A Late Review of Marvel's Tokon Fighting Souls

Hello, and welcome to Kodiye's Byte-Sized Reviews, where we skip the fluff and dive straight into the information you need to make an informed purchase in under 5 minutes. Today we're taking a look at Marvel's Tokon Fighting Souls, developed by Arc System Works and published by Sony, available for the PS5 and PC. Now obviously we're a bit late to the party we this review, but we wanted to be nice and give the developers a couples weeks worth of patches so they could fix the major issues of the game that were present at launch like the games stability, match que times, cpu load and unstable roll back that plagued the pc version which is the version of the game used for this review. After hearing good things about the latest patch for the PC version, we believed that now was a good time to release this review. So let's not waste anymore time and get straight into what makes Marvel Tokon an amazing fighting game package held back by short-sighted design decisions.

Marvel's Tokon has a lot of good things going for it that make it worth the full retail price. Tons of single-player content, like story modes delivered like comic book panels, with each major team getting its own story. There are also Bonus game modes like Survival, a rogue-like game mode where the player needs to obtain cards to buff their characters; Arena, a unique take on the traditional arcade mode where you can choose the route of opponents you want to fight; and finally there's Arcadia Rumble a fun party game mode where you and others run around with your avatars beating the crap out of each other. These modes even offer unique rewards for their completion.

Finally, there are tons of tutorials available to take you from being a novice to someone who knows how to handle themselves online. Especially with how the developers have expanded the routine trials you typically find in fighting games. Instead of just having to copy the combos that the developers give you, there's a new section that turns labbing combos into a puzzle game, forcing you to learn the deeper ins and outs of your character to complete them, thus making you a better player. Sure, you won't be beating Justin Wong anytime soon, but you will definitely walk away from those trials feeling confident in your abilities to control your characters of choice.

The game also features one of the best fighting game soundtracks we've heard in a long time. We would constantly lose matches simply because we would get too distracted by the game's incredible BGM mid-match. Who cares about winning when Ms Marvel's theme starts playing. On top of that, while the graphics themselves are not the most cutting-edge in terms of technical fidelity, Marvel's Tokons has one of the sickest presentations we have seen for a fighting game ever. The game is absolutely gorgeous in its use of color, graphic design, ui, and camera work, creating some of the most insane adrenaline-pumping matches that are both fun to play and watch.

Now that we're done glazing the games positives, we have to address the obvious elephant in the room, which is the poorly optimized PC version of the game. As we mentioned in past shorts on the YouTube channel, the PS5 version of the game is the superior one; unfortunately, due to directions by Sony, Arc System Works had to implement some heavy anti-cheating systems into the game, thus creating a litany of PC- related issues. Now, as we mentioned earlier, there have been several updates over the last few weeks that have made things better for many, but not all. There's still no Linux support; the game can't be played in over 100 countries because they need PlayStation accounts, and apparently the game is crashing, sometimes even blue-screening, for people who got the latest Windows update, which is very unsettling. We did not experience those issues in our testing, and the latest patches have improved things in other critical areas like rollback stability.

As of right now, we cannot recommend the PC version of this game to anyone. Get the PS5 version if you are able to. So with all of that in mind, we give Marvels Tokon Fighting Souls an 8.5 out of 10 for the PS5 Version and a 5 out of 10 for the PC version. It's an amazing game, and I'm sure the PC version will continue to get better with more updates, but as of right now, we cannot recommend the PC version of this game to anyone.