Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls Review – Finding Its Own Identity

Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls had a difficult job before anyone had even played it. Marvel has already been responsible for some of the most memorable fighting games ever made, while Arc System Works has spent years building its reputation around technically demanding fighters with a very particular visual style.

Put the two together, and you can’t help but ask if this is just the next Marvel vs. Capcom. After spending time with Marvel Tōkon, I’ve stopped asking that question. It isn’t trying to bring Marvel vs. Capcom back. It’s taking some of the same ideas and pushing them in a different direction, and what we ended up with is much more fun and interesting.

TL;DR

Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls is a stylish and surprisingly deep fighting game that makes its 4v4 system work through smart team building and a flexible assist system. The accessible controls and excellent training tools make it easy for newcomers to get started, while there is plenty underneath for experienced players to dig into. The 20-character roster is a little small for a Marvel game, and the story and Arcadia Rumble are unlikely to be the main reasons you keep playing, but the core fighting is strong enough to carry the experience.

Not Marvel Vs Capcom – Marvel Tōkon Sets Itself Apart

The first thing I noticed about Marvel Tōkon was iconic the game feels without relying on its predecessors. There is obviously a lot of Marvel history sitting behind this game. Put Spider-Man, Captain America, Iron Man and Deadpool on the same character select screen and comparisons with Marvel vs. Capcom are unavoidable.

For alot of players, that was their first foray into fighting games. I myself remember playing it at the arcade with my friends. So when I entered into Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls I knew what I wanted to play. I wanted a game with huge combos, ridiculous assists, characters bouncing around the screen and that particular kind of chaos that Marvel fighters have always done so well.

Marvel Tōkon has all of that, but it doesn’t spend the entire time reminding me of what came before. That’s largely down to Arc System Works’ presentation. The studio’s anime-inspired style works remarkably well with Marvel’s characters, giving the game a look that feels closer to an animated comic book or manga as opposed to a traditional 3D fighter. The character models are expressive, the attacks have a lot of weight and the cinematography is visually stunning we see a particularly nasty combo or super move.

Some characters benefit from this more than others. Spider-Man’s movement is exactly the sort of thing I’d hoped to see from him, with web attacks and acrobatics making him feel completely different from a character who relies on brute force. Deadpool is another obvious highlight because his animations are packed with little bits of personality and infinite easter eggs.

As a fan of the fighting game genre as a whole, Deadpool quickly became my favourite as almost every move in his are iconic attacks from other fighting game genres. We see Electric Wind God Fist from Tekken, Johnny Cage’s iconic nut cracker, Cell’s intro animation from Dragon Ball, and countless others.

That attention to character design matters because Marvel Tōkon doesn’t have the enormous launch roster some people might have expected from a Marvel fighter. On launce we have a respectable 21 characters, but in the modern age of fighting games, its on the lower end. I am already theorizing what characters we could see in the future, from the likes of Taskmaster mimicking other move sets like Mokujin in Tekken, or Iron Fist and Shang-Chi as potential grapplers. There is of course discourse where people wonder why some characters made the roster and others didn’t, but with a universe as large as Marvel’s, someone is always bound to be missing.

After giving the cast a run through, I think that there was really alot of love and detail put into making each character unique and fun. I would still like more characters, but I don’t think many of the existing fighters feel like filler. There is a reason to learn them beyond simply liking the Marvel character they’re based on, and that becomes clearer once the four-character team system starts to take over.

Choose Your Character – Four Fighters, One Health Bar

One of the easiest misundertandings with Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, and one I know I had when I first heard of the game, was worrying that this would simply be an overcrowded version of your traditional tag fighter. I knew I didn’t want to have to play matches with four characters, learn four move sets, and have four health bars each game the moment I jumped in. Thank god I was wrong.

In Marvel Tōkon You select four characters, but all four share a single health bar. One character starts on the field, while the others are unlocked as the match progresses, you break through screens, and win or lose rounds. As you unlock the ability to use the other characters on your team, you gain their assists and are able to swap between them, causing them to become more involved as the match progresses. The Assemble Gauge controls when some of those options become available, and the structure of the match gradually opens up as more members of the team enter the action.

That shared health bar is more important than it might sound. In a traditional tag fighter, one of the constant concerns is managing the health of individual characters. You might switch somebody out because they’re close to dying, hoping to preserve them for later. Marvel Tōkon doesn’t work that way. Your four characters are effectively contributing to one overall pool of health. It also means I don’t have to learn four characters equally well just to play the game.

This is something that I think is overlooked often when discussing Marvel Tōkon and it being a 4v4 game. At first, four characters sounds like four times the work. What I like is that I’m perfectly able to use just one character. I immediately liked Deadpool, and was fine learning just how to play as him at the start. I can go much deeper into the roster if I want to, but I don’t have to do that immediately.

The matches themselves also have a nice sense of progression. Rather than starting with eight characters all fighting for screen space, Marvel Tōkon lets things build. Additional team members become available through the course of the fight, with mechanics such as wall breaks helping to change the state of the match. It gives me time to understand what is happening before the match inevitably becomes much more chaotic. And yes, it can become chaotic. There are moments when projectiles, assists, supers and characters are all occupying the screen at once, and I have had to take a second afterwards to work out why I suddenly lost half my health.

Marvel Tōkon’s Assist System – Building the Perfect Team

The more I played Marvel Tōkon the more I learned about mixing the characters and how they could best help my new “main”. I didn’t have to learn how to play Ghost Rider to have him on my team. Every member of the team brings an assist, and those assists can fill very different roles. Some are useful for controlling space, others can help with anti-air situations, while others can be incorporated into combos or pressure. The Assemble Gauge determines how frequently I can access these tools.

So when I was learning how to play Deadpool, I naturally started with the rest of the Samurai Outriders team, that included Loki, Blade, and Ghost Rider. Over the course of playing the game, I started to like Black Panther as a team member as a way to extend combos, and grew to enjoy adding Wolverine for his close range anti-air assist that also is armored. And what I love is that once I actively have these members on my team, I feel like they’re the next step in my natural progression to learning a new character.

This is probably where experienced fighting game players are going to spend a lot of their time. The basic use of an assist is easy enough to understand, but getting the most out of it requires a much better sense of timing and resource management. The system has enough flexibility that I can imagine teams being built around very specific interactions rather than simply around the characters themselves.

Fantastic First Steps – The Latest In Easy Onboarding

Arc System Works is well known for in-depth fighting games with complex interactions and mechanics. BlazBlue and Guilty Gear, just to name a couple. However when it comes to Marvel Tōkon, I love the way they’ve adopted a more beginner friendly approach to the fighting game genre.

Marvel Tōkon is the latest in the fighting game genre to incorporate auto-combos. These are simplified inputs that can be stringed together to have a satisfying chain of attacks that deal moderate damage and showcase some of the flashier aspects of the game. Auto-combos and simplified inputs mean that I can pick up a character without memorizing a long list of commands and still get something useful out of them. That doesn’t mean the manual options have disappeared or that experienced players have nothing left to learn. It simply means the game doesn’t make execution the first barrier I have to overcome.

Instead of having to learn long strings of varied button pushes, you can continuously press one or a few buttons in sequence for some decent damage. Of course there is a lot of room for optimization, and the experienced fighting game players will still be able to discover longer more efficient and damaging chains. This also doesn’t take away from the other major skills in fighting games, where you still want to learn move priority, how to space and punish, and playing footsies among other skills.

There is something demoralizing about starting a new fighting game and immediately discovering that I can’t perform the most basic things consistently. Marvel Tōkon gives you enough freedom to experiment before have properly learned you’re doing. I can start with the straightforward stuff, get comfortable with movement and attacks, and then begin looking for ways to do things more efficiently.

I think the distinction between accessibility and simplicity is important here. Marvel Tōkon is accessible, but the actual game isn’t simple. Once I start paying attention to assists, meter, team composition, movement and the different ways characters can interact, there is quite a lot to think about.

In my opinion, this is the right approach not only for fighting games in general, but especially for a Marvel fighting game A large part of the playerbase is going to include people who love Marvel, and not people who enjoy studying frame data and workshopping combos. Giving those players an easy way into the game makes sense, and if they become interested in the deeper mechanics later, the game is ready for them.

Live Action Comics – Marvel Tōkon‘s Story Mode

Fighting Games notoriously don’t have amazing story modes or single player campaigns. However Marvel Tōkon has done a remarkable job of highlighting each of the characters and breathing life into the campaign. The story setup is quite straightforward.

The Champion arrives and gathers Marvel’s heroes and villains into a tournament, with the various teams competing for the opportunity to face him. The story is split across five episodes, each giving a different group of characters its own perspective on the events. This is an easy way to gather all these characters and pit them into a fight against each other. However, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In fact I loved the big bad comic book villain energy.

What I enjoyed more than the actual plot was the presentation. The comic-book panels, voice acting and animated sequences fit the Marvel license nicely, and there are some enjoyable character interactions scattered throughout the campaign. Of course I jumped in to play Samurai Outriders right away. The moments of Loki being a pseudo-villain anti-hero and Deadpool’s antics paired with the seriousness of Blade and Ghost Rider’s edgier darkness made for some really enjoyable story moments.

Some of the team combinations feel as though they exist because the game needs those particular characters together rather than because the story has found a particularly convincing reason for them to be there. That’s not unusual for a fighting game, but it does become noticeable when the campaign is relying on those relationships to carry the story. The campaign is also fairly light on actual fighting. There is a surprising amount of dialogue and comic-style presentation between matches, which makes the story feel more like a collection of short character episodes than a substantial campaign.

Overall I did enjoy the presentation of the story and it was entertaining to watch. It also served as a pretty good basis on getting to know each character and having a chance to play as each one of them. As a fan of comics and manga in general, it was genuinely a good bit of fun.

Final Thoughts on Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls

The biggest compliment I can give Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls is that the game has made me interested in the part of fighting games that normally is never even a consideration: the Team Building. In 2XKO you had cool synergies where your pairings mattered. In the latest Mortal Kombat, you often just picked a support that supplemented your main fighter, and in most other games you don’t even really pick a team. At the start I just wanted to play Deadpool, but then I got to experimenting and got hooked on Blade and Wolverine, and then slowly I began to expand across the roster.

The four-character format gives the game a different rhythm from the Marvel fighters that came before it. The shared health bar means I don’t have to worry about managing four individual lives. The assists mean characters remain relevant even when I’m not controlling them. The Assemble Gauge gives me another resource to think about, and the way the team gradually becomes more involved in a match means the fights can change quite dramatically from beginning to end.

Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls isn’t going to replace Marvel vs. Capcom, and honestly, I don’t think it needs to. What surprised me most is how quickly I stopped comparing the two. Once I started experimenting with teams and figuring out which assists worked best together, I was much more interested in what Tōkon was doing than in what it wasn’t. There are still things I’d like to see improved, particularly the size of the roster, but the actual fighting has enough depth to keep me coming back. It also helps that Arc System Works has made the game approachable without stripping away the things that make fighting games worth learning.

For me, that’s ultimately what makes Marvel Tōkon such an easy recommendation. It looks spectacular, feels very much like a Marvel game, and gives new players a comfortable way into a genre that can often be intimidating. At the same time, there is a deeper game waiting for anyone willing to spend time with its assists, team combinations and more advanced mechanics. I came into Marvel Tōkon expecting a fun Marvel fighter and came away with a game I actually want to keep getting better at. Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls is a welcome addition to any fighting game collection.

Big thank you to PlayStation Greece for sponsoring our review!