Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls Review

There’s a strange phenomenon that can happen when people play competitive video games. In the fighting game community, we tend to call it “a case of the one mores”. That feeling where you need to keep going, you need to get that runback, you need to show that you’re improving because you understand what went wrong last time. “Just one more ‘one more’, last one, no more”, you’ll say. Inevitably, that “one more” becomes twenty more, and you’ve just stayed up until 2AM trading wins with your best friend in a way that invokes the days of staying up until dawn with Marvel vs Capcom 2 and Super Smash Bros. Melee in high school.

That magical “one more” feeling is something that few fighting games give me nowadays, but Marvel Tōkon has left me with it in every play session I’ve had.

A huge part of pulling people into a fighting game and keeping them there is presentation, and Arc System Works knocked it out of the park as they always do. There’s a modified version of the studio’s trademark 2D anime style using 3D models on display here. It hides the 3D nature a bit less while still being largely cel shaded, which makes any screenshot look like a still from a Saturday morning superhero cartoon. It’s absolutely gorgeous.

Every revised Marvel character design looks great, and I love the extra bits of Japanese flair like Iron Man’s new Gundam-inspired design. The soundtrack absolutely slaps, as is tradition for this studio. I can’t get bangers like Captain America’s theme, Ms. Marvel’s theme, or even the character select music out of my head when I’m done playing. Hell, even the menus are dripping with style. Everything comes together to make a world I keep wanting to revisit, a version of the Marvel universe that is insanely inviting even in the confines of a 2D fighting game with only a handful of stages. If that wasn’t enough to keep me coming back for more, the specific flavor of tag team fighter Arc System Works settled on after many rounds of betas and feedback certainly would be.

Producing the spiritual successor to the Marvel vs Capcom series would be a near-impossible task for any company not called, well, “Capcom”, but this team was uniquely positioned to pull it off. With their experience making both the beloved mainstream hit Dragon Ball FighterZ and the just-for-sickos BlazBlue: Cross Tag Battle, they’ve learned what both ends of the fighting game player spectrum want from a tag team game, and it shows. Tōkon feels like a response to the issues fighting game players of all skill levels had with those releases, delivering the ideal middle ground of being physically easy to play without sacrificing mechanical complexity.

This dance between accessibility and depth has eluded fighting game developers for many, many years. I’ve always felt that the answer to “How do we get newcomers in the door without alienating the hardcore community?” is obvious, but it took until Street Fighter 6 for a developer to elegantly pull it off. There, players could use an optional simplified control scheme with fewer attacks overall and Smash-style “direction plus dedicated button” inputs for special moves that dealt less damage. Tōkon’s approach is an evolution of that, and feels appropriate for the crazier nature of the tag team sub-genre. 

The control scheme revolves around five buttons: Light, Medium, and Heavy for different strengths of attacks, Assemble for calling in teammates for an assist, and Unique, which appropriately has a different use per character. Some characters’ Unique button just adds more attacks, like Iron Man getting the Repulsor Shot special move, while others add entire mechanics, such as Magik’s teleportation portals. The remaining buttons on a controller are used for the semi-required Quick Tag that switches between your team’s four characters instantly rather than requiring an assist to finish, Quick Skill that grants access to Smash-like special move inputs, and a dedicated dash shortcut.

Almost every bit of a controller is being put to use here, and as daunting as a control diagram may initially look for Tōkon, I think the layered difficulty of gameplay makes it very approachable in practice. So much of the gameplay is optional, and having everything active at once (even traditional and simple special move inputs) allows players to engage with as little or as much as they want to strike that balance between reliably finishing a combo and putting lots of damage on the board. At an introductory level, players can mash Light, Medium, or Heavy to get suboptimal autocombos and use the Quick Skill button to easily shoot fireballs and lasers at their opponent. At an intermediate level, they can start using chain combos (pressing buttons of ascending strength to get a pseudo-auto combo, something every fighting game should have!), manual combos, and manual special move inputs to maximize damage. And at an advanced level, they can learn Green Goblin! That dude’s a sicko, and has the Marvel vs Capcom 3-style combos to match.

The other side of that accessible design choice is the level of complexity for hardcore fans, which is kept high, just the way I like it in a tag team fighter. Team composition is very different here than in past tag fighters, consisting of a lead character and three backups that all share a single health bar rather than having individual ones. Assists have been homogenized so that the second team member always does a projectile, the third always does an uppercut, and the fourth is the wildcard that does a traditional, unique per-character assist. Combining this with each team starting with only their first two characters available and the other two unlocking over the course of a match, team order is just as important as composition. It makes for a very interesting, and most importantly, fresh experience. Arc System Works declared before release that they wanted this game to be for both people who just want to learn one character with assists backing them up and those who want to fully utilize an entire team. I think they nailed it.

Beyond satisfying mechanics, a fighting game needs a solid amount of content and modes to keep people of all skill levels engaged. This is generally Tōkon’s weakest point as a video game, but it still hits all the essentials in a way I found satisfying. A traditional story mode is here, presented as five different motion comics interspersed with fights for each team. The stories themselves didn’t blow me away since the setup for the game is an anime tournament arc, but the team-based nature of the game leads to some nice character dynamics like Ms. Marvel going out of her way to prove herself to Spider-Man in the Amazing Guardians route. It’s a bit basic considering the gorgeous visuals of the actual gameplay and the fact that Arc System Works has used those in the past to render full-on anime episodes for Guilty Gear Strive’s story mode, but it at least feels appropriate considering the source material.

Arcadia Rumble is a cute mode where you take your online lobby avatar through an arena to gather powerups and tackle CPU or human opponents doing the same before engaging in traditional fights using your accumulated buffs. It plays out like a combination of Kirby Air Ride’s City Trial and Fall Guys, and while it didn’t completely grab me, I think it makes for a fun way to calm down after a long competitive session. An arcade mode is essential for those who want a traditional way to play a fighting game, and Arena offers just that with the added twist of having predetermined routes with branching paths. Again, a basic approach to an expected mode, but I appreciate that it’s there for those who want to mess around with a short burst of offline fights.

Personally, I found the most offline fun hidden in the more hardcore modes. Survival is the one I keep coming back to. It’s a series of one hundred fights of ascending difficulty that go through a cycle of basic fights, a more difficult boss battle, and a save point. Your life bar carries between fights, only refilling a small amount. The additional complexity comes from the collectible card system, where at each save point players can randomly receive three cards with nice artwork. Each new card grants a buff and/or debuff, while lucking into a repeat of a card will level it up. This allows you to create roguelike-style “builds” for each run, an engaging mechanic that few fighting games have attempted. Finishing a full run rewards players with a new color for their point character (often the character’s most appealing color combo in the game), making for a very rewarding loop that’s actually fun to play rather than being a chore like some survival modes.

Training mode of all places has a very interesting twist. It has a nice difficulty curve to ease players into individual characters and the game as a whole, but also includes combo trials that ramp up into fighting game puzzles. Instead of the highest tier of character trials just being a series of “press these buttons in order to get a combo”, the Level-Up Missions ask players to figure out how to do things like “start a combo with this special move, use this other special move at some point during the combo, and finish it with over 45,000 damage”. It’s a very clever way to encourage players to start thinking about how to play fighting games on their own terms and putting their own style to work rather than just copying what someone else tells them to do. That’s the core of what makes fighters a blast at a high level, and finally, finally, a developer is encouraging it in the tutorial of a mainstream game!

The online experience has been one of the biggest talking points of Tōkon before and after release, and is a good example of why fighting games can be hard to review. The PC version in particular was a mess at release, but as I’m writing this review a little over three weeks out, I’ve found a lot of the issues to be improved. When everything works, it works wonderfully. The netcode holds up, matchmaking isn’t outrageously long, and players can sit in training mode or the interactive avatar lobbies while they look for a match. There’s still bugs here and there, like cross-platform matches breaking down occasionally, spectated matches falling out of sync, and matchmaking randomly taking longer than usual. I can only speak to what I’ve played at this point, but the track record of regular patches so far has me optimistic that Arc System Works will iron out remaining issues.

Despite some minor rough edges, I’m having a ton of fun every time I play Tōkon, especially with friends. It feels designed first and foremost as a video game to have fun with, rather than a tool for competition. Vibes and structure-wise, I’m reminded of the era of games like Street Fighter IV: All the essentials, little fluff, get good and have fun.

I strongly believe that Marvel Tōkon is a near-ideal modern fighting game. Between meaningful layers of complexity, a solid amount of welcoming modes, and absolutely phenomenal presentation, Arc System Works has bent over backwards to make an accessible tag team fighter that could make anyone fall in love with the genre for the first time.