A to Z Challenge: Ultimate Alliance & X-Men Legends

 I think it was about 2004 or so, after the first two X-Men movies but before the not very good third movie (or all the spinoffs and soft reboot movies) that X-Men Legends came out for the PS2 and XBox.  Instead of a side-scroller beat 'em up game or fighting game, it was more of a role-playing game like the D&D games I played in the 90s, only I think the combat wasn't really turn-based like the D&D games.

You play as a new female mutant with volcanic powers.  Then you form a party of four with various other characters from the X-Men universe:  Wolverine, Storm, Cyclops, Jean-Grey, Beast, Psylocke, and so on.  And as you go on, you train your character so her powers get greater and also level up the other characters.  As I recall they got Patrick Stewart's voice for Professor X but not really any of the other movie actors.  Reading the Wikipedia entry, some of the other voices would be familiar from Star Wars shows like Dee Bradley Baker and Steve Blum.  Lou Diamond Phillips voiced Forge, who I don't think was ever in the movies.  The venerable Ed Asner voiced a Morlock healer who could help you fix injured characters.

The mansion or school serves as the base where you get to walk around as the female mutant and save the game, play a trivia game, or work out in the Danger Room or stuff like that.

In that game you fight Magneto and the Brotherhood but also some evil humans and Sentinels.  There was a sequel with Apocalypse where I think you get Magneto and the Brotherhood as playable characters but I didn't get that game.

Anyway, it was a fun game for the most part.  The neat thing is after you finish it the first time you can unlock alternate costumes.  The original ones in the game were more like the movie ones, so mostly black and yellow.  It was kind of annoying then because your party would often look pretty similar.  But once you can unlock the costumes you can get the more brightly-colored traditional looks like Wolverine's yellow Spandex, Cyclops's blue suit, and Phoenix in green or red.  I loved the green Phoenix one.  I think there was a cheat code to unlock those sooner.

Shortly after that, they came out with Marvel Ultimate Alliance, which used the same game play but broadened it to the whole Marvel universe.  This was before the MCU had started so other than the X-Men, Blade, and Spider-Man hit franchises and flops like Hulk and Daredevil, there wasn't a lot yet for that. 

In the same way as the X-Men game, you form a party of four from a bunch of different heroes.  You can change your party to fit the situation as sometimes you want raw power and other times you might want more skilled characters or some with magic or whatever.  And you level them up and unlock different powers and costumes and stuff along the way as you fight Dr. Doom.

No matter what you do, though, Dr. Doom is going to steal Odin's power and transform Earth into his playground.  There's kind of a creepy cutscene where you see a bunch of the heroes lying dead while Cyclops I think it is does an Ironhide from Transformers the Movie and meets the same end.

But of course Dr. Doom doesn't just kill all the heroes and your team (whoever they are) were protected at least temporarily by the Watcher and relocated to the Moon.  After fighting some aliens--including Galactus--you return to Earth with some helpful toys.  You get to go into Doom's fortress and defeat him and get Odin's powers back.

I think the first time I played through I used more normal heroes like Captain America, Spider-Man, Wolverine, and someone else.  But another time I created a team of all female heroes:  Sue Storm, Storm, Ms. Marvel (aka Captain Marvel now), Spider-Woman, and one or two others I'd slot in like Jean-Grey, Elektra, or Psylocke or someone like that.  It was pretty fun.  I nicknamed my group the Grumpy Bulldog's Angels after Charlie's Angels:

Another neat thing is like the X-Men game you could change costumes.  They had a lot of alternate costumes from throughout the years for the different characters.  For Blade you could get the weird Robin Hood-esque costume he had early on.  Spider-Woman I think I used her SHIELD outfit instead of the red one--as shown above and Ms. Marvel is in a red outfit that was probably from earlier on.  The cool thing with using the alternate costumes is as you can see above, each has a different hair color, which helps to tell them apart in the middle of a battle.

One lame thing was you couldn't play the Hulk on the PS2 version.  You could only get him on XBox and only in the "Gold" edition.  As if I'd buy a whole new console just to play one freaking game.  I mean, again*.  (*See the "I" entry.  Gratuitous Grumpy Bulldog)

A strange thing is that after you beat the game, Galactus swears to destroy Earth. So you'd think that would be the sequel, right?  Right?  Wrong!

They came out with a sequel that was supposed to be modeled on the "Civil War" story.  First you have kind of a "Secret War" or something story where your team attacks some foreign country and then as the fallout, the government wants to register heroes.  When the heroes pick sides, you get a lot fewer heroes to choose from for your party and have to fight those other heroes.

But that's only like 2-3 levels of the whole game.  Then everyone gets back together to fight the Tinkerer--whoever the hell he was.  Honestly, it wasn't nearly as good.  The PS2 version especially wasn't nearly as deep or full-featured as the first game.  I think a lot of that was it came out when the PS2 was being phased out in favor of the PS3.  It seemed like the programmers just really didn't give a shit about the PS2 version and basically just put in the bare minimum of effort.  Maybe to help drive people to buying the PS3.  Again, as if I'd buy a new console just for that.

A different company developed a third game in 2019 for the Nintendo Switch but obviously I never played that.  There are a lot of other Marvel games for phones and so on.