wouldn’t have been on my short list but I have no real objection to them on their own merits.
Green Goblin: Let me just say by way of preface that I actually quite like the dynamic brought about with anti-heroes like Punisher, mercenaries like Taskmaster, well-intentioned extremists like Magneto, redeemed villains, fallen heroes, etc. With that said, however, I will never understand the thought processes of anyone who actually wanted Norman freakin’ Osborne playable in a game like Marvel Heroes. Almost all villains are motivated by one or more of three things: selfishness, pettiness or craziness. Green Osborne has all of those things, but he’s also one of the very few (Red Skull is the only other one that comes to mind but there are most likely others as well) that’s just plain evil. He is sociopathic and sadistic and to my knowledge has never done one single thing that could be considered even slightly heroic that wasn’t part of a larger, more sinister plan explicitly intended just to ruin someone else’s day. But, as I said before, the game isn’t just about me and whether I understand it or not he does have his supporters. All in all, I think Norm-blin will probably have a really interesting playstyle, I’ll just be pretending he’s Phil Urich the whole time.
Black Bolt: I have nothing against Black Bolt, per se, but I don’t think he fits very well as a playable character. To begin with, he doesn’t give a tinker’s damn about anything besides the welfare and safety of his people. While that’s an admirable trait for a king it doesn’t exactly read ‘hero’ to me. This is a man who moved his entire city to the moon just to get AWAY from humanity and one of his most defining moments was deploying a biological weapon (i.e., the Terrigen bomb) against the entire human race. Then there’s his power level, which frankly cranks the knob up somewhere past ‘ridiculous’, breaks it off and disintegrates it in a fit of pique. He’s strong enough to trade punches with the Hulk, fast enough to overtake Quicksilver and his reflexes are good enough to catch micro-missiles fired at him out of the air with his bare hands. He can fly into outer space and survive there, then go through reentry unprotected without even getting a tan. He can disintegrate, reconstitute and transmute matter on a molecular level. And that’s not even counting his voice, which is well-established as being capable of actually destroying the planet. Add in the fact that he’s wholly unable to communicate on his own (I don’t think I’ve ever even seen him have a thought bubble in the comics), just stand around looking stern while another member of the Royal Family speaks for him, and he isn’t even really a ‘character’ at all, he’s a plot device. The Inhumans are in a never-ending Cold War with humanity and he’s their deterrent force, a nuclear stockpile with a pulse. I know the Inhumans are the next big thing though, so it was a given that one would appear in this pack, and as before he has plenty of supporters. I personally think it’s not only out of character but more than a little demeaning to have the king of Attilan flitting around Manhattan stopping bank robberies and beating up the Mole Man, but I’m content to wait and see how he turns out.
Which brings us to the biggest bone of contention in this pack, Ultron: Ultron was the only inclusion that actually surprised me, not because I didn’t imagine he’d ever be playable but because I did and was surprised I was actually right. When this game first came out, Dr. Doom was the big bad. Then Dr. Doom was playable. Loki was already playable when he was unveiled as the big bad of Chapter 9, but he still fits the basic profile. When Ultron mode rolled around, it was a foregone conclusion that he would become playable at some point, just like it’s almost certain that Super Skrull will be in AP4 (if not before) and Thanos will probably show up in time for AP5 or so. For better or worse, there seems to be a near Dragonball level of ‘defeat means friendship’ going on at Gaz, where last week’s enemy is this week’s ally. Personally, I think they could have done a lot worse; at least Ultron is an interesting character. Most artificial intelligences in fiction tend to be coldly analytical and even though they usually end up the antagonist, it’s typically because of some highly efficient and logical calculations that we pesky organics just happen to end up on the wrong end of. Ultron’s just batshit crazy, with each iteration displaying that crazy in slightly (or not so slightly) different ways. Based purely on his own merits as a character, as long as they can come up with a sufficiently plausible explanation for his actions I think he could be a pretty interesting character.