What parents need to know
Marvel Tokon is a brand new team fighting game (4 vs 4) featuring Marvel characters. However, it is a very Japanese reading of the Marvel universe since the developers, Arc System Works (Guilty Gear, Blazblue, Dragon Ball FighterZ) decided to draw inspiration from the aesthetics of manga to create their versions of Marvel heroes. Thus, Iron Man’s armor is reminiscent of the mechas of series like Gundam or Goldorak, and Captain America shouts the name of his special moves like any good shonen protagonist.
During the confrontations, each team is composed of 4 fighters, but we only control one at a time, even if we can summon our allies to support us in our offensive. You can also change fighters at any time if you want to access a new arsenal of attacks. However, unlike many games that use this tag mechanic, all fighters share the same health bar, which slightly shortens each round.
This decision is probably due to the fact that most fights take place in three rounds, and the winner is a new ally every time you win a round. Once our team is complete, in certain special circumstances, we can then use our ultimate attack team, where each of the 4 teammates gets their hands dirty to inflict maximum damage.
You also have to manage the skill bar, which allows you to perform more powerful special skills, at a certain cost. This bar recharges as you successfully hit your opponents.
The story mode puts us in the boots of 5 teams of 4 Marvel heroes: the Avengers (Captain America, Iron Man, Black Panther and Hulk), the X-Men (Storm, Magik, Danger and Wolverine), the Guardians (Spider-Man, Ms Marvel, SP//dr and Starlord), the Samurai Outriders (Loki, Deadpool, Blade and Ghost Rider) and the Knights of Doom (Dr. Doom, Magneto, Carnage and Green Goblin). We face the threat of the Champion, an intergalactic fighter who, accompanied by The Promoter, travels from planet to planet to find fighters who can offer him a challenge, otherwise he makes the planet in question disappear.
Marvel Tokon offers several game modes. Of course, you can face friends or the computer in versus battles, but there’s also the All-Star Arena mode, which acts as a traditional arcade mode, the survival mode, which, as its name suggests, requires us to survive a maximum number of successive fights, and the Arcadia mode, a special third-person subgame in which you chase other players to shoot them.
Otherwise, as with any good fighting game, we are offered a host of online modes, ranked or not.
Details
Level of experience required
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Evaluation
It’s a fighting game, so it’s inherently violent. The characters hit each other and hit each other violently. Some hits make the opponents bleed, but it’s still quite minor; Tokon has a cartoon style and is not very graphic in its violence. Some characters, especially Carnage, can be scary for younger children.
Some superheroes play the sexuality card (Storm, Magik), but there is no sexuality as such, nor nudity.
As a fighting game, Tokon: Fighting Souls requires very little reading, except perhaps for the tutorial at the very beginning. Some characters, notably Deadpool, may use a more vulgar vocabulary.
Apart from the villain team (obviously), all the heroes act in a … heroic way and try to save the innocent and act with respect towards their opponents.
It’s a game that requires very quick reflexes and a certain ease with the controller. The gameplay is frenetic and requires you to remember key combinations.
Given the price, the amount of content offered is not huge, but still reasonable. Extensions, on the other hand, seem very expensive to us. $47 for four characters, an arena and a handful of trinkets, that’s salty.
Local game modes
Episode mode (single-player story mode), All-Star Arena mode, Survival, Arcadia Rumble, a training mode and a versus mode in which you can compete against the computer or your friends.
Online Game Modes
Ranked or fun online mode, workout, online lobby, and Arcadia Rumble mode.
Expansions/Add-ons (DLC)
A first annual pass is available, at a cost of $46.99. It will offer four additional characters, as well as a new level. At the moment, only one of these four characters has been revealed, Phoenix Cyclops, but it is not yet available.
Our opinion
Arc System Works are veterans of fighting games and their games are some of the most renowned in the genre. So you won’t be surprised to discover that Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls is a great fighting game.
Before continuing, I must clarify my position towards games of this genre. Traditional fighting games (think Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat) are a type of game that I like, but I play them in a very casual way. I like to jump into these games, explore the single-player content, play a few games with friends when I get visitors, but I’m not the kind of player who invests hundreds of hours to master all the subtleties of the mechanics and thus dominate the online rankings (for that, you have to contact my colleague and founder of this site, Marc Shakour).
So this criticism comes from someone who enjoys fighting games, but doesn’t play them very seriously and competitively.
I was still able to appreciate the depth of the mechanics. While playing the episode mode, I was forced to try out each of the 20 characters available in the base game (21 if you include the unlockable Champion), and I slowly discovered which characters suited my playstyle better (Ms. Marvel) and which didn’t suit my style (SP//dr). After several hours of play, I felt like I had a good knowledge of the basic mechanics as well as the peculiarities of my favorite characters.
So I risked myself online… and I got demolished.
It turns out that even though it’s very easy to perform combos thanks to automatic combos (completed by pressing the same button several times in a row), you do more damage if you manually chain combos. So there’s a huge advantage to really taking the time to master our favorite characters.
However, if you just want to have fun with friends who have come to have a drink at home, the handling is simple enough that everyone can have a quick fun without spending hours on menus. It’s a balance that seems ideal to me to please both serious players and neophytes.
If I’m not an expert in fighting games, I’m a very, very big fan of comic books, and I was served. The selection of characters amazed me. Of course, there are the usual suspects (is it even possible to make a Marvel fighting game without Spider-Man, Wolverine or Hulk?), but the developers have also allowed themselves to include niche characters. I didn’t expect to play Danger or Peni Parker in a video game one day, but this surprise is welcome. Be honest, who here knew the villain Champion? In all transparency, not me.
On the other hand, with 20 fighters, the selection seems a bit short, especially since each team has 4 characters, or 20% of the total selection. We understand that several waves of DLC are waiting for us, but still, at $80 CAD for the base version, we would expect a slightly more generous selection.
While we’re on the subject of reviews, it should also be noted that the Episode mode isn’t particularly exciting. The 5 stories offered are only 5 variations of the same scenario, a tournament triggered by the Champion to determine the team that will face him, but with a different team that wins the bet each time. It’s not a particularly exciting storyline, let alone because it’s largely told through static vignettes presented as comic book panels.
It’s a shame, some cutscenes are animated in a Japanese anime style, and they are beautiful. It’s like we ran out of budget, which is a shame for a first-party Sony title.
But in the end, it’s still difficult to deny our pleasure. On the base Playstation 5, the game is beautiful, the animations fluid and the handling quickly makes us feel like a master of combat (but an online confrontation will quickly bring us back to Earth). We also love that the developers of Arc System Works have given themselves the freedom to be creative, introducing a mix of well-known characters and new, more niche heroes, reimagined in a manga style.
Note: PC players are reporting many performance issues on Steam, but since we tested the PS5 version, we are unable to confirm or deny this situation. A code has been given to us by the publisher for criticism purposes. It doesn’t affect our rating.
