Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls Review – Superhero Street Fights | GameObserver Recommends

Comic books are an amazing source for fighting games; they have a huge roster of ready made characters with a thousand and one excuses to get into fights with each other and all sorts of feats and powers to turn into moves. Enter Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, a four-on-four team fighter featuring 20 Marvel heroes and villains as they duke it out in a battle against the villain du jour, the Champion, a character created just for the game.

Speaking of the Champion and those excuses to make characters fight each other, Marvel Tōkon’s story is split into five different story modes, one for each of the game’s default teams, and each with the same basic structure. The Champion, having defeated the Shi’ar homeworld, has turned his sights to earth to find a worthy adversary, one who can stand toe-to-toe with him in a fight. As per his tradition, his opponents are sent invitations and must form a team of four fighters to battle against him. Earth’s first foray into the galactic stage was the Fantastic Four, however currently they are conspicuously absent (but they seem a likely candidate for a DLC team). Each story sees the designated leader traveling to assemble their team – naturally each new member must be fought for one reason or another before they join up. Once the team is assembled, they must fight other teams and take part in some special battles before facing the Champion in four-on-one combat.

In addition to the actual battles, each team’s story is told in a mix of cutscenes and motion comic pages, partially animated and fully voiced. Each comic has a different artist with different art styles, and it’s fascinating to see how differently each artist renders each of Marvel Tōkon’s characters to reflect each story without any of them winding up off model.

The world of Marvel Tōkon is an interesting one. While the broad strokes are similar to that of the mainline comics universe, they are not identical. For example one member of the X-Men team, Danger, has her origins and motivations greatly changed, and the Avengers origin story includes Captain America, but not Ant-Man or The Wasp, though those characters are implied to still exist in universe. Iron Man feels almost entirely based off his movie incarnation, while Deadpool is the same as ever, and yes, he is aware he’s in a fighting game. In a bit of fourth wall breaking fun, the game’s Samurai Outriders team only has their name in universe because Deadpool is aware that’s what they’re called in the game’s select screen.

Unlike other tag and team-based fighters where each playable character has their own health bar and a new character will hop in once your active character’s health has been depleted. You can’t swap a nearly KO’d Storm for a full health Magik, for example, because your entire four person team shares a single health bar. This makes switching characters almost entirely about changing for a favorable matchup, since you can’t lose access to a character mid round.

In addition to the five story modes, Marvel Tōkon has an arcade-style mode where you build your own teams and send them against set matches based on each of the game’s canon teams. A fun note is that, in addition to the five teams from the main game, there are also a bunch of other possible team names that can get called out based on your pickings. For example, if you take the Unbreakable X-Men team and swap out Danger for Magneto, you get the Mutant Supremacy team. You put the four youngest characters on a team together and they’re the Young Marvels. Not every team of four has its own unique name, but enough of them do, and it’s a nice touch.

The other arcade-style mode is a free-for-all party game mode that pits multiple player avatars against each other to collect power ups and player characters in a 3D arena before bringing everyone together to use those collected boosts in a series of matches against other players to win victory points. Naturally there’s also various tournament modes for local and online play, along with casual and ranked matches, and the competition is already heating up. I have dabbled with the casual matches, but I haven’t yet had the time to practice to try my hand at ranked.

Speaking of online, I need to talk about a few quick elephants in the room. Marvel Tōkon requires a Playstation Network account to run, and that includes if you are playing the game on PC or Linux. It also requires running an anti-cheat, which isn’t surprising as a lot of games require them, but said anti-cheat may literally prevent you from playing the game entirely. It did for me. I was initially going to play this game on PC, but it consistently shut itself down even before reaching the title screen, so I had to switch to PlayStation 5. Those who have gotten it to run on PC report that they are getting slower frame rates online than the PlayStation 5 version does.

Those elephants aside, Marvel Tōkon is amazing to play when you actually can play it. It has basic input combo strings for beginners, like all new Arc System Works games seem to have. In fact, it has a weak, medium and strong one for each character, along with standard inputs and manual combo strings and counters. The skill floor has been lowered, but you definitely need to put in work to begin to reach the game’s skill ceiling. Special inputs are fairly simple, but each variation of a move tends to have more variation than strong medium and heavy attacks might initially suggest, and each character has a genuinely unique unique skill with its own functions and limitations; Spider-Man can fire web shots, while Magik can create portals that she can attack or escape through. In addition to basic combos there are tag-in attacks, team combo finishers, and special moves. Tag-in attacks can happen mid combo and can lead to a swap, while team combo moves usually just finish combos, though in a pinch they can become dramatic super combos.

Each character’s moves were crafted with an eye for lore as much as for balance. For example, Spider-Man has a spider sense move that can evade and counter basically any move, except for those of Carnage, where he will evade, but not counter. Ghost Rider is extremely powerful, but he isn’t fully in control of his powers, so while he gets more powerful as you keep the pressure on, you have to avoid pushing him too hard or he burns out into a vulnerable state. Marvel Tōkon was made with lots of love for other fighting games too; Deadpool gets to have most of these, with moves referencing Fatal Fury, Guilty Gear, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and more.

If you like Marvel and fighting games, Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls is a no-brainer. It still has some rough edges to file off, especially on PC, but it’s already plenty fun as is. With the addition of a few fixes and some more characters, it might cement itself in the scene for some time to come.

Tim reviewed Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls on Playstation 5 with his own bought copy. This review is based on the version of the game available at the time of writing and our score will not be changed.