Against All Odds, I Loved MultiVersus

MultiVersus is better than the Smash Bros. franchise. There, I said it, and I'm not taking it back!

Truth is, when I first heard of MultiVersus, I wasn't excited at all; I don't much care for Warner Bros, and the idea of yet another Smash Bros. clone just didn't inspire me. Despite how ridiculous Shaggy vs Batman sounded, it wasn't funny enough nor enticing for me to actually give it a shot. In fact, I wasn't going to; I didn't sign up for the Alpha test and instead moved on, the game didn't even last in my memory for longer than a couple of hours afterwards, and soon it was a long lost thought.

A couple of months later, the Alpha test started and I was not even aware of it. A day passed, and I found out that the test had started because a friend and co-worker of mine told me she'd acquired a key and was going to give it a shot. To be completely honest, at this point, I'd even forgotten I'd discovered MultiVersus originally, and entered looking at it through a brand-new set of eyes: I was looking for fighting games to play with my wife. MultiVersus sounded like the perfect thing for her; she loves Scooby-Doo, and I knew enough of Adventure Time to be excited to give the game a try. I signed up for the Alpha test, though I was sure I wouldn't be getting a key any time soon; I was right.

Truth is, I joined the game after I found out that you can invite people to play. After shamelessly asking my friend for a key, I was lucky enough that she deemed me worthy of one, and I soon found myself installing the game and giving it a shot the same day I rediscovered it.

And I loved it.

Each fight was exhilarating and far better than some of the rounds I'd had in Smash Bros. I found myself enjoying more of the characters present and there were several systems in-game that I quickly grew fond of. Cooldowns were a welcome feature for annoying attacks that might be spammed, though I swiftly found myself wishing other characters had more cooldowns, and despite not liking DC a lot, I found a strange love for Wonder Woman.

I started the way every other coward such as myself does: fighting bots in a custom round and getting a feel for the controls. Although I was experiencing very aggressive lag (possibly due to the fact that I reside in Colombia), MultiVersus' controls felt comfortable in a way that I'd never felt with Smash Bros.; it felt smooth and properly set to do anything I needed in just the click of a button. Neutral attacks being set to one of the two trigger buttons finally stopped punishing me for leaving the analogue stick tilted in a direction always, as a sin I've committed time and again in Smash Bros. I wasn't the only one that fell in love with MultiVersus, as my wife soon fell in love with the premise of the game, and we exchanged control every round because the game doesn't have a local co-op mode.

I gathered the courage and asked my friend once again for a code to see if my wife could play, and she was generous enough to do so (I love you, retrogamergirl); finally, my wife and I jumped into 2v2 rounds and had fun in a way we never did with Smash Bros. Despite her laptop being far too slow to properly handle the game and our internet connection never netting us more than a red bar, we had fun. Sure, we died a lot, and sure we made stupid plays because players would teleport randomly, but somehow, we loved MultiVersus.

It's not that we haven't tried to love Smash Bros., as both she and I are very enthusiastic about practically every Nintendo franchise. Playing as Mario or Link, even enjoying the princesses and playing as Zelda or Peach felt like a crossover I could never get enough of, but soon enough I grew bored. And honestly? I can't even tell you why. Yet, day in and day out, my wife and I grinded through the battle pass for MultiVersus, against the lag, against the lack of computer, against my wife's De Quervain's, we did everything to play just a little bit more; an experience we hadn't had in years.

Seemingly, the stars aligned for us to play MultiVersus. If retrogamergirl hadn't told us about the game, if I hadn't been looking for fighting titles to enjoy these last two months, and if she hadn't been generous enough to give us a key to access it, we wouldn't have tried it. It would've lived in our minds as a game that came and went, and possibly rediscovered it in one of our free-to-play crazes. Not only did we manage to get our hands on MultiVersus against all odds, we managed to like it more than Smash Bros. and reignite a love that had grown stale.

If you didn't get a chance to try out MultiVersus in the Alpha test, I sincerely recommend trying it out on its open beta release in July; I assure you that you'll love it.