See also:
- Awesome Art: Even decades later, the art on the game's stages looks amazing. Special mention goes to Avalon cycling through four very different and very detailed backgrounds.
- Polished Port:
- Aside from a third of the animation frames removed from the characters and some short loading times, the Sega Saturn version is just like the arcade version.
- The MS-DOS version is even better, restoring the missing animation frames and basically removing the load times. Aside from the slight resolution downgrade (and the need for a little DosBox finagling to run the game with a modern controller), it's basically an arcade perfect port.
- Porting Disaster: The PlayStation version, developed by Probe Entertainment, suffers from slowdowns, missing frames of animation, and lengthy load times due to the PlayStation's vastly inadequate RAM that cannot be upgraded that severely limits the amount of sprites that can be stored.
- "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny:
- The Secret Character of Akuma is held as a primary reason for the Crossover with Capcom properties for later entries and the birth of Capcom vs. to begin with, but it's hard to really get across the sheer improbability that this little act of having fun would mark upon the gaming industry as a whole, effectively giving birth to the idea of crossing two separately-owned properties over in gaming that wasn't just adapting pre-existing crossovers. Nowadays, things like Super Smash Bros. and Fortnite doing such cross-company crossovers and collaborations is effectively commonplace well after this game's heyday.
- Arguably even moreso, this applies to the gameplay. It is hard to overstate just how much crazier Children of the Atom was than any other 2D fighting game at the time. The game ambitiously aimed to recreate superhero comic books in fighting game form, and did this with enormous and larger-than-life characters, huge screen-filling attacks, radical new fighting game concepts like chain combos and extensive juggling that added all new dimensions to any hit that connected, and greatly increased mobility to create a fighting game experience completely different from the endless onslaught of Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat clones. Nowadays, it isn't at all uncommon for players - especially those coming into the game from the later entries, even as early as its effective sequel - to find Children of the Atom slow, clunky, at times outright baffling mechanically, and possessing a far less intuitive combo system than they'd expect. Though players even today will usually recognize its influence, you will almost never find a Marvel vs. Capcom fan whose favorite game is this one.
- Signature Scene: Magneto's boss intro, where he is first seen sitting on his throne in Avalon before descending to face the player and manifesting his iconic helmet seemingly out of thin air as the fight begins."You dare rise against me? The human era is over! The mutant era has come."
- Unexpected Character:
- Silver Samurai, particularly since he made it into the game over better known X-Men villains like Sabretooth and Mystique, with the former having to wait until X-Men vs. Street Fighter to make his fighting game debut. It's possible his concept appealed to the Japanese developers at Capcom.
- Spiral and Omega Red also count, both being obscure villains with little exposure outside of the comics and Capcom's games.
