A Zero Introduction: Marvel vs Capcom 3

I'm pretty bored tonight so I figured I could churn another post out about my favorite character in Marvel VS Capcom 3.  If you're unaware, it's a fighting game where each player picks a team of 3 characters to face each other with.  Upon choosing each character they also must select an assist (more on that in a moment).

After teams are selected, the round starts.  Only one of your three characters is controllable at a time, but your two benched characters can be called in to perform their assist.  Assists range in all sorts of uses, from healing your character, granting additional valuable hyper meter, and performing attacks that can stop your opponent in their tracks or keep one of your combos going.

In particular, the character that I tend to play is Zero from the Megaman series.  He has high priority (which basically just means if we both push a button at the same time, there's a pretty good chance I'll hit you before you hit me) and is incredibly agile, his combos are fairly easy to perform and produce a lot of damage, and he's just the flashiest bastard in the game.  I mean he uses a beam saber...

Here's a pretty good intro video if you've never played him before, or if it's your first time checking out MVC3 you can kind of get a feel for what intermediate play looks like!

(Video link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cmpmKk29GaQ -- I didn't perform these combo's, just showing it)

Zero's "bread and butter" combo is easy to connect and does respectable damage, but to really see the numbers fly, you need to relaunch them with assists and extend your combo's by using his level 3 buster followed by the lightning dash.

Learning how to hold a button to charge his buster while performing a combo feels weird at first, but it's really rewarding when you get it down, it makes you think a lot more about how your fingers move when you play and keeps you focused.

I think his Shadow hyper is something that goes really unused, it doesn't last particularly long and you can't get a lot of guaranteed damage out of it, but man you can confuse the hell out of someone with it.  Between Zero's multitude of command dashes and multi-hitting attacks, their screen is filled to the brim with shit that's hard to follow.

To best utilize Zero, it's often recommended to pair him with people like Dr. Doom.  Doom's plasma beam assist is off the walls with Zero, allowing him to perform shenanigans like calling in the plasma beam assist, jumping, and horizontally lightning dashing as the plasma beam is connecting.  Your opponent gets put into an awkward situation: they can't see zero and they don't know which way to block!  Because Zero switches sides they actually have to change which direction they're blocking as he does it.

I recommend varying the timing / button on the lightning dash to keep your opponent guessing for this mix-up.  You might be able to train your opponent to just blindly walk into plasma beams in fear of being crossed up!