I’m still kind of riding high on the Marvel vs Capcom 3 experience. Not near as much as I was into Tatsunoko vs Capcom last year, but that’s probably a good thing considering how debilitating that game became for me.
Anyway, this will probably seem elementary to some of you, but perhaps there’s a few out there like me who are wondering about this still. It’s about Zero and Captain America.
After playing a few matches featuring Zero vs Cap, I got to wondering why it was they were special dialogue rivals in this game. (For some reason I expected that Zero would be rivals for Dante, maybe because they both pretty boys who have tons of techniques and elemental powers. That or Thor… a battle of the blondes!)
But after I finally lost to Cap and he delivered this speech: “I knew a guy like you in WW2. He didn’t make it either.” I knew I had to find out what the deal was. I wasn’t schooled enough in Marvel’s historical storylines to know what that was referring to, but a quick internet search turned me on to the original Human Torch, Jim Hammond. Apparently Jim was youthful blond-haired android who fought alongside Captain America in World War II, killed Adolph Hitler, and then later self-destructed due to power over-saturation from atomic weapon exposure, trying to prevent himself from hurting anyone… before being targeted by villains to be repaired and reborn as a bad guy a few times, but returning to the side of good each time. Wow. Gotta say, Jim and Zero do have more than a few things in common. Someone more familiar with Marvel could probably do an impressive in-depth comparison between the two.
So I got this mental image of Cap looking at Zero and seeing his old friend’s face and he gets all wispy and starts talking condescending old war stories. Naturally this grates on Zero’s nerves because of his renown impatience when it comes to pre-fight dialogues. And so the two have a match to decide their skills and earn some mutual respect. I guess that makes sense.
The things I learn from cross-overs!
I didn’t know there was a non-F4 Human Torch. 😮
I had heard speculation that the Cap/Zero interactions were meant to reference Mitsubishi A6M Zeroes, but this works too.
I thought that at first, especially because of Zero’s kamikaze attack on Vile in the first X game (that for a long time fans wondered if that was why he was named Zero). Cap may well call that “fighting like one.” After that “I knew a guy” line though, I realized I was looking for some kind of physical person. But then again, if he was just being figurative… Well, like you said, it works either way. Thanks for bringing it up.