Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls

PS5 Review

Tōkon Fighting Souls is the latest tag fighting game from Arc System Works, based on the Marvel intellectual property by Disney, and available on PlayStation 5 and PC due to being published by Sony themselves.

Players make a team of four fighters from a roster to challenge other players online in matches of 4 vs 4, or tackle the single player modes like in the story where players chose from one of five teams to challenge The Champion and stop him from destroying the Earth.

My review is based on my experience only with the PS5 version of the game, not the PS5 Pro or the much-maligned PC port which has had a very troubled launch.

Pro:

Art style.
Tōkon Fighting Souls is a visual masterpiece and in my opinion is the best-looking Marvel game ever produced.

Leaning into the bright and cartoon art style with Anime influences, all the characters look very distinctive and pop from the backgrounds with their own style.

The backgrounds all look gorgeous from the tight, dark, and dirty alleyways of New York city to the vast spectacle of space with Knowhere as the background blends into infinity across the sea of stars.

The only bad design choice in my opinion is that some characters look over designed, like Spider-Man who looks too busy or visually cluttered in his design with too many broken up segments, where I would prefer his classic costumes back.

The game can look too chaotic at times with the bright colours and visual effects when both players are using all of their assists in sequence, so 2-8 characters are on screen at once, making it difficult to follow the actions with characters overlapping and visually blocking others.

Frame rate.
All of my gameplay was experienced on a base PS5 and not on PC, so my frames per second are different and not reflective of the PC poor performance.

On base PS5 I was experiencing 60FPS almost exclusively, without any major drops through my play through across all the modes of the game, both offline and online.

Even when playing online my connections were always strong on the European servers, and the rollback net code was always buttery smooth to prevent any major desynch issues fighting online.

Story.
The story of Tōkon is a loose adaptation of The Champions back in the 1980’s, where he arrives at Earth to fight several heroes and if he wins he decides what to do with Earth; destroy or spare it.

This game changes all the characters involved with the exception of Hulk who manages to stay in this adaption, and they change the rules from a 1v1 fight to a 4v1 fight. Instead of individual heroes fighting The Champion, it is now teams of four revolving around a leader of each team (Captain America, Ghost Rider, Spider-Man, Storm and Doctor Doom), as they all fight to get invitations to face the Champion and battle other teams along the way.

The story mode is broken down into five episodes with each episode focused on one team at a time, from their point of view as the player follows their story across 11 chapters from the beginning until the end with the defeat of The Champion.

My favourite stories of the game are the X-Men’s and Knights of Doom (Since the Knights of Doom expand on X-Men’s plotline) revolving around the persecution of the mutant race when they try to save not only themselves, but all of humanity who spite them. This is seen when they reject Magneto and decide not to fall into easy bigotry and hate like Humanity but rise above and the consequences in the Knights of Doom episode where we see Doctor Doom recruit him after this rejection.

The individual character who has the best development is easily Robbie Reyes (Ghost Rider), who only sets out in this tournament to save his brother. In this, Robbie goes from a solo character to learning to being part of a team with the help of his teammates and opposing heroes to overcome his literal inner demons, or outer demons in his case, with his uncle.

I would recommend players take their time and watch all these cutscenes, as each episode is a little over an hour and all of them are fully voiced acted which I wasn’t expecting.

Roster.
While it is a smaller roster for a tag fighting game, I feel that it has enough characters for a diverse roster of characters with more on the way with confirmed DLC. The Phoenix empowered Cyclops is the first revealed DLC fighter.

With 20 characters on the roster at launch and an extra unlockable character when the player finishes the story mode for the first time, it has representatives from most major teams in the comics. Only the Fantastic Four do not have a member at launch, with only Doctor Doom as a related character.

The downside with the roster is the lack of villains to play as compared to the heroes, so if a player wants to make a team of villains, they will be limited to the main four from the base roster of Doctor Doom, Magneto, Carnage and Green Goblin.

A character with a mostly fleshed out movepool but isn’t playable is The Promoter who feels like an obvious inclusion, given her presence in the story and popularity with players.

Voice actors.
The voice cast for Tōkon is absolutely outstanding, for both the English dub and Japanese sub.

They managed to cast a lot of the voice actors who had previously played each character in video games such as Marvel Ultimate Alliance and Midnight Suns, as well as TV shows and films going back to the 1990’s even for characters like Carnage, with his Japanese voice actor Kosuke Okano voicing him in Spider-Man the animated series in 1994.

The standout to me will always be Nolan North reprising Deadpool from his animated roles and own lost media videogame, who has not lost a beat still sounding the perfect blend of manic and over the top. Special love has to be given to his Japanese voice actor of Takehito Koyasu, who previously played Dio Brando, a pivotal antagonist character from JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure, who’s character gets referenced in Deadpool’s animations.

Deadpool Easter eggs.
I was blown away with how much love and care for the history of fighting games was crammed into Deadpool’s design and animations, with references to all major franchises and a lot of very obscure ones.

To my knowledge, all of Arc Systems Works prioritise franchises they work on and have these Easter eggs, from Guilty Gear and Blazblue to Dragon Ball Fighter Z. The latest Arc System Works game I poured hundreds of hours into, with Deadpool copying Cell’s introduction sequence before a match starts, with a Roman Candle instead of a Ki power up.

GameSpot published a video covering over 100+ of them and that players need to watch, since they are all catalogued with the relevant captions and footage from the source material being referenced.

Training modes.
What really impressed me when starting Tōkon was just how in-depth the training options were, with the character lessons being split into three sections being Action Check, Combo Challenge and Level-up missions.

Action Check teaches the player how to perform all of a character’s signature attacks and the variants of them, using extra mechanics like angles or bonus meter to make them stronger. This was very important when learning new characters, as no two characters really play the same with how distinct their special abilities and mechanics behave.

Combo Challenge shows the player how the various signature attacks can be chained together in actual combat, and while I have Dyspraxia, I was still able to finish most lesson 5 or 6’s of each character to get the 100 Combo Challenge trophy. This shows how player friendly most of these basic combos are to chain together.

Level-up challenges are some of the most fun I’ve had in single player, where it tasks the player with a list of conditions that the player must fulfil in one combo before finishing. This usually entails what move the start the combo with, what move needs to be used in the combo, and finally what score they need so players cannot end the combo too early.

They act as fun puzzles to keep the player engaged to try and work out the optimal solution, and if players finish all these optional training modes for a character, they are rewarded with an extra costume with their costume slot 8, so it is worth it for completionists.

Music.
Tōkon definitely has my favourite soundtrack out of any fighting game, with the character themes with these songs being the perfect fit for all of these characters. In my opinion there are truly no bad songs with some of great standout songs being Storm’s (Thunder and Fury), Star-Lord’s (Mixtape Messiah) and Carnage’s (The Red).

The funniest song on the roster and my personal favourite is definitely Green Goblin’s (You Greenhorn!) feeling more like a song by Robbie Rotten from LazyTown, being very cheesy and villainous fast-paced jazz with blaring saxophone and electric guitar. I would highly recommend players listen to it if they haven’t and it’s what I have set as my battle song.

The weakest song on the roster is still good with Spider-Man’s theme song (Webstep) being electronic swing Jazz, which is not my personal taste with how chopped up and stop start it is, making it annoying to listen to. When the main chorus kicks in halfway through it is great, but aside from that it’s a song I never listen to again afterwards.

The opening song reminded me a lot of Marvel Rival’s opening, fitting the more bombastic and Anime art style both games lean on for the aesthetic. It would be perfect for a TV show if they wanted to adapt this story like they had the tie-in comic book for the story.

PlayStation tournaments.
A nice bonus is that PlayStation is hosting community tournaments at regular intervals that the player can sign up and join in on.

There are always several upcoming that are shown off on the main menu for the player to check out and see what time is convenient for them.

At the time of writing this review, I was not able to enter any of these tournaments, so I am unsure if or any prizes were available.

Stages.
Tōkon features 9 stages to choose from, ranging from New York cityscapes to the halls of Asgard, culminating in the destroyed ruins of Champion’s arena from the story mode.

Each stage is a visual marvel and packed with Easter eggs in the background for players to pick out, from Daredevil in the background of New York at night time to Ka-Zar hanging out with Zabu in the Savage Land.

A good choice is letting the player choose which section of the arena that they want to start a match in, like outside Josie’s in New York or the Destroyer’s vault in Asgard. The only downside is that Knowhere does not allow the player to choose where to start.

I wish every stage had multiple arenas to go crashing through in each match, as stages like X-Mansion and the Champion’s arena only have the one area to fight in. Instead, I would propose allowing each stage to also have a variant where it’s just the single arena with the unbreakable walls on each side.

Looking at Smash Brothers where there were Omega versions of each stage to make them play like Final Destination, this would be a great option and consideration for Tōkon as it would also allow each player to unlock their 2 extra assist characters very quickly with wall bounces.

Hopefully in future DLC the number of stages also increases, as currently there are 9 available, with 7 being unique due to Nighttime New York and destroyed Champion’s arena being variants of existing stages. Perhaps we will see more unusual picks in the future, such as stages based on the Splinter Realms like The Dark Dimension with Doctor Strange & Dormammu or Limbo ruled by Magik we see glimpses of.

Con:

Combo breakers.
The biggest feature missing from Tōkon is the lack of a combo breaker mechanic, as currently it is too easy for enemies to stun lock opponents into long combos, dealing over 70-90% damage in online matches.

I would prefer either a combo breaker like most other modern fighting games or like Dragon Ball Fighter Z had, with the Vanish system to stop being pressured by the opponent. The other solution with existing Tōkon systems is to give the player the ability to use the Crossover Reflect system at any time the player has access to the meter.

One health bar.
A contributing issue for how short matches are is that Tōkon only has one health bar per team, with the rounds being ended in just two combos. In comparison, other tag fighting games have a bar for each character to help let the match last longer or just be punished less.

A solution for this would be to split up the one bar into four smaller bars with one per character or make it so characters deal less damage, making the one bar last longer for more enjoyable matches.

Matchmaking.
The matchmaking time for online Ranked and Casual matches can be really long, as even with every setting turned on (Cross play, any signal strength and hopping between regions), it would take me between 5 and over 30 minutes just to get into a match.

If players are waiting for such a length of time, then there should be something for the player to do besides a training model, such as giving the player a full match against the CPU to pass the time.

Ranked mode.
Tōkon made the strange choice to not let players join Ranked mode when they first join the online part of the game, and instead the player has to go and do 10 Casual, lobby or room matches to get experience first.

This was the short-sighted aspect of the game, considering when I play games, I do all the solo content first, so I had done all the episodes in the story mode, finished the arena and done 100 combo challenges between the cast.

Instead of not being allowed it should have just been an optional warning, saying that doing casual matches is recommended before jumping into ranked matches.

Dropped Inputs.
Unsure if this was just a problem with my PS5 or controller, but several times per match I would have my inputs dropped and not go through.

This happened often when doing jump cancels, and more crucially the Tōkon Assemble mechanic not working in the final round when you need it to not lose the match.

Restarting.
When playing offline single player content, it was annoying to find that the player could not restart the current match from the pause screen when badly losing.

When facing the Champion at the end of story mode at CPU level 4, he would combo me constantly for almost my entire HP bar, making me want to restart the match from round one to have another attempt rather than play out the rest of the round wasting time.

Episode battles.
While enjoyable as a whole, I wish the player was able to choose which team member they would start each battle rather than the pre-selected team member.

When doing these battles back-to-back, it would have been more enjoyable to plow through these battles with characters I prefer, rather than characters I struggle with like Green Goblin and Ghost Rider.

Score: 8.6

Conclusion:

The best looking and feeling Marvel fighting game that takes everything that is great in Marvel Vs Capon and Dragon Ball Fighter Z and brings them to a modern audience, alongside a lot of single player and multiplayer content to keep fans playing for a long while.

I would recommend the PS5 version at launch, since the PC version is having a lot of issues with fixes being slow to roll out.