The ever increasing popularity of Marvel is a joy to experience. I grew up with comics and Marvel games and loved to delve in to the stories and find new and unique characters. I’ve owned heaps of books on Marvel lore and used to read them cover to cover in order to know who’s who and what they can do. The world of Superheroes, especially since the MCU, is so close to our own but with that underlying wonder of what someone can achieve with the right motive and ability. Marvel: Contest of Champions has been an opportunity for me to revisit collecting knowledge surrounding superheroes, all while strengthening my mind and skills in Japanese.
Platforms and Language – 6/10
Contest of Champions is currently a mobile exclusive, it can be found and downloaded for free on both Android and Apple store. There are microtransactions for purchasing in-game currency but unless you’re desperate to unlock your favourite heroes you’ll be fine without spending a penny.
The game language can be set in the main options menu and comes with a selection of 13 including Korean, Chinese and Arabic.
Glossary
Usability – 9/10
At its core, Contest of Champions is a beat ’em up. This typically wouldn’t be a genre that is known for its extensive story but this game definitely breaks the mould. Marvel itself is dense in lore, backstory and interactions between its cast of characters making for plenty to write about. The main gameplay consists of you building a team of your favourite heroes and traversing intricate webs across the galaxy in order to defeat Kang. The gameplay is brief, with adequately prepared fights lasting no more than a minute or two at best, meaning your focus will be mostly on the stats and characters themselves. Excluding dialogue, the most frequently seen language in the main campaign is statistical language, showing the attack powers and required materials for levelling up, but you can delve further into this in order to review the effects of certain attacks and see a breakdown of combat terminologies.
Throughout the early stages of the game you will receive a large number of pop-ups and prompts in order to direct you through the controls and mechanics. The gameplay isn’t especially difficult but if you understand more in regards to resistances and synergies you will make the game easier for yourself and pick up some more varied vocabulary along the way. Don’t fret if you start to clear all of the tutorial text boxes as the loading screens will show helpful hints between battles and a large majority of the menus have a small “i” button to show additional information if you forget how things work. There is also a small practice mode which will explain the basic combat mechanics whenever you may need to review them.
Everything above is essentially par for the course, but there are 2 areas of Contest of Champions that make it a stand out game for me. Firstly, the story is very dialogue heavy, in that there is a lot of back and forth between you, the the antagonists and other characters you’ll meet on your journey. This dialogue comes in the form of push-to-progress text boxes that tend to be 3 or 4 lines maximum, making them easily digestible. The variety of characters also means you can read a variety of topics, objectives and mannerisms which will further strengthen your reading ability (especially if you know and love the characters). To make things even better, levels have multiple routes that cross through the same checkpoints. For completionists out there you’ll have to repeat these routes more than once in order to get a 100% rating making for great repeatability of dialogues and more incentive to revise with purpose. Secondly, Each and every character that you see (unlocked or otherwise) has a character bio that will give a short synopsis on who they are, what their faction is and their backstory from their comic and film appearances.
These character bios are vast and each hold unique details, even between variants of the same character, meaning you can expand you vocabulary and learn about heroes that grab your attention at will. The language in these records is more descriptive than the rest of the game and as such tends to have more advanced language overall but I find that this section of the game holds more incentive to learn and understand. If you are a learning a language and you are a Marvel fan I can’t think of many better ways to read around your interests than this.
The game is very well balanced between frequent reading material and bite-sized gameplay meaning, if you so wish, you can sit and play for an extended period of time and maintain a good reading environment. The game can be effectively played through muscle memory alone but I feel that, if you are excited by which heroes you find and want to know more about them, you can easily maintain a focus. As stated before the game itself and progressing naturally through the story would be effective enough to practice your intermediate level vocabulary and dialogue but all in all this game is a definite recommendation from me.
Challenges and methods – 8/10
Reading your team
In total, there are over 200 characters in Marvel: Contest of Champions. This is a hefty number of bios available to you to read and compared to relatively shorter extracts from other games, such as Pokémon, These can be a little daunting to go through. As such, where possible I worked to make sure I could read the bios of my own team as they became unlocked. Even so far as starting from the first character and reading through until I got to a word I didn’t know and starting again from the beginning. This challenge is really flexible in how strict you want to be (do you start again from the character you’re on or the very beginning? Do you read just your unlocked characters or all of them?!) but I can guarantee that this style of method, especially in a game or field you’re interested in, will strengthen your reading and memory.
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