Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls Game Review

The Marvel universe is rocked once again as a new cosmic threat emerges. Assemble teams of Marvel heroes from across the Multiverse to battle one another in 4v4 tag-team fighting glory to determine who will be the true Champion.

Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls is developed by Arc System Works and published by Sony Entertainment. Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls is available on PlayStation 5 and PC/Steam. A review key was provided for this review.

The Marvel universe is rocked once again as a new cosmic threat emerges. Assemble teams of Marvel heroes from across the Multiverse to battle one another in 4v4 tag-team fighting glory to determine who will be the true Champion.

Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls is developed by Arc System Works and published by Sony Entertainment. Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls is available on PlayStation 5 and PC/Steam. A review key was provided for this review.

Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls is an amazing fighting game - if you can play it.

First, the basics. Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls is in many ways a checklist of classic elements. This is a 2D fighting game where opponents duel each other using a variety of standard attacks, special moves, and super techniques to whittle down their opponent's health bar to zero. Win enough rounds (usually best three of five), and you take the game. Controls are a mix of traditional motion inputs and faster one-button specials that each have their trade-offs and advantages. It's a tag fighter where players select a team of characters to face off against opponents, and the characters come from a wide range of Marvel Comics classics and newcomers. Again, none of this is surprising, as “Marvel tag team fighting game” is nearly a tradition as old as the genre itself and features some of the most popular titles to ever grace arcade cabinets or home screens.

To control the chaos, Arc System Works has made the fascinating decision to lump the entire team into a conglomeration of functions. You only start with a portion of your team available, namely a lead and an assist character, with the other two locked out at the start of each game. As the game progresses, you unlock access to these side characters by achieving certain objectives (losing a round will unlock one, knocking an opponent through the wall/corner will as well, etc.). This means that games inherently start with a much lower complexity, as there are only a few characters involved, then organically grow as more characters are unlocked and bring with them further options.

Additionally, the characters all share a single health bar. This means that while you can tag in and out to let different characters take the lead position, you are not strictly forced to do so. In other tag fighters, you have to learn to play all of the positions at one point or another because eventually they will be out on the field, even if you really only need them for a particular assist or combo. This means you could play the game as something akin to a one-vs-one fighter with a bunch of extra functions, or you could approach it like a traditional tag fighter and switch between characters during combos or lulls in the action. While what rates as optimal play involves engaging with the system more and more, this does allow for players just starting to take an à la carte approach to complexity. You can play the “real” game without feeling too overwhelmed.

There are a bevy of other mechanics to consider as well. The order in which your characters are arranged determines what type of assist they use. Active tagging is present here, and assists themselves use the assist meter resources differently depending on when you call them. There is a pseudo-Drive Impact/Alpha Counter mechanic in the form of Assemble Counters and Crossovers, adding another wrinkle to neutral and defense. Character unique ability, auto-combos, on and on - there are exactly as many universal systems as befits a modern fighting game release in the year of our Lord 2026.

This is not to say there is just fighting in ranked ladders or in the training lab. There is a whole bevy of single-player options in the mix as well. There is a full set of story modes that are voice-acted and a lot of fun. Survival mode does what it says on the tin, and there's even the silly Arcadia Rumble that introduces some party game-style silliness that mixes in some of Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising's offerings. Even the combo trials have a nice added feature in that there are set combo routes to explore, but there are also extended challenges which give you a set of conditions and force you to try and hit certain damage thresholds. This is a great way to make players think about how to accomplish something with each character after doing the combo trials, urging you to excel and find new ways to eke out every little bit of damage possible - a dash of creativity in what is often a cookie-cutter paint-by-numbers exercise.

This is all wrapped in the extreme high polish that Arc System Works is known for. The visuals are jaw-dropping, easily one of the prettiest fighting games to ever hit the market. There's this beautiful double-whammy of exaggerated character design work that presents Marvel icons in styles we've never quite seen before, mixed in with traditional comic book style accoutrements such as big onomatopoeia and comic book panels flashing across the screen. Stages are gorgeous, characters are full of life, and even the online lobbies look crisp and clean. The soundtrack is one of the best I've heard in ages, and I find myself bopping to the tunes outside of the game - the mark of a good fighting game, in my humble opinion. It's a tour de force that looks like nothing you've seen before, while also rooted in a profound appreciation for Marvel characters and broader fighting games as a culture.

So what's the catch?

It's hard to play if you're not in a very specific set of conditions.

For this review, I was given a PlayStation code. However, I also got the game on PC, and therein lies the problem. This game plays brilliantly on PlayStation, and other than my own shoddy inputs and combo drops, I've never had an issue. However, playing on PC has been a real crapshoot. I haven't had any issues with single-player or when playing in rooms with friends who have it on PC as well. However, once I ventured into online play for PC in ranked and casual matches, I encountered all kinds of problems. Games with sudden performance drops or massive rollback spikes were often every other match or sometimes back-to-back games. Even as Sony and Arc System Works have repeatedly patched the game in the weeks since release, I've still run into issues, and it has made it hard to even want to boot up the game. Perhaps I've been spoiled by the buttery-smooth experience of other modern titles, but that inconsistency really hurts - especially for fighting games.

On top of that, there's a lot of strangeness regarding the region-locking. Because a PlayStation Network account is required to play, there are literally dozens and dozens of countries where people simply are not allowed to play. It's just… bad vibes. In our modern era, where the global fighting game community has become accustomed to playing against one another from around the world and testing our skills against those far beyond our localities, it's strange to have this game feel locked down based on such an arbitrary factor. Playing Tokon feels like I'm eating a great meal at a reasonable price, yet I'm in a window seat and hungry people are just outside the glass and being told they aren't even allowed to pay for food.

These barriers are more than just psychic stressors. Inconsistent PC performance and an arbitrarily smaller global player pool make it harder for people to enjoy the game. And multiplayer games by their definition require other people for maximum enjoyment. Connecting for PC games can take ages, and a lot of PlayStation-only players I know anecdotally have turned off crossplay - rendering the function a joke. This means that despite all of Tokon's obvious qualities, it has these huge albatrosses around its neck that will keep it from reaching the same potential heights as titles like UMVC3 or DBFZ in their prime. The great single-player features certainly help, but all these asterisks around online play create hangups that are impossible to ignore while also feeling like the easiest possible fumbles to avoid.

In short, Marvel Tokon Fighting Souls is a brilliant game. It is an incredibly welcoming experience to an otherwise intimidating genre (and sub-genre). It looks, sounds, feels, and plays amazing. But it's a few Infinity Gems short of a gauntlet, and I can't help but mourn what could have been.