It’s not the best of times to be aMultiVersusfan. Following a 99% player base drop over the course of eight months, the game’s online features willsoon be shutting downto allow Player First Games to get a full release ready for 2024. It’s notquitediedin the way I thought it might, but it’s certainly entering a period of stasis that I don’t think it would undergo if there hadn’t been such a mass exodus.
MultiVersus' big problem has often been tied to its use of other franchises — I’ve found the mix of IPs to lack cohesion, and others have criticized the inoffensive art style and the wildly different audiences that the game has tried to capture all at once. However, there is a game that pulls off mixing many disparateWarner Bros.franchises, and it’s 2015’sLego Dimensions.
RELATED:The Most Beginner-Friendly Fighting Games, Ranked
Lego games were a massive part of my childhood (hell, the first game I ever played was the originalLego Batman) and whenever I’ve revisited them as an adult, I’ve found that they hold up pretty well. Lego Dimensions is a Toys-To-Life game that involves everything fromPortaltoDoctor Whocrossing over for an adventure across the multiverse. Aside from those two franchises, Warner Bros characters make up a large part of the cast.
Adventure Time,DC, Gremlins, and Scooby-Doo have all featured in both MultiVersus and Dimensions, and even though they’re from different genres — the former a fighting game and the latter a mix of puzzle-platforming, collectathon elements, and open-world exploration — you can learn a lot by comparing how Dimensions and MultiVersus use their IPs. Of course, Lego Dimensionshad some sales troublesof its own as Toys-To-Life fell off — but I vastly prefer the way Dimensions handles its variety of franchises, and it’s a system MultiVersus should bear in mind when it returns.
Though I touched on what franchises the two have in common, I first want to look atallthe IPs the two make use of. Dimensions has a mix of the typical faire that appeals to kids, with DC and The Lego Movie, as well as stuff primed to wrangle the nostalgia of an older crowd, with The A-Team andBack To The Future. Even with a variety of ages in mind, I wouldn’t say any of the 30 properties involved are inappropriate for the core 8-14 audience of Lego games.
MultiVersus isn’t so clear-cut, with mature content likeGame of ThronesandRick and Mortymixing with cartoons like Adventure Time and Steven Universe that appeal mainly to the kids of today, as opposed to Scooby-Doo or Looney Tunes that could be argued to capture nostalgia in adults. Nothing within MultiVersus itself seems particularly inappropriate for kids, but it adds in a few franchises that are distinctly and unmistakably adult-oriented, as opposed to stuff that’saimedat adults but probably wouldn’t scar a kid for life. Dimensions has a core player base of kids with a secondary adult player base, while MultiVersus is far more confused as to what age group it’s primarily catering to.
But the biggest point I put in Dimensions' favor is with art style. MultiVersus has a solid look, but it’s a pretty generic style. The visuals seem to either adapt 2D designs straight into 3D or give live-action characters a pretty stock cartoonish appearance. It doesn’t look bad in the slightest, and the 2D designs are adapted pretty well into 3D, but there’s not really a unifying stylistic theme beyond making everything 3D and rounding off some edges. Dimensions does far more right in this regard, with a universal look that still embraces the visual elements of the individual properties it’s incorporating. Lego has basically perfected its minifigure characters. Everyone present is translated into one of these Lego characters, all looking properly charming and snazzy to boot.
To add to this highly appealing, iconic style, Dimensions goes out of its way to incorporate the looks of its individual properties into that easily-recognizable Lego style. Scooby-Doo is a core example. While MultiVersus bases a lot of its Scooby references on the modern meme of Shaggy having DBZ power levels (which is a little hit-or-miss for me), Dimensions incorporates a cel-shading and a unique pallette to the classic Scooby-Doo world, all the while making frequent homages to the seriesdown to the camera angles used. While it’s an easy tie-in as far as the visuals go, another good example would be characters from The Lego Movie, whose animations are limited to the movement a minifigure could actually make rather than the rubbery flexibility of all the characters who aren’t limited to the capabilities of actual figures.
Not everything Dimensions does would be possible in a brawler, but if MultiVersus were to have, for instance, a single-player mode in the vein ofSuper Smash Bros Ultimateto lay on the references or an art direction makeover, we could be looking at a far stronger representation of some world-famous IPs.
