Season 1 brought a whole family of fantastic heroes to a vampire fight, but the rapidly-incoming sophomore season for Netease’s hero shooter Marvel Rivals is getting its glam on for a trip to Krakoa.
This morning Netease revealed the first look at Season 2 for Marvel Rivals, confirming that Emma Frost and Ultron will be the latest additions to its playable roster. And, given the theming, presumably some of this season’s map additions will whisk players to the idyllic lands of the mutant sovereign nation on the living island Krakoa.
Introduced in 1975’s Giant Size X-Men #1 relaunch by writer Chris Claremont and artist Dave Cockrum, Krakoa was originally something of an antagonistic threat to the X-Men, after Charles Xavier was pushed to put together a new international taskforce of mutant heroes to be the latest incarnation of the X-Men, in order to save his original five students after they were captured and trapped by the living island. But it rose to even greater prominence in Jonathan Hickman’s 2019 soft-reboot of the X-comics line in House of X and Powers of X, where Krakoa was now an ally to mutantkind, and the home of the species’ latest attempt to build a sovereign nation.
The Krakoan Age, as it would come to be known–revitalized by the discovery of a way to combine a circuit of powerful mutant abilities and psionic backups to effectively grant resurrection, and the trade of life-changing miracle drugs made from plants growing on Krakoa itself–was punctuated by diplomatic events known as the Hellfire Galas, which Rivals‘ second season will take its name from. Fancy human-mutant outreach parties, the Galas were designed to show the rest of the world that Krakoa meant business when it come to being a global power, but came to a tragic end when the third Gala was assaulted by the human supremacist organization Orchis, leading to the end of the first Krakoan Age.
Essentially, it was an excuse every year for everyone to dress in incredibly elaborate outfits (and instigate some drama, as all good X-Men stories do), some of which will provide source material for skins being added in season 2–alongside more classic X-themed options like blue-and-yellow training suits for Magik and Psylocke, and Wolverine’s white suit from his time operating as Patch in Madripoor. After all, as Emma herself famously said in Grant Morrison’s New X-Men: we must be nothing less than fabulous.
We’ll find out more about just how Rivals gets Emma Frost and Ultron to work in its tank-healer-support trifecta as we get closer to the launch of Marvel Rivals season 2 on April 11.
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