Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls
Review
Fighting Souls can be great, when it wants to be...
by Dan Lenois
reviewed on PC
Multiverse of Mayhem...
"Episode", aka the game's story mode, contains five variants of the same campaign, each from the perspective of a different superhero team, including the Avengers, the X-Men, and others. Cutscenes are primarily conveyed through comic book page style cutscenes. Aesthetically, this does initially pop out as quite stylistic, but it does become rather tedious over time.
While using comic book panels in order to introduce each campaign's cast of characters might have worked, the absence of any fully-animated cutscenes made it difficult to become fully invested in the story during the first campaign playthrough. By the time I got through the second and then third, which largely repeated the same exact story, albeit with slightly differing dialogue sequences, I began outright skipping each cutscene in order to just jump to the fight itself. By the time I played through the final campaign, I was no longer even bothering to watch the introductory cutscenes introducing my chosen team.
Compared to earlier superhero fighting games like Marvel Vs Capcom 3, or the Injustice series, MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls falls flat in terms of its storytelling. It presents an interesting premise, but doesn’t seem to know what to do with it from there.
It's Clobbering Time...
"Battle", the game's main mode, consists of ranked and casual PVP options, as well as a training room and a replay feature, among other things. Whether you want to take the fight to other players online, play a private match against your friends, or fight the somewhat-competent AI bots, MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls has you covered.
Combat is where the game really shines. Each attack animation looks incredibly smooth, and while there is a notable learning curve, few things are as satisfying as learning to pull off that perfect combo, bringing down your opponent's health to zero without them being able to break free even once. I for one burst out laughing when I perfectly beat Wolverine unconscious in front of the X-Mansion, while the entire X-Men ensemble watched and judged both of us silently from the background.
Time to Smash...
"Arcade" can best be described in a single sentiment: But why?. "Arcade" consists of sillier game modes like "Arcadia Rumble", a Mario Party style minigame, and "All-Star Arena", an offline challenge mode. After having spent several hours giving each of these side modes a fair shot, my only takeaway is that Thanos should have done earth a favour and snapped "Arcade" away. They contribute nothing in terms of replay value, and the developmental resources wasted on these secondary game modes could have been, and should have been, reallocated toward the main campaign and the PVP "Battle" mode. "Arcade" is essentially the post-credits scene no one asked for and is subsequently forgotten.
Overall:
As a PC port, MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls is ok. As with most fighting games, the developers here seem inexplicably allergic to enabling mouse controls, or permitting key rebinding to enable mouse input. Restricting controls to merely half a keyboard, while pretending no other control scheme exists, is a very silly proposal in 2026.
On a performance level, the game ran very smoothly. There were some occasional long loading times, despite this game running off an SSD, but other than that, there were no technical issues.
Overall, MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls offers great gameplay, with a decent character selection roster, and immersive 2D maps to fight on. Its greatest drawback is a lack of clear focus. As a game, it doesn't seem to know what it wants to be, so it tries to dabble in many areas simultaneously, with mixed results.
If you're a diehard Marvel fan, you'll probably find something to enjoy here for a day or two, but whether it has enough to keep you invested for the longterm will likely prove a much trickier question to answer.
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8.0
fun score
Pros
Fleshed-out combat system, vivid art style, decent character selection variety, great 2D backgrounds.
Cons
No high-quality cutscenes, mediocre campaign story, forgettable side modes.
