MultiVersus is great — but a few small changes could make it fantastic

polygon.com:

After a $100k tournament at Evo, reaching 20 million players, and the release of a Rick-less Morty, it’s impossible to say that MultiVersushas lost any of its momentum since its launch. Smash Bros. makes it look easy, but actually, it’s not. Unlike other platform fighters, particularly those containing so many IPs (looking at you, Nickelodeon), MultiVersus has made strides to ensure it doesn’t fumble the bag now or far into the future. While this game is far from the L that was Street Fighter 5’s launch, that doesn’t mean the shit is all sweet. MultiVersus has a few issues that anyone who has played fighting games for years can see instantly. In fact, the game’s strongest points lie everywhere but the gameplay.

MultiVersus is a free-to-play competitive fighting game. Like other games under this umbrella, this means the title is under a lot of pressure to stick with its audience so it can make money for future support and updates. This may seem like a straightforward task for a game with as many crossover characters as MultiVersus (and more on the way), but it’s not simply inevitable.

What MultiVersus game director Tony Huynh has done with the development team at Player First Games is make lemonade into much tastier pink lemonade. The developers took an idea bound to work, especially in a media age obsessed with multiverses and crossovers, and they built upon it to make it even better. The game is free, with innovative and fair monetary practices for the genre; it sports tons of fan service and familiar faces; it’s constantly updated (with even larger updates to come), and — unlike many fighting game developers — the developer stays on top of communication with its player base. I’d go so far as to say MultiVersus has had