See also:
- Adaptation Displacement: Shuma-Gorath and Blackheart are obscure villains much more well known from their appearance in this game and the rest of the Marvel series than they are from the comics.
- Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Iron Man's stage has its own animated intro, which no other background in the game possesses.
- Fridge Brilliance: Thanos invoking The Walls Are Closing In as his Reality Gem-based Infinity Combo
— a Visual Pun about the walls of reality. - Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Shuma-Gorath is popular in Japan thanks to his Combat Tentacles and for his more unique design compared to the rest of the Marvel heroes and villains, being an Eldritch Abomination.
- Good Bad Bugs: Thanos' ending is glitched in the arcade version; instead of being given the option to choose between two endings, both play back to back with Magneto's ending text. While this is fixed in the console releases, the Marvel vs. Capcom Origins version is broken due to being based on the original arcade build.
- Harsher in Hindsight:
- Spider-Man's ending, full stop. To elaborate, Spidey comes home from saving the universe and Mary Jane tells him that she's pregnant, with Peter re-assuring her she and the baby are his universe. Then One More Day happened. Though before that, she already miscarried at the end of The Clone Saga.
- Iron Man's ending is particularly wince-inducing as of the closing years of The New '10s. Using the Infinity Gauntlet, Tony's manages to restore his body to peak condition after saving everyone. In Avengers: Endgame, using the Infinity Gauntlet proves to be too much power for Tony to handle and he ends up sacrificing himself to save the day.
- Hilarious in Hindsight:
- In this game, the Infinity Gems are a vital part of gameplay, which would later be seen again in Marvel Super Heroes: War of the Gems. Years later, they would finally reappear as a vital part of the gameplay mechanics in Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite.
- While his moveset makes sense in the context of wielding the reality-warping power of the Infinity Gauntlet, Thanos's repertoire of attacks is often noted to be somewhat bizarre and goofy-looking, such encasing foes in bubbles and throwing what appears to be a celestial body with the help of the Power Gem, which likely played a part in his Gauntletless moveset overhaul in Infinite. Little did people know Capcom's depiction of the Mad Titan would be strangely prophetic come Avengers: Infinity War, where Thanos is seen using the Reality Stone to turn people's weapons into bubbles and later uses the Power Stone to shatter one of Titan's moons and rain down its debris as meteors upon the heroes, essentially throwing the moon at them.
- In Thanos's ending, if he (the player) chooses to attain even more power with the Gauntlet, he forgoes his usual goals of trying to win Mistress Death over in place of just reshaping the universe as he sees fit. Albeit for radically different reasons apart from just a hunger for power, he also decides to perform this change of plan note in the climax of Avengers: Endgame.
- Memetic Mutation: Some of Spider-Man's lines, such as "One for J.J.!" and "Do your job!" (or alternatively, "DO YOUR GODDAMN JOB!") are minor memes in the community.
- Polished Port: Marvel vs. Capcom Origins, aside from some small audio glitches, is arcade perfect (though this is all that entails, as it includes the above-mentioned glitched ending for Thanos) and features high-quality rollback netcode. It also lets you easily play as Doctor Doom, Thanos and Anita.
- Porting Disaster:
- Much like the version of X-Men: Children of the Atom for the same platform, the PS1 version suffers from slowdowns, missing frames of animation, and lengthy load times. Even the gameplay is not totally intact, as some more obscure tactics and combos from the arcade version aren't possible (most inexplicably, Magneto can not air dash while he is flying), and in the non-Japanese versions, Anita isn't present at all.
- Though slightly above the PS1 version in playability, the Saturn version does enjoy support for the 4MB RAM cart like the later ports of the series, which is a big issue with the huge and very animated characters. As a result, it is significantly choppier and laggier than the arcade version, has the not-quite-perfect gameplay of the Sony port and still does not have Anita except in the Japanese version. The audio is also extremely poor.
- Unexpected Character:
- Shuma-Gorath, an obscure Doctor Strange villain with very few appearances in the comics, even after the game's release, who was chosen because the dev team really liked his design.
- Blackheart. Not a particularly well-known villain, and his most common adversary, Ghost Rider, isn't even present in this game. (And when he did finally show, Blackheart himself was absent.)
- Anita. Not only is she a Guest Fighter from the Darkstalkers franchise, which is Capcom and not Marvel, but she was also never a playable character, being a tag-along for Donovan Baine.
