Videogame Review: Marvel Tokon
Marvel Tokon is pretty good at being the game it wants to be, but ultimately it fails at being the game I wish it were.
Bear with me as I give a little background.
Fighting games have been in an odd place the last few years. Street Fighter 6 still sits at the top of the genre in spite of a lackluster content strategy. The game has seen barely any new costumes or stages, abandonment of its single player World Tour mode, and questionable character choices for season 4 DLC (other than Tifa of course). They have barely bothered to even do tie-ins with the once in a generation big budget Hollywood Street Fighter movie coming out (how the hell you release Arjun instead of Vega in October considering how much the latter features in all the trailers?) It gets away with this because frankly the competition, Tekken and Mortal Kombat, have been even worse this generation. On the 2D fighter front we have had FIVE significant releases in the last year and a half — Fatal Fury: City of the Wolves, Avatar Legends, Invincible Vs, 2XKO, and now Marvel Tokon — and not only have none of them put a dent in Street Fighter’s dominant position but most are struggling to stay afloat if not already declared dead.
Competition did wonders for Street Fighter V. Going up against Mortal Kombat X, Mortal Kombat 11, Injustice 2, Tekken 7, Killer Instinct, Dragon Ball FighterZ, Soul Calibur VI, GranBlue Fantasy Versus, and even fucking Smash Ultimate on the competitive scene, meant that SFV had no choice but to invest heavily in content and improvements to prevent players from moving on to one of the many viable alternatives. The game was buns on release — no basic versus CPU mode, no story, basically nothing but training and ranked mode. In under two years they worked in a complete story mode, 12 additional characters, several new stages, balance changes, additional game modes, and the Arcade Edition re-release. Then two years after that we got Champion Edition with another 12 characters. Six characters a year plus dozens of new costumes and stages, revamped game mechanics such as new V-triggers, and tons of music, art, and QoL improvements demonstrated a willingness from Capcom to EARN that top spot.
SF6, by contrast, has been allowed to coast. It’s old reliable. Very strong netcode, solid online experience, decent single player, balanced and diverse cast of well-designed characters, solid production value. It gets the important things right and is easy to come back to when other games disappoint.
Okay rant over.
Why lead with this?
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Because I REALLY wanted Marvel Tokon to be the first real shot in the arm for both Capcom and the larger FGC. It’s Marvel baby; one of the biggest IP’s on the planet. It’s ArcSys — a developer that knows how to make a good fighting game. Thanks to Sony it also has a big budget behind it which allowed for gorgeous art design and visuals, great music, great voice acting, and an amazing single player story mode. What’s more the combat itself is actually really really fun. Similar to what I said about the Marvel Avengers game from a while back, the developers for Tokon succeeded at the hardest challenge for a game like this; assembling a strong diverse roster of beloved characters and making them all play in unique ways that are entertaining and true to their lore.
So where did it all go wrong? It started with the launch. Sony did not make it easy. First there were the announcements about abandoning physical media, which rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. Then there was the PSN account requirements and the game not being available in dozens of countries. Then there was the shitty performance on PC due to invasive anti-cheat software. Fighting games live and die by their online community. You don’t get a second chance to make a first impression and a bad one is usually a death sentence. Tokon, in spite of a successful beta, had a very bad first impression particularly for PC players. Low Steam reviews and a player count below five year old Guilty Gear Strive were the result.
Patches have helped improve things substantially but the damage was done. What’s more, many of us who dug into the game’s systems have found design choices we don’t love. For one, the shared health bar and restricting access to half of your team members makes the game not feel like a proper team v team fighter. I wanted a chaotic back and forth with every character having their own health thereby forcing me to learn multiple characters and manage health and tags carefully. Emphasizing four person teams so strongly in the story and even giving each permutation a custom name suggests “4 v 4” is essential to the game’s DNA. But it ISN’T a 4 v 4; it’s more akin to Mortal Kombat 1 — one lead character with an assist. If you play well you can win fights with half of your team never showing up.
I understand the logic behind this approach. By having a shared health bar and three rounds instead of just one round with three health bars like in Marvel vs Capcom 2 and 3, you have more neutral resets and less steamrolling. It gives players more chances to come back. Lose a round? The game unlocks a character for you thereby giving you more assists and more total health. Lose another round? You get ANOTHER character, MORE health, and now your team assemble attack is unlocked. Again, I get why they do it. I just don’t like it.
Tag fighters to me are supposed to be zany and unbalanced. Tokon is no different. I played online exactly three times. First match, the guy rage quit after losing two rounds. Second two matches I basically just watched cut scenes of my characters getting wiped in two touches from long ass combos. Offense is pretty unbalanced. The game needs more defensive options and tweaks to assist usage. Characters are unbalanced too; Everyone and their mom is running Spider-man, Magik, Magneto, and Blade. And honestly I don’t mind. MvC2 and 3 were busted as hell. Storm, Magneto, Vergil, and Zero were nightmares to play against but I still had a blast. Tokon at least for its part has a really strong single player with unique arcade and survival modes, an amusing avatar board game action mode, and a surprisingly well-written and well-produced story mode.
There is more than enough good stuff here to recommend it to fighting game and Marvel fans. The game has grown on me over the last month. It went from being a disappointment to a game I intend to stick with for the next few months to see how it evolves. I’m cautiously optimistic after recent statements by the game’s director about adjustments to system mechanics and performance improvements. The slow content release plan is disappointing (4 characters a year) and my first online experience wasn’t great. Still I’m going to take some time to actually learn the game and try out ranked mode at some point. Thor becoming playable and new costumes for Storm will do a lot to win me over.
Marvel Tokon is not some FGC savior. It’s not going to challenge Street Fighter 6, but it is an enjoyable change of pace. With patches and TLC from ArcSys, it has potential to be a decent successor to the older Marvel Fighting games. Here’s hoping they follow through.
*UPDATE*: They just announced year one DLC characters and it is absolute dogshit. Grade lowered, game uninstalled.
Grade: B-
