Invincible Vs opens with a potentially intriguing alternate universe feint—not a rarity for this franchise—as Mark “Invincible” Grayson faces off against an attack by the superpowered alien fascists known as the Viltrumites, led by Mark’s own father, Nolan. In both the show and the comics, Mark’s initial confrontation with his dad—who spent decades gaining the Earth’s trust as the Superman-esque Omni-Man, while secretly plotting to conquer it for his people—is the axis on which its story turns, the moment when a father’s love for his son just barely manages to bloodily win out over his duty to his empire. The player is initially meant to assume they’re watching a different, darker way that confrontation could have played out, with Mark rallying his human allies to fend off a more robust invasion spearheaded by his dad. It’s a decent hook to make these characters fight, and it lets publisher Skybound Games put a lot of shots of Mark and Nolan facing off dramatically in their promotional images.
It’s also, to put none too fine a point on it, bullshit: After just a few fights, Mark’s reality begins glitching out, jumping the player’s control over to fights between different sets of Invincible characters, many of whom have no real reason to be fighting alongside, or against, each other. Pretty quickly, Mark puts 2 and 2 together and realizes that he’s in some kind of holodeck situation, and that the only way to break the machine’s control over his various friends and enemies is to kick the shit out of them. (In one of the story mode’s only really good moments, he briefly seems to go insane, brutally ramming his head into the walls of the fighting arena in order to break himself free from the initial control.) The reveal flows swiftly from there, as the game’s secret villain is revealed to be a minor set of bad guys from the previous season of the show, who’ve captured the various characters to harvest energy from their endless, pointless battles. After fighting the same three or four characters over and over again in three on three battles, Mark and his assembled crew of heroes and villains finally manage to break free, only to queue up a big dumb cliffhanger that’s presumably meant as a jumping off point for DLC or future updates.
Let’s be frank: Fighting games, and especially fighting games adapting other properties, have always struggled with the “Why the fuck are we doing this?” factor. It’s why so many revolve around mystical and absurd tournaments, which at least give characters who are ostensibly friends a reason to kick the shit out of, and even occasionally brutally murder, each other. Games without that inherent hook, like NetherRealms’ also-superhero-focused Injustice, have to come up with increasingly ludicrous explanations (alternate universes, elaborate backstories, Joker Venom, what have you) for why Batman and Superman want to punch each other. But none quite so transparent as Invincible Vs’ “It’s a hologram, so don’t worry about it.” It raises the question of why you even build in that layer of conceit, when you could just slap “Video Game!” over everything, and call it good.
The most irritating thing about Invincible Vs, though, is what a waste of talent and potential drama it feels like. Developer Quarter Up managed to get most of the show’s cast onboard to play themselves, with a few very notable exceptions. (The ersatz Aaron Paul, as vigilante Powerplex, does okay, but the drop-off in quality with knock-off Walton Goggins and faux Seth Rogen is extremely noticeable. The best impression comes from Aleks Le, who does a pretty dang convincing Steven Yeun.) Stars Gillian Jacobs and J.K. Simmons sound as committed here as they do for the rest of the franchise, and the early moments of the story mode feel like they could build into something cool amidst all the punching. (I was especially happy to hear Jason Mantzoukas, much-missed in the show’s most recent season, return as loudmouthed asshole superhero Rex Splode.) But removing the actual reasons for these characters to fight reduces Invincible to its worst self. In my reviews of the series, I’ve criticized it at times for feeling like viewers are simply watching animators smoosh their action figures together; getting to be the one doing the smooshing doesn’t turn out to make that any more palatable.
Invincible the TV show has a nasty tendency, when it runs out of more interesting things to do, to have them just start punching each other. In that sense, a cynic could argue that Invincible Vs’ story is actually a pretty good recreation of the show at its most tedious. But the thing about the show is that it isn’t just those laziest moments: When it comes up with a really good reason for characters to duke it out, it can create compelling superhero drama. Invincible Vs squanders all of that, boiling down rich characters into a few meaningless pre-fight barks. Given the chance to write any superhero story for your big, flashy fighting game, it’s unclear why this is the one you’d choose.
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