Now that Marvel’s Wolverine is on its way, it’s anyone’s guess how much more time Insomniac plans to devote to Marvel’s Spider-Man. There’s surely at least one more main installment and a possible half-sequel featuring Venom. Otherwise, the X-Men are likely to take favor in Insomniac’s future Marvel-related endeavors. If so, there’s still quite a bit Insomniac needs to do to make its Marvel’s Spider-Man franchise as complete and refined as possible before it’s shelved.

Story-wise, Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 has so much to wrap up that it appears unlikely it’ll have time for every character development and tease that Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 laid a foundation for. Gameplay-wise, an emphasis was put on traversal and fast travel while boss fights also received a massive upgrade with health bars and actual combat woven into them. Boss fights in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 are exhilarating as a result of how involved they are now. Unfortunately, they could also be far stronger if they didn’t have so much dialogue between Spider-Man and his respective antagonists that is hard to follow.

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Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 Should Tone Down Dialogue-Heavy Boss Fights

Unless players want to sit through a handful of cutscenes to hear interpersonal dialogue it makes sense why Insomniac would think to pack all of these lines into boss fights where the playable character is going head-to-head with the antagonist anyway.

Nonetheless, in the heat of a climactic boss fight where players are busy worrying about parries, evasions, gadgets, and abilities, there’s hardly any time to attentively listen to every line of dialogue being shouted out, much less steal a glance at subtitles near the bottom of the screen. It would be one thing if this dialogue was simple filler—though it could be argued that epic boss themes would be more appreciated in filling any silences—but there’s actual important dialogue players can miss out on.

Players can easily miss out on the deep-seated reasons why Mary Jane Watson still feels inadequate and unequal in their partnership that are shared during Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’s Scream boss fight, for instance. To say that characters talking during a boss fight is unrealistic might be a stretch, but the amount of dialogue that’s shouted between characters inevitably becomes white noise.

Marvel’s Spider-Man 3 Needs to Pace Its Character Dialogue and Development

Thankfully, while Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 is certainly at fault for dumping a bunch of dialogue into boss fights it also might have introduced its own solution to this problem. Marvel’s Spider-Man 2’s boss fights all have distinct phases with cutscenes transitioning between them.

Here, dialogue is welcome because players can take a moment to stretch their fingers and finally pay attention to what characters are saying. It doesn’t make sense then that so much dialogue saturates each boss fight if intermittent and transitional cutscenes can grant an opportunity for conversations and Insomniac needs to have faith that its boss fights won’t seem empty without its characters yelling at one another incessantly while trading blows. There’s a time and place for characters to share dialogue and boss fights are arguably one of the most undesirable, at least if that dialogue is meant to be important.

Marvel’s Spider-Man interestingly got away with heartbreaking dialogue in the second phase of its Doctor Octopus boss fight, but that’s because its second phase only requires players to switch between pressing square to strike and pressing circle to dodge. This phase is interactively elementary and therefore players could concentrate more on the fight’s cinematic atmosphere and dialogue, though moving away from that basic gameplay with legitimate and comprehensive boss fights in Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 was the right decision, even if it created an issue of its own with how much characters like to talk.