Upon starting Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, players encounter a tutorial that explains the basic attack and defense commands. These commands are simple and easy to grasp, but the game also offers more complex combinations that allow for special moves. This balance between accessibility and depth is considered essential in fighting games, and in the case of Marvel Tokon, developed by the Japanese studio Arc System Works and released on August 6th by Sony for PlayStation 5 and PC, it is particularly well-tuned.
Players can choose to play casually, without much dedication, or dedicate themselves to learning and memorizing the moves of the 20 characters from the Marvel universe available in the title, which include Captain America, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, and the X-Men.
The character models are described as large and artistically detailed, featuring fluid and richly detailed animations, especially when executing special attacks or knocking out an opponent, at which point the screen adopts a 2.5D perspective, lending depth to the two-dimensional graphics.
For those who have been away from fighting games and rely on the aesthetics of past generations, the graphical quality of Marvel Tokon can be surprising. The characters demonstrate agility and respond to commands with precision, making good use of the PlayStation 5 controller, as different moves generate distinct haptic feedback patterns (vibration).
The game functions as a tag fighter, allowing the player to control multiple characters during battles, simply by pressing a button on the controller to switch. This functionality adds strategic layers, enabling the use of a second character to land a special move while the opponent is weakened.
Furthermore, the title includes a career mode for solo play, whose narrative is considered generic but well-constructed with illustrations and videos. However, the main focus of the game lies in the online multiplayer mode, integrating PlayStation 5 and PC players, which helps keep the servers active. Nevertheless, a significant reduction in users on the PC platform was noted: after reaching a peak of 24 thousand simultaneous players shortly after launch, this number dropped to 6,379 on August 16th.
This drop appears to be related to the lack of optimization of the PC version, which presents performance issues (something that does not occur on the PS5, where it was tested, running perfectly) and has generated many criticisms in Steam comments. It is hoped that Arc System Works will manage to resolve these issues, given that Marvel Tokon is an excellent game with the potential to please both fighting game fans and Marvel universe enthusiasts.
