Dread seeped into my bed, sealing shut the door between this sleeper and the far reaches of dream. As morning drew closer, my restless trepidation grew heavier, eventually pressing my feet into pink fuzzy slippers and me bleary-eyed into my living room. I quickly learned the cause of my subconscious discontent.



Capcom, we need to talk about Sentinel.



Tuesday, the Mothership capitulated to demands from the ham-chewing masses; the assault on the Mango Tower was over before most of us knew it had begun. Not with a bang, but with a whimper. Everyone’s favorite genocidal robot has had his health reduced from 1.3 million, the highest in the game, down to Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling territory.



This is an admission from command central that Sentinel, in his alpha male format, was too powerful, and the nerf restores balance to the Force. My reaction is to assume the Do Not Want face.



Is Sentinel overly powerful? The dreaded Oh Pee? To my knowledge, this is the first patch Capcom has ever released of this nature, the first time a character in one of their fighting games has been altered this drastically with downloaded tweaks.



We may never know the answer to that question, now, but I do know this: put me in control of Taskmaster, tag your Sentinel in, and watch my pupils dilate in raw, unmitigated lust. I was sent from the future by John Connor for one purpose and one purpose only, and that’s to use Skeletor to fuck up Sentinels. I could be fighting your Sentinel, you could throw naked Jessica Chobot in my path, and I’d sell my soul to the lord of the pit on the spot to gain the power to see through human flesh just so I could stare past her and get back to grinding metal into submission. The point is, I’m not scared of Sentinel. Neither are a lot of guys.



In the initial days after Marvel’s release, after we got Rocket Punched into a Hyper Sodium Force for the first time, those of us that have been at this a while didn’t start creating internet petitions addressed to the United Nations calling for sanctions against the entire nation of Japan if Capcom didn’t “do something about Sentinel”. We narrowed our eyes and gritted our teeth. We hit the lab. Yes, the value of stock in Morton’s Stock rose fifteen percent on the New York Stock Exchange, but we hit the lab.



What many of us discovered is a character whose obvious strengths require you to alter your game plan a bit. Against Sentinel, you can’t get wild like a sorority girl at Mardis Gras. It requires you to play smart, have an awareness of what you can counter and when, and how best to circumvent his defenses - namely, his armored pokes. Rest assured, however. That big metal bastard is very beatable.



Labeling Sentinel over-powered is next on the To Do list from the same folks that stain their pillows with tears over characters like Dhalsim. No serious player would go out of their way to point fingers towards Dhalsim, or Viper, or Ibuki and name them too powerful, yet if you don’t know what these characters are capable of and how to work around it, they will defeat you easily. They will brush aside your normal game plan like you’re a pretty blond girl accepting an award and Kanye’s in the building. You have to adapt.



Sometimes, it doesn’t take a nerf. Sometimes, it just takes a little bit of information. That and a tampon for your weepy vagina.



Frustrating matters further, the changes made to the character, whether warranted or unwarranted, are the wrong changes. Sentinel is not the problem, he’s just the best at abusing the problem.



X-Factor is the problem.



When I look out over the landscape of complaints about Marvel vs Capcom 3, when I measure it out in game theory, one action is glaringly obvious as a solution: change X-Factor, whether it’s decreasing its effectiveness or altering the way it works in general, and you fix most of those problems outright.



Allow me to say that I understand wholeheartedly the intention behind X-Factor. Marvel vs Capcom 2 was not a game that was notorious for its comebacks. Early mistakes could cost you a character, maybe two, and reaching that point meant the match was effectively over. Newer players may have seen Justin Wong’s Cyclops resurgence, but they’re most likely missing the point; what they think is deft play, what they would probably label as simply difficult, is something that simply isn’t done at high level. Playing a lone character against an enemy with an assist, especially a good assist, is Sisyphus pushing the boulder uphill. It’s ultimately futile.



However, like a short man driving a lifted truck, attempts to compensate missed the mark by a wide margin. It’s one thing to attempt soften the edge of the sort of demoralizing beatdown you can take when you’re down one character, god forbid two, but X-Factor doesn’t balance a fight; when it’s active, depending on your character, you’re the guy at a knife fight swinging a shark around by the tail when everyone else just has sharp metal pokers.



Further, design choices for certain characters seem not to acknowledge the existence of X-Factor at all. A character doing almost 700,000 damage with easy or moderately-difficult to execute combos needs a 150% or 200% damage boost like Charlie Sheen needs another STD. There are only two words that describe getting hit by a button-happy scrub Wolverine in X-Factor: herp derp.



Beyond Sentinel’s sex change missing the mark, there is an underlying question about the effectiveness of balancing a fighting game’s roster based on health discrepancies. Just how debilitating is it to be playing a character on the lower end of the ranking list for hit points when the two players at the sticks are approaching the infamous “soft skill cap”, players with skills near the limit of what one can accomplish with a character?



The conventional wisdom states an inherent balance exists within a character such as Akuma - yes, he deals a lot of damage, but he takes a lot of damage, as well. But in the right hands, especially in a game like Marvel 3, that damage scaling evens out. Pressing all four buttons at once is all that’s needed to inject your character with the spirit of the prison rape baby of Barry Bonds and Hulk Hogan for 10 or 20 seconds. Getting tagged by C. Viper, whose bread and butter combo already does in excess of 650,000 damage, means you’re going to eat at least 75% of your life bar on burnt toast. If you catch her with a combo, the same result: she’s going to end up losing 3/4ths, or more, of her health. Where is the balance when everyone dies so easily?



Herein lies another cardinal sin for X-Factor. As characters are eliminated from the battle, the scales should begin to tilt in favor of the sort of balance supposedly provided by gaps between the health totals of the characters on the field. It is one thing for Akuma to kill Haggar with the help of DHC from Dante or Magneto (or both). It is something else entirely to ask Akuma to kill Haggar and Haggar’s teammates by himself. Where the difference between 800,000 and 1.1 million is nominal when characters easily do 500,000 damage or more by themselves, the gulf between 800,000 and a combined health of over 2.5 million is stark.



X-Factor exists to preserve the ability of the weak to defend themselves. It is the blue shell of Marvel... if the blue shell knocked the lead racer out of first place and replaced him with the scrub that launched the shell. A comeback should still be an uphill fight. After all, you are still a fighter with only 800,000 health facing off against a total of 2.5 million.



X-Factor’s problem is that it doesn’t smooth that slope, making it easier for you to claw your way back over the peak. It levels things, violently, and depending on the characters on the field, it can actually skew the momentum in favor of the loser, no matter how large the advantage being pressed by the aggressor. You could have easily defeated the first two characters on the opposing player’s team, but if he still has a character like Sentinel yet to hit the battle, and he still has his X-Factor left to deploy, you are fully aware that at any moment, you could call assist and end up as ND Lee the sequel.



Lowering Sentinel’s health doesn’t address the fundamental problem many players had with him, and obviously, X-Factor is here to stay. What can be done, then?



The American fighting game community... well, those of us that play games that aren’t exclusive to Nintendo consoles... is adaptable. It’s been a long time since you’ve seen tournament standards set to ban characters. These days, you give us a game, we will play it, no matter what stupidity you managed to slip in (I’m looking at you, Yun).



However, I don’t think I would be alone in saying I would enjoy, very much, playing in Marvel tournaments where the use of X-Factor is banned. Marvel 3’s meta game has developed so that even without X-Factor, certain characters, especially those with teleports or high damage bread and butters, are capable of mounting comebacks without X-Factor. I would applaud an addition to the game that allows players the option of toggling off X-Factor activation from the options menu.



Further, characters need to be addressed on an individual scale with regard to how they are affected by X-Factor activation. It is not a stretch to say that characters with innately high damage should possibly get no damage bonus from X-Factor, receiving a speed bonus instead. While the community at large seems torn about the decision to nerf Sentinel, one way or the other, I don’t think anyone would shed any tears if Phoenix were incapable of activating X-Factor once she reaches Dark Phoenix mode. Or in Jean Grey mode.



There is room to maneuver here. So maneuver, already. Blindfolding Sentinel’s life bar and setting it before a firing squad is wrong for two reasons: it’s unnecessary and it still leaves him in the same position he was in before. Sentinel with 1.3 million health, 900,000 health, or 2 health is still more than happy to drop a flying frying pan on your ass, followed by America’s Favorite.



Should X-Factor be taken out of the game entirely? I’m not sure. There’s only one thing I’m certain of when it comes to Marvel 3, and that’s Fuck Wolverine. The fact that you could drop that guy’s health to below 200,000 and half the internet would still play him is all I need to know about the effectiveness of nerfing Sentinel’s hit points.



Seriously. Fuck Wolverine.