It’s a wild timeline we are in that we don’t have to put out placards of “When’s Mahvel?” anymore. Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 is now playable on modern platforms, but more pertinent here is that there’s a new Marvel fighting game in the works, in the same veins of the tag-team Versus titles the fighting game community love near and dear, but approached by a different developer.
And that developer tag-team is also a peculiar one: Arc System Works and PlayStation.
When Marvel Tōkon Fighting Souls was revealed, it left quite the impression. It looks good! But how does it play, knowing that it’s not a 2v2 or 3v3 tag fighter, it’s a whopping 4v4 game. And the systems, described with words, sounds overwhelming at first glance.
As a novice dabbler of fighting games, who understands the scene but have little ability to show, it worries me somewhat. It would be all for nothing if a fighting game featuring now-ubiquitous characters from one of the most marketable IP if it’s only appealing to a, with respect to the FGC, niche market.
After dabbling a few hours in the recent Closed Beta test, I’m not worried anymore.
Marvel Tōkon Fighting Souls has a nice onboarding, the mechanics are not as dense yet still has depth, and there are subtle design tweaks that makes this fighting game accomodating to newcomers just as it rewards the labbers who eat and sleep fighting games.
Smart, Well-Paced Tutorial
When I first boot up the beta, I was greeted to what’s called the Startup Battle. It’s a tutorial. Fighting games regularly does tutorials, but this one is done a little bit smarter than what I’ve seen and played before. It’s the way it paces itself.
Yeah, you start with the simple stuff like movement and familiarising with the light, medium and heavy attacks. But it’s not simply a checklist of “here’s all the mechanics do them three times” sort of tutorial (you just do them twice, rather than three times, as a matter of fact). These are all introduced in context. Okay, you can move and dash, but can you do that consistently? The tutorial has you in set intervals run across the side of the screen before moving to the next lesson.
Similarly, the game regularly reminds you how the movement controls are mirrored when you’re on the other side of the screen, and has you do a few of the same moves taught before but on the other side of the screen, which also includes having to run to the other side screen.
My favourite bit during the tutorial is how they only teach you the first link attack (auto combos) first, but withheld the other link attack buttons much later so they can introduce the Super Skill and Ultimate Skill (Super and Critical Art, to use Street Fighter 6 lingo) first, which are combo enders for those two button-mash-a-combo buttons.
The ramp up is nice too. Round 1 of this Startup Battle has you do all the fundamental movements. Familiarise with all the buttons in this five/six button fighting game.
Round 2 is where things get heavy as players are introduced to Marvel Tōkon’s unique take on a tag system: Assemble. It’s a lot to take in, so it’s nice that these are peppered with those mirroring and movement exercises in-between introducing the ridiculously layered Assemble system. It’s wild that it’s a whole section dedicated to this one thing, considering you’re mostly learning what just one button can do this whole Round!
The tutorial caps off with a dummy fight against the AI. The AI/CPU opponent here is supremely dumb, so it’s just a victory lap for all players of all skill levels to just let it all out after going through the long lessons.
Normalising Modern Controls
Interestingly, it didn’t strike me until the end of the tutorial that Tōkon seems to be missing something: motion inputs.
I kind of forgot about how to do the game’s equivalent to special moves, which I don’t even know what it’s called until later on, Skills. The game just taught you what’s more or less Modern Controls, where instead of motion inputs + a light/medium/heavy attack button, you just press the dedicated Skill button and a straight direction (tilts). There are also Unique attacks, also bound to a button by default, but everyone has to use that fifth button. But for those who can’t reliably do quarter-circles and DP inputs, Marvel Tōkon becomes a six-button game where you can use that button plus a direction (plus an optional button press) to pull off any special move.
(Technically it can also be a seven-button game, if you prefer to dash with just one button. Though double-tapping d-pad shouldn’t be much of an issue for most players, but it’s nice that for those who couldn’t do that reliably, now has a dedicated, baked-in, no-judging shortcut as well.)
Apparently, Marvel Tōkon does have motion inputs and special moves (Skills) can be done as such. Fighting game oldheads can still enjoy the game the traditional way. Special moves with quarter-circle motions, Dragon Punch input and half-circles are there. Combos can be discovered the old-fashion way by figuring out which normal attacks link together (with some bread-and-butter moves carry over).
But by presenting Modern Controls as the default, it helps more folks who may feel like this being Easy Mode, or a sacrilege addition, feel otherwise. Doing motion inputs, which inputs are hidden by default in the command list, is now an optional Hard Mode, if you will.
It certainly made me, who still stubbornly believed I should just learn to motion inputs despite still being terrible at it for all these years, to just play Tōkon with tilts instead. There’s no stigma to it, it’s presented as the baseline experience, and you still have access to all the same toolkit as those who are sticking to the traditional fighting game experience honed from the heydays of arcades.
If you still don’t know what you’re doing after that long tutorial, don’t worry, as mashing buttons in Marvel Tōkon feels good. Arc System Works dabbled with autocombos before, the one title I’m familiar with is Persona 4 Arena. But here in Marvel Tōkon , it’s not locked to one specific bread-and-butter move. You can spice it up by pressing different buttons during the Link Attack string, so you can present yourself as somewhat knowing what you’re doing.
While doing Super Skill and Ultimate Skills (Supers) are easy enough to do raw (just press two buttons for Modern, but there are still specifically more elaborate alternatives for traditional players) they are also linked to these Link Attacks, enabling any newcomer who simply mash the same buttons over and over to pull off those flashy game-changing, potentially game-ending, moves.
Lowering The Skill Floor While Maintaining The Skill Ceiling
As fun and hype as the Marvel Vs. Capcom games are, or Versus games and tag fighters in general are, they feel daunting to get into. These games have Happy Birthdays and Merry Christmases where a player can basically lose with no way to fight back just because the opponent has locked in, learned all the busted moves, and nail the execution to perfection.
At least in the early life of Marvel Tōkon , I don’t need to worry about having to get a leverless controller so I can reliably do motion inputs. The game’s just fun on the DualSense as is!
But I don’t feel like the game is in any way dumbed down. A walk into the public lobby and playing against players who know how to play, I still get bodied as expected. Though not humiliating so. In a high skill floor fighting game like the good ol’ Marvel VS Capcom games, if you can’t pull a bread-and-butter combo when you have the opportunity to have your turn, you’d likely not have that turn at all due to busted mechanics including infinite combos. Marvel Tōkon has defensive measures to combo-break foes, easy enough to do (again, two buttons) but without the same risk of a fighting game parry. It allowed me to have some chance of fighting back, resetting the momentum of the fight and do one autocombo before, as expected, the opponent gets back in their rhythm and continue beating me up.
And when you see people who know how to play, you know. I fought a few Star-Lord mains who have different bread-and-butter combos than any of the autocombos provide, and different from each other. These are stuff that you discover on your own, not out of reading the command list (which does a good job of explaining and showing what each move does and when to use them).
Having the 4V4 tag fighter to only have one shared health bar across the team may sound sacrilege, but it works well to reduce the barrier to entry yet still provide an avenue to show prowess. In theory, you can just “main” one character and use the other three simply as assists. If you’re good, you can swap between all four characters during a match, keep the opponent guessing and readjusting to your new tempo of fighting. You don’t have access to all the characters on match start, you either have to be really good (smashing the opponent to the next screen) or be really behind (lose a round) to assemble your team so pro players can’t just unload their wildest tech revolving all four characters at least in the first 20 seconds or so. But when they they do, it gets nutty. The type of assists your tag partners can do depends on what slot they are in, but I can see crafty pros having tag loops so they get to access to right assists for the occasion, while most players settle from the one assist they have set before the match.
I feel like in the right hands, Marvel Tōkon can be as busted as the Marvel Vs. games of yore. But at least when played by a newcomer, they can find their footing to be able to throw some punches in, rather than being utterly demolished to the point they refuse to play online, or worse play at all.
Hopefully there are measures to ensure these inexperienced players get to play more with each other, rather than simply being fed to be the victims of the Wazzler.
Closing Thoughts
My takeaway with my time with Marvel Tōkon Fighting Souls’ Closed Beta is that the developers have done the best they can to ensure the skill floor to just have fun with this fighting game low, without compromising much the skill ceiling.
As a below-average fighting game player, I managed to find joy in the chaos quickly. It took less work for me to find the fun compared to Street Fighter 6 was (it was a gentler ramp up thanks to the single-player story mode), though not as immediately intuitive compared to Tekken 8 (hitting buttons there without knowing anything is immediately fun). But certainly far much accessible compared to Fatal Fury: City Of The Wolves which by design is catering to more old-school fighting game fans.
I don’t think every fighting game should specifically be braindead easy to get into, but if a game is planning to cultivate a big audience it has to. And for a game like Marvel Tōkon that’s backed by not only a console maker but also a household franchise, it has to. You want to let the young ones play as Spider-Man whose music theme is just smooth jazz as you’d expect from a New Yorker like him, or as a Gundam-coded Iron Man with a V-Fin and massive mecha-style shoulder pads, or an exosuited Captain America whose current alternate colour turns him into Captain Kedah.
I believe Arc Sys is on the right track in delivering a colourful, imaginative fighting game with a fresh aesthetic spin to familiar Marvel characters that has the depth that fighting game fans crave yet still just as fun for the average Johan to mindlessly press buttons. Whether you’re here for the Marvel Easter Eggs or to be taken for a ride, Tōkon has to be potential to be a fun time for everyone.
Marvel Tōkon Fighting Souls is coming sometime next year for the PS5 and PC.