// KOTAKU — GAMING
Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls: The Kotaku Review
At first, Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls felt too simple for me. Its inputs were so straightforward that I sometimes felt like my matches were playing themselves as autocombos so easy to accidentally pull off had my quartet of Marvel superheroes stylishly dancing across the screen with developer Arc System Works’ signature anime fighter flare. Then, as I spent dozens of hours between the beta and main game learning the ropes, I realized Tōkon was challenging me in ways fighters don’t often do, because I am a stubborn son of a gun who gets particular about how he plays fighting games and wanted to focus almost entirely on mastering Star-Lord, something the game’s design wasn’t going to let me get away with. Hours before I started writing this review, I was considering dropping the game entirely, despite several of my friends still being eager to gather in online lobbies. But just as I was about to hang up my Elemental Guns and maybe go back and play Guardians of the Galaxy or Marvel Rivals to get my Star-Lord main fix, something finally clicked.
I play a lot of fighting games, but I’m pretty picky about how. I’m a one-trick for whoever my main is, meaning I find a character I love and spend dozens to hundreds of hours learning the game through the lens of mastering them. I consider myself an above-average fighting game player, and that’s largely because I spend so much time with one fighter that their movesets and how they react to every other character on the roster becomes embedded in my muscle memory. Fighting games often put me in a rhythmic flow state, parrying, grabbing, punching, kicking, and dodging in a manner that is pretty much instinctual. It’s how I do pretty all right despite never picking up a fight stick. Playing fighting games has always been like feeling my way through a room blindfolded, learning by walking into walls and stubbing my toes until repeated injuries help me move through the space without a second thought. As a tag fighter, Marvel Tōkon made me feel like I was trying to move through the room with weights on my wrists and ankles.
Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, the latest flashy fighter from Guilty Gear developer Arc System Works, is a 4v4 tag fighter that features, at launch, a roster of 20 heroes and villains from across the Marvel multiverse. But unlike some Marvel games which come off as extensions of the Marvel Cinematic Universe’s marketing campaign and seem to be devoid of their own identity, Tōkon is filled to the brim with a blend of Arc System Works’ best-in-its-class anime excess and the recognizable, iconic heroes from the comics. Matches have an interesting sense of progression as players gradually unlock their full team of four heroes throughout rather than having access to all of them from the jump, adding layers of rewarding strategy and party-building savvy to its tag-based systems. Tōkon’s fast-paced, but the speed with which matches play out masks a pretty layered system that can overwhelm as much as it can delight.
Star-Lord, the wise-cracking, classic rock–loving galactic gunslinger was always going to be my main, as he is my favorite Marvel character, and I gravitate toward a character and mold myself around their playstyle, rather than finding the same fighting game archetype in every game—the “Ryu” of each game, for instance—and putting it on like a reliable glove. Luckily, his modular Elemental Guns function similar to Green Arrow’s bow in Injustice, another superhero fighting game I’ve spent hundreds of hours in, so Peter Quill’s hover-boots were a pretty natural fit. For a time, I felt like I was able to comfortably find my groove, keeping my opponents at range and taking advantage of openings I knew how to exploit with Star-Lord. But gradually, as my friends also played more, I felt the gap widening in a way that I frankly wasn’t used to. Even in games like Street Fighter where my usual groups played together and trained enough to maintain an even playing field, I could u